I don't cross the Tennessee border on Route 23 very often any more. I walked down that road almost daily, just ten years ago, when I had friends and clients on the Tennessee side.
Now they're all dead.
They weren't young people; some were only "retired" and some were positively geriatric patients, which was why they hired help, but although their reactions varied, they all had Bad Days at the same time. They all showed reactions to one thing. For about ten years we had no idea what that thing might be. Then Jeffrey Smith mentioned in an e-mail that it might be glyphosate--and all the pieces fell into perfect place. There was no possible room for doubt. Whether they were celiac, pseudo-celiac, cardiac, diabetic, arthritic, or had some other chronic condition, all of them felt worse, were more "disabled" by whatever conditions they had, and were apt to feel grumpy and disagreeable, after exposure to glyphosate.
More than that, some of them had children and grandchildren whose reactions were worse than theirs. The child who never showed any lack of empathy, but had vision and hearing impairments, seemed "brain-damaged" or "autistic" to other people when exposed to glyphosate. The man who'd broken a knee walked with more of a limp when exposed to glyphosate. The woman who'd wanted a baby lost the fetus when exposed to glyphosate. It wasn't even so much that people my age had cancer--it was that their kids did.
I don't think any of Mother's friends died of COVID. Most of them died before COVID. Most of them were older than Mother was, and although Mother's death at eighty-five was indeed untimely, most of her friends were one step away from nursing homes before they died. They gave thanks if they died before being sent to nursing homes. Glyphosate probably was not the cause of their death, although it may well have been the cause of Mother's death. Glyphosate most certainly was the most conspicuous cause of their illnesses and suffering during their last years--more conspicuous than sugar, or wheat, or even alcohol, even when those were known to be symptom triggers.
As long-term readers know, it was only in 2018, after standing in a bustling open-air market and watching a whole crowd react to glyphosate vapors in their several ways, that I started taking this concern seriously as a Celiactivist. I realized that glyphosate specifically, not genetically modified foods generally, was the great universal symptom trigger in 2015 but I still had to see to believe how much harm this poison was doing to everybody, from geriatric patients to primary school children.
So I'm not writing this post to judge those Tennessee farmers who plan to be spraying "herbicides," glyphosate and even worse poisons, on the land before planting in the next few weeks. You've all heard arguments for and against glyphosate and the other poisons. By chemical companies' salesmen you've been told that you can't expect good crop yields without these poisons.
Would I lie to you, Tennessee farmers? My parents farmed. My parents tried planting fields, the first year after all chemical use was discontinued. Planting acres of soil with perfectly good seeds and getting hardly enough of a "crop" to provide the whole family with a home-grown side dish at meals. Picking the dozen or so ears of corn, finding the earworms in each ear, taking all that hard-won corn to the animals and buying corn at the store from farmers who still sprayed poison. Enduring the kindly meant lectures of people who wanted to cling to their "pesticides." Living on the wages of one part-time job in town, or moving back to a city to do jobs they loathed. No, the first few years when your farm is breaking an addiction to that Vicious Pesticide Cycle are not going to be good years. Yes, you'll be very lucky if you don't hear piteous whines from the children: "If you really loved us you'd stay in the city so we could have nice things like all our friends have."
Deal with it. Because while Kennedy's mission in this world is to clean the poisons out of the food supply and thereby bring those lean years upon you, Trump's mission is to crank up the economy to the point where you can get those part-time jobs to keep the land while it recovers. You've seen the bumper stickers, "Please send us another 'boom'--I promise I won't waste it this time." Keep that promise. Trump's economic plan is not sustainable but, if we don't waste its benefits, it may get us through the inevitable decline that comes with the end of the Waste Age. Within ten years of breaking the Vicious Pesticide Cycle you can expect to see good crops again.
You had fifty years to choose to heed what my father tried to show you about breaking the Vicious Pesticide Cycle. Yes, there's a cut-off point for everything. Yes, the people demanding glyphosate-free, glufosinate-free, neonicotinoid-free, paraquat-free, dicamba-free, non-GMO food are demanding something similar to bricks without straw from you. Yes, we feel sorry about this...but there are limits to everything, and at least you can deal with the resurgent monster weed problem, in the first year or two after you stop spraying toxic chemicals on the land, by applying hot water to the weeds. Steaming a weed to death leaves nothing on the land but water that actually helps other plants grow. Yes, you should anticipate a total ban on all "herbicides" and go herbicide-free now. No, you can't expect a lot of sympathy for the pressure to switch to safer weed-wilting technology. Breaking the "insecticide" addiction will be much worse, and you need to start that now, too.
But every economic cloud has a silver lining. In this case, we're talking about longer and healthier lives for farmers. Currently, because of contact with chemicals, life expectancy (and insurance expenses) for farmers are hardly better than for coal miners. Do organic farmers enjoy longer and healthier lives than coal miners? Absoflippin'lutely. So who's bringing the average for "farmers," generally, so low? Would you like to stop being at such high risk for so many horrible diseases? Would you like to stop having many of the diseases you now have?
Farm women these days...I remind so many of you of a grandmother or great-aunt you had, just a little-bitty thing who stayed slim and active through middle age, old age, even very old age. You wish you'd taken after her, you say wistfully, looking down over your billows of flab. Even before you had the baby you sprouted up fast and then, right away, you started slowing down, feeling that it was better to buy a size larger clothes every year than to force yourselves to exercise. Well, you got some exercise; not all the work on a farm has been motorized and mechanized yet; but your thyroids...it's a gene...
Stop. Please. Yes, there's a specific gene for thyroid dysfunction. Mother had it back when normal women were slim. I have the gene, too. Did you know that even dysfunctional thyroids can be brought under control with the right diet and exercise regimen? The dysfunction actually flips; Mother's thyroid tended to slow down; mine tends to speed up, but people can actually choose whether to run our thyroid metabolism at a fast, slow, or average pace. Controlling that sort of thing becomes much, much easier when you're not exposed to glyphosate.
Some of you have a different gene for a milder thyroid dysfunction that doesn't flip. Good for you--it's even easier to control, without even taking pills, although the pills you might take would be cheaper than the ones Mother used to take. But yes, that too. You too can be trim, strong, full of energy, and as much of a "hottie" as you want to be, at thirty or fifty or seventy.
Can we talk, Tennessee farm women? Southerners don't have whole different standard vocabularies we use when talking to people of different generations, as some Asian people do; we say "you" to any person of any age, but we say it with different tones and manners. I have heard a lot of you speak to me as if you thought I was the age of your daughters. I am closer to the age of your mothers. It was understandable. You're fatter than I am, you move more slowly, you feel worse more of the time. You needed glasses before you were old enough to fit into standard eyeglass frames. The skin on your faces sags off the bones and wrinkles and wobbles in that way that actually shows ill health, but is often confused with the look of old age. You blame the way you look and feel on your age, so then you look at me and think I look younger than you are. I do not look young. I look fifty or sixty years old. I am what a well-preserved person of grandparent-age looks like. You do not look old, either, really; you look unhealthy. You have no right to be so "old" when some of you aren't even forty years old yet, but you are. You are going to experience reverse aging when that total glyphosate ban goes into effect. You are going to look and feel the age you really are. Some of you have the kind of hair that turns white earlier than mine, and some have the kind that stays black longer, but nature intended the work you do on your farms, with your men and your children, to be fun--and so it will be.
People in Glyphosate Awareness do not want you to be poor and miserable, Tennessee farmers. We want you to be strong and healthy, to enjoy the job of raising food that keeps other people healthy. We want you to look as good as you feel and feel as good as your work is.
Many of you inherited land that was already stuck in an addiction-like vicious cycle, and you've kept it in that cycle. You've been enabling the addiction when you had a mandate from Nature to break it. You will have to break the addiction. That never has felt good and probably never will, during the withdrawal stage...but it/ll be worth it when the land is healthy again.
Imagine relaxing by the river with a rod and reel...and catching full-sized fish that are fit to eat, instead of knowing that your river barely supports sunfish and carp and they never grow to eating size.
Imagine feeling romantic rather than exhausted at the end of a long day of farm work with your Partner for Life.
Imagine Junior without the learning disorders, Princess without the eating disorders, and The Teenager growing strong biceps, a manly chest, a deep voice, and rejoicing in young manhood instead of fretting that it might have been meant to be a girl.
Chemicals have done you a lot of damage, Tennessee farmers. When you stop exposing yourselves (and other people) to those chemicals, it is going to feel like the Kingdom Coming and the Year of Jubilo. You too will feel like singing along with George Harrison, as an e-friend's got me doing when I recover from a glyphosate reaction: "All (I've) got to take is (a walk) to make it blow away, blow away, blow away!" Goodbye and good riddance to those chronic disease conditions!
There may have to be a year or two when we have to buy our plant-based foods from more sensible farmers in Mexico, and they may cost ounce for ounce as much as gold...but then will come the years when Tennessee farmers are raising and selling "gold," too, before the land recovers completely and the prices of things like strawberries and tomatoes stabilize.
You too have a right to live to be 90 or 100 years old, Tennessee farmers, and you too have a right to enjoy every one of those years. You have a right to grow old without hearing that anyone you know personally has cancer--such a rare, bizarre disease. You have a right to live in a world where the normal end of life is that people's hearts stop in their sleep some time after age 95. You have a right to do as well by doing as much good, and enjoy as much good time in this life, as Jimmy Quillen or Dolly Parton.
But where there are drugs, there are pushers. The pushers of American farmland's addiction to the Vicious Spray Cycle are out there, putting up signs like the bad sign currently disgracing the Tennessee border on Route 450--you know, the one urging farmers to "Stand with glyphosate."
Stand with cancer?
Stand with Crohn's Disease?
Stand with autism?
Are any real Tennessee farmers so glyphosate-damaged you can believe that kind of idiocy?
I know, I know. I've seen it on Twitter--where I also know that it was coming from chemical company spokesmen, because Real Farmers do not waste sunny summer days on Twitter. "Agriculture isn't gardening, Priscilla, dear. We don't have time to hand-pick weeds and insects away from crops."
Well, if you don't have enough respect for the ecology in which you're raising crops to deal with weeds and insects in a mindful way, without causing harm to anyone but the nuisance species, you may not be the ones who need to be doing agriculture. There's nothing really wrong with selling farm land to someone who cares enough about farming to do it in a mindful, sustainable, natural way. Agriculture must become more like gardening. It must get back to its roots. Abundant crop yields are good but the essential goal of agriculture is healthy crop yields.
Stand with strawberries, Tennessee.
Stand with corn.
Stand with potatoes.
Stand with tomatoes.
Stand with beans.
Stand with peaches.
Stand with cherries.
Stand with milk.
Stand with eggs.
Stand with turkey.
Stand with quirky little artisanal crops like "wild" persimmons, watercress and land cress, pawpaws, morels, and dandelion shoots.
Stand with the fuel that runs bodies through the kind of lives you want your children to have.
Stand with eating the "weeds"--most unsprayed native plant species are edible, some quite tasty, and many are at their best when they pop up in the places where you don't want them. Glyphosate positively encourages, through the Vicious Pesticide Cycle, the most unlovable weeds--kudzu and Spanish Needles, Bermuda grass and jimsonweed--but nature intended Tennessee to be blessed with such "weeds" as land cress, dock, dandelion, spring-beauties, ground-ivy, chickweed, chinquapin, catnip, pennyroyal, boneset, queen-of-the-meadow, ladies-thumb, ground cherries, cleavers, clovers, millet, and (at worst) smilax. Native "weeds" are not to be wasted, much less to be poisoned. Most of them belong in salads; the rest are valuable as medicines. They are meant to be received with gratitude, used, and enjoyed.
Stand with solid bones, strong muscles, vigorous hearts, and generally with bodies that are built to last through ninety years of good hard work that feels satisfying, not debilitating, every day..
Stand with good health and good life, Tennessee.
Stand with a total ban on all "herbicide" sprays this summer, with bans on all poison sprays soon to follow and strict limits on use of "insecticide" powders and oils.
Tell the chemical salesmen to go and drown themselves in vats of glyphosate.
