[Scpg] transitions

[steven sprinkel]

Appearing in ACRES,USA

A Journal for Regenerative Agriculture



T R A N S I T I O N S



by Steven Sprinkel





November 2004





On three previous occasions this year it has been necessary to report on the
activities of Dennis and Alex Avery, the father and son sniping squad hired
out by the chemical manufacturing sector to smear the organic farming
movement. Once again the Averys arise as Topic A for ACRES constituents. The
national media campaign against organic agriculture that the Hudson
Institute, which employs the Averys, as well as the American Enterprise
Institute and the Hoover Foundation are carrying on must be met with
aggressive counter measures at the grass roots level in every local paper
and on TV and radio.

The threat is also one of the reasons that the Cornucopia Institute was
founded earlier this year, in order to quickly respond to the attacks.
Cornucopia is designed to act independently and rapidly to protect our
organic heritage. I have been working with Mark Kastel, the co-founder and
executive director of Cornucopia this year, combating the Averys and people
like Henry Miller at Stanford University's Hoover Institute whenever they
surface, and they have been very busy lately.

We immediately recognized that a story appearing in the Los Angeles Times
Health Section on September 6, 2004, spoon-fed by the Averys to an
apparently prejudiced and overeager 'reporter', Mellissa Healy, had the
potential to become as damaging to the reputation of organic producers as
the infamous ABC Television "20/20" segment on organics reported by John
Stossel in February of 2000. That television segment, which was shamelessly
rebroadcast four months later, even after a huge outpouring of criticism by
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), farmers and consumers, the
Organic Trade Association and the Organic Farming Research Foundation, was
pretty much repeated word for word in the LA Times article. The article was
syndicated by the LA Times nationally and reprinted in a number of
papers-but probably fewer because Cornucopia started faxing and emailing
them all to warn them that the story was tainted.

Letters to the Editor were generated that went unpublished in the Times. Mr.
Kastel and I wrote an op-ed rebuke of the story that as of this date has not
been printed anywhere. And while we still hope that the piece sees the light
of day, with the Presidential and national campaign dominating the media it
will not be surprising if the Averys landed their punches without anyone
getting an opportunity to counter their partisan, non-objective attacks in
print.

We will be remiss in assigning all the credit to just a few notable
activists because, as the Watergate adage goes, if "you follow the money"
you will eventually come face to face with the petroleum industry and the
pharmaco-chemical manufacturing sector. The oil and gas men are more prone
to have a visceral dislike for organic farming than they might for the
limited growth forecast for corn-based ethanol production because organic
farmers do not utilize chemical fertilizers. Until recently, The Potash
Corporation was a major funder of the Averys' work.  Potash owns a
double-digit share of the US domestic fertilizer business.

We have done the math here previously, and we must suppose that
Chevron-Texaco-Mobil ( Dow-DuPont-Potash-Cargill) have as well: organic
farming becomes a fifty per cent owner of the food production sector within
forty years based on our current rate of increase. We are no longer a pest
but a competitor. There is no way they can own much of our potential gross
profit except for the fuel organic farmers put in the tanks of our
machinery. If you grow nitrogen, your partner is the sun, not OPEC.

In this election season, an instructive comparison can be drawn between the
neo-conservative, corporate, success at managing  people's thinking by
buying up a an immense portion of the broadcast media and  what portends for
sustainable agriculture if we permit supposedly objective institutions like
our entire higher academic system to serve the needs of the manufacturing
elite. It was bad enough that the government had been bought, but we knew
that. This same fraud permeates the University of California, as well as
Michigan State, Iowa State and Rutgers. For academes outside the closed
loop, its somehow become fashionable to be hopeful about genetic
engineering, even though they are glad the school their kids attend buys
organic lettuce and strawberries. The brainiacs put their pants on one leg
at time-its just that they think they are expert in more things just because
they are expert in one thing.

Then when corporate academics from within those hallowed walls convene and
the American Chemical Society, of all people,  holds a symposium 'comparing'
the health benefits of organic versus chemical food production one might
expect any impartial newsperson to consider the source of the information.

But Melissa Healy and her editors (and publisher, The Chicago Tribune, which
now owns the LA Times) bought the story, fresh from the sooty lips of Alex
Avery. Ms. Healy's prose was riddled with snide innuendo which revealed
either her personal opinions or her susceptibility to be swayed by so much
phony science smothered in money. Part of her story was even funny. She
wrote that the symposium speakers."traced the growing tentacles of a onetime
counterculture movement that has begun to look and act more like an industry
dedicated to expanding its market and increasing its influence on
controversial issues of food safety and supply, such as bioengineered crops
and irradiation of food."

I wouldn't want that organic octopus coming around my nuke facility
either.Those organic people mean to make us sick!

Pretending to be fair-minded, Healy's story was counter-balanced with
tepidly guarded comments from the Organic Trade Association, but OTA is no
tiger when it comes to slashing back at the corporate beast. It made little
difference how many column inches OTA got when the words were  buried in a
2100 word quasi-editorial with big headlines trumpeting that " Some
Scientists Question Organic Food Claims".

Yeah, and some swift boat veterans were not even in the Navy or in Viet Nam.
But the damage is done up front. The apologies end up being meaningless.
Three years ago, when ABC finally had to admit that John Stossel's piece on
organic farming was bogus, it cost one "20/20" producer his job-but the
retraction had almost zero affect on the perceptions created originally by
the misrepresentations.

The organic farming movement has now reached a place on the mountain where
the people who own the land can see that we have adopted a make-able route
to the top. Its time for Monsanto to roll boulders. The system claims that
it adores competition, which is of course why you see that gasoline has the
same price at nearly every pump. But in reality, the system is more like a
mafia than free enterprise. The system markets it love of freedom and
democracy, which is why it follows that the National Guard needs to be
called out to guard that secret cabal when the World Trade Organization gets
together.

Organic farming, like solar energy, is not the product of that system and
the logic and beauty of our alternative captivates the imagination of the
reasonable people without too much argumentation. Genetic Engineering, on
the other hand, needs tons of hype, collusion, and bribery masquerading as
'investment' funding the 'endowments' of Academia. If the biggest commercial
introduction of genetic engineering is linked to the use of a chemical
herbicide it does not take much imagination to acknowledge the real motive
for this technology despite the false advertising. We have often decried the
complicity of biased 'scientists' in promoting a private enterprise that is
obligated to be regulated but is instead given a free pass. Monsanto's
people run the EPA. Meanwhile, The American Chemical Society drags forth
'scientists' who decry the lack of research that proves the health benefits
of organic food. The fact is, good research has been done. They just omitted
it from their agenda.

In comparison, Genetic Engineering, which is widely, and blindly, endorsed
as the future of food production is continually beset by negative research,
despite the fact that corporations have purchased the policies of the media
and filled the ranks of regulatory government with their own employees. We
told you you'd get uncontrollable modified grasses if you insisted on
releasing them into the environment, and we told you that the modified
salmon would outcompete the native species if the synthetic fish escaped
into the ocean. Those warnings are six years old, and now the headlines
corroborate our alarm. Organic farming, on the other hand, has yet to be
proven as a more healthier way to grow broccoli? Why does the system hold up
the current scientific methodology as some kind of objective arbiter when it
is in fact a corrupt process, filled with answers that have been bought? Is
this some sort of obscure shakedown? Do you all want us to buy the research?
Well, get to the point already!

I believe that we have before spoken of the metaphor of the frogs which fail
to register any complaint as the water temperature in their little pot
climbs to a boil. Well, froggies, your water is beginning to bubble. If the
current administration is given another green light in the election, the
National Organic Program will probably be managed even more illegally than
it was in the previous four years. USDA staff  ignores the law, the Congress
ignores the law and the non-profit watchdogs have got so many burglaries
going right now its hard to figure out what to go bark at. Why should the
House of Representatives turn its attention to NOP mismanagement if the guy
who runs the lower house, Tom DeLay, was an exterminator before be left
Texas?

On the bright side, we are going back into the egg business. It's the silver
lining of a dark cloud hanging over the land I have rented until March of
next year, when the poor place goes under the blade and gets carved into
single unit housing. It has been nice dirt.  Twenty two brand spanking new
units to go on top all of my microbes and humus and all the morninglory I
admit I won't shed a tear over. But upon learning of my plight my friend
Jake said he was tired of farming and I could just farm his place
instead-except that boy went and got horse manure awhile back filled with
nut sedge seed and he's got some well-fed sedge now. So I am thinking tall
plants and big stuff like artichokes and tending to low-maintenance
livestock. We used to think we were doing good a few years ago when we got
two bucks for a dozen eggs. Now the retail price is up to four organic
bucks. Every week I haul nearly a thousand pounds of prime kitchen scraps
over to the farm to compost. I finally took a better look, and saw eggs
instead of compost. Since everything that goes into the store is organic,
except those pesky Thai Coconuts ( which I refuse to compost) I do believe
my feed stream is clean. So we are going get a couple hundred chicks ( we
utilize 90 dozens a week, sold as fresh or cooked for the salad bar or the
sandwich) and let the birds eat down the nut sedge.

Spinach is up, tomatoes are still bearing and we are making a steamy salsa
with some stressed jalapenos. Otherwise, I figured how to keep the crows of
my drip tape by giving them a watering pan down at the far end of the farm
and I got these nifty squirrel traps from <thetrapmaker.com> and caught
eight in one setting. Forty-seven in one week. I was dumping those rascals
so regular down in the ravine that I heard the coyotes barking every time I
pulled up at sundown. " Here comes that white pick-up again, fellahs." I
heard them saying.

Far away, in Sacramento, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a
bill outlawing stooping, or bending to pull or kill weeds. This will
certainly bring forth a more urgent need to plant RoundUp Ready vegetable
crops. Though organic farmers were exempted from the regulation,
certification organizations did not report a large increase in the number of
inquiries about organic production standards.