Odd Weather & Funding Cuts

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust

Filed under Community, Conservation, Cooperatives, Economics, Environment, Farm Policy, Food Production, Food Safety, GMOs, Homestead, Hunger, Nutritition, Pollution, Rural Development | Comment (0)

Who Needs RoundUp Ready Alfalfa?

The Obama administration’s director of the USDA (Tom Vilsac) approved the open marketing and planting of Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa and sugar beets last week. To the widely expressed outrage and downright confusion of organic growers and consumers everywhere. Now, sugar beets are a food production crop as valuable and as intensively, unsustainably, chemically farmed as sugar cane, so one could imagine a desire for them to be resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (Monsanto’s RoundUp), as are many other of Monsanto’s proprietary GMO crops. So much of our junk foods and soft drinks are sweetened with GMO corn syrup, that a little GMO sugar in candy bars probably won’t bother most people. Those of us who do care can easily grow our own sugar beets and make sugar out of them, so there should still be organic sugar available.

But I admit to being stumped by the alfalfa thing. I mean, here’s a hay and fodder crop that is highly nutritious, grows thickly across America’s managed pasturelands, and is perennial – as cattle fodder or hay the ground isn’t tilled and a new crop planted in its place every year. Never heard of anybody spraying herbicides on it, as alfalfa grows thickly enough to displace even the most stubborn weeds. Except pigweed, of course, which is already glyphosate resistant via transgene contamination. So other than Monsanto being able to claim the seed is proprietary because it contains their easiest transgene complex, there simply is no reason to have RoundUp Ready alfalfa.

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Filed under Environment, Farm Policy, Food Production, GMOs, Monsanto | Comment (0)