Rolling Hills Organics

State of the Organic Union (Toronto)

2012-02-20T12:20:00.004-05:00

Wilhelm and Barnhild Pfenning

It seems that every other year my spirit tells me it is time to check in on the world of organics via the Toronto conference organized by Canadian Organic Growers (COG) Toronto chapter. My first conference was four years ago in 2008 when I became inspired by the words of Hellge Hellberg of Marin Organic. I came away from the conference feeling as if I had arrived where I belonged – amongst organic growers and consumers empowered with a united vision of doing the right thing.

Two years later, in 2010, the ante was upped by a stellar array of speakers and true organic heroes. Bärbel Höhn, Germany’s first Green Party agricultural minister, related the incredible political foresight and achievement of Germany in embracing, promoting and implementing organic practices nationwide. Percy Schmeiser told his amazing account of his (one farmer’s) brave battle after being sued by Monsanto. Michael Schmidt brought along his passion for raw milk and came out pulling no punches. Wilhelm and Barnhild Pfenning (who in 1965 made the commitment to farm organically and never looked back) received a lifetime achievement award for their tireless work in growing and marketing organics in Ontario. And Wayne Roberts moderated with his usual mix of insight, passion and humour. My sense of belonging in the organic community deepened as I was inspired by the spirit and drive of these organic groundbreaking visionaries.

So it was that I went along in eager anticipation to this year’s conference, titled “The Value of Organic”. I should have known from this vague theme that I should lower my expectations. In 2008 it had been “Visionary Farmers and Consumers”; in 2010 “Grounds for Change.” This year’s keynote speaker was a farmer who did not even embrace organic certification, remarking in the closing session that she knew some very bad organic farmers and some very good conventional ones. Another speaker was a doctor advocating for an “organic” sleep remedy he had developed and patented which was not certified organic. Guy Dauncey raised the bar with his empassioned presentation, noting that organic certification was “an essential benchmark to prevent greenwashing”. Thank you, Mr. Dauncey, for this simple gem of truth.

The theme of the closing panel session was “Is Organic too Extreme?” Conference program notes were littered with organic in inverted commas, angst and soul-searching about the role and future of organics. In my view, whatever organic is and isn’t, whether its too extreme or not extreme enough, too big or too small, it is the only sane and sensible way to approach food and farming as we move forward, both locally and globally. The ever-growing appetite for organic produce and artisan food at farmers markets and farmgates, in health food stores and yes, even in supermarkets, is testament to this. There is much work is to be done on the farm; there is more food to be grown and brought to market for customers to appreciate. The organic movement continues to make waves, offer an alternative to the highly-processed (and now threatened) mainstream. Organic has legs; we should run with them. Missed was a Michael Schmidt or Percy Schmeiser or Helle Hellberg to reinforce Guy Dauncey’s passion to empower, inspire, and sustain us until next year’s conference.

In the meantime, I have decided to supplement my membership of Canadian Organic Growers by supporting their important role with the donation of our annual farm registration fee of $195 to them. The Government of Ontario mandates that there is a choice only between contributing this fee to the National Farmers Union - Ontario, or the Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario, or the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, none of whom focus on organic farming. I resent this limited choice. However, I can request a refund after I have paid my fee, so this is what I shall do.

The seed emergency: The threat to food and democracy

2012-02-08T09:19:00.002-05:00

Photo from http://ncnblogger.wordpress.com/

Patenting seeds has led to a farming and food crisis - and huge profits for US biotechnology corporations.

By Dr Vandana Shiva

From AlJazeera.com http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/201224152439941847.html

New Delhi, India - The seed is the first link in the food chain - and seed sovereignty is the foundation of food sovereignty. If farmers do not have their own seeds or access to open pollinated varieties that they can save, improve and exchange, they have no seed sovereignty - and consequently no food sovereignty.

The deepening agrarian and food crisis has its roots in changes in the seed supply system, and the erosion of seed diversity and seed sovereignty.

Seed sovereignty includes the farmer's rights to save, breed and exchange seeds, to have access to diverse open source seeds which can be saved - and which are not patented, genetically modified, owned or controlled by emerging seed giants. It is based on reclaiming seeds and biodiversity as commons and public good.

The past twenty years have seen a very rapid erosion of seed diversity and seed sovereignty, and the concentration of the control over seeds by a very small number of giant corporations. In 1995, when the UN organised the Plant Genetic Resources Conference in Leipzig, it was reported that 75 per cent of all agricultural biodiversity had disappeared because of the introduction of "modern" varieties, which are always cultivated as monocultures. Since then, the erosion has accelerated.

The introduction of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement of the World Trade Organisation has accelerated the spread of genetically engineered seeds - which can be patented - and for which royalties can be collected. Navdanya was started in response to the introduction of these patents on seeds in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade - a forerunner to the WTO - about which a Monsanto representative later stated: "In drafting these agreements, we were the patient, diagnostician [and] physician all in one." Corporations defined a problem - and for them the problem was farmers saving seeds. They offered a solution, and the solution was to make it illegal for farmers to save seed - by introducing patents and intellectual property rights on those very seeds. As a result, acreage under GM corn, soya, canola, cotton has increased dramatically.

Threats to seed sovereignty

Besides displacing and destroying diversity, patented GMO seeds are also undermining seed sovereignty. Across the world, new seed laws are being introduced which enforce compulsory registration of seeds, thus making it impossible for small farmers to grow their own diversity, and forcing them into dependency on giant seed corporations. Corporations are also patenting climate resilient seeds evolved by farmers - thus robbing farmers of using their own seeds and knowledge for climate adaptation.

Another threat to seed sovereignty is genetic contamination. India has lost its cotton seeds because of contamination from Bt Cotton - a strain engineered to contain the pesticide Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium. Canada has lost its canola seed because of contamination from Roundup Ready canola. And Mexico has lost its corn due to contamination from Bt Cotton.

After contamination, biotech seed corporations sue farmers with patent infringement cases, as happened in the case of Percy Schmeiser. That is why more than 80 groups came together and filed a case to prevent Monsanto from suing farmers whose seed had been contaminated.

As a farmer's seed supply is eroded, and farmers become dependent on patented GMO seed, the result is debt. India, the home of cotton, has lost its cotton seed diversity and cotton seed sovereignty. Some 95 per cent of the country's cotton seed is now controlled by Monsanto - and the debt trap created by being forced to buy seed every year - with royalty payments - has pushed hundreds of thousands of farmers to suicide; of the 250,000 farmer suicides, the majority are in the cotton belt.

Seeding control

Even as the disappearance of biodiversity and seed sovereignty creates a major crisis for agriculture and food security, corporations are pushing governments to use public money to destroy the public seed supply and replace it with unreliable non-renewable, patented seed - which must be bought each and every year.

In Europe, the 1994 regulation for protection of plant varieties forces farmers to make a "compulsory voluntary contribution" to seed companies. The terms themselves are contradictory. What is compulsory cannot be voluntary.

In France, a law was passed in November 2011, which makes royalty payments compulsory. As Agriculture Minister Bruna Le Marie stated: "Seeds can be longer be royalty free, as is currently the case." Of the 5,000 or so cultivated plant varieties, 600 are protected by certificate in France, and these account for 99 per cent of the varieties grown by farmers.

The "compulsory voluntary contribution", in other words a royalty, is justified on grounds that "a fee is paid to certificate holders [seed companies] to sustain funding of research and efforts to improve genetic resources".

Monsanto pirates biodiversity and genetic resources from farming communities, as it did in the case of a wheat biopiracy case fought by Navdanya with Greenpeace, and climate resilient crops and brinjal (also known as aubergine or eggplant) varieties for Bt Brinjal. As Monsanto states, "it draws from a collection of germ-plasm that is unparalleled in history" and "mines the diversity in this genetic library to develop elite seeds faster than ever before".

In effect, what is taking place is the enclosure of the genetic commons of our biodiversity and the intellectual commons of public breeding by farming communities and public institutions. And the GMO seeds Monsanto is offering are failing. This is not "improvement" of genetic resources, but degradation. This is not innovation but piracy.

For example, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) - being pushed by the Gates Foundation - is a major assault on Africa's seed sovereignty.

Agribusiness

The 2009 US Global Food Security Act, also called the Lugar-Casey Act , "A bill to authorize appropriations for fiscal years 2010 through 2014 to provide assistance to foreign countries to promote food security, to stimulate rural economies, and to improve emergency response to food crisis, to amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and for other purposes".

The amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act would "include research on bio-technological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including genetically modified technology". The $ 7.7bn that goes with the bill would go to benefit Monsanto to push GM seeds.

An article in Forbes, titled "Why Uncle Sam Supports Franken Foods", shows how agribusiness is the only sector in which US has a positive trade balance. Hence the push for GMOs - because they bring royalties to the US. However, royalties for Monsanto are based on debt, suicidal farmers and the disappearance of biodiversity worldwide.

Under the US Global Food Security Act, Nepal signed an agreement with USAID and Monsanto. This led to massive protests across the country. India was forced to allow patents on seeds through the first dispute brought by the US against India in the WTO. Since 2004, India has also been trying to introduce a Seed Act which would require farmers to register their own seeds and take licenses. This in effect would force farmers from using their indigenous seed varieties. By creating a Seed Satyagraha - a non-cooperation movement in Gandhi's footsteps, handing over hundreds of thousands of signatures to the prime minister, and working with parliament - we have so far prevented the Seed Law from being introduced.

India has signed a US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, with Monsanto on the Board. Individual states are also being pressured to sign agreements with Monsanto. One example is the Monsanto-Rajasthan Memorandum of Understanding, under which Monsanto would get intellectual property rights to all genetic resources, and to carry out research on indigenous seeds. It took a campaign by Navdanya and a "Monsanto Quit India" Bija Yatra ["seed pilgrimage"] to force the government of Rajasthan to cancel the MOU.

This asymmetric pressure of Monsanto on the US government, and the joint pressure of both on the governments across the world, is a major threat to the future of seeds, the future of food and the future of democracy.

Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, eco-feminist, philosopher, activist and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers' rights, winning the Right Livelihood Award [Alternative Nobel Prize] in 1993.

Grass-fed beef is more nutrient dense than poultry

2011-12-20T09:20:00.002-05:00

Photo from www.libertydexters.co.uk

As our customers are aware, you can purchase grass-fed, grass-finished beef from Dexter cattle at our stand at the Toronto Evergreen Brickworks on Saturday mornings. While the market runs year-round, we will be taking a winter break in January and February, back in March 2012.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011 by Dr. David Jockers

(www.NaturalNews.com) For over 60 years, red meat has been vilified for its heart clogging saturated fat & cholesterol content. Poultry products have been marketed as the healthiest animal protein due to their low-fat content. New understandings of health and inflammation now reveal that grass-fed beef is significantly more nutrient dense than poultry.

Saturated fat and cholesterol have been blamed for heart disease and other cardiovascular diseases. Research indicates that saturated fats and cholesterol are necessary for overall cellular health. They play an extremely important role in regulating neurological, cognitive and hormone function. A diet low in these important fats causes lowered immunity, sex hormone function and accelerated aging and brain degeneration.

Red meat could be one of the best foods in an individual's diet or one of the worst. The key factor is what the animal is eating. Naturally, cows eat a near 100% green diet of grass, flowers, shrubs and other wild vegetation. Grain feeding is genetically incongruent for these animals and leads to excessive weight gain and fat accumulation.

Fatty Acid Ratios

The typical grain-feed is made up of corn and soy due to the low cost associated with government subsidies. Grain-fed cows are extremely high in omega 6 fatty acids. The average ratio for a cow on a grain-fed diet is roughly 25:1 (omega 6:3).

Humans should naturally have an omega 6:3 ratio around 4:1 or 2:1. When these ratios become skewed, they trigger cellular inflammation and accelerated cellular degeneration. This environment causes an individual to become highly inflamed and to build degenerative disease.

The more grass an animal eats the greater their omega 3 content and the lower their omega 6 levels. A 100% green-fed diet, which is genetically congruent for a cow would provide an omega 6:3 ratio of 2:1. This is ideal for the animal's long-term health and is highly anti-inflammatory for human consumption. The omega 3 fatty acids present in this meat are primarily the all-important long-chain variety EPA and DHA.

Chicken and turkeys cannot live on grass alone. They lack the highly specialized digestive tract that allows them to convert grass and roughage into a quality meal. They need some addition to grass and the vast majority of farmers choose to feed them a mixture of soy and corn. Chickens can get about 25% of their calories from grass while ducks can go up to about 50%. The higher the level of grass, the higher the anti-oxidant and omega 3 content of the meat and eggs.

Grass-fed mammals contain high levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA). CLA is considered to be one of the most potent anti-carcinogenic nutrients. Finnish researchers have found that the greater the amount of CLA in a woman's diet, the lower her risk of breast cancer. Women who consumed the largest amount of CLA had a 60% lower risk for breast cancer.

Grass-fed mammals are also extremely rich in carnitine and carnosine. Carnitine helps the cellular mitochondria drive energy efficiently from fat metabolism. Carnitine is the critical gate-keeper that allows fatty acids to pass into the mitochondrial furnace effectively. Carnosine is a powerful antioxidant that improves muscle, brain & cardiovascular function. It functions to reduce the effects of stress by protecting the proteins of the body which aid in tissue healing and repair.

Poultry has significantly less CLA, carnitine and carnosine than grass-fed beef. Beef also contains a lot more branched chain amino acids. This includes the crucial muscle building amino acid leucine. Grass-fed beef has an enormous edge over free-range poultry when one compares the fatty acids, proteins, fat-soluble anti-oxidants and minerals such as zinc.

For more: http://www.naturalnews.com/034445_grass-fed_beef_nutrients_poultry.html#ixzz1h5D8TsvV

Put the Fat Cats on a Diet: Stop Buying Tainted Food From Billion Dollar Corporations

2011-12-08T11:28:00.000-05:00

In recent years there has been much progress in education about the corporate-controlled industrial food system. Documentaries such as Food Inc, Our Daily Bread, The World according to Monsanto, Supersize Me, Fresh – the Movie, Food Matters all help in our understanding of what is at stake, and that is our health and personal freedoms. Here, Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association adds his strong voice to ways we can all contribute in bringing about positive change, and not just in the United States.

By Ronnie Cummins

www.organicconsumers.org

December 7, 2011

"I have not spoken to one farmer who doesn't understand the message of Occupy Wall Street, the message that so many people keep saying is nebulous. It's very clear. Because of business and corporate participation in agriculture, farmers are losing their livelihoods And if it goes on like this, all we're going to have to eat in this country is unregulated, imported, genetically modified produce. That's not a healthy food system." - Jim Gerritsen, a Maine organic farmer.

For the first time since the late-1960s, the American elite and their indentured politicians are losing legitimacy, part of a deepening global crisis that is simultaneously political, economic, and ecological. In the powerful wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, the European Summer of the indignados (the indignant ones), and the Occupy Wall Street movement, rebellion is in the air. As protestors in New York put it "The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."

Across the U.S. and planet, the corporate elite is under attack. An emerging army of indignados are starting to act on the premise that minor policy adjustments in corporate boardrooms, or a cosmetic reshuffling of faces in Washington, are not enough. What the Earth and the 99% underclass need, including consumers and farmers, is a grassroots revolution - a fundamental transfer of power from the corporatocracy to the people. What is required in the face of economic meltdown, deteriorating public health, and climate disaster is a full-scale mutiny on the USA Titanic, a radical change of course before the 21st Century suicide economy of Wall Street and Corporate America puts an end to the human species and life on Earth.

Perhaps the first order of business on the USA Titanic is to stop stuffing money in the pockets of the greedy 1% who are steering us toward disaster. This is why a million consumers, and thousands of community organizations, unions, and churches, have started to strike back against the "banksters," staging sit-ins and protests and moving billions of dollars out of Wall Street and the big banks into community credit unions and local banks. As the internet campaign MoveYourMoneyProject.org proclaims, it's time to "invest in Main Street, not Wall Street, and to lend a hand to local businesses."

Following a similar trajectory a debtors' campaign is gathering steam among students and ex-students to stop paying their onerous student loans, which now total one trillion dollars, and demand the implementation of a federal program of free college tuition and jobs for youth and the unemployed. Approximately 11% of student loans in the U.S. are already in arrears. Similarly, millions of Americans are turning away from Big Pharma's drug pushers and embracing holistic, preventive medicine.

The time has come for America's 300 million food consumers to join the mutiny. Our trillion dollar food and farming System has been corrupted and manipulated by Wall Street, Corporate Agribusiness, and Big Food Inc. into what can only be described as a weapon of mass destruction, severely damaging public health, the environment, and the climate; torturing animals in filthy, disease-ridden factory farms; exploiting immigrant farm workers and food industry workers; and destroying the livelihoods of small farmers and rural communities.

As the first official Declaration of Occupy Wall Street explained on September 29: "They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization."

Food Democracy or Corporatocracy?

Did you ever vote to allow corporate agribusiness to spray a billion pounds of toxic pesticides, and dump 24 billion pounds of climate-destabilizing chemical fertilizers on U.S. crops and farmlands every year? Did you give the OK for factory farms, so-called Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), to feed billions of hapless creatures massive amounts of genetically engineered grain, antibiotics, hormones, steroids, blood, manure, and slaughterhouse waste? Did you give Monsanto, Dow, and Dupont permission to "modify" so-called "conventional" supermarket, school cafeteria, and restaurant food with genetically engineered bacteria, viruses, foreign DNA, and antibiotic-resistant genes? Did you sign a permission slip for the USDA or your local school system to feed students, including your children, greasy, fatty, unhealthy, chemical food in the cafeteria?

If we intend to break the stranglehold of the corporatocracy over the economy, including what and how American farmers grow and what most people eat, it's time to stand up. If we believe that a healthy, organic, and equitable system of food and farming are essential to our health and the health of the planet, we need to think twice before we pull out our wallets at the supermarket or sit down for a meal in a restaurant or a fast food joint. Do you want to be supersized by Monsanto, Wal-Mart, or McDonald's, and allow biotechnocrats, factory farms, and chemical food manufacturers to dictate your food choices?

It's time to vote with our food dollars at the grocery check-out aisle. It's time to rein in elected public officials who take money from corporate agribusiness and Monsanto in the voting booth. It's time for the Great Boycott of Big Food Inc., and a culinary strike against all of their chemical, genetically engineered, sugar, and fat-laden processed foods and beverages. It's time to put the fat cats on a diet, shrink the profits of Wall Street, and drastically reduce the collateral damage of chemical agribusiness, Big Box food stores, and billion dollar junk food restaurants. It's time to Occupy our food chains, kitchens, lunchrooms, and school cafeterias, and transform our $30 billion local and organic food and farming system from being the niche alternative to being the norm in the nation's trillion dollar food economy.

The good news is that most people already know that chemical food is bad for them, bad for their children, and bad for the environment. No one wants to eat Big Ag or Big Biotech's pesticide residues, antibiotics, hormones, or feces-tainted meat. No one is enthusiastic about food that has been irradiated, genetically engineered, or grown with municipal sewage sludge. A recent national poll found that 54% of Americans prefer organic food, especially locally-produced organic food. Millions say they'd buy more organic products if only they had a decent paying job, or less mortgage, medical, or school loan debt. That's partly why millions of us are becoming backyard organic gardeners, or small "market farmers" growing our own. That's why a new generation of food lovers and health addicts are swearing off corporate food and marching to the kitchen, cooking from scratch and celebrating the joys of home-cooked fare with our friends and our families.

Millions of us are starting to break the chains of corporate control in our lives, by supporting organic, fair made, and locally produced products and businesses.

Tired of the quality and range of our daily essentials being dictated and degraded by a powerful network of Brand Name Bullies and Big Box chains? Tired of profit-at-any cost, Wall Street-traded corporations "outsourcing" from sweatshops in the factories and fields, cutting corners on public health and the environment, and sucking up billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies? " Basta," enough already.

Make your pledge today to put the fat cats on a diet. Buy organic and fair made/fair trade products, preferably locally produced. Boycott factory farmed meat and animal products. Eat more raw food, dairy, and vegetables. And if you can, start growing some of your own, even if for now, your "garden" only consists of potted herbs or tomatoes on your window sill or a sprout-making machine in your kitchen. And finally, keep in mind that where you buy a healthy, sustainable product has a very large impact on the economy, the environment, and climate stability. Do you really want to buy your organic food or your fair trade coffee from a multi-billion dollar corporation like Wal-Mart, Safeway, Starbucks, or even Whole Foods Market and Trader Joes?

Ronnie Cummins is the co-founder and National Director of the Organic Consumers Association.

"Paleo" foods

2011-11-03T13:09:00.001-04:00

At Rolling Hills Organics, our regular customers will be aware that we aim to bring to market only the freshest foods, high in nutrition. These include fresh-picked certified organic greens and other vegetables, herbs. We also provide grass-fed, grass-finished (never any grain!) beef from small-breed Dexter cattle. It turns out that all these products fall within the “Paleo diet”. To learn about the real health benefits of only organic and unprocessed food, read on in this fascinating article from Natural News…

Photo from http://paleodietlifestyle.com

by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
(www.NaturalNews.com)

The so-called "Paleo" diet has caught on like wildfire, with millions of people around the world embracing it for both weight-loss and health-promoting purposes. The diet has become so popular, in fact, that a new restaurant in Germany now serves only paleolithic food, which excludes popular modern-day foods like cheese, bread, and sugar.

The UK's Daily Mail reports that Sauvage, which recently opened in Berlin, serves only organic, unprocessed food. Various fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, and herbs fill the pages of the restaurant's menu. Customers will not find the usual wheat-based breads, dairy products, or refined sugar-laden treats available at most restaurants.

Diners at Sauvage do not have to worry about genetically-modified (GM) soybean or canola oil tainting their foods, either. The restaurant uses only ghee, also known as clarified butter; homemade clarified lard, which is actually far healthier than oil and butter substitutes; and unrefined palm and coconut oil to cook its foods.

All of Sauvage's fruit, vegetable, herb, nut, and seed offerings are organic, and its gluten-free baked goods are all made with natural fruits rather than processed sugars. And as much as possible, the restaurant sources only free-range, grass-fed, organic meats.

"The paleolithic Cuisine is based on a groundbreaking vision in nutrition and offers the world's most healthy diet," says Sauvage on its website. "The prehistoric kitchen exclusively works with organic, unprocessed foods. It excludes every kind of processed food such as grains, starches, dairy products and sugar which have no place on the paleolithic menu. The basic ingredients of Paleo cooking are veggies, meat, fish, eggs, oils, nuts, seeds and herbs. All ingredients come from Organic farming or wildlife."

Last year, the Chicago Tribune hailed the amazing health-promoting benefits of the Paleo diet. Besides helping to create a strong and vibrant immune system, the diet can even cure serious diseases like arthritis and heart disease. Its claim to fame also includes improving energy levels, clearing up skin, improving hair and bone strength, and promoting mental balance (http://www.naturalnews.com/029653_p...).

"Many people think the Paleolithic diet is just some hipster trend, but it's a worldwide phenomenon, with an online community that spans the globe," said Sauvage's Boris Leite-Poco to Spiegel Online. "The trend is probably strongest in the United States, where people who have had enough of the fast food way of life and generations of illness have taken it up."

To learn more about Sauvage, visit:
www.sauvageberlin.com/

Food Matters

2011-10-02T09:44:00.002-04:00

By Dr. Mercola

Full story at http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/10/02/food-matters-the-movie.aspx?e_cid=20111002_SNL_Art_1

The film Food Matters presents powerful evidence in support of the ancient wisdom that regards food as medicine, and offers practical solutions to the current health crisis.

Modern medicine has replaced nutritious foods for chemicals in the form of drugs as the preferred mode of addressing disease, with devastating results.

Nutrition alone can prevent and treat many if not most diseases, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, autoimmune diseases, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, anxiety and depression - even cancer.

"Let thy food be thy medicine, and thy medicine be thy food."

That famous quote by Hippocrates, who is often referred to as "the father of medicine," is somewhere around 2,500 years old, and for a long time this sentiment was treated as fact. Today, many scoff at this notion, thinking nutrition and medicine have very little in common; using food to quench hunger and little else, while turning to pharmaceutical drugs to treat illness.

Turning our backs on the fundamental truth that "food is medicine" is no doubt at the very heart of our current disease epidemics.

Another quote by Hippocrates, which is part of the Hippocratic Oath still recited by modern doctors today, is "First, do no harm." Unfortunately, the preoccupation with the idea that there must be "a pill for every ill" now greatly compromises this oath, because the practice of medicine is primarily focused on drugs that oftentimes do FAR more harm than good… Meanwhile, modern doctors receive virtually no training in nutrition.

Food Matters, produced by James Colquhoun, Laurentine ten Bosch, and Enzo Tedeschi is an 80-minute long fast-paced re-education for the layman on the basics of good health, which incidentally is the only way to prevent disease from occurring in the first place. The film presents powerful evidence in support of ancient wisdom that regards food as medicine, and offers practical solutions to the current health crisis.

What You Will Learn from this Film

As summarized on the Food Matters' website, by watching this film you will get answers to the following questions, and straight facts on:

•How you can use food as medicine

•Who needs vitamins?

•Is organic really better?

•How safe is your food?

•Foods that fight anxiety and depression

•Natural therapies for cancer

•Which drugs might do more harm than good?

•The best ways to detox, lose weight and keep it off!

Food Matters really delivers a well-rounded view of the elements required for health, starting with the food supply itself, and the devastating effects modern food manufacturing has had on the quality of our food. Soil depletion is a direct result of modern agricultural practices, and has led to crops containing fewer nutrients. The answer, of course, lies in reverting back to organic and sustainable agriculture. The largest study conducted into organic food confirmed that the idea that organically grown foods are healthier for you is not wishful fantasy. It's a fact.

That four-year long study discovered that:

•Organic fruit and vegetables contain up to 40 percent more antioxidants

•Organic produce had higher levels of beneficial minerals like iron and zinc

•Milk from organic herds contained up to 90 percent more antioxidants

When evaluating food and nutrition it's also imperative to understand what happens to the nutrient content of a food when it is processed, and the potential harm that can be caused by added chemicals. Our food stores are filled to the brim with ultra-processed foods that not only contain ingredients grown in depleted, pesticide-laden soils to begin with, but are further depleted of real nutrients through processing; in the end providing very little beyond empty calories.

Food as Medicine

Fatigue is epidemic, particularly in the United States. In the film, Victor Zeines states that fatigue-related ailments should be viewed as "chronic malnutrition." With proper diet, fatigue is simply not an issue. Feeling "awake" and vibrantly alive is part and parcel of optimal health. Ian Brighthope also makes an excellent point when he explains that each day you neglect nutrition by eating improperly, you're entering deeper into a state of nutrient deficiency. And you cannot make up for it by loading up on veggies every now and again. Nutrition is literally fuel for your cells and organs, and you need to feed your body the proper fuel each and every day, not just once in a while. As Brighthope says, sooner or later you will have to pay for this neglect, and this "payment due," of course, comes in the form of disease.

Well, since improper nutrition caused the problem (and poor diet is at the heart of nearly ALL disease, from colds and flu's to cancer), wouldn't it make sense then that the corrective action needed is proper nutrition?

Dr. Andrew Saul hits the nail on the head when he brings up the point that "the public relations problem of nutrients," is that each nutrient "is good for too many things." Quite simply, it sounds too good to be true!

One nutrient stands out as it can be beneficial for an astounding number of health problems, and that is vitamin D. Its benefits are so profound and multi-varied that a 2008 meta-analysis of 18 randomized controlled trials concluded supplemental vitamin D significantly reduces mortality from ALL causes.

Food Matters also includes a discussion on the health benefits of vitamin C, which has been shown to prevent and treat a wide variety of diseases, from the common cold, to near-terminal cases of the H1N1 swine flu, to cancer.

Food Matters — a Labor of Love

The background story of how this film was produced is just as fascinating as the film itself. It was originally created to convince James' father, Ray, to step out of the conventional box and really start to consider his options. Ray was bedridden with severe flu-like symptoms, chronic fatigue, depression and anxiety, and like most people, he sought professional help. Unfortunately, the conventional approaches left him feeling even worse than before; inching ever closer to despair. To read the full back story, please see the Food Matters website.

Here's a snippet:

"Psychiatrists and medical specialists recommended a myriad of drugs that did nothing to alleviate Roy's physical ailments and, Roy asserts, actually worsened his mental condition. Roy explains his attitude at the time was, "If the best of the medical profession could not help me, how could my son and daughter-in-law with their nutrition and vitamin-based approach help?"

James and Laurentine understood that it would take powerful measures to shock Roy into kicking his dangerous pharmaceutical drug habit. After realizing that he wasn't reading the books that they sent him, the duo set off around the world interviewing experienced doctors, researchers, naturopaths and journalists. Their reasoning was that if Roy wouldn't read the books then maybe he would listen to these experts on DVD."

Their scheme worked… In the interview on their site, Ray explains what happened next:

"… After five years on heavy doses of anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, anxiety medication and sleeping tablets, I started taking therapeutic doses of vitamins and minerals and within a week had withdrawn from all prescription medication." Today, he is disease-free, drug-free, twenty kilograms lighter, running twice a week and enjoying a happy retirement. Roy's return to health was incredibly inspiring evidence of the power of nutritional therapy."

To me, Ray's story is a perfect example of just how simple it can be. Not necessarily easy, as it requires you to shift your perceptions and alter your habits, which most people resist doing, but it's simple in that it's not rocket science. Most people do not need a new and improved drug. They simply need proper nutrition…

First they ignore you,

then they laugh at you,

then they fight you,

then you win.

Mohandas Gandhi

All truth passes through three stages:

First, it is ridiculed.

Second, it is violently opposed.

Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer

In their own words, Gandhi and Schopenhauer have each made what I believe is one of the most valuable observations on the shifting of human views on truth. Right now, we're still in the 'violent opposition' stage in terms of accepting food as medicine. But it's only a matter of time... Once understood, the truth that food can equate to "medicine" is so self-evident that it simply cannot be ignored and opposed forever.

Of course, modern medicine has its place and serves an invaluable function when it comes to major trauma and emergency situations. But as the interviewed experts in this film point out, "not every problem requires costly, major medical attention." For most diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, chronic fatigue, and autoimmune disorders, just to name a few, there are many alternative therapies (including simple dietary changes) that can be more effective than conventional medical treatments — not to mention more economical, less harmful and less invasive.

So please, take the time to watch this film with your family, and share it with everyone you know. It just might save your life, or the life of someone you care about.

Beyond Frankenfoods and Toxics: OCA's Ten Reasons to Buy Organic

2011-08-25T12:16:00.000-04:00

by Ronnie Cummins, Executive Director, Organic Consumers Association

(as reported by NaturalNews)

Organic foods and products are the fastest growing items in

America

's grocery carts. Thirty million households, comprising 75 million people, are now buying organic foods, clothing, body care, supplements, pet food, and other products on a regular basis. Fifty-six percent of U.S. consumers say they prefer organic foods.

Here are 10 reasons why you should buy organic foods and products:

1. Organic foods are produced without the use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). Consumers worry about untested and unlabeled genetically modified food ingredients in common supermarket items. Genetically engineered ingredients are now found in 75% of all non-organic U.S. processed foods, even in many products labeled or advertised as "natural." In addition, the overwhelming majority of non-organic meat, dairy, and eggs are derived from animals reared on a steady diet of GM animal feed. Although polls indicate that 90% of Americans want labels on gene-altered foods, government and industry adamantly refuse to respect consumers' right to know, understanding quite well that health and environmental-minded shoppers will avoid foods with a GMO label.

2. Organic foods are safe and pure. Organic farming prohibits the use of toxic pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones, nano-particles, and climate-destabilizing chemical fertilizers. Consumers worry about pesticide and drug residues routinely found in non-organic produce, processed foods, and animal products. Consumer Reports has found that 77% of non-organic produce items in the average supermarket contain pesticide residues. The beef industry has acknowledged that 94% of all U.S. beef cattle have hormone implants, which are banned in Europe as a cancer hazard. Approximately 10% of all U.S. dairy cows are injected with Monsanto and Elanco's controversial genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone, banned in most industrialized nations. Recent studies indicate that an alarming percentage of non-organic U.S. meat contains dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

3. Organic foods and farming are climate-friendly. Citizens are increasingly concerned about climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas pollution (CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide), 35-50% of which in North America comes from our energy-intensive, chemical-intensive food and farming system. Organic farms and ranches, on the other hand, use far less fossil fuel and can safely sequester large amounts of CO2 in the soil (up to 7,000 pounds of CO2 per acre per year, every year.) Twenty-four billion pounds of chemical fertilizers applied on non-organic farms in the U.S. every year not only pollute our drinking water and create enormous dead zones in the oceans; but also release enormous amounts of nitrous oxide, a super potent, climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas.

4. Organic food certification prohibits nuclear irradiation. Consumers are justifiably alarmed about irradiating food with nuclear waste or electron beams, which destroy vitamins and nutrients and produce cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and formaldehyde. The nuclear industry, large food processors, and slaughterhouses continue to lobby Congress to remove required labels from irradiated foods and replace these with misleading labels that use the term "cold pasteurization." The USDA and large meat companies have promoted the use of irradiated meat in school lunches and senior citizen facilities. Many non-organic spices contain irradiated ingredients.

5. Consumers worry about rampant e-coli, salmonella, campylobacter, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and fecal contamination in animal products coming out of the nation's inhumane and filthy slaughterhouses. The Centers for Disease Control have admitted that up to 76 million Americans suffer from food poisoning every year. Very few cases of food poisoning have ever been linked to organic farms or food processors.

6. Consumers are concerned about billions of pounds of toxic municipal sewage sludge dumped as "fertilizer" on 140,000 of America's chemical farms. Scientific evidence has confirmed that municipal sewage sludge contains hundreds of dangerous pathogens, toxic heavy metals, flame-retardants, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pharmaceutical drugs and other hazardous chemicals coming from residential drains, storm water runoff, hospitals, and industrial plants. Organic farming categorically prohibits the use of sewage sludge.

7. Consumers worry about the routine practice of grinding up slaughterhouse waste and feeding this offal and blood back to other animals, a practice that has given rise to a form of human mad-cow disease called CJD, often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's disease. Animals on organic farms cannot be fed slaughterhouse waste, manure, or blood - daily rations on America's factory farms.

8. Consumers care about the humane treatment of animals. Organic farming prohibits intensive confinement and mutilation (debeaking, cutting off tails, etc.) of farm animals. In addition to the cruel and unhealthy confinement of animals on factory farms, scientists warn that these CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) produce enormous volumes of manure and urine, which not only pollute surface and ground water, but also emit large quantities of methane, a powerful climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas.

9. Consumers are concerned about purchasing foods with high nutritional value. Organic foods are nutritionally dense compared to foods produced with toxic chemicals, chemical fertilizers, and GMO seeds. Studies show that organic foods contain more vitamins, cancer-fighting anti-oxidants, and important trace minerals.

10. Consumers care about preserving America's family farms, world hunger, and the plight of the world's two billion small farmers. Just about the only small farmers who stand a chance of making decent living these days are organic farmers, who get a better price for their products. In addition study after study has shown that small organic farms in the developing world produce twice as much food per acre as chemical and GMO farms, while using far less fossil fuel and sequestering large amounts of excess CO2 in the soil. Yields on organic farms in the industrialized world are comparable to the yields on chemical and GMO farms, with the important qualification that organic farms far out-produce chemical farms under extreme weather conditions of drought or torrential rains. Of course, given accelerated climate change, extreme weather is fast becoming the norm.

For all these reasons, millions of American consumers are turning to organic foods and other organic items, including clothing and body care products - part of an overall movement toward healthy living, preserving the environment, and reversing global warming.

Gearing up for publication

2011-08-10T14:25:00.000-04:00

It has continued to be a tough go in the fields. The cool wet spring, followed by heat and extended lack of rainfall conspired to put paid to most of our touted salad green mixes in July. Stresses on the plants gave marauding bugs the signal to move in, and they have had a feast. The exception was the baby lettuce mix, which battled on gamely through the dry heat, only now flagging in submission. However, we did enjoy a good early season, especially with bountiful hoophouse production; the baby beets and rainbow carrots have performed well, thanking us for their thorough weeding and frequent watering through the heat. Garlic and lavender too rewarded us with healthy harvests.

And now, plentiful early August rains are helping to turn us around. We have been very busy planting arugula, salad mixes, mustards, kales, spinach, beets, carrots, and all are emerging nicely. I even took a rare day off market yesterday, missing a rainy afternoon at Riverdale. Within days, we will be up and running with new production, ready for the second half of the season. Imminent further plantings in the fields and hoophouses will see us right, through till the end of December.

The recent turnaround time gave me pause to finally submit for publication my account of our organic life and musings on the alternative regional food system we are part of. It was with excitement and some trepidation that I clicked on that “Submit” button, and off went the manuscript of my baby – my first book - for evaluation and editing. If all goes to plan, I hope to be flogging Leafy Greens in the Rolling Hills at market come the indoor season. For the time being, there is lots of planting, growing, harvesting and selling to be done and the rest of summer to enjoy…

Garlic Time (cue Music)

2011-07-25T15:13:00.006-04:00

Ah, this farming lark, it’s sometimes a great challenge, but we have to stay upbeat. Otherwise we would lose the plot! We farmers are known for moaning and griping, whining and wingeing, but sometimes we really do have a lot on our plate! July’s blue skies and intense sunshine belie a fierce heat and a brutal aridity which make some plants want to give up the ghost. Only constant gushings of water keep them in survival mode, and those farmers unable to water are truly up against the wall. This weather follows on the heels of an exceptionally cool and wet May and June, whose early plantings have delivered up slim pickings. In my weariness, I have to remind myself that I would rather be doing nothing else in the world, and the rewards in overall health and wellbeing are enormous.

Now, as 2 inches of rain have teemed down outside, the heat and drought have broken, it is almost time to get back to the fields to try to start catching up on delayed planting, so that we have something to show in August and September, traditionally peak season for fresh produce here at Rolling Hills Organics. Turn around day.

I can have no complaints about the traffic at the Riverdale Park and Evergreen Brickworks farmers markets in Toronto that we sell at. Customers are enthusiastic, appreciative, dedicated, and fresh blood is always out there. The positive feedback from customers is music to my ears and reminds me why we work so hard at this game. We do it honestly, as do many farmers, so it annoys me to see produce from the Food Terminal at market (unmarked as such and sold by farmers who should know better). This not fair to customers who think they are buying organic and do so for good reason – their health.

Early in the season, we had excellent Spring greenhouse production of salad greens, which helped us get a jump on things when some farmers were concentrating on their fields. Now, salad green production has slowed with the extreme weather conditions, but we have been boosted by Gundi’s fabulous pesto creations (garlic scape being a bestseller, and now slowly succeeded by the classic basil pesto). Lavender and garlic harvests have been superb, both plants loving the heat and tolerating the dry. Following after the garlic scapes, fresh garlic and “naked garlic” (peeled and bagged), the garlic plants are now fully harvested and drying nicely. The coming weeks will see abundant offerings of hardneck Music garlic, a slightly spicy hardneck variety, with a classic garlic bite and flavour! With 4 to 6 easy-to-peel cloves per bulb, each has a shiny-white sheath and pink-tinged clove skins. They are a good source of calcium, phosphorus and selenium, and an excellent source of vitamin C, vitamin B6 and manganese. We have been using fresh juicy garlic liberally in salads and cooking and feel our skin glowing, even shining with radiant health. One customer remarked how subtle and sweet the flavour of the roasted garlic is. Yes, indeed. Local-grown organic hardneck garlic (as opposed to the supermarket-ubiquitous unorganic softneck grown and harvested who knows when and well-travelled from the other side of the world in

China

) is an elaborate feast for the taste buds and dense with nutrition.

The naturally-raised, grass-fed, grass-finished Dexter beef we take to market has been finding a highly enthusiastic audience. The current schedule of one animal a month is not keeping up with demand right now, especially for the sought-after prime steak cuts (tenderloins, striploins, ribeyes, T-bones, sirloins) and the lean ground beef. We sell the ground beef also through the Northside Grill in Cobourg, where chef Johnny Devlin has had great response to his Dexter burgers, which have replaced Kobe burgers on the menu. All cuts are full-flavoured, dense and highly nutritious. This is what happens when happy cows graze on their natural diet in the open air year round with easy access to shelter. They live in prime health, unstressed and do not need any antibiotics, hormones or unnatural supplementation. When considering the definition of grass–fed beef, it is vital that they are “finished”, or fattened, on grass, rather than grain, for the 90 – 160 days before dispatch. If grain–finished during those months, the levels of important nutrients like CLA and Omega 3 decrease dramatically in the animal’s tissues. It is in the finishing process that those levels and ratios drastically decline because of the grain feeding. Taken individually to the local processor, stress is kept to a minimum and this translates in the flavour and nutrition of the meat.

Hey ho, hey ho, it’s off to work we go…

The Big E.Coli Smear Campaign

2011-06-05T15:06:00.001-04:00

Escherichia coli (E. Coli) bacteria are found in the intestines of cattle, poultry and other animals. If people become infected with these bacteria and those from raw sewage, the infection can result in serious illness, as is the case that has recently sickened many and caused the death of 22 people to date in northern Germany.

German authorities were quick on the draw, passing judgement by falsely blaming Spanish cucumbers and leading to a devastating loss of sales for innocent Spanish farmers. Some were probably forced to go out of business. Then the net was spread to blame not just cucumbers, but also tomatoes and lettuce, affecting sales for farmers across Europe and beyond, as panicked customers were advised not to consume these salad vegetables. Now, the spotlight has turned onto local German-grown beansprouts. Still they blame the vegetables and, by extension, many more innocent farmers.

To me, this smacks of a trigger-happy blame game waged against farmers, hatched up by big corporations and governments (together with the science experts they have in their pockets), and broadcast by their mainstream media, including the Associated Press, BBC. All as a diversionary tactic for seeding maximum panic and doubt in a concerned public. As noted above, E. coli originates from contamination by animal and poultry (even human) waste and fecal matter, just as the tainted spinach in California did. The source of the E. coli found in spinach that killed three people and sickened more than 200 in 2007 was found to be a small cattle ranch. Investigators found E. coli in river water, cattle feces, and wild pig feces on the ranch adjacent to fields of spinach. E.coli may pass through vegetables, but it is usually antibiotics fed to animals, raw sewage, runoff, unsanitary washing practices, contaminated water that are the true cause of such outbreaks.

Scientists say the new E.coli strain is an aggressive hybrid form toxic to humans and not previously linked to food poisoning. How can such a toxic new strain suddenly appear in the food system, particularly at one small farm in northern Germany that is currently taking the rap? The answers will unfold as forensic evidence comes to the fore in the coming days. They won’t be pretty.

For more, read Mike Adams’ in-depth insights at http://www.naturalnews.com/032590_ecoli_superbugs.html

and http://www.naturalnews.com/032622_ecoli_bioengineering.html

Fast Afternoon at Riverdale

2011-06-01T08:56:00.002-04:00

Though it is early in the season and the fields are a week away from first production, I always feel it worthwhile to go to market, if only to keep loyal customers abreast of availability. It was touch-and-go whether I could make it in to Toronto for the Tuesday afternoon market at Riverdale. The garage was waiting overnight on a part crucial to the full fix of the shot brakes on the car. I called first thing in the morning, and, yes, we were on, the part was in. So I pressed into action picking beautiful baby chard, beet greens, kale, lettuce greens from the greenhouse, and made up a mix of spinach, lettuce, bi-colour beet greens, rainbow chard, mizuna, mustards. Thank goodness for the greenhouses! Jerrica and Leigh paused in their fragrant de-grassing of the bushing-up lavender plants and set to washing, weighing and bagging the greens.

On the lovely first true sunny and warm afternoon of the season, I set up our stand midst the trees in Riverdale Park. My colleague Chris was recuperating after surgery so I was on my own. Along with the greens, I had 50 bunches of rhubarb, 10 pounds of sunchokes and some grass-fed grass-finished Dexter ground and stewing beef. The mostly female summery feeders pecked the greens, sunchokes, fresh herbs and rhubarb off the table with abandon and withing an hour and a bit, the table was a greenless desert. The frenzy can be put down to the fine weather and the fact that we, Rolling Hills Organics, were the only vendor with any greens this particular afternoon at market. I explained to the baffled buyers that farmers – ourselves included – are way behind in getting out on the fields planting after this exceptionally cool and wet May that we have just endured. The familiar refrain that I am forced to come out with once every few seasons – we’ll have more next week – was put to good use, before I scooted out of there. Ire was setting in and I didn’t want to be chased out, greenless as I was. Even after snarled traffic on the highways, I was home early to kick back with a hearty carmenère on the balmy deck, to the accompaniment of raucous evening birdsong.

Breakthrough honeybee drugs to treat Colony Collapse Disorder (satire)

2011-05-03T10:39:00.001-04:00

With distressing news facts about health, food, farming, elevated radiation, geopolitical wars, financial collapse, extreme weather leaking out of a largely complicit mainstream media, it is tempting to run and hide. However, it is also refreshing to get a different angle and to have a good laugh once in a while. The following made me chuckle….

Breakthrough honeybee drugs to treat Colony Collapse Disorder (satire)

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor (From NaturalNews.com)

Originally published May 18 2007

Following the mysterious, accelerating collapse of honeybees across North America and Europe - a condition dubbed "Colony Collapse Disorder" - ConPfuzer, a top pharmaceutical company, has announced a new, patented medication designed to treat the disorder by drugging honeybees with psychotropic chemicals. ConPfuzer shares rose $14 in trading today as ConPfuzer's lead pharmaceutical entomologist created quite a buzz with his explanation of how the new drug - called "Buzzalin" - might work. "We have discovered that honeybees are suffering from a brain chemistry disorder," said Dr. B. Pollen, a top researcher at the company. "Our new drug, Buzzalin, has been clinically shown to control the symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder while causing no more than two percent of the bees to commit suicide," Dr. Pollen explained.

Drug development tests were conducted on thousands of bees in the Midwest. Normally, 72 percent of bees suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder become mysteriously disoriented and cannot find their way back to the hive. But after treatment with Buzzalin, 99 percent of the bees returned to the hive on their own. Unfortunately, the other one percent of bees returned carrying automatic weapons which they used against fellow bees. The event made the evening news (because violence = ratings!) but was not considered an obstacle to FDA approval because "the drug benefits outweigh its risks," according to the FDA.

A panel of nine FDA drug safety experts approved the drug last week. Six of the nine have received consulting fees from ConPfuzer, and the other three were bribed with illicit pollination promises.

The buzz in psychiatry

The psychiatric community has reacted favorably to ConPfuzer's announcement. "We believe that honeybees need psychiatric care too," said Dr. Arthur Podd, a world authority on ADHD in animals and insects. "Up to 80 percent of honeybees may currently suffer from symptoms of Colony Collapse Disorder and not even know it," Dr. Podd said. "We need to set up screening and treatment centers to get these bees the medicine they need. No bee should be left untreated," he said.

But some skeptics questioned the need for using mental health drugs on honeybees. When ConPfuzer's Dr. Pollen was asked how such simple, tiny brains could be diagnosed with a behavioral disorder, he offered a stinging response. "No brain is too small to understand the need for psychiatric medicine!"

Side effect warning signs: Honeybesity

Side effects from Buzzalin are already starting to emerge. Honeybees that continue to take the drug for more than one month begin to experience significant weight gain, and many are being diagnosed with a new disease called, Honeybesity. "Overweight honeybees don't fly very well," explained Andrew Apis, a honeybee researcher working at the University of Missouri, Columbia. "Even if they make it out to the flower and collect some pollen, they sort of crash land back in the hive like a damaged fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, spilling their pollen granules all over the inside of the hive and getting their wings stuck in the honey."

But ConPfuzer has promised to come up with a new drug to treat Honeybesity. "Our goal is to end Honeybesity by making beekeepers pay the highest prices in the world for Buzzalin," explained Dr. Pollen. "We'll then take the profits from those sales and pay huge bonuses to our shareholders and CEOs. Whatever's left will be invested in the search for a cure for Honeybesity. We believe it is the obligation of American beekeepers to pay the highest prices in the world for medicine so that we can raise the money needed to search for yet more drugs that we can sell back to the same people at profiteering prices."

The U.S. Senate agreed, passing a law banning the importation of honeybees from other countries and mandating a national "honeybee mental health screening program" covering all honeybees currently in the United States. All such bees found to fly in zig-zag patterns will be deemed "Attention Deficit Hyperactive" and be put on Buzzalin or other patented drugs.

ConPfuzier has also funded a Colony Collapse Disorder support group that's designed to "keep honeybees on our drugs forever" while telling them they're actually getting well. A nationwide "Run For the Cure" event is also being organized that involves disturbing a hive of killer Africanized bees and watching them chase gullible consumers around a football field while they cough up cash for every mile survived.

Behind closed doors, Big Pharma executives are drooling over the market opportunities that have emerged from Colony Collapse Disorder. After successfully drugging most humans and pets through a campaign of medical domination, pharmaceutical companies have been looking into new markets for expansion. "Insects appear to be the next great frontier in pharmaceutical profits," proclaimed one press release sent out by the PHARMA trade group. "We see huge market opportunites in honeybees, spiders, ants and bed mites. Of course, we will also pursue new opportunities for drugging human infants and newborns, but the real growth in selling drugs will be found in turning insects into patients," the press release reported.

All that remains is convincing the public that bees actually have mental health diseases requiring chemical treatment. This is being accomplished through Big Pharma's new campaign that claims: "Insects are people, too!"

About Colony Collapse Disorder: This disease, also known as ADHBee, is caused by a brain chemistry imbalance in honeybees that makes them act like teenagers: They don't come home on time, and even when they do show up, they smell like pollen and refuse to say where they've been. Although this article is a joke, the disorder is real, and honeybee populations are collapsing all across North America and Europe. Click here to read our previous article on Colony Collapse Disorder or click here to read the Wikipedia entry.

The value of grass-fed, grass-finished beef

2011-04-18T12:13:00.016-04:00

Our Dexter cattle in their pasture. They are grass-fed, and grass-finished.

We are days away from a new season at the farmers markets - Evergreen Brickworks on Saturday mornings, and Riverdale on Tuesday afternoons. Along with our fresh salad greens, herbs, vegetables - all certified organic - we will have a regular supply of grass-fed, grass-finished beef. For the benefits of this highly-nutritious food, go to http://products.mercola.com/organic-beef/.

As a reminder of the value of choosing grass-fed and grass-finished beef, read the latest on the failings of food safety regulation from Mike Adams at http://www.naturalnews.com/, re-printed here:

With superbugs contaminating fresh meat, the truth comes out about the FDA Food Safety Bill

Remember all the hubbub about the S.510 "Food Safety Bill" and how it would make your food safe to eat? Well, it turns out those expanded FDA powers do absolutely nothing to even address the safety of fresh meat products, and yet new research reveals that nearly half of all fresh meat and poultry products are contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria, including multiple drug-resistant superbugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/032099_poultry_superbugs.html)

This research was conducted by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) and published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. It was based on 136 samples of fresh meat representing 80 different brands sold in 26 grocery stores from California to Florida.

The research reveals that factory animal farms are breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria which are then passed on to humans through the food supply. This happens because factory farm animals are routinely dosed with both antibiotics and vaccines, causing serious imbalances in their own intestinal flora and immune function. This makes these factory farm animals the perfect hosts for breeding drug-resistant superbugs such as S. aureus, a particularly nasty strain that can be fatal if ingested.

It's yet another reason to buy free-range beef, chicken or pork if you eat those meats, by the way. Only free-range animals that are not injected with antibiotics are safe from the kind of chemical abuse routinely used in factory farm operations.

The S.510 Food Safety Bill is a complete joke

What this situation reveals is just how ridiculous all the debate was over the S.510 Food Safety Bill which recently became law in the

United States

. Remember all those Senators who stood before the American people and insisted S.510 would "make the food supply safe" for everyone?

What they didn't tell you is that S.510 did absolutely nothing to address the safety of meat products. It only attacked vegetables and thinks like raw milk and raw cheese, complete ignoring the safety of meat products altogether.

And now we know why: The meat products sold in America today are so widely contaminated with dangerous, deadly bacteria that if the American people really knew how much bacteria was in their meat, they wouldn't buy it!

So the government, as usual, swept the problem under the rug and pretended that e.coli was a "vegetable farming" problem. Well, I have news for the federal regulators and geniuses in the U.S. Senate who passed S.510: E.coli grows in animals, not plants. So the only way it can even get onto the plants is if the factory animal farms are releasing e.coli downstream where it contaminates the vegetable farms.

The e.coli problem, in other words, is an animal farm problem, not a vegetable farm problem.

If you can't eat fresh meat, what about packaged meat?

So you might think that if so much of the fresh beef and poultry is so widely contaminated with potentially deadly bacteria, maybe the packaged "processed" meat is safer for you, right?

You might want to reconsider that: Packaged meat is almost always preserved with a dangerous, cancer-causing ingredient called sodium nitrite. It's listed right on the label of packages of bacon, sausage, sandwich meat, beef jerky, pepperoni, ham and many other packaged meat products. Sodium nitrite causes cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/007024.html), and it's added to meat products primarily to turn them bright red (as a chemical food coloring agent). It also kills botulism, by the way, because it's yet another chemical antibiotic agent.

So if you eat fresh meat, you're likely to be encountering superbugs. If you eat packaged meat, you're probably eating cancer-causing chemicals.

So what to do?

Solutions for meat eaters

You could always go vegetarian, of course. A largely plant-based diet is not only safer for you; it's also safer for the environment. (Go check out the runoff from the factory cattle farms near Greeley, Colorado, and you'll see what I mean...)

For those who choose to eat meat, here are three things you can do to avoid these dangers:

1) Buy local, grass-fed or free-range meat products from farmers and ranchers you know. Check out the local food co-ops or Saturday farmers' markets.

2) Cook the snot out of your meat products just to be sure you kill absolutely everything that might be living on them.

3) Look for nitrite-free meats at your grocery store or health food store. They're always in the frozen meat section (in the freezers) because without the sodium nitrite chemicals, they have to be kept frozen to avoid spoilage.

And finally, don't believe anything the federal government tells you about so-called "food safety." The federal food safety laws are such a complete joke that they utterly ignore the single largest source of potentially deadly bacteria in the entire food supply: the factory animal farms that have now become superbug breeding grounds.

It's yet another side effect of the widespread abuse of antibiotics. Did you know that in North America, far more antibiotics are given to animals than to people? The flooding of antibiotics into the food supply is a type of chemical assault on our bodies and our environment. These antibiotics are being found in frogs and fish, rivers and streams. They are an environmental pollutant that threaten ocean ecosystems and wildlife.

And yet, the only reason these antibiotics are even needed in the factory animal farm operations is because animal farms are so filthy and unsanitary in the first place. Have you watched The Meatrix animations yet? If not, visit http://www.themeatrix.com/ to learn more.

Mindless consumers created the factory animal farms, in a sense

Now, here's another thing to consider: Why do factory animal farm operations even exist? Because mindless consumers buy meat based on the lowest price and nothing else!

If more consumers demanded grass-fed beef and free-range chicken, the factory animal farms would be out of business! It is the mindless shopping habits of consumers who frankly don't even care where their meat comes from that has given rise to these "lowest price" cattle feed lots and factory farms.

If you don't care where your beef comes from, and you only shop price at the big box stores, guess what you're buying? Antibiotic-injected, superbug-infested factory-farmed beef!

Factory farm cattle companies, of course, are only giving consumers what they demand: the absolutely lowest price on beef, regardless of where it comes from or how the cows were treated, fed or medicated. Amazingly, probably 4 out of 5 beef consumers couldn't care less about what they're eating or where it really comes from. They would eat piles of doggy doo if it looked like hamburger and was on sale for 99 cents a pound.

So it's one thing to blame the cattle factory farms for all this, but the truth is that it is the consumers who create the demand that these factory animal farms are merely trying to meet. If food shoppers really cared what they were eating and changed their shopping habits accordingly, the factory animal farms would collapse virtually overnight.

And that's a point of empowerment for YOU to remember: When you refuse to buy the lowest-price beef (corn fed, factory farmed beef), you deny revenues to that entire model of cow abuse and antibiotics abuse. When you buy local, grass-fed, free-range beef, you support the local cattle ranchers who refuse to participate in the whole system of factory beef operations.

So the choice is up to you, and every dollar you spend makes a difference. If you eat beef or chicken, simply changing your own purchasing habits can have a powerful influence over the entire system. And when enough consumers refuse to buy factory-farmed beef, the beef factories will finally shut down and become yet another sad chapter in the history of food.

Personally, I don't eat beef, but I do buy beef for my dog. And I go to a local farmer's market where I can buy beef bones from locally grown grass-fed, free-ranged cattle.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/032111_fresh_meat_superbugs.html#ixzz1JtK3BvN3

A pair of gardians

2011-04-14T12:53:00.000-04:00

Last week in old Montreal, I fell for a pair of painted wooden carvings from

Indonesia

. To me they are destined to be serene “gardians”. My dear Mum & Dad – now both moved on to another realm – are nonetheless constant companions in the garden, and these two happy souls are their embodiment.

It’s a glorious day out there to baptize them with. Almost mid-April, and time to get out on the fields. The finches, robins, chickadees are twittering away in glee; squirrels are scurrying around, trees are budding up nicely, the grass is greening before our eyes, the garlic is shooting up, and the greenhouses are fully planted with spring greens and starter trays.

The over-wintered spinach is large-leafed and succulent. In a week or so, it’s off to market once more. Dead wood is cleared away. The tractor with cultivator finally gets a run out on some of the fast-drying beds, releasing waftings of earthiness. The sloping fields will have to wait to drain and firm up some more.

The garden awakens from its long winter, and the air is filled with energy and anticipation. We sun-struck planters heed the call.

Organic groups, farmers file pre-emptive lawsuit against Monsanto...

2011-04-01T10:18:00.002-04:00

...to protect themselves from inevitable destruction by GMOs

(NaturalNews) In order to avoid completely losing their businesses and livelihoods to the predatory business model of Monsanto, 60 family farmers, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations have collectively filed a preemptive lawsuit against the multinational biotechnology giant. Filed by the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) on behalf of the plaintiffs, the suit seeks judicial protection against the inevitable lawsuits Monsanto will file against non-GM and organic farmers when its genetically-modified (GM) seeds and other materials contaminate their fields.

In the past, Monsanto has successfully sued farmers in both the US and Canada for allegedly violating patent protections. But the truth is that Monsanto's seeds or other genetic materials have inadvertently trespassed on nearby crop fields, for which any rational person can see makes Monsanto the violator. But Monsanto has someone been able to twist this before the courts to claim that the owners of the contaminated fields were guilty of patent infringement - and shockingly, Monsanto has actually won numerous cases on this illegitimate platform (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Goliath_and_David:_Monsanto%27s_Legal_Battles_against_Farmers).

With the recent deregulation of GM alfalfa - and many more GM crops soon on the way - organic farmers and the organizations that represent and fight for them can see the coming storm. If given free reign over agriculture, Monsanto and its "Frankenseeds" will eventually take over the whole of agriculture - and this is a fact. So the plaintiffs are doing the only thing they can, which is to take proactive steps now to protect non-GM and organic agriculture from being completely destroyed by Monsanto.

"Some say transgenic seed can coexist with organic seed, but history tells us that's not possible, and it's actually in Monsanto's financial interest to eliminate organic seed so that they can have a total monopoly over our food supply," said Dan Ravicher, Executive Director of PUBPAT. "Monsanto is the same chemical company that previously brought us Agent Orange, DDT, PCB's and other toxins, which they said were safe, but we know are not. Now Monsanto says transgenic seed is safe, but evidence clearly shows it is not."

Over 270,000 members are represented as plaintiffs in the case, and thousands of them are certified organic family farmers. The case, Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, has been assigned to Judge Naomi Buchwald in a Manhattan, NY, federal district court. You can read a full copy of the suit here:

http://www.pubpat.org/assets/files/seed/OSGATA-v-Monsanto-Complaint.pdf

"None of Monsanto's original promises regarding genetically modified seeds have come true after 15 years of wide adoption by commodity farmers. Rather than increased yields or less chemical usage, farmers are facing more crop diseases, an onslaught of herbicide-resistant superweeds, and increased costs from additional herbicide application," said David Murphy, founder and Executive Director of Food Democracy Now!

"Even more appalling is the fact that Monsanto's patented genes can blow onto another farmer's fields and that farmer not only loses significant revenue in the market but is frequently exposed to legal action against them by Monsanto's team of belligerent lawyers. Crop biotechnology has been a miserable failure economically and biologically and now threatens to undermine the basic freedoms that farmers and consumers have enjoyed in our constitutional democracy."

Sources for this story include:

http://www.cornucopia.org/2011/03/f...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031922_Monsanto_lawsuit.html#ixzz1IHOZCeV8

Consumer activists unite to demand labeling of genetically modified foods

2011-03-25T09:05:00.000-04:00

Washington, DC March 14, 2011. A growing number of consumer activists are staging demonstrations all over the US, with the largest so far at the White House on March 26, 2011.

They demand labeling of genetically modified foods and they're urging activists around the country to "Rally for the Right to Know" locally. The idea has spread like wildfire with other grassroots rallies already being planned in Colorado, California, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee, Florida and Oregon to coincide with the rally in Washington DC.

Their demands are:
1. We have the right to know and want genetically modified foods labeled.
2. We want factory farmed animal and genetically modified animal products labeled.
3. We want independent, transparent, long-term studies done on the safety of GMO's for animals, plants and humans.
4. We want the organic industry protected from cross-contamination and law suits to organic farmers.

The FDA currently considers GM foods "substantially equivalent" and therefore doesn't require labeling. There is a growing body of evidence that show:

* Health and environmental concerns.
* Corporate control of world food and seed supplies, and monopolization through patents, government lobbying and corporate interest over human interest in all levels of government.
* Monsanto is the leader in GM patents.

Rally Organizer, Trish Wright "We will not stop in our efforts to accomplish our goals. If the FDA won't tell people, we will. Our freedom of choice is being violated by the FDA not requiring these products to be labeled."

To date, the majority of commodity crops are genetically engineered. (Soy, corn, canola, cotton). Many deregulated crops such as GE Alfalfa and GE Sugar Beet, being planted in 2011, have the ability to destroy the organic industry.

People are asked to participate in, or organize a rally in their area.

Contact: TrishWright, Organizer: 540-915-3677

(Rally for the Right to Know)

nogmosroanoke@yahoo.com

April Reeves, Media Contact 604-233-0781, aprilreeves@shaw.ca.

Visit: www.facebook.com/rallyfortherightto... for more information.

Elizabeth Harris

2011-03-14T10:03:00.001-04:00

It was the irrepressible Elizabeth Harris who gave me my big break as a certified organic grower all those years ago. Then as Vice President of Quinte Organic Farmers Co-operative, I approached Elizabeth to apply for the co-op to be a vendor at her flagship organic farmers market at Riverdale Farm in Cabbagetown, Toronto. She sized up what we offered – 12 small certified organic family farms pooling their produce to market direct to the customer – and had her doubts. She was used to allowing only single farms to join her family of vendors. But she sized me up too and found something she liked or trusted, so she said “OK but as long as you bring all the farmers in to sell at your stand through the season”. “Sure”, I promised, one foot in the door. It wasn’t to be, of course; only one or two farmers bothered to come in, but the first season was a roaring success for the co-op as a fledgling sales organization. I made sure we stayed otherwise on Elizabeth’s good side – as one had to – and, over several years, Elizabeth and I developed a wonderful mutual respect. I was awed by her tight control of the market, her fairness, discipline with slack vendors, her amazing vision in holding it all together and bringing people together. “Peter, I’d like you to meet Jamie Kennedy”; “Peter, can any of your farmers supply three bushels of romano beans for a dinner for 75 this Friday?”

She would often call up, tell me about the latest new vendors that she was excited to have visited. She had such respect for farmers and for food produced honestly and in a fresh way. And she would ask my opinion and advice.

Early on at market, I incurred her wrath. She had strong rules and enforced them. Vendors were not allowed to sell before the bell rang, right on 3pm. As I tried to sneak in a sale for a customer who was running off to work, a booming voice bellowed from the other side of the park: “Mr. Finch, the market opens at 3 o’clock, and not before!” Last year, running late in setting up, I upheld her rule, when an impending storm told her to ring the bell early. “No, that’s not fair; I’m not ready”, I pleaded. She agreed to wait, and for weeks after, she deferred to me to see if I was ready before ringing the bell. A softening maybe? I feel deep down that she truly respected her senior farmers, and I was lucky enough to have been in that number.

Elizabeth slipped away from us this week, succumbing to cancer, but her amazing energy, drive and spirit will remain with us as we try to honour her legacy and continue to provide for the table she set for us so passionately.

It has been an honour and a privilege to know Elizabeth; hard to believe that she won’t be overseeing the action on a sunny opening day of market this Spring and that her voice won’t be greeting me across the park: “ Hi Peter, who do you have helping you today? I’d like to introduce you to… ”

New Pathogen found in Roundup Ready GMO Crops

2011-03-03T07:10:00.001-05:00

Photo Credit: Royalty Free Images via Flickr Creative Commons

As reported on www.lavidalocavore.org, http://farmandranchfreedom.org, www.treehugger.com.

Here's another reason the recent approval of GMO alfalfa and sugar beets was a bad idea: researchers claim that Roundup Ready GE crops contain an organism, completely unknown until now, that has been shown to cause miscarriages in farm animals.

The new organism was detected only after researchers observed it using a 36,000x microscope. It is about the size of a virus. The scary part: it can reproduce, and possesses the rare ability to cause disease in both plants and animals.

The research was performed by Professor Don M. Huber of Purdue University. Huber is also a co-ordinator for the USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System. Prior to the recent approval of GM alfalfa, he penned the following open letter to United States Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack outlining the dangers of this organism, how it was discovered, and his recommendation that a moratorium on the sale and planting of Roundup Ready crops be put in place immediately.

Dear Secretary Vilsack:

A team of senior plant and animal scientists have recently brought to my attention the discovery of an electron microscopic pathogen that appears to significantly impact the health of plants, animals, and probably human beings. Based on a review of the data, it is widespread, very serious, and is in much higher concentrations in Roundup Ready (RR) soybeans and corn - suggesting a link with the RR gene or more likely the presence of Roundup. This organism appears NEW to science!

This is highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies. On the other hand, this new organism may already be responsible for significant harm (see below). My colleagues and I are therefore moving our investigation forward with speed and discretion, and seek assistance from the USDA and other entities to identify the pathogen's source, prevalence, implications, and remedies.

We are informing the USDA of our findings at this early stage, specifically due to your pending decision regarding approval of RR alfalfa. Naturally, if either the RR gene or Roundup itself is a promoter or co-factor of this pathogen, then such approval could be a calamity. Based on the current evidence, the only reasonable action at this time would be to delay deregulation at least until sufficient data has exonerated the RR system, if it does.

For the past 40 years, I have been a scientist in the professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and man-made biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. Based on this experience, I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status. In layman's terms, it should be treated as an emergency.

A diverse set of researchers working on this problem have contributed various pieces of the puzzle, which together presents the following disturbing scenario:

Unique Physical Properties

This previously unknown organism is only visible under an electron microscope (36,000x), with an approximate size range equal to a medium size virus. It is able to reproduce and appears to be a micro-fungal-like organism. If so, it would be the first such micro-fungus ever identified. There is strong evidence that this infectious agent promotes diseases of both plants and mammals, which is very rare.

Pathogen Location and Concentration

It is found in high concentrations in Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, distillers meal, fermentation feed products, pig stomach contents, and pig and cattle placentas.

Linked with Outbreaks of Plant Disease

The organism is prolific in plants infected with two pervasive diseases that are driving down yields and farmer income-sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soy, and Goss' wilt in corn. The pathogen is also found in the fungal causative agent of SDS (Fusarium solani fsp glycines).

Implicated in Animal Reproductive Failure

Laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of this organism in a wide variety of livestock that have experienced spontaneous abortions and infertility. Preliminary results from ongoing research have also been able to reproduce abortions in a clinical setting.

The pathogen may explain the escalating frequency of infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations. These include recent reports of infertility rates in dairy heifers of over 20%, and spontaneous abortions in cattle as high as 45%.

For example, 450 of 1,000 pregnant heifers fed wheatlege experienced spontaneous abortions. Over the same period, another 1,000 heifers from the same herd that were raised on hay had no abortions. High concentrations of the pathogen were confirmed on the wheatlege, which likely had been under weed management using glyphosate.

Recommendations

In summary, because of the high titer of this new animal pathogen in Roundup Ready crops, and its association with plant and animal diseases that are reaching epidemic proportions, we request USDA's participation in a multi-agency investigation, and an immediate moratorium on the deregulation of RR crops until the causal/predisposing relationship with glyphosate and/or RR plants can be ruled out as a threat to crop and animal production and human health.

It is urgent to examine whether the side-effects of glyphosate use may have facilitated the growth of this pathogen, or allowed it to cause greater harm to weakened plant and animal hosts. It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bio-availability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders. To properly evaluate these factors, we request access to the relevant USDA data.

I have studied plant pathogens for more than 50 years. We are now seeing an unprecedented trend of increasing plant and animal diseases and disorders. This pathogen may be instrumental to understanding and solving this problem. It deserves immediate attention with significant resources to avoid a general collapse of our critical agricultural infrastructure.

Sincerely,

COL (Ret.) Don M. Huber

Emeritus Professor, Purdue University

APS Coordinator, USDA National Plant Disease Recovery System (NPDRS)

Why GMOs are incompatible with organic production

2011-02-02T10:37:00.002-05:00

The Rodale Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to pioneering organic farming through research and outreach. For over sixty-years, they’ve been researching the best practices of organic agriculture and sharing their findings with farmers and scientists throughout the world, advocating for policies that support farmers, and educating consumers about how going organic is the healthiest options for people and the planet.

From www.rodaleinstitute.org comes this pertinent piece, authored by Jim Riddle

Despite fundamental differences in what they represent, there are occasional calls to allow the use of genetic engineering (which produces genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs) within the USDA National Organic Program. GMO varieties are currently most widespread in corn, soybean, canola and cotton crops, in dairy production, and in minor ingredients, such as dairy cultures, used in food processing, but new products are being introduced and commercialized.

Here are 10 essential points that I believe show why GMOs are incompatible with organic production:

1. Basic science. Humans have a complex digestive system, populated with flora, fauna, and enzymes that have evolved over millennia to recognize and break down foods found in nature to make nutrients available to feed the human body. GMO crops and foods are comprised of novel genetic constructs which have never before been part of the human diet and may not be recognized by the intestinal system as digestible food, leading to the possible relationship between genetic engineering and a dramatic increase in food allergies, obesity, diabetes, and other food-related diseases, which have all dramatically increased correlated to the introduction of GMO crops and foods.

2. Ecological impact. Organic agriculture is based on the fundamental principle of building and maintaining healthy soil, aquatic, and terrestrial ecosystems. Since the introduction of GMOs, there has been a dramatic decline in the populations of Monarch butterflies, black swallowtails, lacewings, and caddisflies, and there may be a relationship between genetic engineering and colony collapse in honeybees. GMO crops, including toxic Bt corn residues, have been shown to persist in soils and negatively impact soil ecosystems. Genetically modified rBST (recombinant bovine somatrotropin, injected to enhance a cow’s milk output) has documented negative impacts on the health and well being of dairy cattle, which is a direct contradiction to organic livestock requirements.

3. Control vs harmony. Organic agriculture is based on the establishment of a harmonious relationship with the agricultural ecosystem by farming in harmony with nature. Genetic engineering is based on the exact opposite - an attempt to control nature at its most intimate level - the genetic code, creating organisms that have never previously existed in nature.

4. Unpredictable consequences. Organic ag is based on a precautionary approach - know the ecological and human health consequences, as best possible, before allowing the use of a practice or input in organic production. Since introduction, genetic modification of agricultural crops has been shown to have numerous unpredicted consequences, at the macro level, and at the genetic level. Altered genetic sequences have now been shown to be unstable, producing unpredicted and unknown outcomes.

5. Transparency. Organic is based on full disclosure, traceability, information sharing, seed saving and public engagement. Commercial genetic engineering is based on secrecy, absence of labeling, and proprietary genetic patents for corporate profits. The "substantial equivalence" regulatory framework has allowed the GMO industry to move forward without the benefit of rigorous, transparent scientific inquiry. The absence of labels has allowed genetically modified products into the U.S. food supply without the public's knowledge or engagement., and without the ability to track public health benefits.

6. Accountability. Organic farmers must comply with NOP requirements and establish buffer zones to protect organic crops from contamination and from contact with prohibited substances, including genetically engineered seeds and pollen. Genetically engineered crops do not respect property lines and cause harm to organic and non-GMO producers through “genetic trespass,” with no required containment or accountability.

7. Unnecessary. It is well established that healthy soils produce healthy crops, healthy animals, and healthy people. Research and development should focus on agricultural methods, including organic, which recycle nutrients to build soil health, producing abundant yields of nutrient dense foods, while protecting environmental resources. To date, recombinant genetic modification has contributed to the development of herbicide-resistant weeds and an increase in the application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, with associated increases in soil erosion and water contamination, while producing foods with lower nutritional content. Technologies, such as genetic engineering, which foster moncropping are not compatible with organic systems, where soil-building crop rotations are required.

8. Genetic diversity. Organic farmers are required to maintain or improve the biological and genetic diversity of their operations. Genetic modification has the exact opposite effect by narrowing the gene pool and is focused on mono-cropping GMO varieties.

9. Not profitable. According to the 2008 Organic Production Survey conducted by the USDA National Ag Statistics Service, organic farmers netted more than $20,000 per farm over expenses, compared to conventional farmers. Use of GMO varieties has lowered the net profit per acre for conventional producers, forcing them to farm more land in order to stay in business.

10. No consumer demand. Consumers are not calling for organic foods to be genetically engineered. In fact, over 275,000 people said “no GMOs in organic,” in response to the first proposed organic rule in 1997. “Organic” is the only federally regulated food label, which prohibits the use of genetic engineering. By genetically engineering organic foods, consumer choice would be eliminated, in the absence of mandatory labeling of all GMO foods.

Jim Riddle is an organic farmer who was an organic inspector for 20 years. He was founding chair of the International Organic Inspectors Association (IOIA), served on the National Organic Standards Board from 2001-2006 (chair in 2005-06). He currently works as Organic Outreach Coordinator for the University of Minnesota and has written authoritatively on organic issues many times on this website. The views expressed are those of the author.

10 Reasons We Don’t Need GM Foods

2011-01-21T18:40:00.006-05:00

As a grower of certified organic produce, it is vital to me to be assured a natural supply of seeds and no contamination of the land I farm. As a consumer of organic and natural meats, fish, dairy, fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, it has become ever more important to me to know that these foods are not in any way genetically-modified. This is increasingly difficult when labelling of GM ingredients (e.g. in processed foods) is not authorized by our government.

10 Reasons We Don’t Need GM Foods

From www.gmwatch.org:

With the cost of food recently skyrocketing – hitting not just shoppers but the poor and hungry in the developing world – genetically modified (GM) foods are once again being promoted as the way to feed the world. But this is little short of a confidence trick. Far from needing more GM foods, there are urgent reasons why we need to ban them altogether.

1. GM foods won’t solve the food crisis

A 2008 World Bank report concluded that increased biofuel production is the major cause of the increase in food prices.[1] GM giant Monsanto has been at the heart of the lobbying for biofuels (crops grown for fuel rather than food) — while profiting enormously from the resulting food crisis and using it as a PR opportunity to promote GM foods!

“The climate crisis was used to boost biofuels, helping to create the food crisis; and now the food crisis is being used to revive the fortunes of the GM industry.” — Daniel Howden, Africa correspondent of The Independent[2]

“The cynic in me thinks that they’re just using the current food crisis and the fuel crisis as a springboard to push GM crops back on to the public agenda. I understand why they’re doing it, but the danger is that if they’re making these claims about GM crops solving the problem of drought or feeding the world, that’s bullshit.” – Prof Denis Murphy, head of biotechnology at the University of Glamorgan in

Wales

[3]

2. GM crops do not increase yield potential

Despite the promises, GM has not increased the yield potential of any commercialised crops.[4] In fact, studies show that the most widely grown GM crop, GM soya, has suffered reduced yields.[5]

A report that analyzed nearly two decades worth of peer reviewed research on the yield of the primary GM food/feed crops, soybeans and corn (maize), reveals that despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase US crop yields. The author, former US EPA and US FDA biotech specialist Dr Gurian-Sherman, concludes that when it comes to yield, “Traditional breeding outperforms genetic engineering hands down.”[6]

“Let’s be clear. As of this year [2008], there are no commercialized GM crops that inherently increase yield. Similarly, there are no GM crops on the market that were engineered to resist drought, reduce fertilizer pollution or save soil. Not one.” – Dr Doug Gurian-Sherman[7]

3. GM crops increase pesticide use

government data shows that in the

, GM crops have produced an overall increase, not decrease, in pesticide use compared to conventional crops.[8]

“The promise was that you could use less chemicals and produce a greater yield. But let me tell you none of this is true.” – Bill Christison, President of the

National Family Farm Coalition[9]

4. There are better ways to feed the world

A major UN/World Bank-sponsored report compiled by 400 scientists and endorsed by 58 countries concluded that GM crops have little to offer global agriculture and the challenges of poverty, hunger, and climate change, because better alternatives are available. In particular, the report championed “agroecological” farming as the sustainable way forward for developing countries.[10]

5. Other farm technologies are more successful

Integrated Pest Management and other innovative low-input or organic methods of controlling pests and boosting yields have proven highly effective, particularly in the developing world.[11] Other plant breeding technologies, such as Marker Assisted Selection (non-GM genetic mapping), are widely expected to boost global agricultural productivity more effectively and safely than GM.[12] [13]

“The quiet revolution is happening in gene mapping, helping us understand crops better. That is up and running and could have a far greater impact on agriculture [than GM].” – Prof John Snape, head of the department of crop genetics, John Innes Centre[14]

6. GM foods have not been shown to be safe to eat

Genetic modification is a crude and imprecise way of incorporating foreign genetic material (e.g. from viruses, bacteria) into crops, with unpredictable consequences. The resulting GM foods have undergone little rigorous and no long-term safety testing, but animal feeding tests have shown worrying health effects.[15] Only one study has been published on the direct effects on humans of eating a GM food.[16] It found unexpected effects on gut bacteria, but was never followed up.

It is claimed that Americans have eaten GM foods for years with no ill effects. But these foods are unlabeled in the

and no one has monitored the consequences. With other novel foods like trans fats, it has taken decades to realize that they have caused millions of premature deaths.[17]

“We are confronted with the most powerful technology the world has ever known, and it is being rapidly deployed with almost no thought whatsoever to its consequences.” — Dr Suzanne Wuerthele, US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) toxicologist

7. Stealth GMOs in animal feed - without consumers’ consent

Meat, eggs and dairy products from animals raised on the millions of tons of GM feed imported into Europe do not have to be labelled. Some studies show that contrary to GM and food industry claims, animals raised on GM feed ARE different from those raised on non-GM feed.[18] Other studies show that if GM crops are fed to animals, GM material can appear in the resulting products[19] and that the animals’ health can be affected.[20] So eating “stealth GMOs” may affect the health of consumers.

8. GM crops are a long-term economic disaster for farmers

A 2009 report showed that GM seed prices in America have increased dramatically, compared to non-GM and organic seeds, cutting average farm incomes for

farmers growing GM crops. The report concluded, “At the present time there is a massive disconnect between the sometimes lofty rhetoric from those championing biotechnology as the proven path toward global food security and what is actually happening on farms in the

that have grown dependent on GM seeds and are now dealing with the consequences.”[21]

9. GM and non-GM cannot co-exist

GM contamination of conventional and organic food is increasing. An unapproved GM rice that was grown for only one year in field trials was found to have extensively contaminated the US rice supply and seed stocks.[22] In Canada, the organic oilseed canola industry has been destroyed by contamination from GM canola.[23] In Spain, a study found that GM maize “has caused a drastic reduction in organic cultivations of this grain and is making their coexistence practically impossible”.[24]

The time has come to choose between a GM-based, or a non-GM-based, world food supply.

“If some people are allowed to choose to grow, sell and consume GM foods, soon nobody will be able to choose food, or a biosphere, free of GM. It’s a one way choice, like the introduction of rabbits or cane toads to

Australia

; once it’s made, it can’t be reversed.” – Roger Levett, specialist in sustainable development[25]

10. We can’t trust GM companies

The big biotech firms pushing their GM foods have a terrible history of toxic contamination and public deception.[26] GM is attractive to them because it gives them patents that allow monopoly control over the world’s food supply. They have taken to harassing and intimidating farmers for the “crime” of saving patented seed or “stealing” patented genes — even if those genes got into the farmer’s fields through accidental contamination by wind or insects.[27]

“Farmers are being sued for having GMOs on their property that they did not buy, do not want, will not use and cannot sell.” – Tom Wiley, North Dakota farmer[28]

References

1. A Note on Rising Food Prices. Donald Mitchell, World Bank report, 2008. http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Environment/documents/2008/07/10/Biofuels.PDF

2. Hope for Africa lies in political reforms. Daniel Howden, The Independent, 8 September 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk:80/opinion/commentators/daniel-howden-hope-for-africa-lies-in-political-reforms-922487.html

3. GM: it’s safe, but it’s not a saviour. Rob Lyons, Spiked Online, 7 July 2008, http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5438/

4. The adoption of bioengineered crops. Jorge Fernandez-Cornejo and William D. McBride, US Department of Agriculture Report, May 2002, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer810/aer810.pdf

5. Glyphosate-resistant soyabean cultivar yields compared with sister lines. Elmore, R.W. et al., Agronomy Journal, Vol. 93, No. 2, 2001, pp. 408–412

6. Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops. Doug Gurian-Sherman, Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009, http://tiny.cc/eqZST

7. Genetic engineering — a crop of hyperbole. Doug Gurian-Sherman, The San Diego Union Tribune, 18 June 2008, http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080618/news_lz1e18gurian.html

8. Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years. Charles Benbrook, Ph.D., The Organic Center, November 2009, http://www.organic-center.org/science.pest.php?action=view&report_id=159

9. Family Farmers Warn of Dangers of Genetically Engineered Crops. Bill Christison, In Motion magazine, 29 July 1998, http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/genet1.html

10. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development: Global Summary for Decision Makers (IAASTD). Beintema, N. et al., 2008, http://www.agassessment.org/index.cfm?Page=IAASTD%20Reports&ItemID=2713

11. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development: Global Summary for Decision Makers (IAASTD). Beintema, N. et al., 2008, http://www.agassessment.org/index.cfm?Page=IAASTD%20Reports&ItemID=2713

12. Marker-assisted selection: an approach for precision plant breeding in the twenty-first century. Collard, B.C.Y. and D.J. Mackill, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, Vol. 363, 2008, pp. 557-572, 2008

13. Breeding for abiotic stresses for sustainable agriculture. Witcombe J.R. et al., Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 2008, Vol. 363, pp. 703-716

14. Gene mapping the friendly face of GM technology. Professor John Snape, Farmers Weekly, 1 March 2002, p. 54

15. Here is a small selection of such papers: Fine structural analysis of pancreatic acinar cell nuclei from mice fed on GM soybean. Malatesta, M. et al., Eur. J. Histochem., Vol. 47, 2003, pp. 385–388; Ultrastructural morphometrical and immunocytochemical analyses of hepatocyte nuclei from mice fed on genetically modified soybean. Malatesta, M. et al., Cell Struct Funct., Vol. 27, 2002, pp. 173-180; Ultrastructural analysis of testes from mice fed on genetically modified soybean. Vecchio L. et al., Eur. J. Histochem., Vol. 48, pp. 448-454, 2004; A long-term study on female mice fed on a genetically modified soybean: effects on liver ageing. Malatesta M. et al., Histochem Cell Biol., Vol. 130, 2008, pp. 967-977; Effects of diets containing genetically modified potatoes expressing Galanthus nivalis lectin on rat small intestine. Ewen S.W. and A. Pusztai, The Lancet, Vol. 354, 1999, pp. 1353–1354; New Analysis of a Rat Feeding Study with a Genetically Modified Maize Reveals Signs of Hepatorenal Toxicity. Séralini, G.-E. et al., Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol., Vol. 52, 2007, pp. 596-602.

16. Assessing the survival of transgenic plant DNA in the human gastrointestinal tract. Netherwood T. et al., Nature Biotechnology, Vol. 22, 2004, pp. 204–209.

17. Trans Fats: The story behind the label. Paula Hartman Cohen, Harvard Public Health Review, 2006, http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/review/rvw_spring06/rvwspr06_transfats.html

18. Report on animals exposed to GM ingredients in animal feed. Professor Jack A. Heinemann, PhD. Prepared for the Commerce Commission of New Zealand, 24 July 2009, http://bit.ly/4HcJuJ

19. Detection of Transgenic and Endogenous Plant DNA in Digesta and Tissues of Sheep and Pigs Fed Roundup Ready Canola Meal. Sharma, R. et al., J. Agric. Food Chem., Vol. 54, No. 5, 2006, pp. 1699–1709; Assessing the transfer of genetically modified DNA from feed to animal tissues. Mazza, R. et al., Transgenic Res., Vol. 14, No. 5, 2005, pp. 775–784; Detection of genetically modified DNA sequences in milk from the Italian market. Agodi, A., et al., Int. J. Hyg. Environ. Health, Vol. 209, 2006, pp. 81–88

20. Report on animals exposed to GM ingredients in animal feed. Professor Jack A. Heinemann, PhD. Prepared for the Commerce Commission of New Zealand, 24 July 2009, http://bit.ly/4HcJuJ

21. The Magnitude and Impacts of the Biotech and Organic Seed Price Premium. Dr Charles Benbrook, The Organic Center, December 2009, http://www.organic-center.org/reportfiles/Seeds_Final_11-30-09.pdf

22. Risky business: Economic and regulatory impacts from the unintended release of genetically engineered rice varieties into the rice merchandising system of the

. Blue, Dr E. Neal, report for Greenpeace, 2007, http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/risky-business.pdf

23. Seeds of doubt: North American farmers’ experience of GM crops. Soil Association, 2002, http://www.soilassociation.org/seedsofdoubt

24. Coexistence of plants and coexistence of farmers: Is an individual choice possible? Binimelis, R., Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2008

25. Choice: Less can be more. Roger Levett, Food Ethics magazine, Vol. 3, No. 3, Autumn 2008, p. 11, http://www.foodethicscouncil.org/node/384

26. See, for example, Marie-Monique Robin’s documentary film, Le Monde Selon Monsanto (The World According to Monsanto), ARTE, 2008; and the website of the NGO, Coalition Against Bayer-Dangers, www.cbgnetwork.org

27. GM company Monsanto has launched many such lawsuits against farmers. A famous example is the case of the Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser. Just one article on this case is “GM firm sues Canadian farmer”, BBC News Online, 6 June 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/779265.stm

28. Monsanto ”Seed Police” Scrutinize Farmers. Stephen Leahy, InterPress Service, 15 January 2004, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0115-04.htm

For more information on GMOs:

www.gmwatch.org

www.saynotogmos.org

www.seedsofdeception.com

www.responsibletechnology.org

Nourishing the Planet

2011-01-14T09:35:00.000-05:00

Report provides a roadmap for food security and agricultural investment, revealing 15 high- and low-tech solutions that are helping to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa

New York, New York (12 January 2011)--Worldwatch Institute today released its report State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, which spotlights successful agricultural innovations and unearths major successes in preventing food waste, building resilience to climate change, and strengthening farming in cities. The report provides a roadmap for increased agricultural investment and more-efficient ways to alleviate global hunger and poverty. Drawing from the world's leading agricultural experts and from hundreds of innovations that are already working on the ground, the report outlines 15 proven, environmentally sustainable prescriptions.

"The progress showcased through this report will inform governments, policymakers, NGOs, and donors that seek to curb hunger and poverty, providing a clear roadmap for expanding or replicating these successes elsewhere," said Worldwatch Institute President Christopher Flavin. "We need the world's influencers of agricultural development to commit to longstanding support for farmers, who make up 80 percent of the population in Africa."

State of the World 2011 comes at a time when many global hunger and food security initiatives--such as the Obama administration's Feed the Future program, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), and the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP)--can benefit from new insight into environmentally sustainable projects that are already working to alleviate hunger and poverty.

Nearly a half-century after the Green Revolution, a large share of the human family is still chronically hungry. While investment in agricultural development by governments, international lenders, and foundations has escalated in recent years, it is still nowhere near what is needed to help the 925 million people who are undernourished. Since the mid-1980s when agricultural funding was at its height, agriculture's share of global development aid has fallen from over 16 percent to just 4 percent today.

In 2008, $1.7 billion in official development assistance was provided to support agricultural projects in Africa, based on statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)--a miniscule amount given the vital return on investment. Given the current global economic conditions, investments are not likely to increase in the coming year. Much of the more recently pledged funding has yet to be raised, and existing funding is not being targeted efficiently to reach the poor farmers of Africa.

"The international community has been neglecting entire segments of the food system in its efforts to reduce hunger and poverty," said Danielle Nierenberg, co-director of Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet project. "The solutions won't necessarily come from producing more food, but from changing what children eat in schools, how foods are processed and marketed, and what sorts of food businesses we are investing in."

Serving locally raised crops to school children, for example, has proven to be an effective hunger- and poverty-reducing strategy in many African nations, and has strong parallels to successful farm-to-cafeteria programs in the United States and Europe. Moreover, "roughly 40 percent of the food currently produced worldwide is wasted before it is consumed, creating large opportunities for farmers and households to save both money and resources by reducing this waste," according to Brian Halweil, Nourishing the Planet co-director.

State of the World 2011 draws from hundreds of case studies and first-person examples to offer solutions to reducing hunger and poverty. These include:

In 2007, some 6,000 women in The Gambia organized into the TRY Women's Oyster Harvesting producer association, creating a sustainable co-management plan for the local oyster fishery to prevent overharvesting and exploitation. Oysters and fish are an important, low-cost source of protein for the population, but current production levels have led to environmental degradation and to changes in land use over the last 30 years. The government is working with groups like TRY to promote less-destructive methods and to expand credit facilities to low-income producers to stimulate investment in more-sustainable production.

In Kibera, Nairobi, the largest slum in Kenya, more than 1,000 women farmers are growing "vertical" gardens in sacks full of dirt poked with holes, feeding their families and communities. These sacks have the potential to feed thousands of city dwellers while also providing a sustainable and easy-to-maintain source of income for urban farmers. With more than 60 percent of Africa's population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, such methods may be crucial to creating future food security. Currently, some 33 percent of Africans live in cities, and 14 million more migrate to urban areas each year. Worldwide, some 800 million people engage in urban agriculture, producing 15–20 percent of all food.

Pastoralists in South Africa and Kenya are preserving indigenous varieties of livestock that are adapted to the heat and drought of local conditions--traits that will be crucial as climate extremes on the continent worsen. Africa has the world's largest area of permanent pasture and the largest number of pastoralists, with 15–25 million people dependent on livestock.

The Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) is using interactive community plays to engage women farmers, community leaders, and policymakers in an open dialogue about gender equity, food security, land tenure, and access to resources. Women in sub-Saharan Africa make up at least 75 percent of agricultural workers and provide 60–80 percent of the labor to produce food for household consumption and sale, so it is crucial that they have opportunities to express their needs in local governance and decision-making. This entertaining and amicable forum makes it easier for them to speak openly.

Uganda's Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC) program is integrating indigenous vegetable gardens, nutrition information, and food preparation into school curriculums to teach children how to grow local crop varieties that will help combat food shortages and revitalize the country's culinary traditions. An estimated 33 percent of African children currently face hunger and malnutrition, which could affect some 42 million children by 2025. School nutrition programs that don't simply feed children, but also inspire and teach them to become the farmers of the future, are a huge step toward improving food security.

The State of the World 2011 report is accompanied by other informational materials including briefing documents, summaries, an innovations database, videos, and podcasts, all of which are available at http://www.nourishingtheplanet.org/. The project's findings are being disseminated to a wide range of agricultural stakeholders, including government ministries, agricultural policymakers, farmer and community networks, and the increasingly influential non-governmental environmental and development communities.

In conducting this research, Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet project received unprecedented access to major international research institutions, including those in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research(CGIAR) system. The team also interacted extensively with farmers and farmers' unions as well as with the banking and investment communities.

10 Reasons to Buy (Eat, Grow, and Be) Organic

2011-01-09T15:02:00.001-05:00

On this sunny cold afternoon, with a very cold night ahead, I am picking the last arugula from the unheated greenhouses, so calling an official end to the 2010 growing season (early in 2011!). With the ground frozen and blanketed with snow at this beginning of January, it is good to recall why we do (or should do) this organic thing,

courtesy of an old Whole Foods paper shopping bag that I kept for the rallying text:

Protect Future Generations - Children receive four times more exposure than adults to cancer-causing pesticides in food.
Prevent Soil Erosion - At least three billion tons of topsoil are eroded from crops lands in North America each year, much of it due to conventional farming practices, which often ignore the health of the soil.
Humane Treatment of Animals - Free-range, pasture-based livestock farms ensure animal health and positively impact natural animal behaviour.
Keep Chemicals Off Your Plate - Pesticides are toxins designed to kill living organisms. Organic foods are grown without these chemicals, protecting you, the consumer.
Protect Farm Worker Health - Farmers and farm workers enjoy better health when they work in a pesticide-free environment.
Save Energy – More energy is now used to produce synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate, and harvest the crops.
Help Small Farmers – Although more and more large-scale farms are making the conversion to organic practices, most organic farms are small, independently-owned and –operated family farms.
Support A True Economy – Organic foods might seem expensive; however, your tax dollars pay for hazardous waste clean-up and environmental damage caused by conventional farming.
Promote Biodiversity – Planting large plots of land with the same crop year after year increases farm production, but the lack of natural diversity of plant life has negatively affected soil quality.
Flavour & Nourishment – Organic farming starts with the nourishment of the soil, producing nourished, & nourishing, plants. Conduct your own taste test!

Couldn’t agree more.

Hundreds of herbal products to be outlawed across EU in early 2011

2010-12-31T13:58:00.000-05:00

No real comment is necessary, except that the following is evidence of another attempt by governments and corporations to restrict and take control of our natural health:

A vital article by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor, in its entirety:

December 31, 2010

www.NaturalNews.com

http://www.NaturalNews.com/030873_EU_directive_medicinal_herbs.html

The global effort to outlaw herbs, vitamins and supplements is well under way, and in just four months, hundreds of herbal products will be criminalized in the

and across the EU. It's all part of an EU directive passed in 2004 which erects "disproportionate" barriers against herbal remedies by requiring them to be "licensed" before they can be sold. It's called the Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive (THMPD), Directive 2004/24/EC.

The licensing requirements, however, were intentionally designed to make sure that virtually no herbs could ever meet them. It costs from $125,000 to $180,000 to license a single herb with the EU, and since herbs cannot be patented and don't have the monopolistic pricing found in pharmaceuticals, there's simply not enough profit margin in most herbs to justify such huge expenditures from any one company.

But that's sort of the point. Governments of the world have been conspiring with the pharmaceutical industry for decades to destroy the competition by outlawing nutritional supplements, herbal remedies and many other forms of natural medicine.

They really are coming for your natural medicine

Some people in the USA are still skeptical that this could ever happen in the "land of the free," yet it's happening in Europe right now, and the

U.S.

is probably not far behind. In just four months, health food stores in the UK will be stripped bare of these suddenly "illegal" herbs, and the many millions of people who have come to depend on them as a safe, natural and non-invasive form of medicine will be forced to pursue pharmaceuticals instead of herbs.

And that's also the point. By driving these products off the shelves, governments know they will simultaneously herd people into doctors' offices where they will be prescribed medications that benefit the wealthy corporations that keep politicians in office (in every Western nation).

It may also drive people to acquire herbs from sources that have poor quality controls. As Dr Rob Verkerk of the Alliance For Natural Health said in an Independent article, "Thousands of people across Europe rely on herbal medicines to improve their quality of life. They don't take them because they are sick - they take them to keep healthy. If these medicines are taken off the market, people will try and find them elsewhere, such as from the internet, where there is a genuine risk they will get low quality products, that either don't work or are adulterated." (http://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...)

You must beg the King for permission

The MHRA (UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency) has received 166 applications for herbal product licensing and has granted 78 so far. Do you see how this works? Now you must be "granted" a license in order to exercise your Natural Law right to engage in the free commerce of Mother Nature's plants. Big Government has stolen from European citizens their natural rights and is now condemning many of them to suffering or even death as a result.

That's how governments always work in the end: they expand their power at the expense of your freedom. They centralize control over your life while maximizing the profits of the powerful corporations that keep them in business. You're watching it happen right now across Europe, and if we don't put a stop to this, it will soon happen in the United States as well. It's already under way, in fact, with the FDA's outlawing of scientifically-validated free speech about nutritional supplements. There's also a war under way on raw milk, and need I even mention the decades-long war being waged against medical marijuana?

Which herbs are under threat of being banned?

Here are some of the hundreds of herbs that are about to be banned across Europe:

• Ashwagandha

• Cascara Sagrada

• Pau D'Arco

• Skullcap

• Horny Goat Weed

... and hundreds more, especially Traditional Chinese Medicine formulas.

Sign the petition

Efforts are under way in Europe to try to reverse this highly destructive directive. You can sign this petition at: http://www.gopetition.com/petition/...

Also, the European office of the Alliance for Natural Health is working diligently to attempt to protect health freedom for EU citizens: http://www.anh-europe.org

They could really use your support right now if you're considering an end-of-year donation of some kind. Health freedom is worth defending, and as we're seeing right now, if we don't take a stand against this, we will all lose our access to natural remedies, vitamins, supplements and perhaps even naturopathic medicine.

There really is a global conspiracy to force you to take pharmaceuticals and surrender your body to conventional medicine. Governments around the world absolutely do not want you to have free choice about how to treat your own health, because "choice" implies that you, like literally billions of other people across the planet, might not choose to poison yourself with conventional medicine's deadly drugs.

Two bad Bills

2010-12-22T11:56:00.008-05:00

In this country we have Bill C36 to contend with. To very little fanfare, it became law in Canada on December 14, 2010. The full ramifications of this nasty bill are not being disclosed in some mainstream news sources. Under Bill C36, police and Health Canada inspectors no longer require a warrant to enter private property in

Canada

. Now enshrined in law, both bodies have powers to remove anything from a business or home, and do not have to report what was taken to the local court. Natural health advocates fear that this is a precursor for another bill that will give Health Canada the power to take some 75% of natural health products off the shelves.

South of the border, The United States House of Representatives has just passed Bill S 510.
The indefatigable Mike Adams writes passionately about this in the following article:
http://www.NaturalNews.com/030808_food_safety_bill_American_farmers.html
(www.NaturalNews.com)

Full article:
Congress sticks it to U.S. farmers with passage of food safety bill that will actually cause fresh produce to be more dangerous

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

The U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 2751 yesterday with a 216 to 144 vote (yes, many members of the House did not even vote). The so-called Food Safety Modernization Act now heads to the President to be signed into law.

When witnessing such a moment in history when the federal government greatly expands its power over an entire industry, it's important to understand the Law of Unintended Consequences. Virtually everything bad that happens after a bill gets passed is due to this Law of Unintended Consequences.

On the surface, the intention behind the food safety bill seems innocent enough: Let's all protect the food supply and prevent people from getting sick due to e.coli and salmonella exposure. But the reality of the result that emerges from the law is quite different.

Get ready for more dangerous, pesticide-ridden food from south of the border

Because the S.510 / HR 2751 food safety bill places an enormous new burden on U.S. farmers - yes, even small farms that are supposedly "exempt" - it's going to drive many farmers out of business.

It will also erect new barriers to farmers entering the food production business, and this is especially true for the small local farmers who grow food for local co-ops, farmers' markets and CSA organizations (Community Supported Agriculture). What we're going to see from all this, then, is the following:

• A reduction in the available SUPPLY of fresh local produce.
• A loss of local farming know-how and food sustainability.
• The financial failure of CSAs, food co-ops and small local markets.
• The loss of countless jobs that were related to local food production.
• An INCREASE in the price of local food, especially organic food.

Food safety bill does nothing to address food imports

At the same time these huge regulatory burdens are thrust upon U.S. farmers, there are no new regulations required for food grown outside the United States.

This means that food coming into the USA from Mexico, Chile, Peru or anywhere else does not have to meet S.510 food safety regulations at all. The FDA, after all, doesn't inspect greenhouses in Mexico or grape farms in Chile which export their products to the United States.

Furthermore, many dangerous chemical pesticides that have been banned in the USA are legal to use elsewhere, and foods treated with those pesticides are perfectly legal to import into the United States. So instead of buying food grown in the United States on small, organic farms, more U.S. consumers are going to be buying food grown elsewhere that's treated with extremely toxic pesticides.

Here are some of the unintended consequences of all this:

• An INCREASE in the importation of fresh produce from other countries.

• A worsening of the agricultural trade imbalance between the U.S. and other nations.

• An INCREASE in the pesticide contamination of fresh produce sold at U.S. grocery stores.

• An INCREASE in agriculture jobs in Mexico, Chile, Peru and elsewhere, even while agriculture jobs are lost in the USA.

• A DECREASE in the overall safety of the food supply because now the proportion of foods imported from foreign countries with little or no regulatory oversight will greatly expand compared to U.S. grown foods.

In effect, then, what Congress has done is impaired the competitiveness of U.S. farms, shifted farming jobs out of the country, increased the pesticide residues in fresh produce sold in U.S. grocery stores and harmed local food security and sustainability by driving small, local farmers out of business.

Such is the nature of the Law of Unintended Consequences. And such is the nature of just about everything that Big Government tries to do when it threatens to "solve problems" by expanding its regulatory control over almost any industry.

We need food security in America

What Congress fails to understand is that we need food security far more than we need more FDA regulations. The knowledge base of local farmers who know how to grow, harvest and distribute food is far more valuable to the security of our nation than preventing a relatively small number of people from getting sick from e.coli each year (even if such a trade-off were a simplistic equation, which it isn't). Because if we lose food security, then we become slaves to the big corporate food producers who are attempting to centralize food production and place food, seeds and crops under their absolute control.

A cynic might even suggest that was the whole purpose of the food safety bill in the first place: To destroy small farmers and centralize food production power in the hands of a few wealthy corporations. Whether that was the intent or not, it is certainly going to be the effect.

What Congress has done with this food safety bill, in effect, is to cripple America's food production know-how and poison the population with far more dangerous pesticide-ridden produce that will now be imported from other countries instead. This bill should have been called the "Mexico Farming Jobs Act" because it's going to shift countless jobs south of the border as farms in the USA realize they simply can't operate under the immense burden of FDA regulatory tyranny.

What's the definition of insanity?

It all makes you wonder what the members of Congress are really thinking. Don't they ever step back and attempt to consider the real-world ramifications of their actions?

Time and time again, the U.S. government seems to do the opposite of what would reasonably be required to solve problems. Think about it: When the U.S. government wanted to stop Wall Street bankers and investment firms from wasting money, it simply handed them a few trillion dollars in new money so they could waste more.

When the government wanted to end debt spending, it spent more debt money out of the foolish belief that you can somehow end your debt by going deeper into it.

When the government claimed it would reduce your health care costs and cover everyone with health insurance, it passed a sick-care law that has only seen health care costs spiraling out of control while insurers cancel policies and end coverage for many children.

And now, the government claims to be making your food safer even though the real impact of the new law will be to make your food far more dangerous while destroying U.S. farming jobs.

This is why those who really know government also know that they who govern best govern the least. Instead of trying to "fix" all the nation's problems by meddling with the actions of hard-working people trying to make a living (such as organic farmers), the government needs to simply get out of the way and let farmers produce their food without the heavy regulatory burden of the FDA - an agency that we know is frequently engaged in actions that can only be called criminal in nature (http://www.naturalnews.com/030461_S...).

Get ready for skyrocketing food prices in 2011 - 2013

With the passage of this food safety bill, I am now publicly predicting skyrocketing food prices over the next two years. We will see fresh, local produce become increasingly more expensive and more difficult to acquire. Many local farmers will shutter their businesses, and farming know-how will be lost for perhaps a generation. The damage that will be done to America's food security and agricultural base is incalculable.

Such is the price we shall all pay for allowing our representatives in Washington to once again violate our Natural Right to grow food and exchange it for goods or cash with our neighbors. The reason this Natural Right was never even mentioned in the US Constitution, by the way, is because the right to grow your own food without government interference is such an obvious "Natural Right" (a God-given right, or a right that is self-evident) that our forefathers never imagined such a right would be infringed by the federal government.

Or if a right were ever infringed by the federal government, our forefathers were certain that the citizens of the United States of America would exercise their other Constitutional rights to nullify the attempted overreaching authority of the federal government and thereby restore their freedoms. Sadly, such a solution does not work when the majority of the population is lulled into a false sense of freedom by a government that deliberately lies to them on a daily basis. Freedom does not exist with the vast majority of the population has no interest in defending it.

Vegetable gardeners can learn something from marijuana growers

Better buy yourself some heirloom seeds while you have the chance. Plant your stealth garden and cover it with camouflage so the government can't see it and order you to destroy it. Soon, backyard vegetable gardeners will need to operate like marijuana growers and start hiding their food from government's prying eyes.

No doubt the U.S. federal government will start using spy satellites to identify "unregistered gardens" that will be targeted for termination. Soon, small farmers may even be raided by armed FDA agents who terrorize their operations and seize cabbages. Seriously.

It sounds crazy today, I know. But a decade ago, no one thought the government would ever outlaw raw cow's milk and arrest ranchers for selling milk to their neighbors, and that's now happening on a regular basis.

In five years, FDA farm raids may be routine. That is, if there's anything left of the federal government (as we know it) in five years. I'm not sure how long they can keep up the financial house of cards, frankly. Always remember this enlightening fact: The entire federal government is just one paycheck away from collapse. I wonder how long FDA inspectors will keep harassing farmers if their paychecks stop? Remember, FDA employees have no loyalty to anything other than their paychecks. Once the money from Washington stops, the army of FDA mercenaries collapses virtually overnight.

And the resilient farmers of America will win in the end, I have no doubt. If I had to choose to live on a deserted island with either ten North Carolina farmers or ten FDA bureaucrats, the choice would be a no-brainer. Farmers can keep you alive. FDA bureaucrats will only stab you in the back, steal your coconuts, and refuse to do any actual work on their own.

They are, after all, parasites who feed on taxpayer dollars and lend nothing of value to society. If the FDA actually did anything useful at all, it would have banned mercury fillings to protect the public from mercury toxicity (http://www.naturalnews.com/030741_m...).

How to change the world by buying organic....

2010-12-16T11:37:00.002-05:00

A prime motivation in this blog is sharing information, news and views about healthy organic food and its apposite, products factory-processed for human consumption by unloving mega-corporations. One of the clearest and sharpest voices is Mike Adams, editor of the always-current Natural News, www.NaturalNews.com.

From time to time, I will be re-printing some of his most pertinent posts. This one is a classic.

First published September 28, 2005

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

Editor of NaturalNews.com

www.naturalnews.com

http://www.NaturalNews.com/012026_organic_farming_dangerous_ingredients.html

You have the power in your hands to change the world. This change ripples out from you in concentric circles, and it all starts with decisions you make at the grocery store because what you choose to buy and consume impacts the world in many powerful ways that you may have never been aware of. Every purchasing decision you make changes the world, but that's a sort of nebulous idea. It's kind of a big idea to grasp, so let's start with something a little simpler. Let's start with how changing your decision at the grocery store changes you and your life, and then we'll move out from there.

How foods affect your physical existence

Let's start with talking about how you exist as a human being. You exist at many different levels and one of them – of course, the most obvious one – is the physical level. In other words, you have physical matter, you have mass and you have substance. This makes up your body and your organs. For a moment, we'll ignore the argument that all your physical matter is just energy, which it is, and stick with the Newtonian view of reality here and talk about the physical you.

This physical you has certain needs. You have to put a certain amount of food through your body. It has to physically move through your body in order to be digested and utilized, so you also have a physical need for certain types of food. These food decisions, the purchasing decisions you make at the grocery store, can alter your physical body. If you begin to avoid purchasing foods and products that contain poisons or dangerous ingredients that I call metabolic disruptors, you can avoid the chronic diseases that most people are experiencing because those diseases are caused by those ingredients.

For example, we know that hydrogenated oils cause heart disease and nervous system disorders. We know that monosodium glutamate and excitotoxins promote obesity and migraines. We know that sodium nitrate, a common preservative found in most meat products, causes pancreatic cancer and colon cancer. We know that artificial food color ingredients promote attention deficit hyperactivity disorders, learning disabilities and so on. There are many other ingredients that cause physical problems as well as problems that go beyond the physical you, but again, we're just talking about the physical, so that's the first level of impact.

Imagine there is an outline of your body which represents the physical impact of the foods that you choose to buy. So, if you're at a grocery store and you're trying to decide between two different crackers - one cracker product is made with hydrogenated oils and another cracker product beside it is made with zero trans fats, no hydrogenated oil and no MSG - then by changing your decision right there at the point of purchase, you're changing the physical impact on your body. Now, that physical impact may not be experienced until a day or two later, and it may not really be obvious unless you make this decision thousands of times over and over again over a period of years, but it does make a difference. It is choosing a different path in your life.

How foods affect your chemical existence

Now, that's just the first level, so what happens next? You also exist at a biochemical level, so you have all this physical matter, but what's actually making this physical matter work is chemistry. Inside your body, you have chemistry that breaks down the amino acids found in foods. You have chemistry that moves water and sodium through the cells of your body. You have enzymes and various enzymatic reactions taking place throughout your body during every living moment. There is a lot of chemistry going on.

Today, most chronic diseases are described in terms of chemistry, even though that's not necessarily the level at which they originate. Cardiovascular disease can be described as a chemical disorder, as something wrong with the lipids in your blood, for example. Poor digestion might be said to be chemically caused because you're not making enough hydrochloric acid in your stomach, for example. Cancer is also often described in terms of its chemical nature, with the explanation that the chemical molecules in your body or your immune system aren't functioning correctly.

You have all this chemistry that is taking place in your body, and what you choose to eat modifies your chemistry. If you choose to buy a grocery store product that contains a lot of white flour and refined sugars, that's going to alter the chemistry of your body when you consume and digest it. It will make your body more acidic and deplete it of certain nutrients - like vitamins, minerals and other nutrients - that are necessary for enzymatic reactions. However, if you make good decisions at the grocery store and choose, for example, to purchase healthy oils - like macadamia nut oil, olive oil, flax seed oil or even unprocessed coconut oil - then your chemistry is going to be much healthier. Your blood chemistry profile will be positive rather than negative. It will indicate health rather than disease.

All these biochemical effects take place and, of course, affect your mental function because the brain is an organ that depends on chemistry for its function. When you have the right foods based on the right decisions you make at the grocery store, you end up with the right chemistry. I think my own health statistics demonstrate that if you make the right decisions, you can create outstanding chemistry that's very easy to verify in a laboratory analysis. It's a direct cause and effect relationship. If you stop eating the foods that are heavily advertised and ignore the advice of nutritionists, dietitians and doctors who are still pushing old-school nutrition, and instead start eating natural and organic foods, healthy oils and plant-based fats, while avoiding toxic ingredients – including red meat, dairy products and excitotoxins – then you, too, can create healthy blood chemistry that you can verify with simple laboratory analysis. It's very straightforward.

To represent this chemical level around your body, draw a larger circle around your body, a second outline; this is the biochemical layer of effect that you're creating by making new decisions at the grocery store.

Bioenergetics: Homeopathic foods enhance your body's energy

The third level is what I call bioenergetic. Just as you are a physical and chemical being, you are also an energetic being. In fact, everything that is chemistry is really just energy, and everything that is physical is really just energy, too. From a physics point of view, there's nothing really there. There is no physical matter in your body; it's all just energy vibrating at certain frequencies with certain interactions.

However, I'm not talking about that type of energy here. I'm talking about the energy of foods, because foods have a homeopathic quality. Every product you choose to consume has an energy; you could call it a feeling. A food that is grown in nature - that has been born in the soil and grows up under the sun with clean air, clean water, clean soils and under the care of small organic family farmers who used care and honesty - creates love, health and connection in your body. Just as homeopathic water has a scientifically proven effect in living systems (including humans and animals), the homeopathic quality of foods also has such an effect. This is not something that has been well studied. The information you're getting here is probably 10 to 15 years ahead of science, but someday I have no doubt that the homeopathic qualities of foods will someday be recognized and measured and will ultimately be found to be very important to the health effects of those foods.

You can create positive energy in foods by praying over them or even chanting over them in a mantra, the way Tibetan monks would do, for example. You can create positive energies in food by giving them clean, pure water, such as unpolluted rainwater. You can use organic soils that have microorganisms in them, so that they're living in balance with the natural ecosystem. You can create positive energy by having the foods harvested by people who are happy to be doing this work, who are not slave workers and who are making a fair wage, either by farming or wild harvesting these foods. This is how you create healthy foods, and when you purchase something at the grocery store, the closer you can get to that vibration of happiness, the healthier the energetic effect is going to be on your body. This is one reason to buy organic foods; not just because they don't have pesticides, but also because they are literally happier foods. They're healthier for your mind, your body and your entire energy system.

In contrast to that, most of the foods that are available in grocery stores (and certainly at restaurants) are really unhappy foods. They are foods that have been grown in unnatural environments. They've been bombarded with pesticides or herbicides. They have not been given clean water and, more importantly, have been planted and harvested under a system of greed, exploitation and corporate farming. Then, they've been processed and had their nutrients stripped away. They've been re-formed and combined with various chemicals, such as preservatives and taste enhancers, and have been packaged in pretty boxes and put on the shelf in the grocery store.

That is a very unhappy food and, if it comes from unhappy animals, then it's even less happy. If it's from cows that have been fed the ground-up parts of other animals, which are routinely fed to cows today, and if these cows have been slaughtered in an inhumane way - which is the way virtually all cows, pigs and chickens are slaughtered today, cooped up in tiny compartments and not being given access to fresh air, sunlight and fresh water - then they are not just unhappy animals; they are probably insane animals. They are what I call mad chickens or insane cows. Even though this makes it easier for animal ranchers to make money, it creates a problem with the final food product: the problem is that that beef, chicken or pork has been imprinted with emotions like anger, greed and terror because of the slaughtering process, and these traits of the food are passed on directly to the consumer.

It's not listed on the box and it hasn't been scientifically proven yet - again, this is years ahead of the science - but it is very much true that if you eat angry red meat, you're going to become an angry person. (You are what you eat, remember?) In fact, this part of it is not so difficult to confirm. You can go out and question a thousand people, find out who's more peaceful versus who's more angry about anything in the world or in their own lives, and you'll find that the really angry people tend to eat a lot of red meat, while those who try to propose solutions, are all about helping people and who give more than they take, are people who don't eat red meat. Vegetarians tend to be happier, more pleasant, less aggressive people than meat eaters, and for years, people have wondered why. Well, I think this is the answer: it's because of the energetic quality of the foods.

The costs of buying non-organic go far beyond money

Again, when you're making that purchasing decision at the grocery store, what you're purchasing has an energetic effect. If you have two pieces of beef on the shelf in front of you, and one piece is $3 a pound and from a cow that has been raised in a terrible environment - that has been fed chicken litter, pumped up full of hormones, has had no access to the outside and has been abused in an inhumane way by corporate ranching operations - then that's going to have a very destructive, negative effect on your energetic health. But if beside that package you have a piece of beef that is $6 a pound and from a free-range, organic cow that has been fed fresh grass, has been able to run freely in open fields and has been treated with a degree of respect by the rancher, then that piece of meat, even though it costs twice as much, delivers so much more in terms of its energetic qualities to you. Yes, you're still eating red meat, and there are still negative health effects from the overconsumption of red meat, but at least you're not poisoning your energetic system as you would be with the conventionally raised meat that's only $3 a pound.

So, that's the energetic effect of the foods you choose to purchase from the grocery store and consume. However, there's a much bigger ripple effect from all of this. Think about it: when you purchase a piece of meat and you choose the organic, free-range cow over the conventionally-raised cow, you actually create demand for organic free-range beef and reduce demand for pesticide-laden, conventionally-raised, abused red meat. You see, every time you purchase a hamburger that has not been raised organically and ethically, you are in effect partly responsible for the raising, slaughtering and abuse of a living, breathing mammal - a cow.

That beef didn't come out of the sky; it came from the flesh of a living animal. When you purchase that flesh, you create economic incentives for people to keep raising those animals - to give birth to another cow, raise it, slaughter it and put it on the shelf to replace the beef you just bought; whereas, if you buy organic beef, you create demand on the organic side. You reward the organic farmer for treating the cattle in a better way. So, you vote with your dollars; you create demand curves that are then met by supply. Everything you purchase has a ripple effect that goes way beyond your physical, chemical or energetic self and goes into the community and planet at large.

How your buying power influences your community

If you haven't done so already, draw a third circle around yourself; that's the energetic level. Now, draw a fourth, much larger circle; this is the community level. This is where you're affecting your local community and the demand curves for various foods and ingredients. By changing what you buy, you change what farmers will grow and how they will grow it. You change what ranchers do to their animals. You change it all, just by choosing what you buy. It can literally be a product right next to another product on the shelf. They can be two inches apart, but they can make a world of difference. If you move your hand six inches to the right and pick up that organic beef, you are making a huge difference in the lives of organic farmers, in saving the planet from pesticides and reducing the revenues for companies that manufacture bovine growth hormones. You're also making the difference in the quality of life of the animal that has been sacrificed to provide you food. In my view, the only way to honor that animal is to choose the best possible existence for that animal. If you're going to consume their flesh, you should at least honor them enough to grant them an organic, free-range existence.

Your choices affect the sources of those foods as well. If you buy from small, local organic growers, like you might find at a farmer's market or local co-op, then you are supporting sustainable farming and local families who have the knowledge and the determination to work close to the earth in an honorable profession. When you purchase from these local organic farmers, you are supporting a way of life that is truly sacred; a way of life that, frankly, more of us would do well to emulate. That way of life includes farming organic produce from the earth in the local sustainable way that honors nature. That's a miracle in action, and every time you purchase those foods, you support those local community miracles.

If you want your community to be made up of farmers who know the land, who can deliver fresh organic produce and who honor the earth, then that's what you need to buy because you support whatever you buy. On the other hand, if you want an earth that is scorched with pesticides, with polluted rivers, increasingly unlivable oceans, polluted produce and heavy metals in your soils, and if you want a system of corporate greed and exploitation, then go ahead and buy the non-organic fruits, vegetables and processed foods because that's what you're going to create by making that decision.

Corporate farming isn't sustainable farming

This brings us to one more level - the corporate level, or the business model level. Everything you choose at the grocery store is a vote for a certain type of business model. If you choose small organic family farms, then that's what you create. If you choose mega-corporations who sell food only because it's something that makes money, just the same as drugs make money or cigarettes make money, that's what you choose to support, as well. In fact, Phillip Morris owns Kraft, a food company that makes thousands and thousands of processed food products. A cigarette company owns a food company that sells you all those processed foods, and I think that's bad for the environment. I think it's bad for the world, and it's the bad corporate model for producing and delivering food products. I don't think it's a sustainable model.

You have so much influence by making these simple decisions at the grocery store. Just by choosing one box over another or one package over another, or picking apples from one bin instead of the bin next to that, you literally change the world because you shift the demand curve. You vote for a type of product. You vote for the way animals should be treated if there are animal products involved. You vote for a business model. You vote for the model of environmental protection that is practiced by these organizations. You affect each and every one of these things just by making a simple purchase decision.

You see, the world becomes what you consume. If you look at it collectively, the products that each of us purchases and consumes amount to the corporate world we have created. It's as if the consumers have created all of this because they have been blind to the effects of what they are doing. The mistake consumers make is that most of them shop based on price. There's no question that the mass-production, corporate-farming, pollution-creating system of producing food is very efficient in terms of retail economics; that is, if you only consider the direct costs. They can give you a slab of meat, a box of cookies or a bag of breakfast cereal more cheaply than organic farmers or small family farms can ever do, and they can probably have a prettier box and make it taste a little better with artificial flavors and more visually appealing with artificial colors. They have a bigger marketing budget because there's so much profit in those nutritionally-depleted foods that they can spend literally billions of dollars a year on advertising to convince people to buy these foods, making sure that those people never learn the true implications of what their purchasing decisions mean.

Now, I got to thinking, "What if products actually showed the effects of what they cause right there on the box, anytime you purchased them? What if every box of cereal, for example, had a little video screen on it, and when you purchased the box you would see a little video of what it causes?" You might see really angry farmers plowing in the field, or if you purchase some canned soup with some meat in it, you might hear the scream of a dying cow. You might see some dead fish floating through the surface of a polluted river, or you might see ocean life or coral reefs dying. You might see a dark, polluted earth with polluted sky and water; that's what really should be on the fronts of these food boxes, because that's the effect.

You might see exploited farmers in Mexico,

Brazil

or other countries who are essentially working under slave conditions to bring you these foods at prices that generate profits for these corporations. You might see an image of Mother Nature herself, screaming, horrified at how her gifts to humankind are being exploited and stripped away of all their healing powers and packaged into these pretty boxes so that you, the consumer, could buy them. If the product itself really told the truth about what it caused, people would be horrified.

Consumers are unaware of the consequences of buying non-organic

The only reason people continue to buy these things is because they don't know the indirect consequences of what they're doing. When they pick up a package of meat, they don't hear the scream of the terrified cow that has been slaughtered in inhumane conditions - the cow who hardly ever saw the light of day, was separated from its mother at a young age, never given any sort of humane treatment and fed ground-up parts of other dead animals, including dead dogs and cats, road-kill and chickens. All of these things are fed to cows today (in fact, they are USDA-approved).

If you saw that on the package of meat, you'd throw it away in a hurry. You'd never buy that package. If you saw the greedy look in the eyes of the CEOs of corporations that were harvesting this meat and growing these cows for nothing but profit, with no sense of ethics and no sense of honor in these animals, and you could see pictures of them stuffing dollars in their pockets and laughing while you consume products with detrimental health effects, you'd never buy that product. You'd put it down in a hurry.

If the packages really told the truth, you'd change your grocery shopping habits in an instant because when you bought fresh fruits, like organic blueberries from a local, family-owned farm, you'd see an image of Mother Nature smiling. You'd see health sprouting out of this package and into your body, as blueberries help enhance your cardiovascular health, provide antioxidants, fight cancer, protect your eyes from vision loss and offer a whole host of other benefits. You'd see happy farmers working with their families, who have created a sustainable revenue model, who honor the earth, who love the soil and who are doing this because they feel passionate about farming and working close to Mother Nature.

That's what you'd see on the package, and you'd say, "Yes, this is the kind of food I want to feed myself, my family, my children and my community. This is what we need." You'd see images of clean running rivers and streams because there are no pesticide runoffs. You'd see oceans thriving with life because there are no poisons coming from the land being used to grow these blueberries.

If the packages really told the truth, you'd see the horrifying images of what the non-organic, corporate-created products do to you and the world, and in contrast to that, you'd see the beautiful, wondrous, creative, positive effects of organic foods and organically-raised animals and how these foods create a positive, healthy impact on you, your community and your world.

That's what I mean when I say you can change the world by making a different decision at the grocery store. When they first hear that, a lot of people think it couldn't possibly be true and that I'm just spending an extra $2 on an organic product. "Why would you do that?" They say. "Why would you spend twice as much money just because it says 'organic' on it?" Well, here's the reason: it's because of everything that it impacts. It's all those concentric waves emanating out from your decision like ripples in a pond. What you do in that moment of decision in a grocery store affects the entire world. You have the power within you to change the world, to vote with your dollars for the kind of world that you want to create - the kind of world that treats animals ethically, that honors nature and its gifts to mankind and that has the kind of sustainable farming methods that don't make the rivers, streams, soils, oceans and air toxic. You have the power to create the future based on what you consume right now.

Do you see why price is the least important of these factors? What's the good of saving a dollar or two on the package of so-called 'foods' if you're poisoning the planet and supporting a corporate empire of exploitation and destruction that would bring you this food a couple dollars cheaper at the expense of the very planet that brought you that gift in the first place? When you buy non-organic, you're not really saving any money; you're dooming the planet.

When you buy organic, on the other hand, you are saving everything that matters. You're saving the small family farms, sustainable farming methods, your own health and the rivers, streams and oceans; you're saving a whole system of honoring Mother Nature. So, the best savings at a grocery store can only be experienced if you're buying organic because, if you buy non-organic, corporate food or processed foods, you're not only getting ripped off yourself; you're ripping off the community and the planet, and you're ripping yourself off at every level - physical, chemical and energetic. However, when you buy organic, you're saving yourself at every level, and you're giving yourself these intangible benefits that are priceless.

Remember: You have the power to change the world inside you right now, and I urge you to exercise it the next time you are at a grocery store making a purchasing decision. The world and its oceans, animals and revenue models are all at stake. The responsibility for making the right decision rests on your shoulders, on my shoulders and on the shoulders of all consumers everywhere, because the only way we are going to change this modern food system is to shift the demand curves. We must force companies to stop poisoning our planet by making it unprofitable for them to do so, and the only way we can do that is by changing our purchasing habits at the grocery store. Change what you buy, and you will change the world.

A bumper year

2010-12-14T08:42:00.001-05:00

2009 had been a trying year, with a cool wet spring followed by a mediocre summer of only spotty heat. From the very get-go, 2010 was a bumper year for us on the farm. After an exceptionally mild winter with very little snow, spring blew in early. As Natasha noted, it was an incredibly fecund time, with blossoms full on the fruit trees, birds busy and abundant, and seeds getting off to a fast start. The growhouses seeded in mid-March were in full production by mid-April, and I was without markets for all the arugula, lettuce mix, mescluns, spinach until the first farmers market and chefs’ awakening to local availability of produce in mid-May. The previous year had frustrated by not yielding any decent harvest of arugula until August; here we were with plenty of the stuff from April right through to December.

Natasha helped me hit the ground running with weeks of hard graft combined with stimulating, wide-ranging dialogue as one glorious spring day followed the next. We planted and weeded as the weeds grew in every bit as fecund as the plants. Grasses and sprouted grain from last year’s straw mulch blanketed the beds and made early harvests a nightmare to prepare for market. Gundi and Meredith formed a great team of salad washers, sifters, spinners, weighers, and baggers, but I did incur their wrath with each new bin of salad and grass in equal measure. We got through it and Lukash braved the heat and the picky weeding with no fuss. Perseverance paid off with an endless stream of fresh-picked, pre-washed greens, beets and carrots for two Toronto farmers markets, three Toronto restaurants, and five local restaurants each and every week, from May through November.

All through the growing and market season the weather was ideal – a lovely warm spring with regular rainfall was followed by a hot summer, warm fall likewise blessed with ideal moisture. This was the opportunity for our farm to step up to the plate, our first season selling solo. After four years with Quinte Organic Farmers Co-operative and a year in tandem with Trentview Farm, we set up at Riverdale and Brickworks farmers markets as Rolling Hills Organics. This meant stepping up production and taking over sales of Peter Southward’s grass-fed and grass-finished Dexter beef. The cattle are maintained by John McGriskin at his farm in Omemee and I order a whole beef as required, cut to our specifications. Customers were grateful for the ongoing supply of prime cut steaks, roasts, ground, and stewing and we took on new converts through the year.

Bountiful reward for the increased production was the unprecedented sales tally at the end of each market. I figured that selling out almost every market and the occasional four-figure take-home was not bad going for a small operation such as ours. Our customers went with gusto for the garlic scape, citrus basil, arugula, and sun-dried tomato pestos, created con brio by Gundi. They clamoured for more of the Seville orange marmalade made over the winter. The six blends of herbal teas found a very select audience, and late in the season, our own Northumberland Hills honey was added to the mix and well received.

On the down-side, heirloom tomatoes in the growhouses were not ventilated well enough and succumbed to leaf mould during a particularly hot and humid spell when I must have over-watered. Having pruned them way back and seen the blight continue to spread, I evacuated them all and determined never to grow them again, particularly when other growers had a spate of sundry beauties. Next year, it will be spring and fall greens and herbs only in the growhouses.

Christina was a huge help all year, at market developing relationships with customers (especially mothers and their offspring) and vouching for the flavour, nutritional value, freshness of all we showcased. And she delivered a steady stream of orders for three top Toronto restaurants whose owners and chefs she has a strong bond with. Apart from the rapport with customers and the strong sales, we had a lot of fun working together. And I have to add that I’ve probably never felt so fulfilled and contented while working hard in all my life. Being outside, preparing the ground, planting seeds, seeing plants grow, harvesting them at their peak, selling them that same day fresh, receiving compliments from customers, coming home tired but amply rewarded, sleeping like a baby…. what else could I ask for?

Progress on the farm

2010-12-13T11:33:00.002-05:00

I live on a rural acreage, so does this make the land a farm? I grow crops commercially, so does this make me a farmer? I prefer to think of the land as mixed use rural and myself as a land steward and market grower rather than farmer. There are too many “conventional” (industrial) farmers for me to relate to this breed, although the resurgence in “traditional” (organic) farmers is very heartening, even if we are a tiny minority.

It is gratifying to see the progress we have made in the eleven years that we have been tending this lovely patch. There have never ever been chemicals spread here; Carman who owned then rented it for growing a variety of crops always farmed traditionally, even though engulfed in a sea of conventional farms. We began growing garlic and lavender, then echinacea angustifolia, before settling on market-fresh greens and herbs as our mainstay and setting up shop as Rolling Hills Organics, certified organic all the way.

We now sell twice weekly at organic farmers market in the city (Toronto), an hour and a half away. We also sell to a handful of upscale city restaurants and I make weekly deliveries to several local eateries (in Warkworth, Cobourg, Port Hope, on Rice Lake). I can genuinely promise all customers exclusively fresh organic produce of premium quality, picked that day or the day previous, washed in pure well water, spun, dried, weighed, bagged and cooled.

Having retired the beast of a BCS walking tractor which doubled as roto-tiller and sickle-bar mower, the grunt work is ably performed by our labour-saving New Holland tractor with its 72-inch roto-tiller, cultivator, plow, and bush-hog, not to mention the front-end loader with its lugging capacity.

Two one-thousand square-foot growhouses now supply mostly salad greens and fresh herbs from mid-April to mid-December, extending our growing and selling season from six months to nine. A third growhouse (next year?) will help us better keep up with demand.

Elsewhere, five acres of fields re-treed five years ago with white and red pine, spruce, and larch are coming along somewhat patchily. This year, beekeeper Ian Critchell placed ten beehives next to the upper fields and so the bees are back and busy (after previous owner Paul von Baich’s six hives and wonderful honey moved away).

In the coming months the first 100 x 300-foot array of solar panels is due to be installed in a pastured field up the hill, the first of an entire acre. We have leased this acre to a Canadian solar energy company and are thrilled to be on the cusp of generating both electricity to go straight into the local grid and supplementary income for, yes, OK, the farm.

Having spent two seasons going to farmers markets with Peter Southward, Peter has now sold his farm with the Dexter beef and moved away to Prince Edward Island. I decided to take over the sale of Peter’s grass-fed, grass-finished Dexter beef at the two farmers markets in the city and to one local restaurant. This full-flavoured, highly nutritious beef is delectable. Being grass-fed and grass-finished means that this 40-head herd of small-breed cattle lives on a nearby farm in its natural environment (outside) year-round, with shelter, living on its natural diet of pasture and grasses, moved on a rotation from field to field. These calm and happy animals receive no grain at all to mess with their digestive system, to add fat or “marble them up” in the final three months of their lives, nor do they receive any antibiotics. They are taken individually to a small local licensed meat processor for butchering. In essence, they receive no stress during their lives, nor in their dispatch. The appetite for this beef has been strong, the interest keen, and the feedback overwhelmingly positive on both flavour and nutritional value.

The future on this land holds a green livelihood for us, from crops grown for market and restaurants, from sale of grass-fed beef, and from solar-powered electricity generation, hopefully for many years to come.