Neil Young: Chemical Factory Farming Threatens the "Garden of the World"

Heather Callaghan

While people have been torn over beloved astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's recent comments on genetically modified organisms, another beloved Neil took a stand - largely unnoticed.

While Tyson claims he never took a side, he still holds that genetic engineering is no different than what we've been doing for tens of thousands of years. One gets the impression from his view that corporatism and science become one for survival - despite negative consequences - and anyone who objects can go back to...being backward? Neil Young took an entirely different point-of-view, putting himself in the boots of that oft-forgotten group that gets left holding the bag in this mix: the farmer! Did his speech inspire them? Not at first...

Did he really suggest that Monsanto, the chemical conglomerates, industrialists and the big bankers are responsible for...? His argument below is unique, to say the least.

Family Farmers Worse Off Despite High Prices (Video)

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Arkansas Declared Disaster Area Due To Drought

(Washington, DC)  --  The U.S. Department of Agriculture has designated the entire state of Arkansas a disaster area due to drought, heat and insects during the 2010 growing season.

According to press releases from all of the state's congressional delegations, farmers are now eligible for emergency loans from the Farm Service Agency to help cover the losses to their crops.

The clock is now ticking on the eight-month window of opportunity to apply for those loans and for the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Program.

How Farm Subsidies Harm Taxpayers, Consumers, and Farmers, Too

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Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides

Image: Big Grey Mare - Grist

Tom Philpott
Grist 

Monsanto's ongoing humiliationproceeds apace. No, I'm not referring to the company's triumph in our recent "Villains of Food" poll. Instead, I'm talking about a Tuesday item from the Des Moines Register'sPhilip Brasher, reporting that Monsanto has been forced into the unenviable position of having to pay farmers to spray the herbicides of rival companies. 

If you tend large plantings of Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" soy or cotton, genetically engineered to withstand application of the company's Roundup herbicide (which will kill the weeds -- supposedly -- but not the crops), Monsanto will cut you a  $6 check for every acre on which you apply at least two other herbicides. One imagines farmers counting their cash as literally millions of acres across the South and Midwest get doused with Monsanto-subsidized poison cocktails.

The move is the latest step in the abject reversal of Monsanto's longtime claim: that Roundup Ready technology solved the age-old problem of weeds in an ecologically benign way. The company had developed a novel trait that would allow crops to survive unlimited lashings of glyphosate, Monsanto's then-patent-protected, broad-spectrum herbicide. It was kind of a miracle technology. Farmers would no longer have to think about weeds; glyphosate, which killed everything but the trait-endowed crop, would do all the work. Moreover, Monsanto promised, Roundup was less toxic to humans and wildlife than the herbicides then in use; and it allowed farmers to decrease erosion by dramatically reducing tillage -- a common method of weed control.

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RELATED ARTICLES:
Genetically Modified Foods and the Monsanto Initiative
Food Fascism in the Land of the Free

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