This makes me feel a little better about today's status update. A payment for last week's writing was delayed. Therefore this week's writing was delayed. What should have been finished and mailed out yesterday ought to be started this morning, except...you know what day it is. Tuesday is Glyphosate Awareness Chat day. I have to read a lot of dreary stuff about the slow progress of glyphosate awareness. So my writing is delayed, and so, moreover, I have to warn people to expect delays all winter. Those correspondents who mail out postcards every week already know, but some people don't know...in the mountains not only Internet service, but all electrical service of any kind, can be shut down for days or weeks any time it snows. And people don't drive. And businesses don't open.
Meanwhile, people continue to scream back and forth about whether glyphosate causes cancer.
I suspect, if the matter were independently studied over the decades it would take, glyphosate may turn out not to be a primary mutagen or teratogen. So far as we know, that role in the development of cancer is nearly always played by a natural virus. The various toxins, bacteria, even other kinds of virus, to which we are exposed play their own parts in allowing the cancer to develop rather being zapped by antioxidants. From the fact that animals exposed to glyphosate consistently show only a slightly higher incidence of several different types of cancer, while showing a tremendous range of other nasty reactions (some of which kill the animals before cancer does), my guess would be that, instead of glyphosate being a primary cause of cancer, individuals' different reactions make glyphosate a facilitating agent for cancer and for several other diseases to which individuals are predisposed. So, for all practical purposes, what non-specialists mean by saying "Glyphosate causes cancer" is true, but so is what the glyphosate apologists mean by saying that in a more precise and technical sense glyphosate doesn't cause cancer--that is, it's not the sole and whole cause.
I say this distracting quibble should be dismissed from the whole discussion. If someone has cervical cancer, which we all believe we "know" is caused by one specific virus for which a (still experimental and hazardous) vaccine is on the market, and if it's possible to prove that she picked up that virus by sleeping around in 1979, and if her body has been holding the virus in check for all these years but the virus wins the battle and the cancer starts causing symptoms when she's exposed to glyphosate, then for all practical purposes, yes, glyphosate did "cause" her cancer. Even if what it actually "caused" was the kidney malfunction that merely made her feel tired and "old," and doze off at her desk, while the cancer started to grow and metastasize during the days her kidneys weren't doing their job...
By analogy, if a Bayer plant caught fire because someone dropped a cigarette, and people who now have reason to hate Bayer ran out and threw kerosene all around the plant, I expect Werner Baumann would agree that those people were arsonists? (Well, I would.)
Meanwhile, the majority of people who don't have cancer continue to suffer other unpleasant reactions to glyphosate...
Over the weekend, while waiting for the payment for the writing job, I had some knitting orders to fill and some quality time to spend checking the new hard drive on my home computer for losses and duplications from the data transfer process. I happened to check my records of the year when I was closest to that distant cousin of Dad's who died from glyphosate-induced narcolepsy last summer. He was an active farmer that year; his wife was ill. I spent several nights on a reclining chair at the foot of her bed that year. I don't want to go into all the disgusting, embarrassing details...let's just say that these people's grown-up children and school-aged grandchildren visited them regularly, and every one showed unpleasant reactions during each spray poisoning episode. The relative used "Roundup" on his garden, lived near the railroad where glyphosate was sprayed on the tracks at night, and also used "Raid" whenever he saw an insect. He and I and his wife each had a different reaction to each kind of poison; I didn't notice every family member reacting after he'd sprayed poison in his house or garden, but they all lived near the railroad and they all reacted when it was sprayed. So far none of them has had cancer. Not one. But each and every one has been ill, in a different way. The son who has the pseudo-celiac reactions is now "disabled" by them.
The patriarch of this family, who died last summer, was in most ways an admirable man. He shared Dad's interest in science and engineering, and even invented a machine they used but never mass-produced. He was older and smaller than the rest of Dad's cousins in that generational group; possibly that was why, at least on one occasion, he was the bravest and toughest of them all. But he wanted to believe that chemical "pesticides" could be safe. He wanted to believe that he felt sick and tired after exposure to glyphosate because he was "getting old," and sometimes he did doze all day when he personally had not been spraying "Roundup." He wanted to believe that he felt grumpy and had hypertensive headaches after using "Raid" for the same reason, and he did generally take care of his cardiovascular health.
So last summer, while feeling "old" after a double dose of glyphosate poisoning, he dozed off and never woke up. And meanwhile one of his sons, whose hair turned grey early but who is not old, is "disabled" by something that looks just like my celiac reactions, although he's not a celiac, was not a sickly child, and has no reaction to unpoisoned wheat. And the other children and grandchildren are "tired," or "nervous," or they have "allergies," or arthritis-like pain, or cardiac-like symptoms, or are grumpy or brainfogged, all at the same time, after being exposed to glyphosate.
I know what's wrong with them; some of them are beginning to suspect that I'm right. Can we do anything with this information, this year, like get the glyphosate sprayers out of the neighborhood? Because Big Business, Big Government, Big Money are involved, individuals suffering from the eight different kinds of painful non-cancer reactions that glyphosate is known to cause in humans can...expect delays.
(The list of glyphosate reactions, with gross-out photos and horrific emergency room reports, is still showing at epa.gov ; please find it and comment on it there, searching for "glyphosate," and noting that after commenting you'll be redirected to your comment rather than the page other people need to use to post their comments--so if you want to steer others to that precise link, copy the URL somewhere before commenting.)
Meanwhile, an increasingly feeble chorus of "But the (corporate-funded, highly questionable) 'science' shows glyphosate doesn't (all by itself, in a vacuum) cause cancer" is being displaced by a more credible chorus of "But what will we farmers do-o-o without glyphosate?"
Well, we're all better off without grain in our diet than with toxic grain, so I recommend that farmers who've become dependent on glyphosate just write off a year or two. Take jobs in town. Take time to think about what some people have been saying longer than this web site, or any of the humans behind it, have even been alive: That whole "Farmers should get big, or get out" idea always was stupid, immoral, and unsustainable. Grandma Bonnie Peters cast her first vote for President Eisenhower, and still feels glad and proud that her man won...but Eisenhower was no farmer and he gave a fatal nod to a disastrous model of "scientific" farming that is proving to be neither good science nor good farming.
George Peters' fans, if any of them are "reading" this web site through voice software (this group of people had major visual impairment twenty years ago), will remember that he always said that farmers should get small, or get out. Farming is best done by hand, without waste, without poisoning the land, without even fouling the land with any machinery heavier than a mule. The only sane way to control weeds and vermin is to be a predator rather than a poisoner. Pull up weeds and burn them or eat them. Pick insects into a bottle of water or alcohol. Don't kill the creatures that naturally work with you to eliminate these pests from your field. This fairly well limits the size of farms to about fifty acres per active farmer, which is enough to feed a couple and a reasonable number of their children and produce a modest cash crop...once the land has had time to recover from the Vicious Spray Cycle, in which pest species lack natural predators, so they proliferate out of control and you pick more insects than crops.
Yes, on this model of farming it takes many years of hard work for farmers to become rich. Yes, some factory-farm operators are going to lose some money. When we consider that these factory-farm operators have been poisoning humans and torturing animals for years, it's hard to feel very bad about their loss of money.
Anyway. When land begins to recover from being poisoned, you can expect to see huge aggressive weeds and swarms of insects. My parents did plant vegetables in fields that had been sprayed (for insects only) the year before. Learn from their experience: They lost a lot of time and money and barely harvested enough vegetables for our meals, all...summer...long. The field of tomatoes, meant to be the cash crop, had just started producing a few organically grown tomatoes before all the vines withered up and died, from a fungus that had thrived on the chemical fertilizers previously used to boost corn yields in that field. All income came from non-farming part-time jobs, and that was a bad year. Two bad years, actually. Then for the next two summers, and the winter between, Dad took a full-time job that moved us all the way across the country, and the land had two more years to rest. So actually it was the fifth summer when my parents actually had a harvest, and it was a poor one. The corn, especially, was riddled with earworms, which are a rare species in parts of North America where a Vicious Spray Cycle hasn't started, and a major pest wherever it has. The first year my parents planted crops in two of the three patches of arable land they used was 1971. The first year that land showed a small profit was 1981. Between 1976 and 1981 we ate well, even delivered crops to our short list of customers for cash, but recovered barely enough cash to break even.
There are things farmers do, other than switching to a different poison or set of poisons, to speed up this process of recovery. My parents knew about crop rotation--switching from corn to tomatoes, e.g. They did not know about the soil conservation benefits of mulch. (They'd read about them but, since their problem was insects not weeds, they didn't want to risk money on a heavy mulch, so they didn't find out how much good it can do for people with weed problems.) Just a light mulch, as in laying worn-out clothes and old newspapers between your vegetables and weighting them down with pebbles, will shade out weeds in a well tilled field. What if you have a flat, dry, wheat-friendly field where the soil dries out and blows or drains away if it's well tilled? A heavier mulch of organic material such as wood chips, several inches deep, will conserve topsoil and even build topsoil over time.
Something I've been wanting to do for a long time is to put bales of straw on the steeply sloping ground in he orchard, let them weather all winter, apply a lot of "plant food" in spring, and plant vegetables in them. Some people whose land is really too steep to plow are creating sustainable, relatively easy-care terraces and raising unsprayed vegetables this way.
Then for farmers who are willing to give up wasteful cultivating and harvesting machinery, there's the benefit of mixed planting. Each kind of plant has different biochemical properties and requirements, so some plants are natural "companions" for each other and some are the opposite. I was struck by this when I visited a newly organic farm whose owners had failed to hand-pick their Mexican Bean Beetles daily when trying to raise a cash crop of beans. Most of the bean plants had been skeletonized. Only the rows of beans near the tomatoes these people had planted for their own use still looked like bean plants. Tomato plants have a strong odor. Mexican Bean Beetles don't like that odor. A row of tomatoes between each row of beans would not have kept the beetles away, but it would have helped, especially during the years while the beetles' natural predators were recovering from the Vicious Spray Cycle.
Bottom line: Farming is work. You have to bend over. You have to get your hands dirty. You get wet, you perspire, and even though you learn to handle insects without touching them, you still come into contact with several insects--and some of the ones that sting or bite when touched are friendly species you want to encourage, too. However, when you limit yourself to reasonable quantities of non-native crop plants (no monocropping! don't even think about it!) and don't poison the air with those (counterproductive) "pesticides," it's pleasant work.
In the long term, it pays off. Not only you but your heirs reap rewards. Real farmers have to think in the long term. (At the Cat Sanctuary, my family revelled in apples, including Arkansas Black Twig apples, from trees planted by a long-gone relative who never picked an apple while he lived there. Yesterday morning, I picked up one of the last persimmons of the season, fully ripe and absolutely delicious, from a tree planted by my mother, who gave up hope of ever seeing the persimmon seeds she'd planted grow into fruit-bearing trees.) Eventually (if you keep at it) you start harvesting truckloads of "artisanal," organically grown produce for which you can charge obscene prices (if you can get it past your friends and neighbors to sell it in the city). But, to get there, you have to...expect delays.
Amazon book link? Here's an updated and expanded edition of a book my parents found helpful...
Postscript. The Internet is not the most logical place to look for links to True Green farming material because, as Wendell Berry observed long ago, the Internet is not a True Green phenomenon. Your best sources of material probably don't have electrical wiring in their homes, let alone Internet connections. There are, however, a few True Greens in cyberspace. Youall are cordially invited to post links to your most informative content in the comment section.
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