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What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

by RafaelaYFPY Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

Bill Nye, the bow-tied erstwhile kids’ TV host, onetime dancer with the stars, and tireless champion of evolution and climate science, was never a virulent or wild-eyed critic of genetically modified crops. Back in 2005, he did a pretty nuanced episode of his TV show on it, the takeaway of which was hardly fire-breathing denunciation: “Let’s farm responsibly, let’s require labels on our foods, and let’s carefully test these foods case by case.”

In his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, published just last November, Nye reiterated these points. His concern about GMOs centered mainly on unintended consequences of growing them over large expanses—he cited the example of crops engineered to resist herbicides, which have been linked pretty decisively to the decline of monarch butterflies, which rely on abundant milkweeds, which in turn have been largely wiped out in the Midwest by GMO-enabled herbicide use. Nye praised certain GMOs, such as corn engineered to repel certain insects, but concluded that “if you’re asking me, we should stop introducing genes from one species into another,” because “we just can’t know what will happen to other species in that modified species’ ecosystem.”

Now, Nye’s doubts have evidently fallen away like milkweeds under a fine mist of herbicide. In a February interview filmed backstage on Bill Maher’s HBO show (starting about 3:40 in the below video), Nye volunteered that he was working on a revision of the GMO section of Undeniable. He gave no details, just that he “went to Monsanto and I spent a lot of time with the scientists there.” As a result, he added with a grin, “I have revised my outlook, and am very excited about telling the world. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world!”

Monsanto’s longtime chief technology officer, Robb Fraley, responded to the interview with an approving tweet featuring a photo of Nye at company HQ:

It will be interesting to hear what wonders within Monsanto’s R&D labs turned Nye from a nuanced GMO skeptic to a proud champion.

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What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

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How Monsanto’s Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

by CandaceAnthon Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ask an agribusiness exec about sustainable agriculture, and you’ll likely get an earful about something called “precision agriculture.” What is it? According to Yara, the fertilizer giant, it’s technology that “enables farmers to add the specific nutrients needed for their crop, in exactly the right amount, at the right time.”

That is to say, instead of using intuition and experience to decide how much fertilizer or pesticides to apply, farmers rely on sensors, satellite data, and the Internet of Things to make such choices. In addition to selling farmers agrichemicals, Yara also sells a “knowledge platform, supported by tools for precision farming,” including “an online service providing advice on the physical mixing characteristics of Yara’s foliar products with agrochemicals.”

Yara isn’t the only industry titan to move into the information-peddling business. Genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto envisions itself transforming into an information-technology company within a decade, as a company honcho recently told my colleague Tim McDonnell. A year ago, Monsanto dropped nearly $1 billion on Climate Corp., which “turns a wide range of information into valuable insights and recommendations for farmers,” as Monsanto put it at the time.

But will Big Ag’s turn to Big Data deliver on the environmental promises made in the press releases and executive interviews? McDonnell lays out the environmental case succinctly:

The payoff for growers can be huge: Monsanto estimates that farmers typically make 40 key choices in the course of a growing season—what seed to plant, when to plant it, and so on. For each decision, there’s an opportunity to save money on “inputs”: water, fuel, seeds, custom chemical treatments, etc. Those savings can come with a parallel environmental benefit (less pollution from fertilizer and insecticides).

These are real gains. No one who has seen fertilizer-fed algae blooms in Lake Erie—or had their municipal tap water declared toxic because of them—can deny that the Midwest’s massive corn farms need to use fertilizer more efficiently. Des Moines, Iowa, surrounded by millions of acres of intensively fertilized farmland, routinely has to spend taxpayer cash to filter its municipal drinking water of nitrates from farm runoff. Nitrates are linked with cancer and “blue-baby syndrome,” which can suffocate infants.

But as Quentin Hardy suggested in a recent New York Times piece, Big Data on the farm can also steamroll an extremely effective conservation practice: crop diversification, which can slash the need for fertilizer and herbicide, as a landmark 2012 Iowa State University study showed. Big Data, Hardy argued, gives farms incentive to both get bigger and plant fewer varieties of crops.

His argument is twofold. First, the precision ag tools being peddled by the agribusiness giants are quite pricey:

Equipment makers like John Deere and AGCO, for example, have covered their planters, tractors and harvesters with sensors, computers and communications equipment. A combine equipped to harvest a few crops cost perhaps $65,000 in 2000; now it goes for as much as $500,000 because of the added information technology.

When a farmer invests that much in a technology, there’s an “incentive to grow single crops to maximize the effectiveness of technology by growing them at the largest possible scale,” Hardy writes. “Farmers with diverse crops and livestock would need many different systems,” and that would require yet more investment in information technology.

Hardy finds evidence that the shift to information technology is already accelerating a decades-long trend of ever-larger Midwestern farms focusing more and more on churning out just two crops: corn and soy. “It’s not that smaller farms are less productive, but the big ones can afford these technology investments,” a US Department of Agriculture economist tells him.

One farmer Hardy talked to owns a family farm in Iowa that grew from 700 acres in the 1970s to 20,000 acres today. “We’ve got sensors on the combine, GPS data from satellites, cellular modems on self-driving tractors, apps for irrigation on iPhones,” the farmer tells Hardy.

The recent plunge in corn and soy prices might only exacerbate the trend. All that gear and information allows the farm to operate at a high level of efficiency and at a vast scale, making it more likely to eke out a profit than smaller operations in a time of lowball crop prices. As a result, over the next few years of expected low crop prices, the farmer with 20,000 acres in Iowa expects his farm to expand at the expense of “farmers who don’t embrace technology,” he tells Hardy.

But economies of scale and efficiency don’t automatically translate to less use of toxic chemicals and pollution. Big Data may help monocrop farmers use less fertilizer and pesticides per acre harvested than they had been before, but if they drive out more diversified and less chemical-intensive operations, the result might not be as clear-cut as the agribusiness companies suggest.

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How Monsanto’s Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

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Will This New GMO Potato Take Off? McDonald’s Has Spoken

by ZacTzbnwtiujmn Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Would you be excited to pluck a bag of precut, gleaming-white potato slices from supermarket produce bin—fresh not frozen, and ready to throw in the pan or the FryDaddy?

Your answer may decide the fate of the “Innate” potato, which has been genetically engineered to resist browning and to contain less of the amino acid that turns into acrylamide—a probably human carcinogen—when potatoes are fried at high temperatures. Developed by the agribusiness giant J.R. Simplot, a major player in the $3.7 billion American potato market, the product won approval last week from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The reason you can currently only buy frozen precut potatoes is that they turn brown quickly. The Innate solves this, uh, problem.

To understand why the success of the new potato will hinge on your desire for convenience, a little background is in order: Simplot is one of the three massive companies (alongside ConAgra and McCain Foods) that buy potatoes from farmers, process them into French fries—as well as tater tots, spiral fries, and wedges—freeze them, and distribute them to companies ranging from fast-food giants to supermarket chains.

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Will This New GMO Potato Take Off? McDonald’s Has Spoken

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EPA: Those Bee-Killing Pesticides? They’re Actually Pretty Useless

by LawannaGvr Posted on October 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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So, there’s this widely used class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, marketed by chemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, that have emerged as a prime suspect in honeybee collapse, and may also be harming birds and water-borne critters. But at least they provide benefits to farmers, right?

Well, not soybean farmers, according to a blunt economic assessment released Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency (PDF). Conclusion: “There are no clear or consistent economic benefits of neonicotinoid seed treatments in soybeans.”

Wait, what?

The report goes on: “This analysis provides evidence that US soybean growers derive limited to no benefit from neonicotinoid seed treatments in most instances.”

Hmmm. But at least they’re better for farmers than no pesticide at all?

Nope: “Published data indicate that most usage of neonicotinoid seed treatments does not protect soybean yield any better than doing no pest control.”

Ouch.

The EPA notes that in recent years, US farmers have been planting on average 76 million acres of soybeans each season. Of those acres, an average 31 percent are planted in seeds treated with neonics—that is, farmers buy treated seeds, which suffuse the soybean plants with the chemical as they grow. So that’s about 24 million acres of neonic-treated seeds—an area equal in size to the state of Indiana. Why would farmers pay up for a seed treatment that doesn’t do them any good, yet may be doing considerable harm to pollinators and birds? The EPA report has insights: “data from researchers and extension experts … indicate that some growers currently have some difficulty obtaining untreated seed.” The report points to one small poll that found 45 percent of respondents reported finding non-treated seeds “difficult to obtain” or “not available.”

Another reason may be marketing. Syngenta, for example, promotes its “CruiserMaxx” seed treatment for soybeans, which combines a neonic insecticide with two different fungicides. The pitch: “Promotes better emergence, faster speed to canopy, improved vigor and higher yield potential.
Protects against damaging chewing and sucking insect pests. … Increases yield even under low insect pressure.”

Only one US crop is planted more abundantly than soybeans: corn, which typically covers around 90 million acres. According to Purdue entomologist Christian Krupke, “virtually all” of it is from neonic-treated seeds. That’s a land mass just 10 percent smaller than California. You have to wonder what bang those farmers are getting for their buck. I have a query into the EPA to see whether it has plans to conduct a similar assessment for corn. Meanwhile, this March 2014 Center for Food Safety research report, which was reviewed by Krupke and Jonathan Lundgren, a research entomologist at the US Department of Agriculture, found that the bee-killing pesticides offer at best limited benefits to corn farmers, too.

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EPA: Those Bee-Killing Pesticides? They’re Actually Pretty Useless

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Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Hormel, Bacon, and Amputated Limbs

by MadelinRuz Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Much of the outrage generated by the meat industry involves the rough treatment of animals. But as Ted Genoways shows in his searing new book The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food—which grew out of his long-form 2011 Mother Jones piece “The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret”—the people employed in its factory-scale slaughterhouses have it pretty rough, too. The book hinges on a rare neurological disorder that, in the mid-2000s, began to affect workers in a Spam factory in Austin, Minnesota—particularly ones who worked in the vicinity of the “brain machine,” which, as Genoways writes, used compressed air to blast slaughtered pigs’ brains “into a pink slurry.” As Genoways memorably puts it: “A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket.” I recently caught up with him to talk about the world of our dark, Satanic meat mills, and the bright spots he sees after immersing himself in it.

Mother Jones: When did you first get interested in the meat industry?

Ted Genoways: I’m a fourth generation Nebraskan, and my grandfather, my dad’s dad, during the Depression, worked in the packinghouses in Omaha around the union stockyards there. One Sunday, when they were visiting relatives just outside of Omaha, my grandfather decided to take my dad in to see the packing houses, and into the hog-kill room, when he was probably about 10 years old. And my dad said that he was just sort of overwhelmed by the noise and the screeching of the hogs and the terror. My first book was a book of poems, Bullroarer: A Sequence, that had one section that dealt with some of that.

MJ: How did you go from poetry to investigating this disturbing brain disorder among meat-packing workers?

TG: Around 2000, I had a job working as a book editor at the Minnesota Historical Society Press, and the first book that I worked on there was a book called Packinghouse Daughter, by Cheri Register, about the packinghouse strike in Albert Lea, Minnesota, in 1959. Her father was one of the meatpacking workers there. I also read Peter Rachleff’s book about the Hormel strike in the ’80s in Austin, Minnesota, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland.

So it caught my eye in 2007 when there were some AP stories, and eventually the New York Times did a story, about the outbreak of this neurological disorder among the packing house workers at Quality Pork Processors in Austin. The fact that the people affected were almost entirely Hispanic intrigued me.

I started by wanting to tell the story of this medical mystery, but what quickly evolved was a picture of the hiring practices at QPP and how that tied back to the history of the strikes—there was just this whole universe that was contained in that story.

MJ: Rural Minnesota is a pretty white place. What did the strikes have to do with transforming the plant’s workforce from majority white to majority Hispanic?

TG: In 1986 the strike ends, and in ’87, they Hormel management announce that half the plant is a new company, called Quality Pork Producers, and the hundreds of people who worked there would be offered their jobs back, but no longer under the union contract.

And without union protection, the native work force began to drift away. In no time, you’ve got a nearly all-Hispanic workforce that’s made up hugely of undocumented workers. What surprises me is how quickly the communities turned their anger toward the new arrivals, and not the company itself.

TP: You report that since the launch of QPP, there’s been an emphasis on speeding up the kill line. And that ends up being the probable trigger for the neurological disease you dug into.

TG: Right, the line speed becomes the issue that the Mayo Clinic doctors see as the key factor in explaining what was happening—exposure to hogs’ aerosolized brain tissue increases as the volume of hogs processed goes up—a messy job got messier. And at the height of the 2007 recession, the demand for Spam was so high that they were offering overtime hours, so the hours of the exposure increased.

But beyond this neurological disorder that’s tied to the line speed, there’s all the repetitive stress injuries, there’s obviously the kind of traumatic injuries that occur from cuts and amputations on the line—all of those increase when line speed increases. I talked to a number of people who said, when amputations occurred among the workers, and you’ve got somebody who’s had a finger chopped off or has had a deep cut on their arm so that they’re bleeding all over their station, there’s somebody there to just pause that station and clean it while the rest of the line continues to move. Workers told me that at peak times, they’re not allowed bathroom breaks, or even ordinary breaks to sharpen knives or to wash their hands. And the more I got to looking at it, I started to see how line speed affects all phases of production.

MJ: Talk about some of those effects.

Ted Genoways Photo: Mary Ann Andrei

TG: First, you need more hogs coming in the door. And what that means right away is more CAFOs concentrated animal feeding operations, or factory-scale livestock farms. Ideally for the packers, it means more involvement in the CAFOs, how they’re run, what their production schedules are, what the animals are fed in order to produce an animal that has the lean-to-fat ratio that matches your needs for various products.

The other thing is if you’re going to increase speed but not increase the workforce, it means more mechanization, which is very often kind of experimental. And sometimes where things break down is in the quality of the meat or just how well it’s cut. Sometimes what breaks down is how sanitary it is, or how safe the workers are.

For the machine to work right, and especially for it to work right at high speed, every cut going into it has to be the same size. And as mind-boggling as it is, it’s cheaper for the company on that kind of scale to control the size of the hog than to change the size of the cut inside the plant.

And of course this is where you get all of the breeding programs, the antibiotics and growth enhancers that they’re fed so that every hog is on the exact same program and is coming to be the same size.

MJ: You dig deeply into the the special US Department of Agriculture program—known as HIMP, in the department’s evocative acronym—that allowed Hormel to run its line much faster than the industry standard.

TG: The argument that was made in the early ’90s, when this was first pushed, was that the old inspection model was outmoded. They said what we need instead is a modern system that will focus on microbiological testing. And that sounds like common sense. The problem is that the way that they wanted to implement this was to reduce the number of inspectors. That reduced number of inspectors then would be responsible for double-checking the inspection that would be carried out by the companies themselves.

And the companies argued that what this would allow them to do would be to run the line faster—they said, we’ll put out more product which will bring the price down for consumers, and we’ll have a safer product coming out as well. And it’ll reduce government costs. So it sounds like the perfect thing all around. The problem they had is what it essentially did was put the companies in charge of their own inspection.

MJ: As I know from covering it myself, and know even better after reading your book, the meat industry is a relentlessly bleak topic. From your reporting, did you find any hope for positive change?

TG: The meat industry operates under the assumption that what people care about in food is low cost. And what foodie movements have done, as they move toward the mainstream, is demonstrate that people will pay a little bit more for food that they feel is safe—the animal has been well-treated, the workers have been well-treated.

The other thing we’re seeing is that Americans’ meat consumption has leveled off and even started to drop a little bit in recent years. People have said, “I’ll take a smaller portion if it’s higher quality, and I’ll pay a little bit more for it but I’ll worry a little less about what’s in it.” And if enough people will do that, the industry will respond.

My other concern is that as the American consumer becomes more aware and enlightened about all this, the meat industry is also doing its best to move into all parts of the global market. And there’s still lots of parts of the world where just having food is something that is a major issue—so you’re back to the lowest-possible-cost idea.

MJ: That makes me think of the fact that our biggest pork producer of all, Smithfield, recently got bought by a Chinese company—so even though we’re eating less factory-farmed meat here, production could actually increase, driven by demand in China.

TG: Yes. But still, here in the US, very few people were thinking about the meat industry ten years ago. You talk to people about it now, and everybody is aware of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser and the whole wave of people who have come behind who are informing the public about all of this, and I think people are making different choices, now that they have that information.

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Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Hormel, Bacon, and Amputated Limbs

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Butterball Goes ‘Humane’ for Thanksgiving. Really?

by DomenicWolinski Posted on September 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s becoming a Thanksgiving tradition as hoary as NFL football or the bloviations of your drunken uncle: days before the national feast, an animal-welfare group releases an undercover video documenting vile conditions within industrial-scale turkey facilities (see 2013, 2012, 2008).

This year, the largest turkey producer of all, Butterball—which churns out a billion pounds of turkey meat annually, a fifth of US production—has made a bold move to get ahead of these appetite-snuffing PR debacles. By fall 2014, presumably in time for Thanksgiving, all of its products will bear the American Humane Certified label, the company announced Tuesday.

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Butterball Goes ‘Humane’ for Thanksgiving. Really?

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Tom’s Kitchen: ¡Ceviche!

by ArleenWLBE Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m reading Paul Greenberg’s superb new book American Catch. In it, Greenberg teases out Americans’ weird relationship to the sea. “We are a nation of coasts,” he writes, in which “nearly half of the population chooses to live less than ten miles from the sea.” Yet on average, we eat just 15 pounds of fish and shellfish annually per capita, vs. 100 pounds of red meat. Don’t even get me started about how growing loads of Midwestern corn, mainly for livestock feed, takes out huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico, the mainland US’s greatest fishery. Of the fish we do eat, a startling 91 percent is imported—much of it farmed under dodgy conditions and barely inspected by food safety authorities. Meanwhile, we export nearly a third of our own abundant wild catch.

Contemplating these contradictions made me want to eat some damned fish. So I went to Austin’s stellar old-school fish monger Quality Seafood to see what I could get from the seascape nearest me, the Gulf of Mexico. The display included a gorgeous stack of black drum filets, a firm white fish subtly streaked with red—and rated a “good alternative” by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, which scrutinizes fisheries based on their sustainability. Contemplating the brutal heat outside and my stash of produce at home—tomatoes, a red onion, serrano chiles, limes, etc—inspiration hit me: ceviche, that sublime, no-cook Mexican answer to sushi. Well, it’s not exactly like sushi—the acid in the lime juice breaks down the fish, effectively cooking it. Which beats the hell out of firing up the oven on a hot day.

So I snatched a filet of black drum and got busy with the cutting board. Here’s what I did. This dish brings together a lot of sharp, bright flavors in a lovely way.

Simple Ceviche
1 pound filet of a firm white fish—preferably from a nearby source—cut into ½ inch chunks
1 red onion, cut into ½ inch chucks
Sea salt and black pepper
4 limes, juiced; and at least one extra, in case
1 ripe tomato, cut into ½ inch chucks<
1 clove of garlic, smashed, peeled, and minced into a fine paste
1 hot chile pepper, such as serrano or jalapeño, minced fine<
A little extra-virgin olive oil
1 avocado, cut into ½ inch chucks
1 small head of cilantro, chopped

Put the fish, the onions, and a good dash of salt and pepper in a bowl. Add the lime juice and toss. There should be enough juice to fully submerge the fish. If not, juice another lime and add it to the bowl. Let the fish/onion/lime juice combo sit in the fridge, covered, for an hour or so (here’s an excellent Serious Eats guide to how long to let ceviche marinade based on your taste).

To finish, add the tomato, the garlic, the chile, a lashing of olive oil, and the avocado and cilantro (if someone in your crew hates cilantro, parsley and even mint work great). Toss, taste for salt, and serve with chips.

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Tom’s Kitchen: ¡Ceviche!

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The Toxic Algae Are Not Done With Toledo. Not By a Long Stretch.

by AnthonyArevalo Posted on August 6, 2014

Mother Jones

Last weekend, Toledo’s 400,000 residents were sent scrambling for bottled water because the stuff from the tap had gone toxic—so toxic that city officials warned people against bathing their children or washing their dishes in it. The likely cause: a toxic blue-green algae bloom floated over the city’s municipal water intake in Lake Erie. On Monday morning, the city called off the don’t-drink-the-water warning, claiming that levels of the contaminant in the water had fallen back to safe levels. Is their nightmare over?

I put the question to Jeffrey Reutter, director of the Stone Laboratory at Ohio State University and a researcher who monitors Lake Erie’s annual algae blooms. He said he could “almost guarantee” that the conditions that caused the crisis, i.e., a toxic bloom floating over the intake, would recur this summer. But it’s “pretty unlikely” that toxins will make it into the city’s drinking water. That’s because after the weekend’s fiasco, a whole crew of public agencies, from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to the US Environmental Protection Agency to the city of Toledo, have been scrambling to implement new procedures to keep the toxins out. “I think they have a pretty good plan in place,” he said. But “you can’t guarantee there won’t be a recurrence because you can’t predict “how bad the concentration of the toxins going into the plant from the lake is going to be.”

Reutter added that he “anticipated” that the new system for protecting Toledo’s would be more expensive than the current one. Back in January, the local paper The Blade reported that Toledo “has spent $3 million a year battling algae toxins in recent years, and spent $4 million in 2013.”

And those hard realities highlight a hard fact about our way of farming: It manages to displace the costs of dealing with its messes onto people who don’t directly benefit from it. The ties between Big Ag and Toledo’s rough weekend are easy to tease out. “The Maumee River drains more than four million acres of agricultural land and dumps it into Lake Erie at the Port of Toledo,” The Wall Street Journal reports. More than 80 percent of the Maumeee River watershed is devoted to agriculture, mainly the corn-soy duopoly that carpets the Midwest. Fertilizer and manure runoff from the region’s farms feed blue-green algae blooms in the southwest corner of Lake Erie, from which Toledo draws its water.

And those blooms don’t just tie up oxygen in water and push out aquatic life, creating dead zones. They also often contain the compound that triggered the water scare: microcystin, a toxin that can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, severe headaches, fever, and even liver damage. Apparently, a particularly noxious chunk of algae floated over Toledo’s water intake equipment, causing the microcystin spike.

Back in early July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Michigan delivered their forecast for this year’s bloom on the western part of Erie: It would likely be much smaller than it was in 2011, when a record 40,000 metric tons of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) accumulated, but likely much higher than the past decade’s average of 14,000 metric tons—the researchers forecast a 2014 bloom weighing in at 22,000 metric tons. The blooms don’t peak until September, which is why Reutter is convinced that the condition that created last weekend’s troubles will likely re-emerge.

Here’s a chart from the report:

Chart: NOAA and University of Michigan researchers

The bottom half of that chart tracks the flow of phosphorus, the component of fertilizer and manure that triggers freshwater algae blooms, into Lake Erie. Of course, farm runoff isn’t the only way phosphorus makes its way into the lake. Municipal sewage and industrial waste play a role, too. But reforms imposed by the Clean Water Act in 1972 minimized those sources, pulling Lake Erie from the brink of death.

The below chart, taken from a 2013 Ohio Lake Erie Phosphorus Task Force report, shows the sources of Lake Erie phosphorus over the past several decades. Under pressure from the Clean Water Act, pollution from “point” sources like wastewater treatment plants and factories have been severely curtailed. But the CWA doesn’t regulate “non-point” sources, mainly agriculture. “Harmful algal blooms were common in western Lake Erie between the 1960s and 1980s,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration notes. “After a lapse of nearly 20 years, blooms have been steadily increasing over the past decade.”

Chart: Ohio Lake Erie Phosphorus Task Force

Climate change plays a role, too—both because longer, warmer summers give algae more time to build up, and because warmer mean temperatures are also likely driving a steep increase of heavy rains in the Upper Midwest, which force more phosphorus off farm fields and into waterways. Changes in the way farmers apply fertilizers are also apparently making phosphorus more mobile as this 2012 article by Jessica Marshal for the Food and Environment Reporting Network shows.

Of course, western Ohio isn’t the only Corn Belt region encountering toxic algae. “A reported chemical spill on the Des Moines River above Saylorville Lake Wednesday turned out to be a blue-green algae bloom,” the Iowa Department of Natural Resources reported in late July. More recently, the Army Corps of Engineers issued an advisory against swimming in two beaches of Lake Red Rock, Iowa’s largest lake, “in response to the presence of a significant blue-green algae bloom which has the potential to impact the health of humans and their pets.”

The web site Toxic Algae News tracks blooms nationwide. Here’s its latest map. Red pins in a state mean harmful algal blooms recur annually in “many” lakes; orange pins mean they recur in one or two lakes.

And phosphorus isn’t the only fertilizer component that feeds algae blooms. Nitrogen does to saltwater what phosphorus does to freshwater—and every year, the Mississippi River carries titanic amounts of nitrogen into the Gulf of Mexico, more than half of which comes from corn and soy farms. These flows feed a vast algae bloom that creates an aquatic dead zone that can reach the size of New Jersey—blotting out a wild, abundant source of high-quality seafood, in order to grow crops that mainly go to feed livestock, cars, industrial cooking fats, and sweeteners. This year’s dead zone clocks in at 5,008 square miles—”area roughly the size of Connecticut and is three times larger than the 2015 goal established by a task force specifically created to address the problem,” the Mississippi River Collaborative announced Monday.

Such sacrifices are what economists call “externalities”—the costs of doing business that don’t show up on the bottom lines of farmers, or the companies that buy their goods for animal feed and ethanol, or the firms that sell them the seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers that facilitate mass monocropped plantings.

Residents of places like Toledo are left holding the bag. Many people there are questioning the safety of their water supply and turning to pricey bottled water instead, USA Today reports. And now, the city’s taxpayers (or some public entity) will likely be paying more than ever to keep algae toxins out of the tap water.

Originally posted here – 

The Toxic Algae Are Not Done With Toledo. Not By a Long Stretch.

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40 Million People Depend on the Colorado River. Now It’s Drying Up.

by EttaHussain Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Science papers don’t generate much in the way of headlines, so you’ll be forgiven if you haven’t heard of one called “Groundwater Depletion During Drought Threatens Future Water Security of the Colorado River Basin,” recently published by University of California, Irvine, and NASA researchers.

But the “water security of the Colorado River basin” is an important concept, if you are one of the 40 million people who rely on the Colorado River for drinking water, a group that includes residents of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and San Diego. Or if you enjoy eating vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, and spinach over winter. Through the many diversions, dams, canals, and reservoirs the river feeds as it snakes its way from the Rockies toward Mexico, the Colorado also provides the irrigation that makes the desert bloom in California’s Imperial Valley and Arizona’s Yuma County—source of more than two-thirds of US winter vegetable production.

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40 Million People Depend on the Colorado River. Now It’s Drying Up.

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Boy, Hipsters Sure Are Defensive About Their Almond Milk

by CharlenLowman Posted on July 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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When I penned my little opus about almond milk last week, I really didn’t intend to insult anyone’s intelligence, provocative headline aside. What I really wanted to do was encourage people to think about what they’re buying when they buy this hot-selling product. My editors chose the title and I went along, because they know more than me about what makes people click. And people clicked! I’m pretty sure that “Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters” is my most-read piece ever at Mother Jones.

It takes a gallon of water to grow a single almond. How does an almond’s water footprint stack up to other foods’?

Reactions mostly hovered in a range between mild annoyance and blind rage. One guy dropped by the Facebook page of the farm I helped found, Maverick Farms, to inform me that he planned to keep drinking almond milk—and spilling it, even. To drive his point home, he even looked up the farm’s phone number and repeated his pledge on the answering machine. Thanks for the update!

The oddest response came from Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, who took the opportunity to school me in the art of the “food troll”:

This fool is talking about how almond milk is not as good as just eating almonds. False comparison. I eat tons of almonds. Love em. And I drink almond milk too. Love it. I can have both. You love regular almonds so much? Do you eat more almonds than me? Not a chance. I eat more almonds than you. And still drink almond milk. Case closed on that particular argument I guess.

Still not convinced? Nolan adds the coup de grace: “If I puked up almond milk it probably wouldn’t even taste that bad relative to other kinds of puke.”

Right. Meanwhile, several people thundered that since I dare question the value of almond milk, I must be a tool for Big Dairy. “Were you paid off by the Dairy Farmers of America to write that piece?” one wag wondered on Twitter, adding, helpfully ” PS I’m no hipster and I love my Almond Milk!”

Actually, my piece did not purport to judge almond milk against the standards of dairy milk and find it wanting. “I get why people are switching away from dairy milk, I wrote, since “industrial-scale dairy production is a pretty nasty business.” I did cop to drinking a bit of kefir, a fermented milk product. But my intention wasn’t to promote Big Dairy, but just to point out that almond milk is nutritionally pretty vapid compared to other products. An eight-ounce serving of Helios brand organic kefir contains 16 grams of protein, vs. 1 gram per serving in most almond milk brands. That’s a remarkable difference. But of course, people consume things for all sorts of good reasons, not just protein content.

Now, I didn’t get into much of an ecological analysis in my piece, but there is an interesting one to make here. Back in May, my colleagues Julia Lurie and Alex Park looked at the literature and found that it takes 23 gallons of water to produce a glass of almond milk and 35 gallons to produce a serving of yogurt. Let’s assume that it takes a similar amount of water to make Helios kefir, which is essentially fermented skim milk. On the surface, the almond milk looks a lot easier on the water supply. But if you look at it on a protein basis, almond milk looks like a disaster: it takes 23 gallons of water to produce a gram of almond milk protein—and less than two gallons to produce a gram of kefir protein.

Even though kefir costs more than $4 per quart vs. about $2 for almond milk, it starts to look like quite a bargain on a protein basis.

Almond milk’s dilute nature lies at the heart of the critique made by Slate’s Maria Dolan, the most thoughtful one I’ve seen of the piece. My basic complaint against almond milk is that it’s a watered-down product: you take something that’s quite nutrient-dense and deluge it with water, essentially selling people a few almonds and a lot of water.

I’m thinking about it in the wrong way, counters Dolan. “Is drowning them in water to create almond milk really a bad thing from an environmental perspective?” she asks. “Just as making meat a garnish, not the centerpiece of your meal, thins the environmental impact of eating beef, so consuming almonds sparingly—by diluting them into milk, for instance—reduces their ecological impact.”

But I’m not sure that almond milk works to moderate people’s almond consumption. California’s rapid, and ecologically troubling, expansion of almond production is largely driven by booming exports, mainly to Asia. But US consumption is booming too. According to the Almond Board of California, the US market consumed 394 million pounds of almonds from the 2007-’08 harvest and 605 million pounds in 2012-’13. That’s a 50 percent jump in five years. And as I noted in my post, almond milk sales are surging at an even faster clip. It seems to me that the almond milk craze, whatever else it is, reflects a clever food industry strategy to sell yet more almonds, not a way for consumers to reduce their environmental impact.

The Almond Board also reports that California now provides 84 percent of the globe’s almonds. Given the state’s severe water constraints, and that current levels of production already require 60 percent of managed US honeybees for pollination, often to disastrous effect, we may all have to ease up—not just on the almond milk, but also on almonds themselves. Hell, even ignorant hipsters like me love almonds.

Excerpt from – 

Boy, Hipsters Sure Are Defensive About Their Almond Milk

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