This is great harvest of ideas re. GMOs and just plain eating naturally. Thanks for the compilation and the good writing. Yes, I eat organic and grow organic, too, in the back yard.

Courtney Cowgill let GMOs off easy. Here's what the GMOs already on the market are scientifically KNOWN to cause: malnutrition, low sperm count, in utero fetal death, aborted fetuses, birth defects, infertility in following generations, obesity, diabetes, pancreatitis, lupus, cancer, brain damage, nerve diseases, resistance to antiobiotics, stroke, gastrointestinal toxin production, dysfunction of liver, kidneys, lungs, heart, brain, pancreas, & gut, permanent genetic damage, & death. The execs & BODs of Monsanto, Syngenta, et al. (plus FDA & USDA officials who approve GMOs) should be prosecuted for murder.

Also, the propaganda about GMOs is a lie. In fact, GMO so-called crops have low yield, absorb Roundup poisons & pass them on to the consumers, require increasing amounts of Roundup (causing superweeds, superbugs, & toxic runoff), require irrigation, & cause allergies & respiratory disease in some people who harvest the plants. Moreover, Monsanto makes farmers sign contracts to buy only Monsanto terminator seed (i.e., buy it each year) & Roundup. The price of seed & Roundup then increases drastically due to Monsanto's "company store." Tens of thousands of farmers in India have committed bankruptcy-related suicide due to Monsanto's lies about its Bt cotton, & their livestock have sickened & died from grazing on the Bt cotton plants after harvest (they never did that with natural cotton).

Farmers are ever looking for what to grow. Needing to profit does that to you. There is nothing about deciding to grow any one crop that does not come without trepidation and fear of failure. And heaven knows there a myriad ways to fail in growing a crop.

The failure can be brought about by insects and other pests, and that gives rise to pesticide use, which has increased the world food supply ten fold or more. Competing growth is controlled to some extent by herbicides, of which Roundup is but one of thousands. Lack of water at appropriate times is mitigated by irrigation whenever possible, much of it in the West and subsidized by the Federal Bureau of Reclamation. In my farm management, I use all the tools I have at my disposal. And I am not intellectually willing, to some extent, to use them willy nilly. Farm chemicals cost a lot of money, and you use as few as possible.

Last year I went through a painful process of how to deal with the newly introduced Spotted wing drosophila fruit fly from Japan and northern Asia. That fly lays its eggs, one or two at a time, in ripening soft fruits. The resulting maggot puts out a couple of snorkles for gas exchange, and begins to consume the fruit from the inside out. The very piercing of the fruit skin by the serrated ovipositor introduces bacteria inside the fruit. They lay about 300 eggs a life time, which can be as long as 280 days. I caught some in traps in February, after a night in the teens followed by a cold sunny day. It takes from 6 to 13 days from egg to maggot to pupae and emerging fly. We can have as many as a dozen generations a season from one fly. There are zero known predators for the fly in any life stage. There is no sex attractant that we can use to attract flies to a trap in droves. There is no known directed predator from Asia to release here to kill them, like a specific wasp or some such similar critter. The result: I lost years of Integrated Pest Management insect populations because the particular insecticides registered to my crop are less than 5 that will allow you to spray and pick in the same year. And none of them are specific to the flies. They are broad spectrum insecticides. They kill any insects. I hated using them. And still do. "Nuking" insects is just not in my makeup, personally. But I have to wear the hat of a person paid to save the crop.

I was and am, personally, not in favor of using insecticides. IPM works for insects with a predator. My most damaging were caterpillars from moths, for which I used Bt sprays , which are bacteria that interrupt digestion in caterpillars or "worms." Then there were aphids, which suck the life out of plants. I was in constant conflict with crop advisors about spraying aphids, which are know virus vectors. I would tell them it took a lot of aphids to attract their predators, and they will come. And they always did, and we went from infestation to having trouble finding one in a week's time. Billions of aphids died each year in one week. Were consumed. Now I kill them and any other insects, with sprays I need to be afraid of personally, all to control the SWD fruit fly and have a blueberry crop to sell.

So my dilemma was that I was not of the mind to spray for SWD. Just went against my grain. But I nor anyone else, had an answer to SWD which were by now firmly entrenched. I was just an employee whose mission was to keep my bosses financially stable. I had to do whatever it took to ensure a crop of maggot free berries suitable for the fresh market. It would be unethical of me NOT to spray. And I still don't like to, or want to, but have to. In no way do we break any laws or regulations. We use only EPA and FDA approved chemistries. By the label. No more or no less. I can still hate that I do it. But I still have to do it.

However, if there is anyone out there who would pay my boss about a million bucks a year to not spray, he would consider it. Nobody is going to hold their breath.

If you want relatively cheap, abundant, good quality foods, with shelf appeal and shelf life, chemicals will be a part of that supply. At this point in time. organic does not pay enough more to make up for loss of shelf life, berry size, crop size and expense to even have a crop. If it did, we would be working on having an organic label. IN the meantime, we try to be as sustainable as we might be. But not spraying for SWD cannot sustain the farm and the investment in costs and forgone years of production of anything on that land while we grew plants to a size where a crop could be taken off, and then another ten years to bush maturity, which we have reached on half our acres.

Ever in crisis, we are all hand picked, and we do wonder if we have enough pickers left out there in the welfare state. Border crossing arrests are way down due to the recession and no migrant labor moving around for fear of deportation. Our farm is 60 miles from a major metro area, and the only non Hispanic pickers we ever see are a small group of SE Asians. Never an African American. Never a Native American. Never an Anglo American. The SE Asians are making money to send a kid to university, and the Hispanics are following a cultural working ethic of agricultural labor. The rest are above doing piece work with a minimum wage guarantee. We have one Hispanic family (middle aged mom and dad, a grandmother, and two kids in their early twenties) who routinely make, as a family, more than $400 a day. The owner pays their gas to get here. The family will make around $25,000 in two months of picking at our farm and one other. All of it on payroll checks with all the deductions. And then they go north to pick apples and pears in Washington. That is a work ethic and a family supporting themselves by picking crops. I am sure they get in 26 weeks of work, and are able to draw unemployment when work is not available. Of course they are the exception. This is the USA, where the two new guys on my kid's logging crew came from hundreds of miles away, having been out of work for months or a year or more. They are green, but passed the piss tests, and are able bodied and eager. That alone is not the norm today. My son is driving the crew bus because he is the only one who has a driver license and can be insured. He'd rather sleep in a seat while someone else drove. Much of America's youth is unemployable because of drug testing, felony records, and slothful lifestyles (seemingly can't get up and to work in the morning), and no high school diploma or satisfactory military record. The majority of ag jobs have no such screening or requirements. But we compete with welfare and selling drugs. And not well.