Rock & Roll Farm

Monday! Mar 20 2006 // 12:10 am //

Now tell me my notions of good and bad are simplistic.

This article from Newsweek, Why GM is Good for Us: Genetically modified foods may be greener than organic ones, may teach you more about farmers than you’ve learned from me all year.

Farm-raised pigs are…an environmental hazard. Their manure contains phosphorus, which, when it rains, runs off into lakes and estuaries, depleting oxygen, killing fish, stimulating algae overgrowth and emitting greenhouse gases….

(Last time I checked, pigs are fed phosphorus supplements.)

As it turns out, there is a solution to the pig problem, but it requires a change of mind-set among environmentalists and the public. Two Canadian scientists have created a pig whose manure doesn’t contain very much phosphorus at all. If this variety of pig were adopted widely, it could greatly reduce a major source of pollution.

Here’s the original article, which states…

…there is a large variation in phosphorus availability in key feed ingredients….Currently, swine diets are formulated with a big safety margin to compensate for this variation. In addition, phytate phosphorus, the major form of phosphorus in cereal grains and oil seed meals, is not thoroughly digested by pigs. As a result, swine producers, thinking that their animals aren’t absorbing enough phosphorus, often supplement pigs’ diets with the expensive nutrient to ensure adequate growth.

Catch that? Not only are they given supplements, they are given supplements to supplement the supplements. But this is not as outrageous as the next claim from the Newsweek article.

Standing in opposition to these advances are advocates of an organic food philosophy that holds to the simplistic notion that “natural” is good and “synthetic” is bad. Genetic modification is unacceptable to organic farmers merely because it is performed in a laboratory.

Well, you can hardly blame me. A laboratory ran over my dog once and I never got over it.

Actually, my opposition to these so-called advances have less to do with an organic food philosophy and more with an understanding of the current relationship of man to environment as non-sustainable. My opposition is to factory farming - the reason there is such a volume of manure to cause the run off. Factory farming which pumps livestock with unnecessary supplements just in case it’s needed.

Chances are, farmers will continue to grow their polluting organic pork, their allergenic organic soy and their neurotoxin-sprayed organic apples. Worse still, they will make sure that no one else gets a choice in the matter of improving the conditions of life on earth—unless, that is, others rise up and demand an alternative.

Farmers will be out there “making sure that no one else gets a choice.” I wonder if the author of this article has ever met a farmer. So, it’s farmers who get to make choices about how they grow, not the consumers who demand the cheap and convenient food which necessitates these methods.

I’d prefer we rise up and demand an alternative to the global economy that recognizes the degradation of ecologies as an “external” cost. The environment is not a quantifiable commodity. And I’ll bet that any farmer you ask would agree.