The night of the Academy Awards, we watched for a minute before getting bored and going to bed. If we’d known that the graceful and gentlemanly Joaquin Phoenix (my pick, by the way … just sayin’) was going to talk on behalf of confined animals when he picked up his Oscar, we would have stayed up.
But, then, maybe not. It’s almost ho hum to hear anti-CAFO words from Hollywood where everyone, it seems, has gone vegan or vegetarian. It’s a giant step that they want to understand the food system, even though we wonder how farmers will regenerate the barren land without grazing animals and all the good necessaries they drop while they graze.
I bet there’s some lab working on it right now … a vegan input that has not only the nitrogen, carbon and other measurable elements, but also the microorganisms that land needs. And I imagine it’s made from … you guessed it … soybeans and corn. And there are a dozen university soil scientists lining for the big bucks to test it. Just like they lined up for the big bucks to test industry’s Roundup-Ready soybeans, corn, cotton and veggies. And, then, when Roundup stopped working, lined up for the big bucks to test dicamba-ready crops.
Who are the real guinea pigs? Consumers, of course.
It takes the nation’s left and right coasts a long time to get the message, being so far from the flyover zone, but eventually someone like Mr. Phoenix figures it out.
I hope the influencers are paying attention to the Bader Peach Farm case against Bayer (which is now the owner of Monsanto). That case, just ruled upon, came down on the correct side of consumers and voters, when it awarded $265 million to the owners of a 900-acre peach farm near Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The Baders’ neighbors had planted patented soybeans that are resistant to dicamba, a deadly weed poison. Clouds of the poison drifted to the peach trees, not resistant, and killed them.
The award gave Baders the $15 million they will have to spend in re-planting and waiting for trees to deliver a new peach crop. And there was an extra $250 million in punitive damages against Monsanto, the industrial inventors/promoters of the dicamba scheme.
For a while, Bayer/Monsanto (now re-branded as BASF) tried to argue that the Baders, who also farm thousands of acres of row crops, made more money the years their peaches were dying than they’d made before. Irrelevent, said the jury. The Baders got lucky in the row-crop game for a year, but no fair penalizing someone who’s trying to diversify, feed their local stores and build sustainable food systems for the future.
BASF lawyers tried to blame the weather, which got hot and breezy and blew drifting clouds of dicamba from the nearby soybean fields where it was supposed to kill weeds. That didn’t work. Then they tried to blame the farmers who applied the dicamba. That anti-farmer strategy didn’t work either. It blew back on the lawyers just like the drift.
The dicamba promotion here in farmland in 2019 was that if your neighbor was going to plant dicamba-ready beans and spray them, your crops should be poison-proof also. So, you’d better plant the same patented thing. Clever, right? Farmers heard it from one expert after another … the same experts who said to plant Roundup-Ready in the first place.
Farmers have for years trusted these new, industry-promoted schemes, which are tested in the university labs by grad students (our kids) under the same professors that taught when the farmers were in school. Did your professor lie? Or was s/he misled by the industry that paid for the university laboratory?
The anti-climate and anti-farmer arguments failing, BASF lawyers blamed a fungus, which came on the trees as they were dying. Fungus is an end result when trees die — an effect of the dying, not a cause. The jury saw through those arguments and blamed the right culprit — the inventors of the scheme. In their statement, the Jury said that BASF was in a “conspiracy to create an ecological disaster to increase profits.” That is true. Everything those guys do is to increase profits! It’s a conspiracy, all right. One against consumers and the earth.
The jury system is a beautiful invention: It allows for people imagining the same sorrows they’ve heard about in the courtroom. BASF attorneys have already said they’ll appeal.
But here are a couple of things: The Midwest’s state ag departments have been crushed with complaints against these dicamba sprayers. Seventeen states are overwhelmed with more than 1,400 official accusations regarding 2.5 million acres. And, there are more than 18,400 lawsuits with claims that Monsanto’s Roundup has caused cancer users. Three cases that have gone to trial have been decided in favor of the consumers.
It’s welcome news that folks on the coasts are trying to figure out what’s in the food on their grocers’ shelves. The support’s been a long time coming, and welcome now it’s here.
Margot Ford McMillen farms near Fulton, Mo., and co-hosts “Farm and Fiddle” on sustainable ag issues on KOPN 89.5 FM in Columbia, Mo. She also is a co-founder of CAFOZone.com, a website for people who are affected by concentrated animal feeding operations. Her latest book is “The Golden Lane: How Missouri Women Gained the Vote and Changed History.” Email: margotmcmillen@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2020
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