Farm to Table...

Imagine that you’re a farmer. You’re working the land in rural America, dutifully planting the corn seeds that you think are best (those you’ve saved generation after generation, without genetic modifications). Only one day, you open the door to find a representative from the very big-agribusiness you were trying to avoid and he’s suing you because he found a small batch of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn on your property. You try to explain: My neighbor plants Roundup Ready, not me, the seeds must have blown into my field unintentionally. To no avail, Monsanto takes you to court, if you fight it you’re saddled with legal fees, if you don’t fight it, you lose a lot, but maybe not the whole farm.

This is happening to farmers across the country (as outlined in this month’s Vanity Fair article, “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear”). In 2007, farmers were involved in 112 with lawsuits with Monsanto in 27 states, and those are only the ones that went to trial.

A quick primer on Monsanto: the company started out producing saccharine, then aspirin, and then a range of products released dioxins and PCBs as byproducts. Those byproducts were then dumped into nearby water supplies or simply buried, leaving communities with messes that they’re still cleaning up. Two former Monsanto plant sites are among the most polluted spots in the U.S. and Britain. In the early 1980s, Monsanto got involved with seed engineering and now produces lines of genetically modified (GM) seeds that resist the company’s own Roundup herbicide (note: there are no nutritional benefits in the GM seeds). The company is now the world leader in GM seeds with patents for GM soybeans, canola, cotton, in addition to corn. Their next venture: milk (more on that later).  

Thanks to Monsanto’s work, in 2007, 142 million acres were planted with GM crops, up from zero acres in 1980. Farmers plant GM seeds because they think that they increase yield and save money, and they can spend less time tending to fields that they can easily treat with Roundup herbicide instead of constantly weeding and plowing. But they also have to sign agreements to plant Roundup Ready seeds, that include not sharing, a clause that leads to many a lawsuit.

Monsanto’s latest venture is rBGH (bovine growth hormone). RBGH is a hormone that makes cows produce more milk, and, though the USDA hasn’t found a danger in drinking milk from cows that have been injected with rBGH, Canada and the EU haven’t approved it. Many farmers in the U.S. label their milk rBGH free as a selling point, and that ticks Monsanto off. They’re argument: labeling milk rBGH free makes their milk (with rBGH) look bad. Since the blog post about this issue back in January, Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, supported consumers, saying that “the public has a right to complete information about how the milk they buy is produced,” supermarket chains Kroger, Safeway, and Publix and shoppers are flocking to organic milk, and Starbucks refuses to use milk products with rBGH.

All good news, but it’s not over yet. Monsanto has been around for decades and isn’t going anywhere fast. In the meantime, there are two easy things you can do to make sure your food and the farmers who produce it are safe from Monsanto:

1.      Eat fruits and vegetables from organic and/or local farmers.

2.      Buy milk that you know is rBGH free.

Photo of an anti-Monsanto crop formation from the Vanity Fair article.