Capital Press
By Dan Wheat

WATERVILLE, Wash. — Feeling their 1,012 petition signatures to stop genetically modified wheat have been ignored, three Waterville wheat growers may start a new petition drive this winter seeking labeling of any foods containing such products sold in the U.S.

“At a minimum, we’d like to see labeling, but we really want Monsanto to stop developing GMO wheat,” said Tom Stahl, one of the three growers. Labeling would bring about the demise of biotech products because people increasingly don’t want them, he said.

The farmers are concerned that if biotech wheat gets started in north central Washington it could torpedo sales to Japan, the largest consumer of the region’s wheat. They’re also concerned about potential health risks of biotech products.

Japan is opposed to genetically modified wheat but has accepted some modified canola, Tom Mick, CEO of the Washington Grain Alliance in Spokane, has said.

Stahl, Joe Ludeman and Lynn Polson formed the Committee to Save Our Farm Markets last Nov. 20 and gathered the 1,012 signatures during the winter, mainly from posting copies of their petition in businesses in Waterville and Wenatchee.

Some signatures came from other parts of the state. They say they could have gotten more with a better effort.

The petition asks national and state associations to warn farmers against growing genetically modified wheat unless customers agree to buy it. The petition also seeks investigation into the health safety of such wheat and opposes open-air test plots, saying pollen would spread and contaminate conventional wheat.

“If we contaminate our land, warehouses and shipping facilities with genetically modified wheat and our customers reject it, then we could lose our markets and go out of business,” the petition states.

North central Washington produces about 13.5 million bushels of dryland soft white winter and spring wheat annually. About 85 percent of it is exported to Asia, mainly Japan.

Scientists can modify genes in wheat and other organisms to exhibit certain desired traits. Wheat could be modified to tolerate glyphosate-based herbicides such as Roundup, which would allow farmers to kill weeds without killing the wheat. Wheat cultivars could also be modified to be poisonous to pests, resistant to drought or contain other traits.

Monsanto Co., of St. Louis, Mo., has developed and sold much of the genetically modified seed available, including corn and soybeans. It was working on wheat but dropped it in 2004 in the face of grower and trade organization opposition. It resumed work in 2009 with support from the National Association of Wheat Growers and wheat organizations in Canada and Australia.

Stahl believes Monsanto lobbied NAWG board members to soften their opposition.
In an e-mail response to Capital Press questions, Monsanto spokeswoman Kelli Powers said the company has a good relationship with NAWG but isn’t sure it lobbied its board members. She said there has been growing acceptance and interest in biotech wheat to meet future demands and that nine wheat industry organizations in the U.S., Canada and Australia support increased breeding and biotechnology. A NAWG survey in February 2009 showed more than 75 percent of growers support the use of tools like biotechnology to improve wheat, she said.

Monsanto’s near-term focus is on breeding better varieties and it does not expect to introduce biotech wheat until the next decade, Powers said in the e-mail.

In June and July, the Committee to Save Our Farm Markets delivered copies of the petition to Central Washington Washington Grain Growers in Waterville, the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, the National Association of Wheat Growers, U.S. Wheat Associates, the Washington Grain Commission, Capital Press and Wheat Life Magazine.

Tony Viebrock, board president of Central Washington Grain Growers, announced at the co-op’s annual meeting in June that the board made an informal decision to discourage farmers from growing biotech wheat or hosting test plots until customers agree to buy it, Stahl said.

“I asked Viebrock for a copy of the minutes and he said the decision was informal and not contained in the minutes,” Stahl said.

Viebrock verified that and said he thinks the board will leave its position unofficial.
The other organizations did not respond. Stahl called it “thundering silence.”

“There appears to be a certain timidity in facing down Monsanto and opposing the National Association of Wheat Growers … which has endorsed GMO wheat,” Stahl said.

Rather than timidity, Viebrock said, growers and organizations are interested in using biotech products to get grassy weeds out of wheat and improve production. But they are concerned about losing markets.

NAWG spokeswoman Melissa George Kessler pointed to the organization’s principles supporting biotech wheat with plans for minimal market disruption.

Stahl said that allergies and other health problems are attributed to genetically modified organisms by the Institute for Responsible Technology, an organization opposed to genetically modified organisms.

Viebrock said there’s also information about health benefits from genetically modified organisms.

Ludeman said he initially was most concerned about the potential market loss but has grown more interested in the health aspects. He said he doesn’t like a few giant companies controlling seed production.

“We don’t understand the process of altering genes enough to unleash it on the world,” Stahl said. “Genes can’t be recalled. We’re playing God without the wisdom or power of God to fix what we do.”

About 72 percent of Oregon voters rejected a 2002 initiative that would have required labeling food that had genetically modified ingredients.

What isn’t being discussed in Congress, during the ongoing debate on the broken federal food safety system, is the root cause of the most serious pathogenic outbreaks in our food—the elephant (poop) in the room.

The relatively new phenomena of nationwide pathogenic outbreaks, be they from salmonella or E. coli variants, are intimately tied to the fecal contamination of our food supply and the intermingling of millions of unhealthy animals. It’s one of the best kept secrets in the modern livestock industry.

Mountains of manure are piling up at our nation’s mammoth industrial-scale “factory farms.” Thousands of dairy cows and tens of thousands of beef cattle are concentrated on feedlots; hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of chickens are confined in henhouses at one location for the production of eggs and meat.

Livestock producing manure is nothing new. But the epic scale of animal numbers at single locations and the incredible volumes of animal waste is a recipe for disaster. It eclipses anything that was happening on old McDonald’s farm.

Feces carrying infectious bacteria transfer to the environment and into our food supply. Feeding heavily subsidized corn and soybeans to cattle, instead of grazing the ruminants on grass, as they were genetically designed to do, changes the pH in their digestive tracts, creating a hospitable environment for pathogenic E. coli to breed. The new phenomenon of feeding “distillers grains” (a byproduct of the ethanol refining industry) is making this risk even more grave.

The current near-nationwide contamination in the egg supply can be directly linked to industrial producers that confine millions of birds, a product of massive, centralized breeding, in manure-rich henhouses, and feeding the birds a ration spiked with antibiotics. These are chickens that the McDonald family would likely have slaughtered on the farm because they were “sickly.”

Thirteen corporations each have more than 5 million laying hens, and 192 companies have flocks of more than 75,000 birds. According to the industry lobby group, United Egg Producers (UEP), this represents 95% of all the laying hens in the United States. UEP also says that “eggs on commercial egg-laying farms are never touched until they are handled by the food service operator or consumer.” Obviously, their approach has been ineffective and their smokescreen is not the straight poop.

In addition to our national dependence on factory farms, the meatpacking industry, like egg production, has consolidated as well to more easily service the vast numbers of animals sent to slaughter from fewer locations. Just four companies now control over 80% of the country’s beef slaughter. Production line speed-ups have made it even harder to keep intestinal contents from landing in hamburger and meat on cutting tables.

All of these problems are further amplified by the scope of the industrial-scale food system. Now, a single contamination problem at a single national processing facility, be it meat, eggs, spinach or peanut butter, can virtually infect the entire country through their national distribution model.

As an antidote, consumers are voting with their pocketbooks by purchasing food they can trust. They are encouraging a shift back towards a more decentralized, local and organic livestock production model. Witnessing the exponential growth of farmers markets, community supported farms, direct marketing and supermarket organics, a percentage of our population is not waiting for government regulation to protect their families.

The irony of the current debate on improving our federal food safety regulatory infrastructure, now centered in the Senate, is that at the same time the erosion of FDA/USDA oversight justifies aggressive legislation, the safest farmers in this country, local and organic, might be snared in the dragnet—the proposed rules could disproportionally escalate their costs and drive some out of business.

While many in the good food movement have voiced strong concerns about the pending legislation—it’s sorely needed—corporate agribusiness, in pursuit of profit, is poisoning our children!

When Congress returns to Washington, we have no doubt that food safety legislation, which has languished for months, will get fast-tracked. In an election-year our politicians don’t want to be left with egg on their face.

We only hope that Senators will seriously consider not just passing comprehensive reform but incorporating an amendment sponsored by John Tester (D-MT), a certified organic farmer himself, that will exempt the safest farms in our country—small, local direct marketers. We need to allocate our scarce, limited resources based on greatest risk.

Farmers and ranchers milking 60 cows, raising a few hundred head of beef, or free ranging laying hens (many times these animals have names not numbers), offer the only true competition to corporate agribusinesses that dominate our food production system.

Mark Kastel and Will Fantle are codirectors of The Cornucopia Institute, a farm policy research group based in Cornucopia, Wisconsin.

The Albany Herald
By Terry Lewis, staff writer

BLUFFTON, Ga. — Will Harris III is a fourth generation “cow man” … So what would his daddy think of what he’s doing on his 1,000-acre farm tucked into this bucolic corner of Early County?

“Oh, he’d have never let me do it,” Harris said, laughing.

What Harris is doing at White Oaks Pasture is spinning 134 years of family tradition on its ear by turning his back on the “Industrial Agricultural Establishment’s” traditional methods of cattle farming.

In 1995 Harris decided to base his farm on the “Serengeti Ecosystem Rotation Model” in which large ruminants are followed by small ruminants then birds to provide a circle of life in the ecologically rich grasslands of Africa.

“We began the transition in 1995, but the truth is we’re still transitioning,” Harris, 55, said.”I just got tired of the excesses of the industrial agricultural system,” Harris said of his decision to transition to organic farming. “We are trying to emulate nature. We’re not perfect, but it’s the better way.”

White Oak is the only on-farm, USDA-inspected grass-fed processing plant in the United States. Harris says basis of White Oak, the state’s largest certified organic farm, is that animal welfare is foremost.

“What we are trying to do is to create a system that allows our animals to follow their instinctive behavior. It’s the silver bullet for animal welfare.” Harris, a 1976 University of Georgia graduate with a degree in animal science, said. “Our cattle is grass-fed. We don’t use hormone implants, subtherapeutic antibiotics and do not confine corn-feed.”

The farm is free-range, meaning the animals are not confined to a particular pasture and are allowed unhindered movement.

Following the Serengeti Model, Harris’ large ruminants are the cattle, the small ruminants are sheep and the birds are chickens and turkeys.

“My cows walk around in the woods and they don’t get sick,” Harris said. “The sheep follow them and the chickens and turkeys aren’t far behind. As you can see we have a lot of calm, happy animals around here.”

White Oak maintains an average of 1,200 cattle, 350 sheep, 3,000 chickens (little Rock Reds) and 1,200 turkeys. You’ll see no 300-foot long chicken houses at White Oak. The birds are grouped in flocks of 600 and roost at night in small chicken houses like our grandparents once had.

Harris is just now stepping into the chicken business, and for the moment his business is beef — lots of it. White Oak currently ships just more than 200,000 pounds of beef per month.

“I’m not blaspheming one type of beef over the other,” Harris said. “I will not say anything negative about industrial beef. I’ll just sat we have a fairly sophisticated customer base, and they can make their own decisions.”

The farm is also unique in that its slaughter facility was designed by Temple Grandin, a professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. A person with high-functioning autism, Grandin is a best-selling author and a consultant to the livestock industry in animal behavior.

“I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right,’ Grandin says on her Wikipedia site. “We’ve got to give those animals a decent life and we’ve got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.”

White Oak is a zero-waste facility, getting seven boxes of beef (around 420 pounds) from a 1,000-pound cow. The hides are salted and stored to be sent to a tannery later, the entrails are liquefied and turned into fertilizer and the bones are run through a wood chipper and later spread over the pasture to add calcium to the soil.

Harris sells his beef to Whole Foods, Publix, Cisco, Buckhead Beef, Destiny Organics and Tree of Life among others. His customers range all over the eastern United States.

“There is no doubt we are a niche market, Harris said.

Harris added that White Oak’s goal is “animal welfare, environmental stewardship and maintaining the local integrity of a local, non-centralized food system.”

The farm’s green bent goes beyond its animals. The plant’s entire water supply is heated by solar energy, and some of the its power comes from a $320,000 solar pole barn. The barn is capped with 216 27×28 solar panels which generate 30 percent of the plant’s energy.

Harris say he will eventually convert the plant to 100 percent solar power.

So when will that happen?

“I don’t know, we’ll get around to it,” Harris laughed. “My whole life is a work in progress.”

For all the environmental angst being expressed over livestock, we rarely mention its counterpart: deadstock. Most of a slaughtered farm animal cannot be transformed into edible flesh. About 60 percent of it — offal, bones, tendons, blood, and plasma — becomes abattoir waste and, as such, has to be either recycled or disposed of. Despite our earnest efforts to better understand our increasingly complex food system, deadstock reminds us that the highest costs of food production are often hidden in places we rarely venture as we track our food’s journeys from farm to fork.

The livestock industry in the United States produces 1.4 billion tons of waste every year. Ranchers, butchers, and slaughterhouses have traditionally sent carcass remains to rendering plants. Relatively cost-effective and environmentally efficient, these operations — comprising what’s often called “the silent industry” — have efficiently recycled the unsavory by-products of meat production, as well as downer cows, road kill, and euthanized cats and dogs, into a variety of commercial products (such as animal feed, soap, lard, candles, and “personal care products”). All things considered, rendering plants, although by no means without problems, have kept deadstock mercifully out of sight and out of mind.

But rendering plants have fallen on hard times of late. Mad cow disease, which was first identified in the U.K. in 1986, has led to costly regulations that rendering plants have passed on to their customers. In 1997, it became illegal in the United States to feed the remains of a dead ruminant to a live ruminant, thus eliminating one of the industry’s largest markets: cattle feed. In 2009, the FDA made matters worse for renderers by requiring them to remove the brain and spinal cord from cows older than 30 months (thus making it especially expensive for dairies, whose cows live longer, to render deadstock). The intention behind this provision was certainly sensible—it keeps prions, the bits of the nervous system that contain mad cow disease, out of feed destined for non-ruminant animals—but its economic impact has been considerable. Costs have gone up as much as fivefold, and the industry has consolidated into fewer operations.

How this problem will be solved remains anyone’s guess. Early responses, however, haven’t been encouraging. On-site burial of animals has always been popular, but it’s becoming increasingly commonplace with the decline of rendering plants. This legal option is certainly an improvement upon illegal off-site dumping (which anecdotal evidence also suggests is rising), but it’s still a case of sweeping waste under the rug. Feedlots and ranchers basically dig their own bins and windrows and bulldoze waste into a mass grave. Burial pits are capable of holding tens of thousands of pounds of carcasses. Some states require permits to dig them, others don’t. Negative impacts on water quality have been well documented both on site and downstream from burial grounds. Groundwater contamination is routine. The leaching of chloride, ammonium, nitrate, coliforms, and E. coli intensifies with rainfall and oozes for decades after burial (it can take 25 years for carcasses to decompose).

Outdoor incineration has also become more popular with the gradual decline of rendering. But incineration comes with its own rap sheet of environmental and health-related pitfalls. It reliably releases heavy metals into the atmosphere. Pyres emit pollutants including sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides. Incineration is almost always used for culled animals—beasts that have been condemned to death after a disease outbreak (burying them works poorly because they can literally explode as a result of methane build up—a conditioned known as “cattle bloat”). When infected animals are burned, a host of new poisons go airborne. Without the most rigorous monitoring, these toxins easily reach the human food and water supply. All in all, incineration is a mess.

Another alternative to rendering animal carcasses is composting. This option is relatively new, with many states making it legal to compost dead farm animals in the past ten years. On paper the procedure has its merits. Animals are aerated in a giant compost bin, where they decompose to produce humus that is rich in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus—all of which potentially make it an excellent fertilizer. Many agriculture experts are optimistic about animal composting [pdf].

But (there’s always a “but” when it comes to animal agriculture) there are problems—some minor, others quite serious. Minor ones include the fact that bones do not compost easily or quickly. More serious problems center on the fact that what’s being composted is more than animal flesh and bones. The antibiotics, growth promoters, vaccines, and array of agricultural chemicals routinely used in animal agriculture are also composted. Composting, moreover, can also concentrate naturally occurring heavy metals. Currently, states that allow the use of composted animals limit its application to relatively innocuous tasks such as growing highway wildflowers.

A final, and by far the most hopeful, option is the anaerobic digestion of slaughterhouse waste. Anaerobic digestion generates biogas (a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane that can be converted into usable energy) and sludge (which can be used as a fertilizer). Biogas digesters have proven their effectiveness in China, where more than 20 million households receive their energy for lighting and cooking from small local digesters processing all manner of organic waste.

There are, however, numerous devils lurking in the details. Digesters do a poor job of processing long-chain fatty acids, leaving behind a thick layer of fat at the end of digestion. Experts insist that digesters work best when they are small and decentralized (to minimize threats of contamination during transport), but this requirement contradicts their other insistence that digesters be “constructed far from residential areas for reasons of biosecurity and to reduce odor problems.” Digesters are water-intensive. The sludge they produce can contain prions and dangerous heat-resistant bacteria—neither of which anaerobic digestion kills (not the kind of fertilizer we want). Trumping all these concerns is something more logistical: digesters are so rare that they are, for all intents and purposes, not a viable current option.

Unfortunately, the challenges we now face with respect to slaughterhouse waste and downed animals demand urgent solutions. With rendering plants on the decline, and with current alternatives beset with problems, we have every reason to start discussing deadstock with the same intensity that we discuss livestock. Next year, slaughterhouses in the United States will kill more than 10 billion animals. What will happen to the waste? The answer might seem to be beyond our power to influence. But it does give us yet another factor to contemplate before we tuck into our next animal.

Recently, at the farmers market, a woman rushed over to me excitedly, seeking out the vendor with the fresh eggs that her friend had told her about.

“She told me the yolks were deep yellow, and the eggs were the best she had ever tasted! How does he grow them?” she went on to ask.

Chickens on pasture

As I explained the process of raising chickens on pasture, I smiled to myself. One small victory for local family farms. One small victory for conservation.

My conversation with her made me more aware just then, that while Ohio is rich in natural resources, a great portion of its population feels no connection to the land, and it can seem difficult, if not impossible sometimes, to bridge the gap.

The truth is, I know the farm where those eggs came from. But more than that, I know that countless hours have been spent there, designing and installing conservation practices, with countless more spent working and re-working the grazing system again and again, to find a good fit, because it’s a work in progress.

Getting message out

I know the farm family and how hard they work to get their message out, to promote conservation and to sell fresh products off the farm, products made possible through steps taken to treat the land and animals in such a way that promotes sustainability.

I know the challenges they face bridging the gap. I know, too, that there is no better time than now to buy locally grown and produced fare, and it has never been more important to keep farmland in sustainable production.

Like the harvests the season produces, Ohio is ripe with potential to help people make the connection to the land once again.

It is a connection that conservation partners have been encouraging for years, and there is no better time than now to help make it.

Local venue

Whether it is providing a venue for local farmers to sell or market their product, talking with local economic development authorities about the importance of agriculture and conservation to the economy, purchasing products directly from a local farm, or simply explaining the process of raising chickens on pasture to an inquisitive consumer, the connection is waiting to be made.

Local food initiatives have the potential to extend beyond the benefit of simply providing fresh food. They can spur economic development; encourage economic diversity and tourism; and ensure the sustainability of natural resources.

They have the potential to increase awareness of agriculture and food production, connecting people one again to the farm and how food is produced there.

They promote agricultural sustainability, keeping farmers in business by allowing them to make a living on the farm, while encouraging them to retain farmland in production.

Local heritage

Local foods initiatives protect local heritage and culture and instill pride in our communities. They foster appreciation, attract young farmers and promote a better quality of life.

And I realized then, as I spoke with that excited consumer, that for one brief moment, the connection was made.

Every conservation practice installed, every grazing management plan written, every small piece of advice given or tried culminated in the ultimate victory — the work paid off — the message was heard.

Wendee Zadanski has been the natural resources specialist for the Jefferson Soil & Water Conservation District since 2001. She has a bachelor’s degree in natural resources conservation from Kent State University. She can be reached at 740-264-9790 or wzadanski@jeffersoncountyoh.com.

What do a half-billion eggs have to do with democracy? The massive recall of salmonella-infected eggs, the largest egg recall in U.S. history, opens a window on the power of large corporations over not only our health, but over our government.

While scores of brands have been recalled, they all can be traced back to just two egg farms. Our food supply is increasingly in the hands of larger and larger companies, which wield enormous power in our political process. As with the food industry, so, too, is it with oil and with banks: Giant corporations, some with budgets larger than most nations, are controlling our health, our environment, our economy and increasingly, our elections.

The salmonella outbreak is just the most recent episode of many that point to a food industry run amok. Patty Lovera is the assistant director of the food-safety group Food & Water Watch. She told me: “Historically, there’s always been industry resistance to any food-safety regulation, whether it’s in Congress or through the agencies. There are large trade associations for every sector of our food supply, starting from the large agribusiness-type producers all the way through to the grocery stores.”

The salmonella-tainted eggs came from just two factory farms, Hillandale Farms and Wright County Egg, both in Iowa. Behind this outbreak is the egg empire of Austin “Jack” DeCoster. DeCoster owns Wright County Egg and also owns Quality Egg, which provides chicks and feed to both of the Iowa farms. Lovera describes DeCoster as “a poster child for what happens when we see this type of consolidation and this scale of production.”

The Associated Press offered a summary of DeCoster’s multistate egg and hog operation’s health, safety and employment violations. In 1997, DeCoster Egg Farms agreed to pay a $2 million fine after then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich described his farm “as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop.” In 2002, DeCoster’s company paid $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Mexican women who reported they were subjected to sexual harassment, including rape, abuse and retaliation by supervisors. Earlier this summer, another company linked to DeCoster paid out $125,000 to the state of Maine over animal-cruelty allegations.

Despite all this, DeCoster has thrived in the egg and hog business, which puts him in league with other large corporations, like BP and the major banks. The BP oil spill, the largest in the history of this country, was preceded by a criminally long list of serious violations going back years, most notably the massive Texas City refinery explosion in 2005 that killed 15 people. If BP were a person, he would have been imprisoned long ago.

The banking industry is another chronic offender. In the wake of the largest global financial disaster since the Great Depression, banks like Goldman Sachs, flush with cash after a massive public bailout, subverted the legislative process aimed at reining them in.

The result: a largely toothless new consumer-protection agency, and relentless opposition to the appointment of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren to head it. She would give the banks as much oversight as the new agency would allow, which is why the bankers, including President Barack Obama’s appointees like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and economic adviser Larry Summers, are believed to be opposing her.

The fox, you could say, is watching the henhouse (and the rotten eggs within). Multinational corporations are allowed to operate with virtually no oversight or regulation. Corporate cash is allowed to influence elections, and thus, the behavior of our elected representatives. After the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which will allow unlimited corporate donations to campaigns, the problem is only going to get worse. To get elected, and to stay in power, politicians will have to cater more and more to their corporate donors.

There is hope. There is a growing movement to amend the U.S. Constitution, to strip corporations of the legal status of “personhood,” the concept that corporations have the same rights as regular people.

This would subject corporations to the same oversight that existed for the first 100 years of U.S. history. To restrict political participation just to people will take a genuine, grass-roots movement, though, since Congress and the Obama administration can’t seem to get even the most basic changes implemented. As the saying goes, if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Proponents of organic farming often speak of nature’s balance in ways that sound almost spiritual, prompting criticism that their views are unscientific and naive. At the other end of the spectrum are those who see farms as battlefields where insect pests and plant diseases must be vanquished with the magic bullets of modern agriculture: pesticides, fungicides and the like.

Which view is more accurate? A 10-year study of an organic coffee farm in Mexico suggests that, far from being romanticised hooey, the ‘balance and harmony’ view is on the mark.

Ecologists John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto of the University of Michigan and Stacy Philpott of the University of Toledo have uncovered a web of intricate interactions that buffers the farm against extreme outbreaks of pests and diseases, making magic bullets unnecessary. Their research is described in the July/August issue of the journal BioScience.

The major players in the system – several ant species, a handful of coffee pests, and the predators, parasites and diseases that affect the pests – not only interact directly, but some species also exert subtle, indirect effects on others, effects that might have gone unnoticed if the system had not been studied in detail.

A key species in the complex web is the tree-nesting Azteca ant (Azteca instabilis). The ants aren’t particular about the kind of tree they live in, but for some reason their nests are found in only about 3 percent of shade trees on the farm, and ant-inhabited trees aren’t randomly distributed – they’re found in clumps.

The researchers believe the clumpiness results, at least in part, from the ants’ vulnerability to a parasitic fly. Ant colonies expand by sending off queens and broods to nearby trees, but when all the trees in an area have ant nests, the flies can more easily find ants to parasitise. So high-density clusters are preferentially attacked and eventually disappear, either because the ants all die or because the ants move to other trees.

The ants have a cosier relationship with the green coffee scale, a flat, featureless insect that is a serious coffee pest in some regions, but not on the farm where the study was done. Azteca protects the scale from predators and parasites in return for honeydew, a sweet, sticky liquid the scale secretes.

One of those predators is the lady beetle (Azya orbigera), whose adult and larval forms both feed on scale. When an adult beetle tries to attack a scale insect, the ants chase it away. But beetle larvae, which are covered with waxy gunk that gums up the ants’ mouthparts, are able to polish off plenty of scale. The ants even aid the murderous larvae, albeit inadvertently. In the course of shooing off parasitic wasps that attack scale, the ants also scare away bugs that parasitise beetle larvae.

The beetles also seem to influence the ants’ distribution patterns by preying on the scale, on which the ants depend for honeydew. The researchers explored the relationship using theoretical modelling and found that if ants take over the whole plantation, the beetle goes extinct because adult beetles can’t get enough to eat.

If the ants disappear from the farm, the beetles go extinct because the larvae starve. But if ants are confined to clusters, due to the influences of both beetles and parasitic flies, the beetles thrive and keep the scale insects under control.

‘The interesting thing is that the beetles could not exist except for the highly patterned ant population, but it could be those very same beetles causing the pattern formation in the first place,’ said Vandermeer, who is the Asa Gray Distinguished University Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. ‘The beetle creates the conditions for its own survival.’

The white halo fungus, a disease of scale insects, also enters in. The disease occurs here and there throughout the farm but runs rampant only where large populations of scale are found, which is only where the ants are protecting the scale. By suppressing the scale, on which the ants depend for honeydew, the fungus indirectly affects the ants’ survival.

But that’s not all: The fungus also attacks coffee rust, a notorious pest that virtually wiped out coffee production in Sri Lanka (previously known as Ceylon), Java and Sumatra in the mid-19th century and has since infiltrated Central and South America but has not caused serious problems in those areas. White halo fungus only works its magic against coffee rust, however, in the process of conducting major assaults on scale, and those assaults happen only where there’s lots of scale – in other words, where the scale is under ants’ protection.

In addition to Azteca, other ant species protect scale, and some of these ants are predators of the coffee berry borer and leaf miner, which are also coffee pests. The researchers are still working out the details of the relationships among the various ants and the other species with which they interact.

As the research team continues to discover more species that are part of the web and more complex direct and indirect interactions among all the members, it’s increasingly clear that the ‘naive’ view of nature working in harmony closely matches the scientific facts.

‘There are many farmers in the tropics who have been on their land for a long time – sometimes many generations – and have seen these things happening and intuitively understand the connections,’ said Vandermeer. ‘The stories they tell about the balance of nature sound almost romantic and religious sometimes, but if you just change the words, they start sounding like what we’re describing.’

Though this study is being done within the confines of a 300-hectare (740 acre) farm in southern Mexico, the researchers believe their approach and findings are more broadly applicable.

‘Our view is that interaction webs of this sort will prove common in agro-ecosystems in general,’ said Perfecto, professor of ecology and natural resources. ‘Although widely appreciated in natural systems, such webs haven’t been seen in agro-ecosystems because the people studying them haven’t looked at them in this way.

They’re looking for magic-bullet solutions; they want to find the thing that causes the problem and then fix it. Our approach is to understand systems that are working well, where there are no problems. By doing that, we can define systems that are more resilient and resistant to pest outbreaks.’

Source: University of Michigan News Service

Those docile black and white Holstein “milk machines” on today’s industrial dairies hardly evoke an image of their wild progenitor, the enormous auroch, Bos primigenius, that commandeered Eurasian forests some 8,000 years ago, on the cusp of its impending domestication.

European scientists, hot on the trail towards sequencing the complete auroch genome from ancient, well-preserved bone, intend to resurrect this extinct bovine from which all modern domestic cattle arose.

Motivation for such an undertaking derives from “Jurassic Park” fascinations as well as the potential utility of repopulating Northern Europe’s forests in which this native herbivore once browsed, contentedly munching on beech saplings, which today threaten to choke these boreal ecosystems.

The proposed back-breeding project, using domestic cattle strains, which yet carry key portions of the ancient auroch genome, is reminiscent of a similar early 20th century effort carried out by the brothers Heck, directors of the Munich and Berlin zoos.

The Hecks seemingly “reversed evolution” by crossing numerous cattle breeds to combine remnant characteristics from their wild auroch ancestors, the last of which perished in 1627 on a Polish game preserve.

Without any sophisticated genetic tools beyond the fresh rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inherited traits, the two German zoologists produced beasts that in all visual respects appeared identical to depictions of aurochs in famous French and Spanish cave paintings from the Paleolithic era.

This astonishing breeding experiment inadvertently launched much misguided interest in human eugenics, which the cruel Nazi regime pursued to a devastating end.

Several dairying friends of mine who transitioned their herds to pasture have quickly recognized that today’s cows, bred for maximum production on grain diets, do not perform particularly well when foraging grass.

These visionary herdsman are now calling upon out of favor breeds such as the Dutch Belted and others, well adapted to pasture, as genetic reservoirs of disease resistance and consistent production under new grass paradigms.

Western cultures, especially, have prospered by an eight millennia-long intimacy with bovine relatives, a profound respect for which has significantly eroded over our current industrial age.

Perhaps retrieving the great mother auroch from an abyss of extinction will engender in modern Homo sapiens some newfound appreciation for the fellowship and interdependence we share with all Earthly beings.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program (NOP) today announced an amendment to the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances. The amendment extends the use of methionine in organic poultry production.

Published in the Federal Register today as an interim rule with request for comments, it extends the allowance for methionine in organic poultry production until Oct. 1, 2012, with the following maximum allowable limits of methionine per ton of feed: 4 pounds for layers, 5 pounds for broilers, and 6 pounds for turkeys and all other poultry. This interim rule is based upon a recommendation by the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) on April 12, 2010.

Methionine is an essential amino acid necessary in poultry diets for proper cell growth and feather development. While methionine is naturally present in organic poultry feed, the amount is not sufficient to maintain the optimal health of the birds. The NOSB determined that the loss of the use of synthetic methionine would disrupt the organic poultry market and cause substantial economic hardship to organic poultry operations.

The interim rule will become effective Oct. 1, 2010, and is currently available for comments. Comments must be submitted by Oct. 25, 2010. All comments received by this date will be considered prior to the issuance of the final rule. The interim rule and public comments may be viewed at www.regulations.gov, filed as document AMS-NOP-10-0051.

Under the authority of the Organic Foods Production Act, the Secretary of Agriculture can amend the National List based on proposed amendments developed by the NOSB. The National List identifies the synthetic substances that may be used and nonsynthetic (natural) substances that may not be used in organic production. Since being established in 2001, the National List has been amended 13 times, including this interim rule.

For further information about this rule, contact Melissa Bailey, Director, Standards Division of NOP, at (202) 720-3252.

]]> http://www.cornucopia.org/2010/08/usda-extends-the-use-of-methionine-in-organic-poultry-production/feed/ 0 http://www.cornucopia.org/2010/08/growers-usda-must-act-prevent-sugar-supply-issue/ http://www.cornucopia.org/2010/08/growers-usda-must-act-prevent-sugar-supply-issue/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:43:37 +0000 The Cornucopia Institute http://www.cornucopia.org/?p=3123 The Associated Press
By Michael J. Crumb

DES MOINES, Iowa — A judge’s ruling halting planting of genetically modified sugar beet seeds has left growers feeling uncertain as they wait for federal officials to decide the next step for a crop that provides half of the nation’s sugar supply.

Duane Grant, chairman of the board at the Boise, Idaho-based Snake River Sugar Co., said if a solution can’t be worked out to use the genetically modified seed, his company and its growers fear there isn’t enough conventional seed to plant next year. The company produces about 20 percent of the nation’s beet sugar.

“There has been no incentive, no market, no demand for conventional seed since 2008 and we believe there is not enough conventional seed available for our growers to plant a full crop in 2011,” he said.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in California issued his ruling Aug. 13 that put on hold future planting of sugar beets using genetically modified seeds. White’s ruling allows this year’s crop to be harvested and processed, but the current seed crop can’t be planted until the U.S. Department of Agriculture reviews the effect the genetically altered crops could have on other food.

That could take several years. Until then, genetically modified seeds can be stored.

At issue are seeds developed by St. Louis-based Monsanto Co., used to grow about 95 percent of the sugar beet crop. The seeds are engineered to withstand the weed killer Roundup, allowing farmers to reduce the use of other chemicals and limit the practice of tilling fields to kill weeds.

Monsanto seeds also dominate corn and soybean production, but experts said last week’s decision is limited to sugar beets. Some groups hope, though, that the ruling could prompt the USDA to take a broader look at questions involving genetically modified crops.

Monsanto referred questions to Luther Markwart, executive vice president of the American Sugar Beet Growers Association. He said the next move is up to the USDA.

“The message we’re giving people is you have to be patient and let this play out,” Markwart said.

USDA spokesman Caleb Weaver said the agency’s attorneys are reviewing the ruling but haven’t made any decisions.

White’s ruling was the latest step in a lawsuit filed in 2008 by the Center for Food Safety, the Organic Seed Alliance and the Sierra Club challenging the USDA’s regulatory oversight for genetically engineered sugar beets and the potential that the seeds could contaminate other crops.

Sugar beets are planted on more than 1 million acres in 10 states, with Minnesota, North Dakota and Idaho being the top producers.

Robert Green, a North Dakota beet grower, said he didn’t know what would happen next but was confident he would plant sugar beets next spring.

“Sugar beets provide half the sugar for this country, and I don’t believe they will make the requirements so stringent people will go without sugar,” said Green, who farms near St. Thomas in far northeastern North Dakota.

Grant, whose Snake River Sugar Company has about 1,000 growers in Idaho, Washington and Oregon, said the USDA must act quickly so growers can plan for next year.

“We have a limited ability to influence them, and we will be dependent on their timely decision-making process,” Grant said.

The ruling comes two months after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a ban on the planting of genetically modified alfalfa seeds. The USDA still must abide by a lower court’s order to conduct an environmental impact study on use of the seeds.

Representatives of the groups that filed the sugar beet lawsuit said their suit and the alfalfa case shows the USDA hasn’t properly overseen genetically modified crops.

Matthew Dillon, founding director of the Organic Seed Alliance, said he would like the USDA to review of all genetically modified crops.

“We hope the government will sit down and look at what coexistence will look like. And past administrations have skirted the issue, believing that somehow, magically, plants won’t cross and these two types of systems can coexist without contamination,” Dillon said.

But even some who agree with Dillon don’t believe challenges to such crops as corn or soybeans are likely.

George Kimbrell, an attorney for the Center for Food Safety, noted that corn and soybeans are annual crops that are overwhelmingly genetically modified and self-pollinating. Also, he said, farmers typically rotate annually between the two crops. Those factors reduce the risk of contamination, Kimbrell said.

Another issue is that genetically modified corn and soybeans have been dominant for at least a decade, while alfalfa and sugar beat seeds are among the newest to be approved.

“Once it’s deregulated and out there, it’s not easy to do a challenge,” Neil Carman, clean air director of the Sierra Club, said. “The problem is that with some of those crops, the horse got out of the barn before we were ready to file legal cases.”

]]> http://www.cornucopia.org/2010/08/growers-usda-must-act-prevent-sugar-supply-issue/feed/ 0