The organic dairy industry is a thriving one ($1.4 billion business annually). Its dairy cattle eat alfalfa for much of the year. At Organic Valley, the largest organic farmer cooperative in the U.S., for example, the cows eat a totally organic diet that averages 32 pounds of certified organic alfalfa per day—60% of their diet. If genetically modified alfalfa is approved, its inevitable pollen drift would eventually contaminate and destroy the natural organic alfalfa crops and seed stocks that these cattle depend on.
Certified organic animals cannot eat genetically modified food. Ingesting GM’d forage would result in the decertification of organic dairy farmers. Organic alfalfa is already expensive and hard to find and if existing stocks are contaminated by GM’d alfalfa, it would be even harder for organic farmers to find enough grain to feed their animals.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are plants that have had one or more elements of their DNA altered—to add pesticide to them, for example. In the case of Monsanto’s premier GMOs, which are basically delivery systems for one of Monsanto’s biggest selling pesticides, RoundUp, the seeds are made to be RoundUp resistant, or as their naming convention refers to it, “RoundUp Ready.” RoundUp, by the way, is a glyphosate, a pesticide ingredient that has been listed as “the third most common cause of pesticide illness in farm workers. It is the most common form of reported pesticide poisoning in landscape gardeners.” (That quote, along with a lot more troubling news can be found here.) It is also a known carcinogen. Being “RoundUp Ready,” means it’s impervious to RoundUp because its DNA has been altered to make it pesticide friendly. When it sprouts and RoundUp is sprayed on it, the weeds around it—and many unintended targets in the soil—will die, but the sprout won’t. It’s RoundUp Ready and able to thrive in a pesticide pool. In this case, it will grow into the genetically altered alfalfa that ends up going into the gut of ruminant dairy cows.
While Monsanto insists that proper “stewardship” would minimize pollen contamination of non-GM’d alfalfa, farmers who have been watching the pattern of GMOs know the drill. "The USDA cannot ensure GMO alfalfa can be grown without cross-contaminating other crops, so it should not be allowed and it is not needed. Farmers have been growing alfalfa successfully for a hundred years," says Organic Valley CEO George Siemon. This also threatens non-organic farmers who choose not to grow GM’d crops.
Alfalfa is the third most valuable crop in the U.S. ($8 billion per year, grown on more than 21 million acres) and fourth most widely grown (behind corn, soy and wheat). Besides dairy cows, it’s used as feed for beef cattle, pork, lamb, sheep, and by bees for honey production--and also shows up as the proverbial alfalfa sprouts. Alfalfa plays a pivotal role in crop rotation because it helps prevent nitrogen leaching and helps maintain nutrient levels and organic matter in soil. It’s also the first perennial seed to be proposed as a GE crop and it has a huge pollination radius—it drifts far and wide.
Fred Kirschenmann is the Iowa Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow and a farmer in North Dakota. “Alfalfa is a perennial with a three-mile pollination radius, so farm buffers won't work," he said. "It is impossible to contain." But its capacity to carry its contamination long distances and basically take over any competing non-GM’d alfalfa is only part of the story.
It’s also impossible to know what the long-term effects of eating GMO’d food are likely to be. Before GMOs were initially approved in the mid 1990s, even scientists at the FDA were alarmed at what they were seeing in tests being run, but their opinions were ignored and approval moved forward. (If you really want to dig into this nasty history of GMOs, fasten your seat belt and read Jeffrey Smith’s books, mentioned at the end of this blog entry.) “Any politician or scientist who tells you these products are safe is either very stupid or lying,” says Geneticist David Suzuki. “The experiments have simply not been done.”
Fred Kirschenmann echoes that. "We still don't know the long-term effect of GM crops on the health of animals and people," he says. "It took us 40 years to find out that CFCs were blowing a hole in the ozone."
In a matter of a few years, Monsanto’s GMO’d seed has garnered 95% of the market share of soy grown in this country and 80% of the corn. In Canada there’s no organic canola industry at all. (And it’s hard to find in the U.S.) It was wiped out by GMO’d varieties that contaminated it by cross pollination and sometimes by simply falling off farm trucks that passed on roads and blew into fields and took root. Because Mother Nature is so efficient, windblown seed pollen can end up anywhere. And does. A test strip of GMO’d wheat blew from its spot in western Canada and ended up contaminating wheat growing in several spots in Europe.
Monsanto has been successfully—mostly without us being able to know it—shoving GMOs down our throats since they were first approved under false pretenses in the mid-90s. Pitched as the food that would end hunger, be drought and pest resistant, and reduce pesticide use while surviving the rigors of climate change, GMOs have been a huge flop, have weakened the diversity of our heritage seed stocks, and posed risks to our environment that are incalculable. (Monsanto’s claims that its products require less pesticide was shot down by a 2009 study that showed that during its 13-year examination, the use of RoundUp ready seed increased herbicide use by 383 million pounds.) HRH Charles, Prince of Wales, an ardent environmentalist, has called GMOs the "biggest environmental disaster of all time."
Considering their deep prevalence in our food chain, they’re also a well-kept secret. Monsanto refuses to label GMOs—and it can—because in many states it’s actually against the law to label a food as a GMO because of so-called food libel laws mandated by interest groups after the famous case between Oprah and the Cattleman’s Association (the CA lost). Monsanto doesn’t want us to know when and if we’re eating GMOs because it knows from surveys that most people wouldn’t eat them if they were offered a choice. No such laws exist in the EU where GMO labeling is required, and they are banned in places like Ireland and Egypt. In many African nations they are not allowed even as free food aid.
These GMOs pose absolutely no advantage to you the consumer. They’re not cheaper, more nutritious or safer. In fact they’re the opposite, not only because of the unknowns associated with their safety but the downstream externalities, the real costs to us, our bodies and our planet. The stage on which this is being played out isn’t just about alfalfa. It’s about our right to participate as consumers—to know what we’re eating and whether it’s safe for us and our families—and to demand accountability of our government agencies to do their jobs and look out for our health, not the interests of the corporations whose only interest is a healthy bottom line.
For Monsanto, getting this approval is win-win. There is no down side. They not only will be able to sell their seed but if the past is prologue, they’ll be able to reap the benefits of this uncontrolled pollination. It’s happened before. One of the most famous cases comes from a Canadian canola grower named Percy Schmeiser who was sued by Monsanto for patent violation. Monsanto had discovered plots of its proprietary RoundUp Ready canola growing in Schmeiser’s fields. Schmeiser, a lifelong seed saver who had carefully collected 50 years worth of heritage canola seed, had not planted Monsanto’s seed. It had simply blown onto his farm from elsewhere and taken root. His own crops were contaminated and his heritage seed stores ruined. Nonetheless, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that it didn’t matter how the seed got onto his farm; he was liable. Monsanto won. This story has been repeated hundreds of times with American farmers.
Today, March 3, is the last day the USDA is taking comments from consumers about whether or not to deregulate GMO alfalfa and release it into our food systems and into the world’s air currents. Contact them and your elected representatives. It’s easy. Just press a couple of keys on your cellphone or computer keyboard. This is huge. It matters to you and the generations that will eat the food produced by the soils that will harbor these crops. Let’s not condemn them to unknown and unknowable dangers and our planet to further contamination and unwanted agents of change.
What you can do TODAY:
- Contact the USDA with your comments by going here. (Sample: “I DO NOT support the deregulation of GMO alfalfa. Please reject Monsanto’s request. Thank you.”)
- Call your Senators and your Congressperson. Urge them to tell the USDA to reject Monsanto’s application to sell GMO’d alfalfa, or to even grow so-called test strips. Don’t know how to find them? Go here. Or call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for your Senators’/Representative’s office numbers.
- If you are on Facebook, click here to post the petition to your Wall.
- If you have a Twitter account, click here to automatically send a tweet about it.
- Learn more about GMOs (also called GE—genetically engineered—crops or seeds) and how they are affecting our seed stocks, our soil, our nutrition, creating trade imbalances with our global customers and how GM’d seeds are destroying lives in third world countries. Read Jeffrey Smith’s illuminating 10-part series here at Huffington Post. (You’ll find his amazing books mentioned there too.)
- If you’re planning to grow a garden this year, support organic heirloom seed companies like Seed Savers.
