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The claims made in this article, Food Inc., and other pieces of agitprop are not based in reality. I'm part of a fifth generation farm family. We've been work

by crikli 14y ago

The claims made in this article, Food Inc., and other pieces of agitprop are not based in reality. I'm part of a fifth generation farm family. We've been working the same ground for over 100 years (that's sustainability in practice) and I'm here to tell you that nobody is killing themselves. Especially with $6 corn. Monsanto is not the enemy of the family farm. I'll elaborate when I have more time and a device other than my iPad as I know I need to provide more than this here on HN. :)

maxerickson 14y ago
The lawsuit is in Brazil. The claims about people killing themselves are from India. So U.S. corn prices probably don't quite factor in. Also, if you are importing diesel and fertilizer, you aren't quite self sustaining (I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, I like cheap and available food, but the popular idea of sustainability is about accounting for and balancing flows of energy, not keeping land productive).
- sp332 14y ago
  That's sustainable energy sources. Sustainable farming is different.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    My reading was that the comment meant "We're still here", not "We are among the best in the world at minimizing inputs".
    - crikli 14y ago
      I meant both. See my response above but minimizing inputs is the core motivation of most of our family's technology and infrastructure investments. GPS integration alone has allowed us to use the minimal amount of fertilizer as we're able to use historical data to know which parts of the field need which amounts of what.
  - glesica 14y ago
    How can you separate the two? Mechanized agriculture requires large amounts of energy, does it not? So if your energy source is unsustainable, your farming method is unsustainable. Seems logical.
- crikli 14y ago
  I'm using the word sustainable in the dictionary sense of the word rather than in the context in which it has become a rather vaguely defined buzzword. We've(1) been harvesting crops off of the same ground every year for over 100 years. Thanks to technology the yields from the ground have increased every single year while the adjusted price of grain has dropped over the long term. Yes, we use fertilizer and diesel that are of course brought in from other areas as there is no other way to farm thousands of acres. People that don't farm don't get how much we care about the land. It's not just some abstract cause temporarily adopted, it's what our father's father's passed to them and what we hope to pass to our sons and daughters. We want to use the smallest possible amount of fuel, fertilizers, and herb/pesticides because that stuff costs a lot of money and farming is a low margin operation (the last couple years notwithstanding). Technologies like Roundup-ready soybeans mean that we take fewer passes with a tractor over the same crop row, reducing the use of herb/pesticides and fuel, and dramatically reducing soil compaction. (1) I make no income from farming, although I grew up working in the fields. I own a software company and I'm married into the family I'm referencing with the inclusive pronouns.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    I do understand that farmers are very motivated to minimize inputs (but many of them are also stubborn and risk averse, because they are just people). I suppose my point is that you are asking for a fight that I don't think is worth fighting when you use it the way you did (and I see merit to the fuzzy buzzword idea that encourages people to be more mindful of their impacts).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
Spooky23 14y ago
Nobody is killing themselves because you're being subsidized by the American taxpayer to grow lots of corn. Monsanto is a nasty corporation, but their nastiness is fueled by government policy that allows them to leverage patents and practices to make a commodity product like corn as profitable to them as pharmaceuticals are to Genentech or AstraZenica. It's great for you now, and results in cheap food prices for the consumer. But there are dangerous long-term social (ie. lots of obese people fattened up by artificially cheap and ubiquitous corn-derived sugar), biological and economic consequences
- johnchristopher 14y ago
  Parent is sweden if I remember correctly. Farm subsiding is a thorny issue in UE and there seems to be some debate in sweden about it http://www.thelocal.se/7443/20070529/ http://www.thelocal.se/7443/20070529/
- randomdata 14y ago
  The $6 quoted is the current market price (give or take a few cents) for old crop corn, sans subsidies. That is historically high, by a large margin. I think most would consider that to be quite the opposite of cheap. I will add that as a seventh generation farmer in Canada, where we have no real subsidies, we still grow just as much corn. It is a core part of our crop rotation, and even when it is a money loser, we still pretty much have to grow it at some point – you can get away with not growing it for a rotation or two, but it will catch up with you eventually. I assume the same is true for Americans in the corn belt. How much of a factor do the subsidies really play in those decisions, or is it just a part of their normal crop rotation (with the added benefit of not having the big losses we often have to deal with here)?
- crikli 14y ago
  We don't accept subsidies and would absolutely love to see them go away completely. They're doing nothing but sustaining inefficient farming practices and keeping afloat farmers that are quite simply bad at what they do. I don't want to get too off into the HCFC rabbit trail, but I have yet to see any research that indicates anything other than correlative evidence between the ingestion of C6H1206 derived from corn. If you have access to research that proves causality I'd love to see it.
Tichy 14y ago
Read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond - 100 years is not really proven sustainability yet...
jlgreco 14y ago
Why do everyone keep on insisting that people who hate Monsanto must have watched some movie? Monsanto has bugged the hell out of me for years and I've never even heard of that movie.
- goostavos 14y ago
  Well, the movie was fairly popular, and did raise a lot of awareness for people not directly involved in the farming or GM production dialogues. That, or because it's easier to dismiss someone's argument by discrediting their words.
- crikli 14y ago
  Food Inc is what really whipped up the anti-Monsanto rhetoric; it's uncommon for me to interact with someone about agriculture and food without the film coming up.
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  Yeah, I was reading articles on Monsanto's practices with GM crops in the '90s and I don't think Food Inc. was out then. I wonder if the debate over patentability of genes has been reinvigorated by the debate over the patentability of software methods. There's also an interesting parallel in the BitTorrent/media company conflict and the seed cleaner/Monsanto one. Certainly we hear more about software patents than bio ones, but maybe we just need to find and read BioHacker News...
astrodust 14y ago
A hundred years is a sliver of time compared to how long agriculture has been going on. People live a hundred years and nobody would argue they're "sustainable" in any sense. You might be doing it right. You might be making a total mess of things but it'll take another fifty years before it collapses. Only time will tell. How dependent are you on fossil fuels? How well would you fare as a farmer if you had no access to chemical fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, or any sort of gasoline powered equipment? How much would corn cost if the completely insane policy of diverting large amounts of it to ethanol production? The people that are killing themselves are largely in India where there is an entirely different market.
- randomdata 14y ago
  How much would corn cost if the completely insane policy of diverting large amounts of it to ethanol production? It may be insane from a purely scientific point of view, but that doesn't tell the whole story. If you recall from around the 2006 timeframe, before the energy policy changes, we were swimming in corn. It was coming out of ears, sitting in massive stock piles doing nothing, and more was coming in each day. Even if you say ethanol is ultimately energy neutral/negative, it was still energy ripe for the taking. Now the problem, even if you take away the subsidies, is that corn is still an important crop in a grain farmer's rotation. Looking back on the 2006 timeframe again, you might remember the farmers here in Canada losing their shirts over their corn production (we don't have the subsidies). But they still grew it, because there was no reasonable alternative. Not even leaving the fields fallow was an option, as the banks wouldn't hear of it (a loss on corn is smaller than the loss on no crop at all). I've heard some suggest that farmers grow other crops instead of corn, which sounds good in theory, but those other crops require additional multi-million, even multi-billion, dollar outlay of new equipment and infrastructure to get started. Farmers are already operating on thin enough margins that it is financially impossible. It is cheaper to just take a loss on corn for the year. It is just not clear to me what the alternative is, especially to maintain sustainable food production of other crops. It is far more complex than just the science of ethanol.
  - astrodust 14y ago
mcantelon 14y ago
>nobody is killing themselves Nobody in the US you mean. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Farmer_suicides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Farmer_suicides Creating a monopoly on something naturally abundant (seed) is a part of Monsanto's long-term vision and a seed monopoly will make them a powerful political force in the world. The power to manage regional population by controlling seed supply has great military value.
JamisonM 14y ago
Others have taken issue with a 100 year sample size for a definition of "sustainability in practice" but I would not. My family bought its first Diesel tractor quite a bit less than 100 years ago, diskers to seed in the 1950's (I think), 4WD articulating tractors to pull them in the 1970's, and air drills in the 1990's. Started using nitrogen fertilizer instead of manure in the late 1960's. We started using herbicides in the 1970's, insecticides in the 1990's (though never much of them) and fungicides in the 1990's. GMO crops in the 1990's as well. I think we started growing Canola in the late eighties or early 90's and only started growing Soybeans in the last few years. I am wondering which of the farm practices engaged in right now, in 2012, in any way resemble the "sustaining" of a practice from 100 years ago?

by crikli 14y ago

maxerickson 14y ago

The lawsuit is in Brazil. The claims about people killing themselves are from India. So U.S. corn prices probably don't quite factor in. Also, if you are importing diesel and fertilizer, you aren't quite self sustaining (I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, I like cheap and available food, but the popular idea of sustainability is about accounting for and balancing flows of energy, not keeping land productive).

sp332 14y ago
That's sustainable energy sources. Sustainable farming is different.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  My reading was that the comment meant "We're still here", not "We are among the best in the world at minimizing inputs".
  - crikli 14y ago
    I meant both. See my response above but minimizing inputs is the core motivation of most of our family's technology and infrastructure investments. GPS integration alone has allowed us to use the minimal amount of fertilizer as we're able to use historical data to know which parts of the field need which amounts of what.
- glesica 14y ago
  How can you separate the two? Mechanized agriculture requires large amounts of energy, does it not? So if your energy source is unsustainable, your farming method is unsustainable. Seems logical.
crikli 14y ago
I'm using the word sustainable in the dictionary sense of the word rather than in the context in which it has become a rather vaguely defined buzzword. We've(1) been harvesting crops off of the same ground every year for over 100 years. Thanks to technology the yields from the ground have increased every single year while the adjusted price of grain has dropped over the long term. Yes, we use fertilizer and diesel that are of course brought in from other areas as there is no other way to farm thousands of acres. People that don't farm don't get how much we care about the land. It's not just some abstract cause temporarily adopted, it's what our father's father's passed to them and what we hope to pass to our sons and daughters. We want to use the smallest possible amount of fuel, fertilizers, and herb/pesticides because that stuff costs a lot of money and farming is a low margin operation (the last couple years notwithstanding). Technologies like Roundup-ready soybeans mean that we take fewer passes with a tractor over the same crop row, reducing the use of herb/pesticides and fuel, and dramatically reducing soil compaction. (1) I make no income from farming, although I grew up working in the fields. I own a software company and I'm married into the family I'm referencing with the inclusive pronouns.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  I do understand that farmers are very motivated to minimize inputs (but many of them are also stubborn and risk averse, because they are just people). I suppose my point is that you are asking for a fight that I don't think is worth fighting when you use it the way you did (and I see merit to the fuzzy buzzword idea that encourages people to be more mindful of their impacts).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

Spooky23 14y ago

Nobody is killing themselves because you're being subsidized by the American taxpayer to grow lots of corn. Monsanto is a nasty corporation, but their nastiness is fueled by government policy that allows them to leverage patents and practices to make a commodity product like corn as profitable to them as pharmaceuticals are to Genentech or AstraZenica. It's great for you now, and results in cheap food prices for the consumer. But there are dangerous long-term social (ie. lots of obese people fattened up by artificially cheap and ubiquitous corn-derived sugar), biological and economic consequences

johnchristopher 14y ago
Parent is sweden if I remember correctly. Farm subsiding is a thorny issue in UE and there seems to be some debate in sweden about it http://www.thelocal.se/7443/20070529/ http://www.thelocal.se/7443/20070529/
randomdata 14y ago
The $6 quoted is the current market price (give or take a few cents) for old crop corn, sans subsidies. That is historically high, by a large margin. I think most would consider that to be quite the opposite of cheap. I will add that as a seventh generation farmer in Canada, where we have no real subsidies, we still grow just as much corn. It is a core part of our crop rotation, and even when it is a money loser, we still pretty much have to grow it at some point – you can get away with not growing it for a rotation or two, but it will catch up with you eventually. I assume the same is true for Americans in the corn belt. How much of a factor do the subsidies really play in those decisions, or is it just a part of their normal crop rotation (with the added benefit of not having the big losses we often have to deal with here)?
crikli 14y ago
We don't accept subsidies and would absolutely love to see them go away completely. They're doing nothing but sustaining inefficient farming practices and keeping afloat farmers that are quite simply bad at what they do. I don't want to get too off into the HCFC rabbit trail, but I have yet to see any research that indicates anything other than correlative evidence between the ingestion of C6H1206 derived from corn. If you have access to research that proves causality I'd love to see it.

Tichy 14y ago

Read "Collapse" by Jared Diamond - 100 years is not really proven sustainability yet...

jlgreco 14y ago

Why do everyone keep on insisting that people who hate Monsanto must have watched some movie? Monsanto has bugged the hell out of me for years and I've never even heard of that movie.

goostavos 14y ago
Well, the movie was fairly popular, and did raise a lot of awareness for people not directly involved in the farming or GM production dialogues. That, or because it's easier to dismiss someone's argument by discrediting their words.
crikli 14y ago
Food Inc is what really whipped up the anti-Monsanto rhetoric; it's uncommon for me to interact with someone about agriculture and food without the film coming up.
creamyhorror 14y ago
Yeah, I was reading articles on Monsanto's practices with GM crops in the '90s and I don't think Food Inc. was out then. I wonder if the debate over patentability of genes has been reinvigorated by the debate over the patentability of software methods. There's also an interesting parallel in the BitTorrent/media company conflict and the seed cleaner/Monsanto one. Certainly we hear more about software patents than bio ones, but maybe we just need to find and read BioHacker News...

astrodust 14y ago

A hundred years is a sliver of time compared to how long agriculture has been going on. People live a hundred years and nobody would argue they're "sustainable" in any sense. You might be doing it right. You might be making a total mess of things but it'll take another fifty years before it collapses. Only time will tell. How dependent are you on fossil fuels? How well would you fare as a farmer if you had no access to chemical fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, or any sort of gasoline powered equipment? How much would corn cost if the completely insane policy of diverting large amounts of it to ethanol production? The people that are killing themselves are largely in India where there is an entirely different market.

randomdata 14y ago
How much would corn cost if the completely insane policy of diverting large amounts of it to ethanol production? It may be insane from a purely scientific point of view, but that doesn't tell the whole story. If you recall from around the 2006 timeframe, before the energy policy changes, we were swimming in corn. It was coming out of ears, sitting in massive stock piles doing nothing, and more was coming in each day. Even if you say ethanol is ultimately energy neutral/negative, it was still energy ripe for the taking. Now the problem, even if you take away the subsidies, is that corn is still an important crop in a grain farmer's rotation. Looking back on the 2006 timeframe again, you might remember the farmers here in Canada losing their shirts over their corn production (we don't have the subsidies). But they still grew it, because there was no reasonable alternative. Not even leaving the fields fallow was an option, as the banks wouldn't hear of it (a loss on corn is smaller than the loss on no crop at all). I've heard some suggest that farmers grow other crops instead of corn, which sounds good in theory, but those other crops require additional multi-million, even multi-billion, dollar outlay of new equipment and infrastructure to get started. Farmers are already operating on thin enough margins that it is financially impossible. It is cheaper to just take a loss on corn for the year. It is just not clear to me what the alternative is, especially to maintain sustainable food production of other crops. It is far more complex than just the science of ethanol.
- astrodust 14y ago

mcantelon 14y ago

>nobody is killing themselves Nobody in the US you mean. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Farmer_suicides http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Farmer_suicides Creating a monopoly on something naturally abundant (seed) is a part of Monsanto's long-term vision and a seed monopoly will make them a powerful political force in the world. The power to manage regional population by controlling seed supply has great military value.

JamisonM 14y ago

Others have taken issue with a 100 year sample size for a definition of "sustainability in practice" but I would not. My family bought its first Diesel tractor quite a bit less than 100 years ago, diskers to seed in the 1950's (I think), 4WD articulating tractors to pull them in the 1970's, and air drills in the 1990's. Started using nitrogen fertilizer instead of manure in the late 1960's. We started using herbicides in the 1970's, insecticides in the 1990's (though never much of them) and fungicides in the 1990's. GMO crops in the 1990's as well. I think we started growing Canola in the late eighties or early 90's and only started growing Soybeans in the last few years. I am wondering which of the farm practices engaged in right now, in 2012, in any way resemble the "sustaining" of a practice from 100 years ago?