Category Archives: Agroterrorism

Pesticides will soon include potentially toxic nanoparticles

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Pesticide manufacturers expect that — by incorporating nanomaterials into their products — they can help farmers spray their fields more efficiently, losing less pesticide to “environmental drift,” for example.

But as with GMOs, the federal government has no existing protocols for testing nanoparticles (which behave in ways that are dramatically different from larger scale materials). before they are used in consumer and industrial products.

Oregon State University scientists also warn that researchers have found that six out of 40 nanomaterials (in a cancer study) “evoked a toxic response, most of which was linked to a specific surface chemistry that scientists now know to avoid.”

via New approaches needed to gauge safety of nanotech-based pesticides | News & Research Communications | Oregon State University.

Frying our kids' brains for perfect produce

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At least one is contaminated with Malathion. Photo: /Tetsumo Flickr CC

No one wants tics, fleas or lice on his dogs or his children.

And I understand that some gardeners will go to any length to have a perfect rose bush, or lawn.

I even know a guy on my block in Milton, Massachusetts, who boasted that he had stockpiled a recently banned grub control chemical in his shed. A perfect lawn is that important to him.

But when a Harvard scientist reports that kids with just a little bit of a common pesticide in their pee have 55 percent higher risk for ADHD, it is time to give up on perfection.

Scientists are still trying to figure out the sources of most of the Malathion they found in children. But a previous report found pesticides in more than a quarter of frozen blueberries and strawberries.

Weisskopf and his colleagues speculated that for most of the children in their study, exposure came through food. The 2008 report of the U.S. pesticide residue program found, for example, that 28% of frozen blueberries, 25% of strawberries and 19% of celery were contaminated with malathion.

via ADHD study: Pesticide is linked to developmental problems – latimes.com.

Interior Secretary: US needs more trees, fewer people

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Carbon footprint. Photo: Samantha Jade Royds/Flickr CC

Carbon footprint. Photo: Samantha Jade Royds/Flickr CC

In Copenhagen, where world leaders are slapping the “pollutant” label on any carbon-based life-form with a nervous system, the US signals its cooperation:

“Carbon pollution is putting our world—and our way of life—in peril,” said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar in a keynote speech at the global conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark. “By restoring ecosystems and protecting certain areas from development, the U.S. can store more carbon in ways that enhance our stewardship of land and natural resources while reducing our contribution to global warming.”

via New science estimates carbon storage potential of US lands.

Truth is, the federal government is no good steward of the environment. (In fact, it is the nation’s #1 polluter.)

And the mineral exploitation of federally-managed lands, particularly split estates, threaten to spoil water supplies for cattle ranchers, farmers and homeowners who depend on well water for their very survival.

High marks for Hub water, but…

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Think clean thoughts. Photo: Chad Miller/Flickr CC

Think clean thoughts. Photo: Chad Miller/Flickr CC

I still drink more bottled water then makes sense anymore.

But this new report (link, excerpt, below) is not at all heartening, as it comes in the wake of many embarrassing stories about Massachusetts’ crappy municipal supplies.

See, the trouble is that even if MWRA is doing a good job providing clean water, Massachusetts’ towns have a knack for fouling-up the end product.

NOTE: MWRA reservoirs are well-protected and very few contaminants are ever found. During 2004 and early 2005, there were short-term high TTHM levels during a changeover in treatment. Since the change to ozone in July 2005, TTHM levels are now at all-time lows with averages of about 5-15 ppb.

via EWG Tap Water Database 2009.

In future, GMO foods will be impossible to avoid

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Hope its OK. Photo: CC/Daniel Beaman

Hope it's OK. Photo: CC/Daniel Beaman

It’s hard to say exactly which foods we will be forced to eat, in Earth’s CO2- and O3-stuffed atmosphere.

But it is likely those foods will be genetically modified to counter the toxic effects of these atmospheric gases, and to maintain their nutritional value.

Global food security in a changing climate depends on the nutritional value and yield of staple food crops. Researchers at Monash University in Victoria, Australia have found an increase in toxic compounds, a decrease in protein content and a decreased yield in plants grown under high CO2 and drought conditions.

via New crops needed for new climate | h+ Magazine.

Cockamamy cow feed supplement: fish oil

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Photo: CC/James Jordan

Photo: CC/James Jordan

Dublin scientists say adding fish oil to cattle feed will make them fart less, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, farmers could also feed their cows grass, instead of corn, which is what they get on those godforsaken feedlots.

In fact, the way it works now, Smithfield and others stuff their feedlot cows with antacids, because the corn feed makes them so sick.

April 6, 2009 Omega 3 fatty acids in fish oils have many documented benefits to humans including the reduction of cholesterol, but what of the benefits to animals and the environment in general? While assisting the heart and circulatory system in animals and improving the meat quality in cattle, it is also, according to researchers at the University College in Dublin, beneficial in reducing methane levels from flatulence when added to the diet of cattle.

via Fish oils fed to flatulent cows could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Food Revolution 2030

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The food riots anticipated by military experts have already started. Now the Royal Institute for International Affairs is talking revolution, as a way to approach world hunger.

The Royal Institute for International Affairs is calling for something “close to a revolution” in agricultural efforts to meet the world’s hunger for food by 2030. A report from Chatham House (link, below), says we may already be at a point where a global middle class of fatties is taking food from the mouths of the poor.

Chatham House – Publications – Reports and Papers – View Paper
In the longer term, the key challenge is to increase the supply of food: the World Bank estimates that demand for food will rise by 50 per cent by 2030, as a result of rising affluence and growing world population. Achieving this challenge will require something close to a revolution, and a massive investment in agriculture in developing countries.

Operation: Crimson Sky II

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Bush administration to introduce a devastating livestock virus to the U.S. mainland

Plum Island, the US Department of Agriculture boasted in 1995, “was the only place in the United States where (foot-and-mouth disease) can be studied.”

The USDA called the 840-acre Plum Island, home to its disease research center, “Alcatraz for Animal Disease,” due to the 1.5 miles of choppy water between it and densely populated areas in two states.

Now Homeland Security, which took over Plum Island from the USDA post-9/11, wants to bring foot-and-mouth to the mainland.

The risk of an accidental release of the livestock illness–which would devastate the U.S. food supply–is substantial.

And US military forces are apparently unprepared to contain one, the AP reports (paraphrased by me):

Dangerous Animal Virus on US Mainland

“It was a mess,” said a Kansas senator, speaking of a 2002 contain exercise, Crimson Sky, in which the National Guard ran out of bullets.

Even so, the Kansas senator, Pat Roberts, wants the lab in his state. “It will mean jobs” and spur research and development, he says in the AP piece.

Homeland Security’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility will go to Kansas, or Georgia, or North Carolina, or Mississippi. That decision will come as early as next year.

Just designing the place will cost $45 million. It is expect to open in 2015.

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