Sticking It to Monsanto, One Biointensive Garden at a Time

You’re a farmer. You’re resisting the giant agro-corporations, who are ready to swoop in and buy up your farm at the first opportunity. You’re fighting to stay afloat in a system that rewards over-production (and under-compensation), forcing you to rely on government subsidies in order to turn a profit. The subsidies are dwindling because of the biofuel problem, and your neighbor’s farms are getting higher and higher yields because they all switched to genetically modified (GM) crops, which further lowers the subsidy price per pound of crop you produce. In a system that makes it nearly impossible to make money, at least you can save your own seeds for replanting, the way that farmers have done for centuries.

Oh wait, that’s right, you can’t.

Monsanto is the company that makes Round-Up, and it also makes a line of seeds called Round-Up Ready. (Monsanto also makes plastics, anti-freeze, fuel additives, resins, rubber goods, vinyl siding, industrial fluids, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and artificial caffeine.) These Round-Up Ready seeds are increasingly being used by farmers across the nation, mainly because they boost productivity and reduce time spent in the fields, desirable qualities in a market that demands high productivity. Monsanto panted the crap out of these seeds, and its patent states that farmers can’t save seeds from each year’s crop for replanting; farmers must purchase the Round-Up Ready seeds anew each year. This is incredibly inefficient from the farmer’s perspective, and incredibly profitable for Monsanto.

As Monsanto’s market share in seeds increases, the company has become very litigious in its efforts to protect their patents. If a farmer should store and plant the seeds from the previous year’s crop in defiance of Monsanto’s patents, and Monsanto should find out about it, the farmer will experience an onslaught of unwelcome bullying tactics by Monsanto. These tactics include confronting farmers in their fields armed with surveillance photos, threatening expensive legal proceedings unless the farmer coughs up a cash settlement; filing lawsuits and drawing out the proceedings in order to financially ruin the farmer being sued; and, probably the most evil and scariest tactic of all, suing farmers whose crops have accidentally picked up some of the GM genes by cross-pollination across fields, even if they never purchased the Round-Up Ready seed in the first place. That last tactic involves sending employees to fields surrounding the farmers who are known Round-Up Ready customers and gathering samples to be tested in company labs in order to search for cross-pollinated crops containing the patented genes of their GM seeds. That kind of effort, on a national (and perhaps global) scale, takes an awful lot of money and resources, something the farmers on the receiving end of that wrath could never dream of competing with in court.

In Vanity Fair’s green issue, there’s a piece about Monsanto that provides a good place to begin understanding just how awful Monsanto really is. The article states that “The company has a staff devoted to enforcing patents and litigating against farmers.” Later in the article, it says:

“’I don’t know of a company that chooses to sue its own customer base,’ says Joseph Mendelson, of the Center for Food Safety. ‘It’s a very bizarre business strategy.’ But it’s one that Monsanto manages to get away with, because increasingly it’s the dominant vendor in town.”

So if you’re a farmer who purchases Round-Up Ready seed, you can’t collect the seed from that year’s crop for replanting. If you do, you’ll have to contend with Monsanto’s unbelievable resources and its dedication to suing farmers. And, if you’re a farmer whose property just happens to border on a farm where Round-Up Ready seed is planted, you’ll also be subjected to Monsanto’s bully tactics (this isn’t in the VF article, it’s from a documentary called The Future of Food.) And what does all this litigation get Monsanto, besides profit from next year’s seed purchases by every single one of their customers? Complete control over their portion of the seed market. And as that portion continues to increase, so does Monsanto’s control of the seed supply, which directly controls the food supply.

Monsanto is hated by just about everyone, including the farmers who buy their seed every year. Besides the Round-Up Ready litigation, Monsanto is also pursuing dairy farmers who put “rBST-free” on the labels of their milk cartons. You can read more about this in the VF article beginning on page five. (Did I mention that Monsanto manufactured Agent Orange for the government during the Vietnam War? Here’s a fun little tidbit on what Agent Orange did to the Vietnamese and their forests, not to mention our American soldiers.) Is this who we want to control our nation’s food supply?

Regardless of whether or not we want Monsanto (and other petrochemical companies) to control our food supply, it’s happening. As consumers of organic and sustainable foods, it’s important to know about Monsanto for several reasons. Consuming foods from sustainable farms is important for the environment and for our health, to be sure; but it’s also incredibly important for the future of our food supply. Scientists have known for a long time that genetic diversity among any population is the best defense against disease, environmental changes, or another catastrophe, whether natural or man-made. If our nation’s food supply, and eventually that of the world, are controlled by a handful of suppliers selling seed that will produce crops that are genetically identical, then the security of our food supply is weak indeed. All it would take is one disease or pest that was resistant to the chemicals produced by Monsanto, and our food supply would be shot. I think that’s a very scary position to be in.

I’ve begun to educate myself on how I can avoid supporting this food supply, and I still have much to learn. Buying organic food, as locally as possible, seems to be one answer. But I believe that organic farming is just the beginning. Many organic farms have sustainability issues, particularly the dwindling amount of topsoil (another issue for another day). Any farm that’s completely sustainable is a good answer to the food supply problem, but those farms are more difficult to come by than you’d think. Ecology Action is one such farm (or “garden,” as they call it), and I’m hoping to be able to take a tour of their site in Willits sometime this summer. I’m not sure exactly what the long-term solution to our food supply problem is, and I’m not even close to being qualified to try and find such a solution.

But there is something I can do. I can make my food purchases with the Monsantos of the world in mind. If I don’t buy into their system, I don’t support their stranglehold on the American food chain. This means no fast food, no sodas, no conventional grain-fed meats, no conventional produce that’s been grown with pesticides, no processed foods that contain corn derivatives, and no chemically processed foods of any kind. DAMN, right? But the fact is that it’s not that hard. I’m already avoiding all of those things, and I’ve been doing so for a few years now. There are enough alternatives to the conventional food supply today that finding healthy and ethical food sources is much easier than it would have been, say, thirty years ago. And while it’s true that good-quality sustainable foods do cost more, I’d say that the cost of the current agricultural model in the U.S. to our future generations is going to be massive.

On a personal scale, I’ve had to cut back in other areas to allow for a higher food budget. Ted and I don’t go to see as many movies in the theater as we used to, and we try to avoid spending money on things that we deem frivolous. But we haven’t had to give up everything we enjoy, either. Ted plays video games, which is a great release for him, and I do love shopping for clothes now and then. We also both own iPhones, and between the two of us we collectively own five computers. I think it’s nearly impossible to avoid buying into the manufacturing machine entirely if we want to live a contemporary lifestyle. But we do pick our battles, and refusing to buy conventional and even some unsustainable organic foods is one way we can make a difference with our dollars.

I’m also starting a home garden, which is another good way to at least partially avoid buying into the American food machine. I’ll be posting photos later of our gardening efforts later. For now, I’ll just recommend John Jeavons’ book The Sustainable Vegetable Garden as a beginner’s resource because I’m still pretty uneducated about gardening in a way that doesn’t reduce topsoil. But gardening responsibly is another good way to stick it to the Monsantos of the world. Growing a few heads of biointensively-grown lettuce and some tomatoes aren’t going to make a dent in the larger scheme of things, but what if one million Americans did just that? What about two million? Ten million? Suddenly those few lettuces per household make a much larger impact.

So, don’t buy foods created by the American industrial food machine, and start a small biointensive garden in your backyard, even if it’s on a tiny scale. Monsanto totally sucks, so let’s start out own little Garden Rebellion. Who knew that being defiant would be so delicious?