organophosphate
Trump’s sellout of American heritage.
It’s easy to forget that the president is doing real damage to things that all of us share.
Opinion | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER
Trump’s Sellout of American Heritage
Timothy Egan
Timothy Egan OCT. 13, 2017
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An aerial view of a landscape in the Bristol Bay watershed. Credit Paul Colangelo
The last runs of heavenly wild salmon are trickling in this month, the buttery coho with flesh the color of fall foliage. After that, we’ll have to settle for mostly farmed and frozen fish until next spring — no substitute for the real deal.
We can count on this seasonal miracle, healthy fish returning to their birthplaces and then on to the dinner table, so long as the fragile balance of nature remains intact. But with a president who is going after clean air, clean water and the world’s most valuable wild salmon fishery, the fate of creation and all the myriad wonders within it is at stake.
I use “creation” as an appeal to creationists to look at what your president is doing to Eden, or what’s left of it. I also want to appeal to economic nationalists. For the U.S.A. has the greatest home for sockeye salmon on the planet in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. The Trump administration is putting it at risk in order to aid a foreign mining conglomerate.
This American carnage is led by a man whose job is to protect the natural world within our borders, the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt. As you may have heard, he has sealed himself off from the public with a $25,000 phone security system and an 18-member security detail. It took a court order to pry loose some of the details of his meetings. No surprise, he holds daily lap-dog sessions with the companies he is supposed to regulate.
Pruitt is the swamp, the only wetland the Trump administration wants to protect. He serves the oil, chemical and mining interests that propped him up when he was attorney general of Oklahoma. He now runs the oil, chemical and mining protection agency out of Washington, with our money. You would never guess that this toady in a suit works for us.
Continue reading the main story
Timothy Egan
The environment, the American West and politics.
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SEP 29
In Rome, a Visit With the Anti-Trump
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The Week the Earth Stood Still
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Biologist in a warming land 4 minutes ago
I am a scientist. Words like “diabolical,” “maniacal,” “loathsome,” are foreign to my vocabulary. Yet, the actions of the repugnant man in...
Newt Baker 4 minutes ago
"I use “creation” as an appeal to creationists to look at what your president is doing to Eden, or what’s left of it."There is no point in...
james jordan 20 minutes ago
Tim,You write the truth. The Trump administration keeps bragging about all of the good they have done in 9 months. Their idea of making the...
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Look around. The catastrophic wildfires that are sweeping through iconic landscapes in Northern California and carpet-bombing entire neighborhoods are a glimpse into an early future in the West. Hurricanes, rolling in one after the other, are swamping cities. Every month brings a new high temperature record.
Until this year, the American response was in tune with the rest of the world — to try to do something to fix this overheated globe of ours.
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In announcing this week that President Trump intends to spite all the other nations and gut President Barack Obama’s signature effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions, Pruitt framed the move as the end of the “war on coal.” Now comes the war on the planet and public health.
Amid the hourly calamities of a White House that is forced to treat its chief occupant like a toddler, it’s easy to forget that Trump is doing real damage to things that all of us share.
So, that’s politics, right? To the victor go the spoils. He’s simply rolling back onerous regulations, as promised, and sticking it to the global elites on climate change. Well, no.
Your party affiliation will not protect you from the chemicals sprayed on strawberries — shown to cause brain damage to children — which Trump will allow to remain in the food chain. Living in a red state will not keep warming oceans from rising ever higher when the latest 500-year storm hits your region. Being a Trump supporter does not protect your favorite stream from the toxic discharge of a power plant into a public waterway.
All of the above are potential consequences of more than 50 environmental rules that Trump has tried to kill since he took office.
National monuments — not the Confederate kind that Trump wants to preserve, but special places protected in somewhat the same way as national parks — are also in his sights. These are unique landscapes set aside for their cultural, historical or scenic splendor. Trump could shrink 10 of them — another sellout of American heritage.
In Alaska, he is going against the will of the people to target Bristol Bay. Half the world’s wild sockeye come from this magical place, a bounty that supports 14,000 jobs. Alaskans are a cantankerous bunch who can’t agree on much of anything. Yet they voted by an overwhelming margin in 2014 to protect Bristol Bay from a gold and copper mine that could generate 10 billion tons of toxic waste.
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And unlike big food producers in the heartland, the Bristol Bay salmon industry is not propped up by subsidies, chemicals or compromised politicians. The fish need only clean water and healthy oceans. That’s why the E.P.A. had earlier concluded that the proposed Pebble mine could have a “catastrophic” impact on the bay.
Trump’s men are rolling over for the gold mine. Just hours after Pruitt met with the mine’s corporate leadership, Trump reversed E.P.A. protection, as CNN reported this week. If you’re surprised that wild salmon would be sacrificed for precious metal, remember that one of Trump’s few passions is for gold-plated bathroom fixtures.
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BASF to harvest seeds, herbicide businesses from Bayer for $7 billion.
BASF has agreed to buy seed and herbicide businesses from Bayer for 5.9 billion euros in cash, as Bayer tries to convince competition authorities to approve its planned acquisition of Monsanto.
businesses from Bayer for $7 billion
Maria Sheahan
4 MIN READ
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - BASF has agreed to buy seed and herbicide businesses from Bayer for 5.9 billion euros ($7 billion) in cash, as Bayer tries to convince competition authorities to approve its planned acquisition of Monsanto.
The logo of Germany's largest drugmaker Bayer is pictured in Leverkusen April 26, 2014. REUTERS/Ina Fassbender/Files
BASF, the world’s third-largest maker of crop chemicals, has so far avoided seed assets and instead pursued research into plant characteristics such as drought tolerance, which it sells or licenses out to seed developers.
SPONSORED
But Bayer’s $66 billion deal to buy U.S. seeds group Monsanto, announced in September 2016, has created opportunities for rivals to snatch up assets that need to be sold to satisfy competition authorities.
Bayer had offered to sell assets worth around $2.5 billion. The European Commission said in August that the divestments offered by Bayer so far did not go far enough and started an in-depth investigation of the deal.
Bayer has to sell the LibertyLink-branded seeds and Liberty herbicide businesses because they compete with Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer and Roundup Ready seeds.
LibertyLink seeds, used by soy, cotton and canola growers, are one alternative to Roundup Ready seeds for farmers suffering from weeds that have developed resistance to the Roundup herbicide, also known as glyphosate.
The spread of Roundup-resistant weeds in North America has been a major driver behind Liberty sales.
“BASF’s decision to acquire seeds assets represents something of a change to its prior view on its needs to respond to recent industry consolidation in agriculture,” Morgan Stanley analysts said.
“Nonetheless, the proposed assets for acquisition are high margin and high growth and represent a sensible bolt-on addition,” they added.
The sale to BASF values the assets at around 15 times 2016 operating profit (EBITDA) of 385 million euros, which Bankhaus Lampe analyst Volker Braun said was “reasonable” considering the assets had to be sold anyway.
BASF will finance the acquisition through a combination of cash on hand, commercial paper and bonds. It expects the acquisition to add to its earnings by 2020.
A cyclist rides his bike past the entrance of the BASF plant in Schweizerhalle, Switzerland, July 7, 2009. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann/Files
Shares in Bayer rose 1.3 percent to the top of Germany’s blue-chip DAX index by 0845 GMT, while BASF fell 0.7 percent.
REGULATORY SCRUTINY
The businesses Bayer is selling to BASF generated 2016 sales of 1.3 billion euros.
While the Commission could block the deal, it has approved others, such as Dow’s tie-up with DuPont and ChemChina’s takeover of Syngenta - although only after securing big concessions.
Bayer said it continued to work with the authorities to close the Monsanto deal by early 2018.
As part of the asset sale to BASF, which is conditional upon the Monsanto acquisition going through, more than 1,800 staff, primarily in the United States, Germany, Brazil, Canada and Belgium, will transfer to BASF.
BASF has committed to maintaining all permanent positions, under similar conditions, for at least three years after the deal closes, Bayer said.
As part of the deal, BASF will acquire Bayer’s manufacturing sites for glufosinate-ammonium production and formulation in Germany, the United States, and Canada, seed breeding facilities in the Americas and Europe as well as trait research facilities in the United States and Europe.
Bayer said it would use the proceeds of the sale to partially refinance the planned acquisition of Monsanto. It would provide an update on expected synergies from the acquisition by the time the deal closes.
BofA Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse acted as financial advisors to Bayer. Its legal advisors are Sullivan & Cromwell, Dentons, Cohen & Grigsby and Redeker, Sellner & Dahs.
($1 = 0.8442 euros)
Reporting by Maria Sheahan; Editing by Tom Pfeiffer and Keith Weir
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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UK College of Agriculture/flickr
Drowning in grain: How Big Ag sowed seeds of a profit-slashing glut.
Abundant supplies have helped lower food prices across the world, but the benefit to consumers and impoverished nations is muted by several factors.
SPECIAL REPORT-Drowning in grain: How Big Ag sowed seeds of a profit-slashing glut
by Reuters
Wednesday, 27 September 2017 11:00 GMT
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Abundant supplies have helped lower food prices across the world, but the benefit to consumers and impoverished nations is muted by several factors
By Rod Nickel
CARMAN, Manitoba, Sept 27 (Reuters) - On Canada's fertile Prairies, dominated by the yellows and golds of canola and wheat, summers are too short to grow corn on a major scale.
But Monsanto Co is working to develop what it hopes will be North America's fastest-maturing corn, allowing farmers to grow more in Western Canada and other inhospitable climates, such as Ukraine.
The seed and chemical giant projects that western Canadian corn plantings could multiply 20 times to 10 million acres by 2025 - adding some 1.1 billion bushels, or nearly 3 percent to current global production.
The question, amid historically high supplies and low grain prices, is whether the world really needs more corn.
A global grains glut is now in its fourth year, with supplies bloated by favorable weather, increasingly high-tech farm practices and tougher plant breeds.
The bin-busting harvests of cheap corn, wheat and soybeans are undermining the business models of the world's largest agriculture firms and the farmers who use their products and services. Some analysts say the firms have effectively innovated their way into a stubbornly oversupplied market.
Never has the world produced so much more food than can be consumed in one season. World ending stocks of total grains - the leftover supplies before a new harvest - have climbed for four straight years and are poised to reach a record 638 million tonnes in 2016/17, according to USDA data.
Farmers and agriculture firms could once count on periodic bouts of crop-destroying weather to tame gluts and drive up prices. But genetically modified crops that repel plant-chewing insects, withstand lethal chemicals and mature faster have made the trend toward oversupply more resistant to traditional boom-and-bust agrarian cycles, experts say.
Another key factor: China - the world's second-biggest corn grower - adopted stockpiling policies a decade ago when crop supplies ran thin, resulting in greater production than the world needs.
"I think the norm is where we are now," said Bryan Agbabian, director of agriculture equities at Allianz Global Investors.
Allianz investors seem to agree: The value of two agriculture equity funds that Agbabian manages fell to $300 million this year from $800 million in 2011 as crop prices slid, he said.
Abundant supplies have helped lower food prices across the world, but the benefit to consumers and impoverished nations is muted by several factors, including problems with corruption and distribution of food in developing regions, said Sylvain Charlebois, professor of food distribution and policy at Canada's Dalhousie University.
The bumper harvests may actually harm poor communities more than they benefit their residents in food savings because lower prices depress farm incomes in the same areas, said John Baffes, a senior economist at the World Bank.
Even as farmers reap bountiful harvests, U.S. net farm incomes this year will total $63.4 billion - about half of their earnings in 2013, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture forecast.
Lower incomes mean farmers cannot spend as much on seed, fertilizer and machinery, extending their pain to firms across the agriculture sector.
Potash Corp of Saskatchewan, the world's biggest fertilizer company by capacity, closed its newest potash mine last year, eliminating more than 400 jobs, and has seen its U.S.-listed shares fall by nearly half since the beginning of 2015. The drop erased $14 billion in value, and left Potash seeking to merge with rival Agrium Inc.
With profits under pressure, seed and chemical companies are scrambling to consolidate.
Monsanto's annual profit in 2016 was its smallest in six years. It agreed last year to combine with Bayer AG, which would create the world's largest integrated pesticide and seed company if the deal closes next year.
Grain handler Bunge Ltd said this summer it would cut costs, and left the door open to selling itself after posting a 34 percent drop in quarterly earnings.
Bunge CEO Soren Schroder sought to reassure investors in May by saying all that was needed to trim supplies was one bad stretch of weather in the U.S. Midwest.
But the glut pervades many major farming regions, making it unlikely that drought or floods in one region could wipe out the mounting global surplus. Even with dry conditions in North America, Europe and Australia, the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts that this year will bring the second-biggest global corn, wheat and soybean harvests ever.
Bunge's Schroder made his comment about bad weather less than three weeks before confirming an informal merger approach from commodities giant Glencore Plc.
"When prices tanked, farmers were no longer willing to pay more" for seed and chemicals, said Jonas Oxgaard, analyst at investment management firm Bernstein. "The mergers are absolutely driven by oversupply because their growth is gone."
Monsanto spokeswoman Trish Jordan said the company believes demand growth still justifies corn expansion, and she disputed the notion that crop science advances are backfiring on agricultural technology firms.
Monsanto rival DowDuPont Inc is making the same bet and currently sells the shortest-season field corn in North America, maturing in 70 days, spokesman Ali Aziz said.
Success in the lab and the field, however, has contributed to oversupply and may continue to sustain it, said Oxgaard, the Bernstein analyst.
"It's somewhat the seed companies' fault - they keep breeding better and better seeds every year," he said.
DARWIN, SEX AND CORN
Charles Darwin helped plant the seeds of the grain glut. The biologist and evolution theorist showed in the late 1800s that cross-fertilization of plants - in which sex cells are fused between crop varieties of the same species - creates a more vigorous breed than those that are self-fertilized.
His work and others' influenced successive generations of crop scientists and led to the development of hybrid corn, said Stephen Moose, a professor specializing in crop genetics at University of Illinois.
U.S. farmers started planting the first significant acres of hybrid corn in the 1930s, and by 1950 it made up nearly all the corn seeded in the United States.
Yields exploded. Farmers who reaped 20.5 bushels of corn per acre in 1930 harvested an average of 38.2 bushels in 1950, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Further hybrid breeding breakthroughs generated corn with leaves that grow more erect, allowing farmers to sow it more densely without starving plants of sunlight. Yields first topped 100 bushels per acre in 1978.
After conventional breeding breakthroughs became harder to find, corn gained new vigor through the 1990s with genetic modification.
In 1996, U.S. regulators approved corn that was genetically engineered to produce bug-killing proteins, accomplished by inserting a bacterium hostile to the corn borer insect into the plant genome.
Before the end of the 1990s, corn able to resist weed-killing chemical glufosinate or Monsanto's glyphosate hit the market.
Those modified varieties and others that followed proved pivotal in generating the abundant corn crops that have since become commonplace, Moose said.
"In the seed industry, it stimulated a whole other round of investment," Moose said.
In the 20 years since GMO corn reached U.S. farms, yields jumped another 37 percent to a record 174.6 bushels per acre last year.
Some experts believe the expansion of corn yields may soon hit a ceiling. The crop may be nearing the natural limit of its production potential, and crop yields will likely plateau in the next decade, based on how plants convert light to food and their ability to recover from heat, said Ken Cassman, agronomy professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Technology has also provided better defences against pests.
Syngenta AG's Viptera and Duracade traits, used to control worms and beetles, launched in 2010 and 2013. SmartStax corn seed, introduced by Monsanto and Dow in 2009, brought twin benefits of insect protection and herbicide tolerance, said Paul Bertels, vice-president of production and sustainability at U.S.-based National Corn Growers Association.
The breakthroughs in seed and pesticide technologies have not come without problems. Monsanto is now embroiled in a controversy over dicamba, a big-selling chemical designed to kill weeds that harm Monsanto's genetically modified crops.
Many U.S. farmers say dicamba has drifted from its intended fields, damaging plants that are not resistant to the chemical. Monsanto believes the main causes of drifting are errors by farmers and applicators in deploying the herbicide, company spokeswoman Charla Lord said.
GROWING CORN IN ALASKA
As it grew stronger, corn grew faster. Corn that required 120 days to mature in the U.S. Corn Belt during the 1960s now needs only 105 to 115 days.
Farmers in northern North Dakota plant and harvest corn in 80 days, and have doubled the state's production in five years.
Fast corn is now stirring even the imaginations of researchers in the far north.
University of Alaska Fairbanks horticulture professor Meriam Karlsson grew hundreds of corn plants in the Arctic state in 2015.
The plants, germinated in a greenhouse before they were transplanted outside, grew from a short-season garden corn variety that matured in less than 60 days. Corn rose only four to five feet, allowing plants to spend maximum energy on growing ears, rather than leaves and stalks.
Karlsson had expected few corn plants to survive in Fairbanks - less than 120 miles (190 kilometers) from the Arctic Circle.
"It's much more adaptable than I expected," she said. "Amazing what breeding can do. It was kind of exciting that you could do it."
The lure of technology comes down to money for farmers.
Even with Chicago corn futures down more than 50 percent from their 2012 record high, the high-yielding crop offers one of the strongest returns to Canadian farmers, generating profits per acre four times that of canola, based on average prices and costs, said National Bank analyst Greg Colman.
As corn spreads across the Canadian Prairies, those robust yields are winning farmers over, said Dan Wright, Monsanto Canada's lead for corn and soybeans.
"Once you harvest corn at 140 or 180 bushels, it's something you want to do again," he said.
While corn compares nicely to some crops, it offers U.S. farmers marginal returns at current prices, Bernstein's Oxgaard said. Switching to other crops is not easy in areas like the U.S. Midwest, where farmers traditionally swing between corn and soybeans, and have invested in costly equipment to grow them.
GLUT TRACES ROOTS TO SHORTAGE
The problems of plenty were on nobody's mind less than a decade ago. In 2008, a dramatic food price run-up stirred riots from Haiti to Egypt.
Four years later, the U.S. Midwest, the engine of the global corn and soybean growing machine, suffered its worst drought in decades, opening gaping cracks in the soil and withering crops.
Chicago corn and soybean futures hit record highs as U.S. production fell to multi-year lows.
But high prices proved the cure for high prices.
Farmers in traditionally less productive corn-growing countries such as Russia, Argentina and Brazil expanded corn output to seize bigger profits.
U.S. farming quickly rebounded, reaping record corn harvests in three of the next four years.
New corn varieties have made global production more balanced than ever, with 12 countries producing at least 10 million tonnes of corn annually, up from 10 before the drought.
Even if U.S. or Brazilian corn crops suffered major weather damage, the world would still have the expanding Black Sea corn region to tap, not to mention China's enormous supplies, said Bertels, of the U.S. corn growers association.
China's stockpiling policies, enacted in 2007 when corn supplies were tight, also stimulated oversupply. Aiming for self-sufficiency in grains, Beijing bought virtually the entire domestic crop each year and paid farmers as much as 60 percent more than global prices.
The program stuffed Chinese warehouses with some 250 million tonnes of corn by the time Beijing scrapped it last year. China is now boosting incentives for farmers to switch to soybeans from corn.
"The world's corn is mainly in China," said Li Qiang, chief consultant at Shanghai JC Intelligence Co Ltd.
He said it will take three to four years for stocks to reach a "normal" level of around 40-50 million tonnes.
The Black Sea region, made up of Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, has become a disruptive force with rapidly expanding exports. Moscow aims to drive grain production to 150 million tonnes by 2030 from 117 million in 2016 after increasing storage and export capacity in ports in the last couple of years.
Glut conditions are expected to ease modestly this year, amid dry conditions in China and the United States, but supplies are still so large that prices remain weak.
OVERSUPPLY OF EVERYTHING
In northern North Dakota, an expanding frontier for corn and soybeans, Paul Thomas started dabbling in both crops about a decade ago on his farm near Minot, seeking higher returns than wheat.
Both are now among his biggest crops, including short-season Monsanto corn varieties that have only been available for a couple of years.
Profits may be tougher for Thomas to eke out this year due to dry weather and soft prices, but he shrugs off the struggle.
"We're very capable of producing a large amount of bushels given an economic incentive," he said. "If we end up over-producing, then we shift to one that's more in need. That's just the way agriculture works."
Thomas acknowledged, however, that the traditional dynamic may be changing in this current glut.
"I don't know any single crop that isn't in oversupply," he said.
Seeding equipment is becoming more precise, and increasingly cost-conscious farmers are applying fertilizer and chemicals more intelligently, said Al Mussell, head of research at Canadian think tank Agri-Food Economic Systems.
Monsanto projects that corn will become by the mid-2020s one of the biggest crops produced in Canada, which is an agriculture-exporting powerhouse in canola, wheat, oats and pork.
Soybeans are also spreading across Canada. Farmers seeded a record high 7.3 million acres in 2017, up 75 percent in five years.
On Monsanto's research farm in Carman, Manitoba, the next target is marketing a corn variety that matures in 70 days within the next two years. After that: an even quicker plant to snatch DowDuPont's claim to North America's fastest corn.
It is ambitious but realistic, said Kelly Boddy, manager of Monsanto's research farm.
"Wind the clock back a few years," he said, "and breeders wouldn't have thought it possible."
(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Additional reporting by Polina Devitt in Moscow; Michael Hirtzer in Chicago and Dominique Patton and Jo Mason in Beijing; Editing by Simon Webb and Brian Thevenot)
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Farmer wants a revolution: 'How is this not genocide?'
Health comes from the ground up, Charles Massy says – yet chemicals used in agriculture are ‘causing millions of deaths’. Susan Chenery meets the writer intent on changing everything about the way we grow, eat and think about food.
The kurrajong tree has scars in its wrinkled trunk, the healed wounds run long and vertical under its ancient bark. Standing in front of the homestead, it nestles in a dip on high tableland from which there is a clear view across miles and miles of rolling plains to the coastal range of south-east Australia.
Charles Massy grew up here, on the sweeping Monaro plateau that runs off the eastern flank of Mount Kosciuszko, an only child enveloped by the natural world, running barefoot, accompanied by dogs and orphaned lambs. Fifth generation, he has spent his adult life farming this tough, lean, tussock country; he is of this place and it of him. But when his friend and Aboriginal Ngarigo elder Rod Mason came to visit he discovered that a lifetime of intimately knowing the birds, trees and animals of this land wasn’t significant at all.
EU report on weedkiller safety copied text from Monsanto study
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The tree is probably a lot older than 400 years. Rod told him that when the old women walked their favourite songline tracks they carried seeds of their favourite food and resource plants, and sowed them at spirituality significant camping places. His front garden was one such ceremony place – there would have been a grove planted, and the women had stripped the bark from the tree to make bags and material. This old tree represented a connection to country “deeper than we can imagine, and linking us indivisibly with the natural world”, he writes in his book Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth.
Part lyrical nature writing, part storytelling, part solid scientific evidence, part scholarly research, part memoir, the book is an elegant manifesto, an urgent call to stop trashing the Earth and start healing it. More than that, it underlines a direct link between soil health and human health, and that the chemicals used in industrial agriculture are among the causes of modern illness.
It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial
“Most of our cereal crops, the soybeans, the corn, are all predicated now on the world’s most widely used chemical which is glyphosate [Roundup],” Massy says. “There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system. Its main effect is on the human gut and our entire immune system.
“When you look at the As – autism, ADHD, all the other auto-immune diseases – their take off is a 95% correlation to these chemicals being introduced. The evidence is that it affects the gut and the immune system, though it is not the sole factor, and it is a complex thing. But it is that gut that drives our whole immune system, it is our second brain.”
Roundup in a supermarket
‘There is mounting evidence that it is one of the most destructive chemicals ever to get into the system,’ Charles Massy says of Roundup. Photograph: Rene van den Berg/Alamy
He says that when you spray insects with insecticides you kill off the predators so you have got to have more powerful chemicals next time because the pests come back stronger. “Roundup is now on its sixth or seventh phase.”
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Massy is among scientists who believe we have entered a new geological epoch, the life-threatening Anthropocene, where human impact has permanently altered the Earth’s geology and sustaining systems, causing ecological destruction and extinction of species. “It is the greatest crisis the planet and humanity has ever faced,” he says, sitting at his kitchen table in country New South Wales. “It makes a world war look like a little storm in a teacup. And we are in denial.”
Tall, lean, fit, with white hair crowning a face that has spent a life outdoors, Massy looks more like the establishment grazier he is rather than a powerful advocate for revolutionising everything about the way we farm, eat and think about food. We are at a tipping point, he says, and if we it ignore we are “history”.
Massy spent eight years going to his office in an outbuilding behind the house in the early hours of morning to write before a day of working on the farm; the 569-page book is his life’s work; the big picture, the long view both historical and into the future that pulls together the latest international scientific research and thinking on climate change, regenerative farming, industrial agriculture and the corporations driving it.
He writes: “While consuming more resources than the Earth’s systems can replenish, we are hurtling towards multiple calamities. We are degrading the air we breathe, denaturing the food we eat and water we drink and lacing them with a witch’s brew of deadly poisons.”
We have lost touch with the land, we manipulate the Earth to our own ends, we dominate it and are ultimately destroying it. Aboriginal people, he says, saw it differently, as something to be nurtured and nourished, a living entity. He calls their custodianship “one of the greatest ever sustainable partnerships between humankind and the ecosystems they occupied”.
Farmer and author Charles Massy
The farmer, scientist and author at home on his property, Severn Park. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
Then white Australians brought what he calls the mechanical mind and the European mind. “It is a totally different continent to anywhere else in the world. It works totally differently to that young landscape of Europe with humidity and rich soils. Until we throw off the European mechanical mind we are going to continue to stuff the joint. It is not something inanimate that you can belt. It is almost like being with a lover, you have got to nurture it and care for it.”
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Now 65 and “a fossil” Massy is, by his own admission, a “biophilia”, filled with the wonder and delight of nature. “I believe one cannot gain true ecological literacy without a great empathy with, and understanding of, nature and how it functions. Thus one’s heart also needs to be involved.”
But his own journey and awakening was slow and stumbling. He was at university when, at the age of 22, his father had a heart attack and he came home to manage the merino and cattle property. Well-intentioned and diligent he read the books, he sought advice, he learned. “I thought I was running a pretty good show.” His wool was being bought for fabric by “the top guys in Italy. We were the first group to breed animal welfare-friendly sheep.” But he now realises he was “blind” and “oblivious”, he saw the landscape “as if through a glass darkly”.
He writes: “I completely overlooked the most important of all factors, the keystone of the whole operation: that our farm was a complex and dynamic series of ecological systems, and that our landscape actually functioned in specific but sensitive ways.” He made mistakes; he assiduously ploughed a paddock just before a huge storm came and washed the topsoil away, “I had cost the landscape perhaps a thousand years of topsoil.” Like many other regenerative farmers he reached the conclusion he had to make a big shift when something “cracked” his mind open.
If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away
For Massy it was the years of drought, 1979 to 1983, that plunged him into depression and major debt. He finally understood that he needed a completely different mindset and management approach if he was going to come to terms with the reality of drought. “The land, soils, micro-organisms and other creatures and vegetation are adapted to this,” he writes. And so he began his journey towards enlightenment. After 35 years he went back to university and completed a PhD in human ecology, consulting everyone from scientists to Aboriginal elders.
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We are driving in his ute across the plateau, cloud shadows dancing across the big-sky landscape, kangaroos and wallabies bouncing along, kelpies on the back to muster the healthy sheep. The paddocks are strewn with great monolithic rocks, 400m years old. There are birds and wildlife that have returned since he became a holistic farmer. Deep in the soil the bugs, microbes and fungi are sourcing nitrogen and nutrients. Change has to literally be grassroots, food health comes from the ground up, the health of people is entwined with the health of landscapes and soil. “The minute you fertilise and spray all that biology is gone. The vital thing about regenerative or organic farming is this healthy living dynamic soil. Landscapes with diverse arrays of plants are nutrition centres and pharmacies with vast arrays of primary and secondary compounds.”
As the dogs bound away to herd the sheep, he says, “One of the big ideas I discovered going back to uni was this concept which I came to, that our natural complex systems will self-organise themselves back to health. I think it is one of the biggest ideas. I think it is as big as evolution. It has only just emerged with physics and chemistry and computers and stuff. The Earth itself it is a self-organising regulating system.”
The human element is the problem, the learning how to live tuned to its rhythms, to get out of its way, to listen to the land. “I say confidently that not many farmers can read the landscape. For them to change they have got to admit they have been wrong for most of their lives. The thing that is challenging about it is that you have got to be totally flexible to adjustment and really get your mind into how nature works and be able to change tactics.”
He tells the story of the grasshoppers. Before he began holistic grazing the property was regularly hit by plagues of wingless grasshoppers. “They turned an OK season into instant drought. They thrive under degrading management, bare ground provides them with egg beds. But once we began our biodiverse plantings plus holistic grazing we have not had a grasshopper attack since.
The entrance to Charles Massy’s property
The entrance to Severn Park: ‘Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property,’ Massy says. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
“Ecological grazing yields total ground cover, higher cover, deeper roots, more moisture absorption plus more biologically alive soils; it means nematodes and other creatures eat the grasshopper eggs. You get excited when you see a new plant species suddenly emerge again. Now we have got 10 invaluable native grass species I never thought I would see on our property.”
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The winter nights are cold on the plateau and, with a glass of red wine and before an open fire, Massy is unrepentant about criticising the big-end-of-town companies that promote chemicals in industrial farming, and the governments that don’t act. In the book he says unhealthy food “is not just poisoning us but is also, confoundingly, making us obese as well”. Now he says “when you are eating that McDonald’s crap even though you are bloated your body is still hungry because your organs are not getting nutrients.
“If people ate truly nutrient-rich food out of healthy soil, you would slash the national health bill straight away. The big chemical companies and big food companies know exactly what they are doing. It is now causing millions of deaths – tell me why that is not genocide?”
But just as nature find its own solutions, culling, reorganising, so too is Massy offering answers, a “toolkit” of how to change.
“This combines the best of Old Organic – namely its respect, empathy and reverence for Mother Nature – with the best of modern, ecologically simpatico science and Earth-empathic thought.” The kind of people who make the change, he found, were those with strong belief in community and healthy food that does not come from contaminated soil.
Call of the Reed Warbler cover
What lies beneath “is a burgeoning mass of life and activity that is 10-fold that above the ground; fungi bacteria, and other organisms have begun to create and sustain an entirely different, living absorbent soil structure; the very heart and essence of healthy farming and landscape function. The secret is to simply restore healthy landscape function and allow nature to do the rest.”
Massy agrees that he is “not naive enough to think it would be a nice seamless shift. I think we are going to see some pretty frightening stuff.”
But for him, a defining moment came when, while sitting against an old snow gum, he heard the “beautiful, piercing song of a reed warbler” returning after a long absence from this area. It was, he says, a “metaphor for us humans to once more become the enablers, the nurturers, the lovers of Earth”.
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Dicamba drives Iowa farm chemical misuse complaints to record high.
Nationally, 2,242 farmers say dicamba has damaged an estimated 3.1 million acres, a University of Missouri report shows.
About three-fourths of Shane Susie's 80-acre soybean field was damaged after getting hit with dicamba that drifted over his crops from neighboring fields.
The herbicide also savaged his family's trees, flowers and vegetable patch.
"We're not eating anything out of it this year," said the 30-year-old who farms near Kingsley in northwest Iowa.
He estimates his soybean damage losses at $15,000. With drought worries and low corn and soybean prices, "it will be a tough year." he said. "It makes a challenging year more challenging."
Susie and other Midwest farmers have been drawn into a national debate swirling around whether new dicamba versions are safe for growers to use.
Nationally, 2,242 farmers say dicamba has damaged an estimated 3.1 million acres, a University of Missouri report shows.
Iowa ag leaders are investigating a record 258 crop damage reports from pesticide misuse this year. About 100 complaints on 150,000 acres are tied to dicamba.
Monsanto and other ag giants like DuPont and BASF have developed seeds that are genetically modified so they can be sprayed with dicamba, killing weeds but leaving the crop unharmed.
At issue is whether the new dicamba products stay where they're sprayed — or move to neighboring fields, where they can damage non-resistant crops, fruits and vegetables, trees and flowers.
Volatility vs. applicator error
Monsanto claims the problems primarily come from farm application errors.
"We did 1,200-some odd tests in connection with registration of our product with EPA," said Scott Partridge, Monsanto's vice president of global strategy. "They confirmed to us what the label says — if it's followed ... there will be no off-target movement of dicamba by wind or volatization."
Some university weed scientists disagree.
"The big debate is whether or not the stuff is volatilizing," or turning from liquid to vapor, enabling it to easily move, potentially over a few days, said Robert Hartzler, an Iowa State University weed scientist.
"New formulations were supposed to have taken care of the volatility problem," he said, "but all the research suggests that they've reduced the volatility, but not to a level that's safe" after plants have emerged from the ground.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is talking with academic researchers, state farm regulators, and Monsanto and other manufacturers to determine whether new restrictions should be placed on the chemical's use.
"The underlying causes of the various damage incidents are not yet clear, as ongoing investigations have yet to be concluded," the EPA told the Register.
Monsanto said it's cooperating with the EPA's review and expects a decision soon.
Last week, the company challenged an Arkansas task force recommendation to ban the use of dicamba-related products after April 15 next year.
In July, the state issued a four-month prohibition on dicamba use. Arkansas farmers have logged 963 dicamba-related complaints this year.
Hartzler said he and other weed scientists support EPA restrictions on dicamba product-use after plants have emerged from the ground, a time that can vary depending on the state.
"If it is volatilizing, it’s nearly impossible to use, in my opinion, post-emergence," he said.
Hartzler said Monsanto and BASF are fighting restrictions because they would "greatly reduce the value" of their chemical and seed systems, which required "a huge investment" to develop over several years.
"The seed is where they make the majority of their money," Hartzler said. "So if the chemical is restricted and it no longer controls waterhemp or Palmer amaranth, farmers would not see the need to pay additional money" for that technology.
Iowa and U.S. farmers want more weapons in their battle against weeds that can't be killed with glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's popular Roundup Ready products.
Several Southern states are struggling with glyphosate-resistant Palmer amaranth, a rapidly growing, fast-adapting "super weed" that can quickly overrun cotton and soybean fields.
Palmer amaranth is creeping across Iowa, moving into about half of its counties. So far, the weed can be killed with glyphosate, but weed scientists say it's only a matter of time until it adapts to the the widely used chemical.
The Iowa Department of Agriculture has asked farmers in the state to check fields this harvest for Palmer amaranth, which can grow more than 7 feet tall.
Who will cover damage?
Partridge said about 75 percent of the 1,000 U.S. crop damage reports Monsanto has investigated are due to "failure to follow the label."
Monsanto continues to look into the other 25 percent to determine what role weather might have played, he said.
Partridge believes better education can reduce complaints and points to Georgia as an example. It required that chemical applicators become certified and has experienced no reports of drift damage.
With Monsanto expecting customer demand to double, he warned that Arkansas growers could see twice the damage if the state continues its ban in 2018. That could result in farmers using an older, more volatile version of the herbicide, he said.
Clark Porter, who farms near Waterloo, said he anticipates more farmers will look at using dicamba-tolerant seeds to reduce their damage risk.
Porter said two of his fields received dicamba damage — one when he sprayed using a tank contaminated with a dicamba product and another he believes was vapor drift. One field should see little reduction in yields; the other — just a few acres — will have losses, he said.
Depending on when it occurs, dicamba damage may have no impact or climb up to 40 percent in yield reduction, Hartzler said, based on damage reported in Iowa.
Pat Swanson, who farms near Ottumwa, said her family experienced no problems when they had a contractor spray 220 acres of soybeans.
"We were happy with the results," said Swanson, a Pioneer seed dealer. "We had no problems with drift."
The Iowa Soybean Association said it's working with farmers, researchers, manufacturers and others to find answers, so growers "can continue to have access to these important products and they can be assured that their own and their neighbors’ crops won’t be affected."
Susie, a Beck's Hybrids seed dealer, worries that his losses won't get covered, given the ongoing debate about whether the responsibility for the damage lies with dicamba makers or those applying their products.
Insurance adjusters have determined their clients followed label instructions when spraying the dicamba that damaged his fields. His only other option is to file a lawsuit against the applicators or join a class action suit against dicamba makers.
"I think it's a great product, but I'm not sure there was enough research done" to ensure it remains stable once it's applied, he said.
He agrees with Porter that farmers might feel forced to buy dicamba-tolerant seeds next year "to protect themselves."
"It's not what we should have to do. We shouldn't be fearful about getting damaged," Susie said.
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Florida is due for a reckoning. Will Irma be it?
Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms in recorded history, looks set to hit the continental United States in the coming days. If we are lucky the storm will veer back out to sea, but the National Hurricane Center’s forecast shows the hurricane bearing down on South Florida. Even if it only sideswipes the state, it will wreak havoc.
Florida Is Due for a Reckoning. Will Irma Be It?
By ASHLEY DAWSON
SEPTEMBER 8, 2017
Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms in recorded history, looks set to hit the continental United States in the coming days. If we are lucky the storm will veer back out to sea, but the National Hurricane Center’s forecast shows the hurricane bearing down on South Florida. Even if it only sideswipes the state, it will wreak havoc.
Florida is statistically due for a hit. According to the National Hurricane Center, 40 percent of hurricanes to strike the United States from 1851 to 2010 hit the Florida coast, a total of 114 hurricanes in 160 years. In other words, a hurricane hits Florida every year or so on average. Last year, Hurricane Hermine produced a nearly six-foot-high storm surge when it landed in northern Florida, but before that, the state went more than a decade without a single hurricane landfall. As the planet has warmed, development along Florida’s flood-prone coastlines has left more people more vulnerable to storms.
Four of the top eight cities in the United States most vulnerable to a major storm surge are in Florida, according to a recent report. This is not just because South Florida is extremely flat and low-lying, although this is certainly a major problem. More than half of the people in the United States who live four feet or less above sea level live in South Florida. In addition, cities like Tampa, Fort Myers and Sarasota lie alongside big areas of shallow water that produce strong storm surges when hurricane winds funnel water toward shore.
Miami residents on Wednesday buying supplies in preparation for Hurricane Irma.
CRISTOBAL HERRERA / EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
Aggravating matters, South Florida’s cities, in particular its largest, Miami, are built on porous limestone that’s effectively a rocky Swiss cheese. As the limestone soaks up rising seawater, Miami’s infamous “king tides” — fresh water forced up from drains and pipes by underlying salty water — become more frequent. Because of this limestone geology, Miami and other cities in South Florida cannot build substantial sea walls to hold back storm surges the way other cities, like New Orleans and Rotterdam, have. The water would simply flow underneath.
Yet despite these dangers, South Florida continues to grow. The state as a whole has gained more than two million residents since Hurricane Wilma in 2005. None of these arrivals have firsthand experience of Florida’s unique exposure to natural disasters. Although the state has an exemplary emergency response system, much will depend on how ordinary people react in the face of the hurricane. With a storm the magnitude of Hurricane Irma, people helping other people are the most important resource.
And Florida’s real estate market is booming. Although the 2008 financial crisis plunged millions of homeowners into foreclosure, the property market quickly rebounded. New luxury condos have popped up in Florida in recent years, significant numbers of them in areas likely to flood as climate change causes increasingly ferocious storms. For decades, state and local governments have permitted development in hurricane-prone areas. They have argued that this development adds to the tax base, which can in turn generate funds that can be used to shore up disaster defenses. But such policies ultimately place more property — and people — in harm’s way.
What will happen when all that property is deluged by a megastorm, whether it is Irma or the hurricane after it? In six of Florida’s most vulnerable cities, more than a million homes at risk for storm surge damage are not covered by flood insurance, according to recent analysis. These homeowners face financial ruin. Meanwhile, nearly 1.8 million Florida homes and businesses are in the beleaguered National Flood Insurance Program, which was $25 billion dollars in debt even before Hurricane Harvey; Irma could push it much deeper underwater.
As if all this were not enough, there’s the threat of a storm-caused nuclear meltdown. The Turkey Point nuclear power station sits on an exposed island in Biscayne Bay, about 25 miles south of Miami. Built in the early 1970s, the aging plant depends on similar vulnerable backup systems to prevent a meltdown as those of Japan’s Fukushima plant, which is still leaking radiation. Although Turkey Point’s main reactors are 20 feet above sea level, the plant’s diesel-powered backup generators, which keep cooling water circulating through the reactors when power is knocked out, are less elevated and less well insulated, according to Phil Stoddard, the mayor of South Miami.
Florida needs to confront the reality it faces as a state in the front lines of climate-change-related disasters, including the folly of coastal development. The state needs to begin exploring managed retreat from areas that are particularly threatened, offering buyouts to homeowners with properties in low-lying areas so that their land can be turned into flood-absorbing wetlands or aquatic parks. Maximum care should be taken to ensure that this retreat does not siphon funding to the rich while ignoring the needs of low-income homeowners.
One way or another, Florida is due for a reckoning. We can only hope that it will not be too grievous, and that whatever happens it will help transform the political culture of a state whose governor is a climate-change denier despite Florida’s extreme vulnerability to natural disasters, a place where solar power is essentially banned despite its fame as the Sunshine State.
Ashley Dawson, a professor of the environment and the humanities at the Princeton Environmental Institute, is the author of “Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change.”
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How not to run the E.P.A.
I have been worried about how the Environmental Protection Agency would be run ever since President Trump appointed Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, to oversee it.
How Not to Run the E.P.A.
By CHRISTINE TODD WHITMANSEPT. 8, 2017
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I have been worried about how the Environmental Protection Agency would be run ever since President Trump appointed Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, to oversee it. The past few months have confirmed my fears. The agency created by a Republican president 47 years ago to protect the environment and public health may end up doing neither under Mr. Pruitt’s direction.
As a Republican appointed by President George W. Bush to run the agency, I can hardly be written off as part of the liberal resistance to the new administration. But the evidence is abundant of the dangerous political turn of an agency that is supposed to be guided by science.
The E.P.A.’s recent attack on a reporter for The Associated Press and the installation of a political appointee to ferret out grants containing “the double C-word†are only the latest manifestations of my fears, which mounted with Mr. Pruitt’s swift and legally questionable repeals of E.P.A. regulations — actions that pose real and lasting threats to the nation’s land, air, water and public health.
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Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, answering questions from reporters at the White House in June. Credit Al Drago for The New York Times
All of that is bad enough. But Mr. Pruitt recently unveiled a plan that amounts to a slow-rolling catastrophe in the making: the creation of an antagonistic “red team†of dissenting scientists to challenge the conclusions reached by thousands of scientists over decades of research on climate change. It will serve only to confuse the public and sets a deeply troubling precedent for policy-making at the E.P.A.
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The red-team approach makes sense in the military and in consumer and technology companies, where assumptions about enemy strategy or a competitor’s plans are rooted in unknowable human choices. But the basic physics of the climate are well understood. Burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. There is no debate about that. The link is as certain as the link between smoking and cancer.
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A broad consensus of scientists also warn of the influence of the warming climate on extreme weather events. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the enormous wildfires in the Western United States and widespread flooding from monsoons in Southeast Asia are potent reminders of the cost of ignoring climate science.
As a Republican like Mr. Pruitt, I too embrace the promise of the free market and worry about the perils of overregulation. But decisions must be based on reliable science. The red team begins with his politically preferred conclusion that climate change isn’t a problem, and it will seek evidence to justify that position. That’s the opposite of how science works. True science follows the evidence. The critical tests of peer review and replication ensure that the consensus is sound. Government bases policy on those results. This applies to liberals and conservatives alike.
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There are two sides, at least, to most political questions, and a politician’s impulse may be to believe that the same holds true for science. Certainly, there are disputes in science. But on the question of climate change, the divide is stark. On one side is the overwhelming consensus of thousands of scientists at universities, research centers and the government who publish in peer-reviewed literature, are cited regularly by fellow scientists and are certain that humans are contributing to climate change.
On the other side is a tiny minority of contrarians who publish very little by comparison, are rarely cited in the scientific literature and are often funded by fossil fuel interests, and whose books are published, most often, by special interest groups. That Mr. Pruitt seeks to use the power of the E.P.A. to elevate those who have already lost the argument is shameful, and the only outcome will be that the public will know less about the science of climate change than before.
The red-team idea is a waste of the government’s time, energy and resources, and a slap in the face to fiscal responsibility and responsible governance. Sending scientists on a wild-goose chase so that Mr. Pruitt, Rick Perry, the energy secretary, who has endorsed this approach, and President Trump can avoid acknowledging and acting on the reality of climate change is simply unjustifiable. And truly, it ignores and distracts from the real imperative: developing solutions that create good jobs, grow our economy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prepare for the impacts of climate change.
Policy should always be rooted in unbiased science. The E.P.A. is too important to treat like a reality TV show. People’s lives and our country’s resources are at stake. Mr. Pruitt should respect his duty to the agency’s mission, end the red team and call on his agency’s scientists to educate him. No doubt they’re willing and eager to impart the knowledge they’ve dedicated their lives to understanding.
If this project goes forward, it should be treated for what it is: a shameful attempt to confuse the public into accepting the false premise that there is no need to regulate fossil fuels.
Christine Todd Whitman, president of the Whitman Strategy Group, was the E.P.A. administrator from 2001 to 2003 and the governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 8, 2017, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: How Not To Run The E.P.A. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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