Re: With all the FT and organic certification talk

Quoth "Jack Denver" <nunuvyer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:

| You mean the kind of Monsanto future where we literally grow enough corn to
| burn and mass starvation in places like China and India, where famines used
| to kill millions, are things of the past? If that's the Monsanto future,
| then bring it on baby, bring it on.

Yeah, that's what they've been selling us. Even if it were true, you
still have to ask whether this approach is sustainable, and at what price -
how much is left, by the time you figure you have nothing to lose by
continuing to farm the earth that way. That's the rest of the Monsanto
future. You can go to these great examples of the Green Revolution and
start to get some ideas about what it looks like.

But there is some of room for doubt that it's really true. I don't keep
a scrapbook ready with all this stuff, but here's a fairly recent press
release on research from the University of Wisconsin that shows organic
forage and grain crops doing fine against the "conventional" alternatives:
https://www.agronomy.org/press/releases/2008/0324/4/

and one from the University of Michigan suggesting that you could expect
even better results in the 3rd world:
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1036065820070710

You don't have to believe it will work, but I guess it is something like
religion after all - if you suppose that some people have faith because
the alternative is worse. At any rate, to return to my point, it is not
about pesticides, or about any inherent property of the produce.

Donn
.