Blog – Page 22

What to Feed the World?

December 8, 2014 by Mark Dewey

American industrial agriculture may be standing in the way of international cooperation.

“In the United States, they put anything in their mouths,” Jean Cabaret, an organic farmer who lives in the region of France known as Brittany, recently told a reporter for The Washington Post. “No, this must be stopped.”

Jean Cabaret and his unwashed chickens.

‘This’ is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an agreement that would link the economies of the United States with those of the 28 nations comprising the European Union more intimately than ever before. The horse of globalization is already out of the barn, right? Why not hitch it to your cart?

Because doing so might drench your chicken in the chemical that keeps your local swimming pool from incubating all the nasty stuff that washes off of other people’s bodies: chlorine, which was recently used to thwart the annual Midwest FurFest Convention, prompting the evacuation of a Hyatt Hotel in suburban Chicago, and sending 19 people to a local hospital.

Jean Cabaret doesn’t want to eat that stuff.

Chlorinated American chickens.

According to The Washington Post, “passage of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) could be a globalization milestone, creating a megamarket of 800 million consumers from Alaska to Finland, Hawaii to Greece.”

Isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t it create, like, millions of new jobs, both here and in the many European countries whose economies are in worse shape than ours? Maybe, but it would also end Europe’s ban on American “Frankenfoods” — genetically-modified, hormone-boosted, or chlorine-sanitized products most Americans eat every day.

A lot of people on the far side of the pond want to keep that ban in place: last week an online petition opposing TTIP garnered its one millionth signature, a number that forces the European Parliament to hold a hearing on the matter.

“Most of these concerns about chemical use and those kinds of things are blown up in the media to become a problem that really doesn’t exist,” Scott Russell, a professor of poultry processing at the University of Georgia (who would have guessed that poultry processing had its own professoriate?), told National Public Radio back in September. Russell reports that the American poultry industry uses only one capful of chlorine per gallon of water, and the chemical poses no health threat because it gets rinsed off the chickens (with unchlorinated water?) before they’re sold to us.

“We’re not trying to force anybody to eat anything,” Michael Froman, the U.S. trade representative, told The Washington Post. He just believes that “the decision as to what is safe should be made by science.”

Workers prepare chickens at the AIA factory in San Martino, near Verona, Italy. (AP)

But safety may not be the motivating factor here — it’s probably money. According to a study by a Dutch university, it costs the American poultry industry about 80 cents to make a pound of chicken, while European chicken growers, who can’t use chlorine or hormones, have to spend a dollar. How long can principles hold out against a profit margin differential of 20 percent? Passage of TTIP wouldn’t force Parisians to eat Purdue chicken, of course, but it may price Jean Cabaret’s birds right out of the market.

The pool at Franklin Park may offer safer swimming than Stoney Creek, but I don’t go to Stoney Creek to swim in safety. I go for the drive, and for the climb up the back side of that cliff with the jumping ledges at three different levels — high, scary, and I’ve-never-tried-the-top-one. It’s true that the last time I was there my dog pooped in the water, but he was on the other bank and the turd floated downstream pretty fast.

If every dog in The Shenandoah Valley pooped in Stoney Creek, I don’t suppose I’d want to swim there, and you may not want to swim there knowing my dog did, but how many of us would prefer a version of The Shenandoah Valley where the only place to swim is Franklin Park?

Meet Corn Earworm

November 21, 2014 by Mark Dewey

We thought you might like to get acquainted with the creature that helped itself to some of your peaches-and-cream sweet corn this summer: corn earworm.

Your dining companion, the adolescent corn earworm.

According to the Cooperative Extension at North Carolina State University, corn earworm is pervasive in the Western Hemishpere. It feeds on more than 100 different species, but its favorite food is corn. The guys who stole our kernels this summer were earworm larvae, which emerged from tiny eggs laid by the adult version of this creature, the corn earworm moth. In our neck of the woods, “corn earworms overwinter as ‘resting’ (diapausing) pupae in soil at a depth of more than 5 cm,” NC State reports. “Adults emerge in early May, mate, and seek suitable oviposition (egg-laying) sites. A high percentage of first generation eggs are laid on the leaves of seedling corn when it is available.”

Not a little wormie anymore.

Each female moth lays up to 3,000 eggs, one at a time, and each egg becomes a little wormie fellow. Despite those numbers, you probably never saw more than one green caterpillar on any of your ears of corn because the biggest of the nasty buggers eat their little brothers and sisters before they settle into veganism, which they practice for two or three weeks before digging into the dirt to pupate themselves. They grow wings underground, then they emerge, lay eggs, and the cycle starts again. In a Virginia growing season, that cycle repeats itself at least three times.

Earworms aren’t the primary target of the genetic modification that causes most American corn to produce the bacterium B. thuringiensis subsp. kurstaki, also known as Bt; that technology is aimed at rootworms, which eat from below, not from above; but the protein Bt makes is bad for all lepidopteran caterpillars, so a lot of earworms do succumb to its charms. However, most conventional sweetcorn growers control earworm with applications of Mustang Max, Warrior, or Capture/Brigade, all of which are toxins belonging to the pyrethroid group.

“For many years the pyrethroids have provided exceptional levels of control of earworms,” Purdue University says. However, “in recent years, there have been scattered reports of pyrethroid failures in small plot trials and in commercial fields. Recent research has shown that populations of earworms collected in Indiana and Illinois have low to moderate levels of resistance.”

And there’s the rub: when every female lays thousands of eggs, and three or four generations of females lay their thousands of eggs every summer, it doesn’t take long for the gene pool to change.

The corn we grow doesn’t produce Bt, because the seed hasn’t been genetically modified to do so, and we don’t spray the ears with Mustang Max or Warrior or any other pyrethoid because

“While pyrethroids may be amongst the least toxic of insecticides, they are an excitatory nerve poison, acting upon the sodium ion channels in nerve cell membranes:

by sending a train of impulses rather than a single one, they overload the pathways, blocking the passage of sodium ions across cell membranes; similar in action to organophosphates (which include the now banned DDT); inhibits ATPase, which affects the release of acetylcholine, monoamine oxidase-A and acetylcholine;

inhibits GABAa receptors, resulting in convulsions and excitability (and more ‘minor’ problems such as sleep disorders);

known to be carcinogenic;

liver damage

thyroid function

cause chromosomal abnormalities in mice and hamsters;

are highly toxic to insects, fish, and birds;

mimic estrogen, leading to estrogen dominant health problems in females and feminizing effects in males, including lowered sperm counts and abnormal breast development;

sublethal doses have produced a wide array of abnormal behaviors, including aggression, and disruption in learning and learned behaviors”

It seems better in the long run to share a little of our corn with worms.

Are We Round-up Ready?

November 19, 2014 by Mark Dewey

The other day my sister-in-law, who’s a nuclear physicist, overheard me talking to her daughter about the corn we grow at Great Country Farms.

“Most of the corn in America comes from seeds that have been genetically engineered to produce a protein known as Bt, which kills the worms that like to eat sweet corn,” I said. “We don’t use that kind of seed, so some of our corn has worms under the husk at the top of the ear. But you just cut off the part the worms have eaten, and you eat the rest.”

“The results of a comparison of GM and non-GM corn from adjacent Midwest fields in the US that first appeared on the Moms Across America March website [1] are reproduced in Table 1.”

“I didn’t hear the beginning of that conversation,” my sister-in-law said later, “but you must have said you’re opposed to using GE seeds. Why is that?”

Knowing that I’m temperamentally inclined to subvert powerful conglomerates that pretend my welfare motivates their business models, and believing that such temperamental inclination is a sorry excuse for indoctrinating twelve-year-olds, I told the physicist that I don’t yet understand the issue as well as I’d like, and that I’m trying to learn the benefits of genetic engineering, but the downsides I’m aware of now are these:

1. Genetically engineered crops haven’t existed long enough for anyone to have a clear sense of how they might affect the human body over time.

2. One company, Monsanto, makes both the herbicide that allows for greater corn yields and the GE seeds that tolerate heavier doses of that herbicide, and I distrust that kind of profit-driven harmonious interest, especially when it controls 90% of the American corn market.

“I thought genetic engineering was supposed to reduce pesticide use,” she said.

“I think Monsanto’s corn has one added gene that makes Bt and another that tolerates glyphosate, which is the toxin in Round-up.”

“So why is the glyphosate necessarily worse than the problem it prevents?” she asked. “Isn’t glyphosate actually less toxic than pesticides farmers used before there was Round-up?”

“I think that’s true,” I said, “but Round-up is used so heavily now that its cumulative effect may be worse than the pesticides it replaced.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but it’s also possible that the adverse effects are a reasonable trade-off for a lot more food.”

That seemed unlikely to me, but without any evidence to the contrary, I had to admit that it was possible. Two days later, Mark Zurschmeide sent me a link to this article, which provides a lot of specific information that makes glyphosate look like a bad idea. The argument in favor of glyphosate has always been that it doesn’t hurt people because it works by disrupting production of amino acids that are crucial to plants but not to people, so it kills them but not us.

But Doctors Anthony Samsel and Stephanie Sennef of MIT recently published a paper pointing out that the microbial cultures in our intestines need to produce those same amino acids, and that glyphosate effects those cultures the same way it effects broadleaf cultures in a cornfield. So glyphosate may not in fact directly damage human tissues, but by killing off our inner flora, it undermines our health substantially.

“Roundup significantly disrupts the functioning of beneficial bacteria in the gut and contributes to permeability of the intestinal wall and consequent expression of autoimmune disease symptoms.” says Sarah Pope, the Healthy Home Economist.

I still consider myself relatively uninformed about these matters, and I realize that everyone who takes a stand on the issue has a bias of some kind — I’m trying to neutralize mine by copping to it — but it makes sense that glyphosate, a pesticide, would trounce my inner flora.

That can’t be good.

Solar Farming at Great Country Farms

June 15, 2014 by Mark Dewey

Imagine this: your Tesla’s running low on power so before crossing the mountain you stop in Bluemont to top off your battery at the only public charging station between Leesburg and Winchester, which is attached to a building that began its life as a school for the children of Loudoun County’s recently-freed slaves, and which then spent 50 years as a US Post Office, and which is now the headquarters of Independent Solar Solutions; and while the photovoltaic panels on that building are polarizing the electrons in your battery pack, you ask yourself this question: how did Bluemont village become the nexus where historic preservation meets sustainable energy?

The answer, believe it or not, is soccer.

“Jaime and I were at a wedding together,” Niko Eckart explained, “and he said, ‘You’re from Germany, right?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘So you love soccer, right?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘So do I! All my kids play,” and I said, ‘How many kids do you have?’ and he said, ‘Eight,’ and I said, ‘Eight? Let’s form a team and go to Germany and play!”

Two months later, they did exactly that.

Jamie is James Hogan, owner of HSP Direct, a direct mail marketing firm based in Herndon, and one of the principals at Independent Solar Solutions, an enterprise he wouldn’t have pursued a couple of years ago. “As an American, particularly living in this area, my idea of solar power came from the seventies and eighties,” Hogan said, “when solar power had a negative stigma because installations were ugly and didn’t work very well. When you saw it, your response was, like: ‘Oh. Solar.’”

As in, Oh, that’s too bad. I might have bought the place without that glaucous slab of wasted wishful thinking on the roof.

“But when we went to Germany and saw solar everywhere, and saw how good it looked, how normal it looked, my attitude about it changed.”

Independent Solar Solutions is based on the belief that a lot of people will react like Hogan did when they see that solar power isn’t as cumbersome as a ’78 Impala any more. “When we start installing modern solar panels here,” Hogan said, meaning places like western Loudoun County, “they’ll spread like a virus.”

Hogan and Eckart believe that one reason there isn’t much solar power in Loudoun County at the moment is that people don’t see it, so they don’t think about it — or if they do, they envision something incompatible with bucolic pastureland and historic architecture, which are the things that make a lot of people want to live in Western Loudoun.

ISS technicians working on a rural installation.

But technology has changed a lot since Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House — and Ronald Reagan took them off, because the little bit of power they produced wasn’t worth the eyesore they created. Modern panels are slimmer, sleeker, dressier, and that blueish color you see in the eyes of old blind dogs is gone.

To show that photovoltaic panels can actually enhance the look of rural properties, Hogan had several installed on the roof of his barn, which is right on Snickersville Turnpike. He says people stop to admire them all the time.

“Our goal is to add five megawatts of power to the local grid in the next three years,” Eckart said. “That’s enough to power 3,600 houses.”

And the road to achieving that goal goes through Great Country Farms.

Independent Solar Solutions will begin installing 52 solar panels on the roof of the farm store next week, enough photovoltaic technology to generate 70% of the electricity required to heat, cool, and illuminate that large building, and to refrigerate its walk-in cooler. That’s a lot of power. And when they finish that job, they’ll put 36 panels on the roof of the Zurschmeide’s house.

At the same time, they’ll launch a homepage that will monitor the amount of electricity generated by the installation over the course of a year, a month, a day, or at any given moment, along with the total wattage generated since the installation came online. They’ll set up a video display inside the store so visitors can watch the farm’s electric meter spin in real time, and learn about contemporary solar power. “We see it as the latest attraction at Great Country Farms,” said Josh McConnell, the firm’s chief technician and CEO.

“Mark [Zurschmeide] has had solar power in mind from the start,” Eckart said. “When he built the main house twenty years ago, he purposely faced it toward the southwest, so it would be well situated for solar panels when the time came.”

Eckart and Hogan have floated a couple of other ideas past the Zurschmeides, such as installing a class-two charging station at the farm or at Bluemont Vineyard, so people can charge up while picking their CSA bonus or savoring a glass of wine. “Another possibility,” McConnell said, “is a cooperative solar farm, which could run more or less like the CSA program does. That way, even people who live in places where it’s impossible to install solar panels could enjoy solar power.”

To show people how historic buildings can be retrofitted for energy efficiency and solar power, Eckart and McConnell are remodeling the old Post Office at the intersection of Snickersville Turnpike and Railroad Street in Bluemont. The building will serve as the company’s headquarters and show room, with a full range of solar products on display. And, yes, there’ll be a charging station for your Tesla.

Monarch Waystation

June 15, 2014 by Mark Dewey

Of all the things to protect, why butterflies? For their good looks? For their symbolic value as things that undergo dramatic change inside cocoons?

Yes.

And because they’re good pollinators.

But the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy suggests that monarchs are also canaries in the

Gene-plays-an-important-role-in-monarch-butterflys-migration

contemporary coal mine, meaning that their death should signal us that we’re in danger ourselves. And monarch populations have declined 80% in the past twenty years, largely because monarchs depend on a plant family that people don’t like: milkweeds. They grow between rows of corn and soybeans in the Great Midwest, and they send out those cottony seeds that float from one row to another, from one field to another, from one county to another, spreading milkweeds everywhere. According to insect ecologist Chip Taylor, of the University of Kansas, farmers used to control those weeds with a tiller, which chops weeds and turns the soil without disturbing crops. “The milkweed survives that sort of tillage to some extend,” Taylor says. “So there may be 20, 30, 40 plants per acre out there, enough so that you could see them.”

Not anymore.

Since 1996, when the Monsanto Corporation began engineering corn and soybeans that tolerated repeated applications of its Roundup herbicide, most large-scale farming in America has shifted toward those products — and thus shifted away from weed-control practices that afforded milkweeds a modest survival rate.

Lincoln Brower, a biologist at Sweet Briar College, says that there 108 different species

of milkweed in the United States. “The whole monarch migration evolved in relation to this milkweed flora,” Brower says, and recent studies show that 60% of those plants have been eliminated from the grassland ecosystem of the midwest. “We’re not talking about one species,” Brower says. “We’re talking about an entire native flora being eliminated.”

Herbicides kill not only milkweeds, where monarchs lay their eggs, but also wildflowers which provide the nectar adult monarchs need to survive. Brower says that between the time they emerge from the chrysalis and the time they head for Mexico, adult monarchs pack on 100 mg of fat, all of which comes from wildflowers. Without that fuel, they can’t make the trip.

So one answer to the question why butterflies is that we don’t have to revamp the whole

system of American agriculture to help them recover. All we have to do is plant a few milkweeds and nectar sources in our gardens. Great Country Farms has joined the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy’s “Keeping the Magic Alive” campaign by establishing a monarch way station here on the farm and designing a butterfly tour option for visiting school groups to help children and their teachers understand the plight of the monarch.

To join the campaign in your own back yard, visit the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy’s website.

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What to Feed the World?

Meet Corn Earworm

Are We Round-up Ready?

Solar Farming at Great Country Farms

Monarch Waystation

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