Re-occupy your body or accept the 3 reasons to die for

Veggies on Wheels is the newsletter that comes with Pfenning's organic box and this time it reports on Pfenning's participation at the Guelph Organic Conference (which I did not go to because it's in Guelp and I don't have a car to get there). One of the biggest issues were GMO, courtesy of Monsanto. Apparently the majority of Canadians still don't know anything about GMO (which box do they live in?). The reader is then referred to the article Re-occupy your body and a pamphlet has been enclosed from Cban.ca (Canadian Biotechnology Action Network) with info on GMO but I talk about that in another post.   


I have not read the whole article yet because it's long but I'm sure it's good. The three reasons that are most threatening to our health, and according to the newsletter make up the primary causes of disease and death nowadays, are: 
- bad food 
- most prescription drugs
- a poisoned environment

Which one disturbs you most and which one can you influence the best? Go figure. 
I am not concerned with the second point (yet) as I don't take any drugs. The first one is half-concerning to me. I know we still do not eat completely organic.  I am not feeling great about our daughter drinking non-organic milk but she drinks lots and the non-organic costs enough. Also, I am sure we'd eat a bit more meat if the organic stuff did not cost a fortune. But it's not actually that difficult to eat healthy and decent food. You do the shopping, you decide what's in your cart, it's in your hands. And by the way, buying non-organic produce and peeling it in the hope to get rid of the bad stuff does not seem the best idea. You are still supporting the farmers who contaminate our environment and the bad stuff will go through the skin of some fruits and vegetables. 

The poisoned environment is a huge concern, especially with this government that's big on setting up environmental disasters. You can't really "un-poison" the environment and get rid of all the harm that has been done but we can slow down the add-on of chemicals and toxic substances to our air, water and soil. Looking around me it still doesn't happen enough. For example, when I cycle or walk I probably breathe in more greenhouse gases than the car drivers. That's nuts! I'm the victim of other people's polluting habits. I noticed that most people are happy to give me a ride (if I ask) but carpooling is still not very common. That's nuts too! Driving is just one issue, but you scan make up the list yourself of activities that harm our environment. And then start ticking off the bad habits you give up. This should become a mandatory, annual exercise for everyone. I wonder how slowly or quickly things would change and how big the procrastination rate is.  

Alternative Agriculture

is the title of an episode of The Nature or Things that I watched on DVD from the library. I don't know how old it is and again it was not all new to me but it was very very wonderful to see green, trees, fields, and animals roaming freely in the foothills of the Rockies. Yes, I am feeling very deprived of nature at the moment, especially hearing about daffodils and cherry blossom from Europe. I am currently pressuring my husband into moving somewhere greener where we are not buried under snow and ice for six months and then wade through deep puddles for another month, before finally by mid- or end of May the first bits of green spring up. Sorry, I can't handle this! 

Back to the film. First of all, all the good examples of agriculture came from Alberta. There was the farmer with rare breed cattle & pigs, the farmer with organic pigs & chickens, and the farmer way in the Southwest of AB who raises organic cattle in the foothills. He belongs to a Co-op of 5 or 6 farmers that all got certified organic. It's better for the land, the livestock, the people, not only the farmer but also the consumer. This last farmer made the statement that some people make donations to organisations whose goal is to conserve and protect nature but when they go shopping they roll their eyes at the high organic meat prices and buy the cheap (bad) stuff instead. I agree. I do it although not often because we eat meat only once per week. At this point I should buy organic because it's not going to ruin us financially. Leaves me with the problem to get to where the organic meat is ... If you eat lots of meat though I guess buying it organic will leave way bigger holes in your pocket than the occasional donation. At least we don't donate money on a weekly basis, more like every couple of months. But his point is right: With what we buy we make a big statement about what we want and what we will not accept and supply follows demand, right?!


Second, the bad example came again from the US, North Carolina to be exact. Apparently it's THE pig country of the USA and of course the pigs are raised in crowded, feed lot conditions. The sewage generated by the pigs sits in ponds, smelling horrendeously, until it gets sprayed onto fields. The fields receive way more sewage though than they can cope with and the sewage seeps right down into the ground water and waterways. Consequently fishes die and the waterways sooner or later collapse. What's being done about it? Not much because the hog industry denies all accusations and surely being such a big industry they will have politicians "under control". Here's a great article from back in the 1990s: Watch out for killer algae: years of dumping hog wastes into North Carolina rivers has created a monster


Also in the US, around 90% of all antibiotics are fed preventatively to healthy livestock, and more than 3/4 of the grains grown in the US is fed to livestock as well.



Last but not least, I don't like the title of the documentary. Organic farming, or farming in a way where the livestock is respected and kept humanely and eats grass instead of grain and antibiotics should be the only way of farming. Isn't it terrible that our agriculture has gone so far that the natural approach to farming as it had been done for a long time before the industrial revolution is now the "alternative"!? 


 

The run off we cause ... - part 2

This is still referring to the things I learned from the documentary Crapshoot: 

 

We are looking now at sludge. Sludge is the solid waste after water is removed; it’s also called bio-solids even though that’s not quite right if you remember the list of substances going into sewage. As mentioned before, sewers were never meant to be clean and chemical-free. The use of sewers was not meant to result in safe and beneficial products that could be reintegrated into the nutrients cycle. In Canada half the sludge is still spread on farmland. Sludge is often free of charge to the farmer and even labelled as soil enhancer!

Example: In rural Ontario, where food is grown and cattle grazes, sludge is taken onto fields without notifying residents. The sludge gets dumped 1 to 5 times per day.  Afterwards plastics and waste products can be found on the fields. A resident started asking questions and got no proper answers from government authorities or the treatment plant. Instead she was threatened that she would have to shut up about the issue in order to not cause worries amongst other residents. Water tests come back with E-Coli contamination. Looking forward to your farm fresh produce now?

In Sweden and other European countries (Belgium, Netherlands) sludge spreading on farm land has been banned, not by government but by agricultural entities. One reason was that flame retardants in sewage were spread on fields and later found in food and breast milk – the concentration of flame retardants had doubled every 6 years in Sweden. These flame retardants are linked to causing cancers. In Sweden sludge has since been used as a land filling material in motorways and non-critical places.

The state-of-the-art waste management facility in Edmonton includes a huge composting hall. The resulting compost was initially sold as Nutri-Plus but not everything that goes into the composting hall is just organic waste. In the meantime it’s sold as compost enhanced top soil to residents and agriculture.