Recently, OzEarth made a sobering discovery, namely that world-renowned anti-GM, “transparent farming” poster-boy Joel Salatin feeds his livestock GM grain.

Hard to believe?  Check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYWYU5V8JOo&feature=related
at  21 minutes and 50 seconds.

In our horror, we posted a telegraphic, somewhat charged, and (shameful though it is to admit) imperfectly spelled comment about this on a related YouTube video, and received the following response:

@helkyrie GMO is not a pesticide. It stands for genetically modified object. And no he doesn’t [feed his livestock GMOs]. And no he doesn’t support mosanto [sic]. Not very informed are you?

We responded as follows:

search youtube for Polyface Farm Pt.1, go to 21:50.

I know what GMO stands for. FWIW the O actually stands for organism.

Genetically modified grain is modified in order to be pest-resistant. To do this, pesticides are incorporated into the grain’s genetic structure.

GM grain _is_ a pesticide. Which Joel is feeding his livestock. By doing so he sanctions the corrupt, dangerous and NON-transparent practices of GMO producers, including Monsanto.

How’s that for informed?

So I’m already feeling a bit shamefaced about the sarcastic tone of my response – my only excuse is that I react as badly as the next person to being called stupid!

However, I remain disturbed by what lies behind my interlocutor’s comment – that people who are against GMOs are ill-informed.  So here is a fuller explanation of our position on GM, and why we have a problem with Mr Salatin using it to feed his stock in particular.

Why we have issues with GM

It’s not because:

  • we are afraid of the unknown
  • we are anti-tech
  • we are either ill-informed or misinformed.

It is because of:

  • The superbugs and superweeds that this kind of monocultural, pesticide and herbicide-based agriculture is giving rise to – to say nothing of an increase in pesticide use due to GM crops
  • The potential dangers of the vectors recombined from deadly viruses used in the creation of GMOs.
  • The insanity that is a policy of letting “foods” which are either totally untested, or have been shown in trials to be actively dangerous, onto our tables and into the troughs of animals we eat. The same companies that are doing this were also responsible for the nightmare consequences of things like Agent Orange, so their track record of only releasing safe products is not exactly sparkling.  I think it also bears mentioning that introducing untested items into the market, or worse, suppressing reports on the dangers of these items, is far from the ideal of transparency that Salatin claims to subscribe to.
  • The “terminator gene” – a lose-lose scenario if ever there was one.  If the gene works, it means that the farmer cannot save seed and becomes a slave to Big Ag (both for seeds, and for the herbicides the seeds have been designed to work in tandem with) in order to stay in business: frequently with tragic results. If the gene doesn’t work, GM plants cross-pollinate existing non-GM crops.  And what if the gene only kicks in after a while? What, for example, if the terminator gene were to spread to all wheat plants in the world, rendering them sterile?
  • The ethical issues around the patenting of life, and the nefarious misuse that’s been made of patenting laws internationally by GMO producers. GMO companies are suing farmers for growing “their” product, after the farmers discovered to their horror that their non-GM crops had been cross-pollinated!
  • And last but not least: GMO cereals don’t deliver what they promise – vastly increased yields and therefore food security in a time of explosive population growth.  The facts: yields of GM crops are better than organic for about the first four years.  After that it’s even money, and in fact organics outperform significantly in adverse growing conditions (which everyone but the climate change denialists acknowledges is a scenario we’ll be dealing with more and more into the future).  So on top of all the above, genetic modification of food crops is not actually a solution for food security.  Bottom line for me: if I can eat something which I know isn’t poisonous, why would I eat something when I have no idea what the health consequences might be, if it’s not even ending hunger?

Why we have a problem with Joel Salatin using GMO feed

For us, the worst of it is that we are actually really interested in and approve of the vast majority of what Mr Salatin is doing.  Which is why it’s that much more shocking and disappointing to discover that he’s using GM feed. And yes, I am aware that Salatin’s stated position is that he’s against Monsanto, but our view is that his use of GM feed makes a lie of that.

For as long as he’s using GM feed, he is tacitly condoning the many extremely dubious practices of the likes of Monsanto. Worse, to the extent that the effects of that feed on the ecosystem (including livestock, and us) are not known or are known to be detrimental, he is behaving irresponsibly (to put it mildly).  And to cap it off, by using GM feed he is supporting the market for it, when the evidence suggests there’s just no need for it to exist.

Because he’s been a hero of ours, part of me wants to hope that there is such a thing as benign GMO feed and that’s the stuff that Mr Salatin is using.  GMO proponents are fond of arguing that genetic engineering of crops has been going on for thousands of years by way of farmers selecting plants for desirable traits and crosspollinating to create hybrids, and GM techniques are merely a shortcut – why not just build the traits in from the outset, rather than faffing around for dozens of plant generations in order to do it the “old-fashioned” way and get the same result?

I have at least two problems with this argument.  The first is straightforwardly factual: GM incorporates genetic changes into plants (for example, by splicing in animal genes) which would never occur in nature, no matter how much selecting of desirable traits were done over any number of generations.  So to say that GM techniques are a quicker version of conventional cross-possination and hybridising methods is nonsense.

My second and bigger problem is to do with how and why plants are being genetically modified. GMO cereals in particular, with their built-in pesticides and resistance to herbicides, have been specifically engineered with the aim of facilitating petrochemical-based, monocultural farming.  All other considerations as to the (un)trustworthiness of Big Ag and the safety of GMOs aside:

This method of farming is actually mining. If you farm this way, you strip the land of its soil, its clean water, its nutrients, its microorganisms.  In short, you create deserts.

Farming this way also depends completely on oil-based fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides.  Soon we won’t be able to afford to extract them, but in the meantime we will have killed the land so comprehensively that alternative growing methods won’t work.  We will have painted ourselves ito a very hungry corner.

And this is the main reason why we are so appalled: because farming with GMOs is a major contributor to the unprecedented, multiple-scarcity catastrophe for which humanity is headed if practices don’t change; and as such, nobody who is serious about land care or sustainability should ever, ever use GM crops for any reason.

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