The story of dicamba (an herbicide used together with crops that
have been genetically modified for resistance to the herbicide) has
been in the news for a while now, but more and more evidence seems
to be filling in the story, and the following article seems to do a
good job of bringing it together pretty succinctly. We recommend
you read it.
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/markets/this-miracle-weed-killer-was-supposed-to-save-farms-instead-it’s-devastating-them/ar-AAqX7aN?li=BBnb7Kz
A point the article touches on in passing that we'd like to focus on
is how the early steps away from local food sovereignty may not be
so bad, at least as far as science is able to clearly demonstrate at
the time those choices are made, but even in the early stages
science
can point to the fact that the bio-tech and
chemical solutions are only going to be temporary solutions, and
nevertheless we can also know ahead of time that accepting those
temporary solutions means burning bridges to more traditional ways
of farming. For example, suppose some bio-tech trait coupled with a
chemical herbicide offers the possibility of labor-savings that
would allow farmers to grow two or three or four times as many acres
as before: what happens after, in order to make way for the greater
profitability and efficiency of the new way of farming, all those
family farms that have sold out or gone broke or have ceased to be
worth passing on to the next generation... what happens when the
high tech solution quits working? Our agriculture will then have
become dependent on finding and accepting a new generation of
chemical and bio-tech solutions; those relatively smaller family
farms that could have dealt with the problems without the same kind
of chemical dependency but that gave way to "greater efficiency"
will likely be gone for good; and all those smaller farms will
likely require generations to reestablish. We will have then
created for ourselves an emergency (an emergency we should have
foreseen) where the only minimally disruptive remaining solution
will be to accept chemicals and bio-technology with already known
adverse side effects we never would have accepted to start with.
And this is almost exactly what seems to be unfolding with dicamba
right now.
So what can farmers and the consumers that support them do now?
Do we keep heading further down the same path, setting ourselves up
for having to face even worse choices in the near future? That's
surely the direction mainstream agriculture is going to go, but our
hope is that stories like that of dicamba will be a wake up call to
many in our community (and elsewhere), that more people will
recognize the overlooked costs of conventional agriculture, that
they'll open their eyes to see how many bridges have already been
burned, that they'll see the short-sightedness of choosing the
short-term cost savings and conveniences of conventional food, and
that they'll invest themselves in building alternatives that offer a
thorough-going alternative to the series of foreseeable emergencies
and gradual impoverishment that conventional agriculture
represents. Or to put that more simply: we hope you will increase
your resolve to find the most thoroughly homegrown alternatives to
the kind of food sold in supermarkets, not just tasty and colorful
but calorie- and acreage-marginal things like vegetables (although
that's often the best and easiest place to start), but also crops
(like the soybeans in this story) grown for "vegetable oil" and feed
for animals to produce the animal products you consume (and their
substitutes like butter from grass-fed cows and other grass-fed
dairy and meat.)
