Boycott Land O'Lakes - GMO Pushers

Hay Now — It’s Boycott Time: Land O’Lakes, This Means You!

By Citizens for Safe Food and Feed

Farm Wars

By now you’ve heard how President Obama and his Monsanto Administration have plowed through approvals of three more genetically engineered products, including GE alfalfa.  Well, here’s something else you should know:

To produce its Round-Up Ready Alfalfa seeds, Monsanto partnered with a company called Forage Genetics International, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Land O’Lakes dairy co-op. That’s right, Land O’Lakes stands to make a fortune from polluting our food supply with untested and unlabeled GMOs.

To protest, you could sign one of the many petitions going around that will likely just be ignored.  But there’s another way to show your disapproval of genetically engineered Round-Up Ready Alfalfa:  Boycott all Land O’Lakes products — its butter, cheese, eggs, speads, margarine, seasonings, creams, cocoa and cappuccino mixes, sour cream and milk.  All of them.

You have the power to economically punish Land O’Lakes — the owner of Forage Genetics, Monsanto’s partner in crime — for its role in polluting the food chain with untested and unlabeled GMOs, increasing the use of toxic glyphosate herbicide, and potentially destroying the organic beef and dairy feed market by loudly refusing to support Land O’Lakes with your dollars.

Tell all your friends to go to all the supermarkets in their area and let the check-out clerks know that they’re boycotting Land O’Lakes products until they are out of the GMO business, loud enough for other shoppers to hear.  And next, stop by the store manager’s desk and tell him about the boycott.

Send Land O’Lakes and other companies a clear message:  HAY you — We’re FED UP with GMOs in our food supply!

And to make sure Land O’Lakes knows why its sales are down, contact its president and CEO Chris Policinski and let him know you won’t be buying Land O’Lakes products anymore because you don’t want genetically engineered food or animal feed:

Chris Policinski
President and CEO
Land O’Lakes
4001 Lexington Avenue
Arden Hills, MN 55126-2998
651/481-2222

Spread the word…

Monsanto - Criminal of the Decade

Has Forbes Gone Psychotic or Taken the Blue Pill? 
By Dr. Joseph Mercola
Forbes has declared Monsanto “Company of the Year,” calling criticism of the notorious company “vicious” attacks against a company that “has been working to make humanity better fed.”
What’s more, Forbes claims that the attacks come because Monsanto has close to a monopoly in some seed markets, which Forbes argues is because they are making “seeds that are too good.”
You read that right. Apparently, Monsanto’s decades-long attempt to control the seed market -- which has led it lawsuits against small farmers and genetically modified plants that never regerminate, forcing farmers to buy seeds year after year -- is apparently just a result of their being “too good.”
I encourage you all to BOYCOTT Forbes and cancel any subscription you may have.

For anyone who knows anything about the business of Monsanto, the news that this ominous company has been named “Company of the Year” by renowned Forbes magazine is simply shocking.
This follows on the heels of other oxymoronic honors, such as

• President Obama accepting the Nobel Peace Prize while firmly entrenched in a seemingly never-ending war spread across two countries, and
  
• Time magazine naming Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke “Man of the Year,” supposedly for “saving” the US from “an even worse” financial collapse than what Bernanke himself helped create.
  
• Even more ironic are the media efforts to convince you that the unsustainable situation created by printing of billions of dollars to bail out failing banks and companies can be sustained indefinitely.
  

So, who is responsible for these strange decisions? And perhaps more importantly, why?
Through the lens of these examples, a rather bizarre picture is taking shape. I can’t say exactly what the message is, but I believe I can say this: Beware, because deception is taking place through coordinated media manipulation.
If you know anything about how conventional media is being used on a mass scale, you realize that typically someone is trying to sell you on something – an idea, an ideology, a certain mindset, in order to eventually produce a certain behavior.
The question is, what are they trying to convince you of now?

Are We Living in Some Alternative Reality?

When reading the news these days, I often feel like I’m getting information from some alternate Universe where up is down, and left is right. Because they surely aren’t reporting reality on this planet. It’s gotten so blatantly bizarre lately, it’s as though they don’t even bother to come up with a decent cover story to shroud their attempts at manipulating your mind.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there are still many who have not figured this game out yet, who will swallow just about anything that magazines like Time and Forbes put in print – like the story that Monsanto is a world class do-gooder.
Unfortunately, there are still those who are unaware of the many improprieties and outright crimes committed by Monsanto, such as:

• Suing small farmers for patent infringement after Monsanto’s GM seeds spread wildly into surrounding farmers’ fields, contaminating their conventional crops
  
• Secretly discharging PCB-laden toxic waste into an Alabama creek, and dumping millions of pounds of PCBs into open-pit landfills for decades after PCBs were banned in the US for being a possible carcinogen.
  
• Being found guilty of bribery to bypass Indonesian law requiring an environmental assessment review for its genetically engineered cotton.
  
• Last year, the supreme court of France found Monsanto guilty of falsely advertising its herbicide Roundup as "biodegradable" and “environmentally friendly.” Scientific evaluation discovered that glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp, is acutely toxic to fish and birds and can kill beneficial insects and soil organisms that maintain ecological balance. Additionally, the surfactant ingredient in Roundup is more acutely toxic than glyphosate itself, and the combination of the two is even more toxic.
  
• In 2007, the South African Advertising Standards Authority also found Monsanto guilty of lying when advertising that “no negative reactions to Genetically Modified food have been reported.”
  
• According to one EPA scientist, Monsanto doctored studies and covered-up dioxin contamination of a wide range of its products. She concluded that the company’s behaviour constituted “a long pattern of fraud.”
  
• In 1999, the New York Times exposed that Monsanto’s PR firm, Burson Marsteller, had paid fake "pro-GMO" food demonstrators to counteract a group of anti-biotech protesters outside a Washington, DC FDA meeting.
  

This is but a short list of examples, but it should give you a clue as to why I question the rationale behind giving them this honor.

Monsanto – Company of the Year?

Anyone who has studied the devastating effects of the unrestrained release of genetically modified crops into the environment will see the insanity in declaring Monsanto “Company of the Year.”
What the world needs is a return to saner, more sustainable farming practices, not mass cultivation of crops infused with “suicide genes” that prevent regermination the year after, or food crops that have been contaminated with GM seeds used for pharmaceutical production.
I truly believe that letting Monsanto lead us down the garden path is nothing short of suicidal.
It’s time for people to realize that while the declared motive behind GM food is an altruistic one -- to alleviate hunger, poverty and malnutrition worldwide – in reality, the ruthless propagation of GM crops are intended to create previously unimaginable profits above anything else.
Despite their assurances, we’re already beginning to see the real price of all that tinkering with Mother Nature: unnatural crop combinations that can harm your health and potentially cause generational DNA changes, for example.
Not only that, but contrary to promises, GM crops are FAILING MISERABLY all across the world. The reality simply isn’t living up to the hype of increased yields of healthy crops.
After 30 years of GMO experimentation, we have the data to show:

• No increase in yields; on the contrary GM soya has decreased yields by up to 20 percent compared with non-GM soya. Up to 100 percent failures of Bt cotton have been recorded in India. And recent studies by scientists from the USDA and the University of Georgia found that growing GM cotton in the U.S. can result in a drop in income by up to 40 percent.
  
• No reduction in pesticides use; on the contrary, USDA data shows that GM crops has increased pesticide use by 50 million pounds from 1996 to 2003 in the U.S., and the use of glyphosate went up more than 15-fold between 1994 and 2005, along with increases in other herbicides to cope with rising glyphosate resistant superweeds.
  
• Roundup herbicide is lethal to frogs and toxic to human placental and embryonic cells. Roundup is used in more than 80 percent of all GM crops planted in the world.
  
• GM crops harm wildlife, as revealed by UK and U.S. studies.
  
• Bt resistant pests and Roundup tolerant superweeds render the two major GM crop traits useless. The evolution of Bt resistant bollworms worldwide have now been confirmed and documented.
  
• Vast areas of forests, pampas and cerrados lost to GM soya in Latin America.
  
• Epidemic of suicides in the cotton belt of India. 100,000 farmers between 1993-2003, and an estimated 16,000 farmers a year since, have committed suicide since Bt cotton was introduced.
  
• Transgene contamination is completely unavoidable, as science has recently revealed that the genome (whether plant, animal or human) is NOT constant and static, which is the scientific base for genetic engineering of plants and animals. Instead, geneticists have discovered that the genome is remarkably dynamic and changeable, and constantly ‘conversing’ and adapting to the environment. This interaction determines which genes are turned on, when, where, by what and how much, and for how long. They’ve also found that the genetic material itself has the ability to be changed according to experience, passing it on to subsequent generations.
  
• GM food and feed linked to deaths and sicknesses both in the fields in India and in lab tests around the world. For example, in April 2006, more than 70 Indian shepherds reported that 25 percent of their herds died within 5-7 days of continuous grazing on Bt cotton plants.
  

Forbes on a Roll – But Where?

But Forbes doesn’t just throw your intelligence for a loop by hailing the success of a destroyer like Monsanto. Oh, no. There’s more.
Tellingly, in the same issue, Forbes also lashes out against chelation therapy, and derides anyone who thinks there may be a connection between vaccines and autism.
So what is this all about, really?
I have to seriously wonder why we are being urged to imagine we live in a world where no bad deed goes unrewarded; a place where what’s bad for you is somehow beneficial, and where lack of integrity, reason and logic is applauded.
What is this type of media coverage saying to you? What is this saying to your children?
This is not what America used to stand for, if I remember correctly. And it’s not what America should stand for now, or in the future.
Quite frankly, it’s all wrong. It’s all upside-down and backwards.
The only good thing about these blatantly bizarre media displays is the fact that they are just that – blatantly bizarre. And hopefully that will shake more people from their slumber and cause them to ask some basic questions about what’s really going on in this world.

Important Questions Only You Have the Answer to

• Who taught you what you know?
  
• Who do you listen to? What messages are you receiving from conventional media? How do you determine what’s real and what’s not?
  
• When was the last time you turned OFF the television and really pondered some issue at length, on your own, looking at it from all sides, including the sides you’ve been told to ignore? Heck, when was the last time you asked WHY you are being told to ignore it in the first place!
  

Other questions may be even more important than the preceding ones, as they involve really tuning into yourself:

• Where do you fall within the scheme of nature?
  
• Do natural laws apply to you?
  
• Where does science fit in? How far can science take you? Are you willing to gamble the future of your children on the assurances of mega-companies like Monsanto, who have tremendous responsibility to their shareholders to turn a profit in a crumbling market?
  
• To what degree do you think man-made chemicals can improve your health? What IS health, really? What does your body really need in order for all those trillions of cells to thrive in harmony?
  

Folks, I encourage you to open your mind; think deeply and clearly, and avoid jumping to preconceived conclusions based on what you think you “know,” without first challenging yourself to discern who fed you that “knowledge” in the first place.
Personally, I’m fed up with the brainwashing that conventional media dishes out, and if you too have had enough, I suggest you boycott Forbes and cancel any subscription you may have to their magazine. Unless you simply don’t want to live in a right-side-up world, that is.
Congressman Ron Paul said the following in one of his speeches before Congress earlier this year, and it sums up my sentiments exactly:

"Is this a dream or a nightmare? Is it my imagination or have we lost our minds? It is surreal. It is just not believable. A grand absurdity. A great deception. A delusion of momentous proportions based on preposterous notions and ideas whose time should never have come.
Insanity passed off as logic. Evil described as virtue. Ignorance pawned off as wisdom. Slavery sold as liberty. The philosophy that destroys us is not even defined. We have broken from reality, a psychotic nation. Ignorance with a pretense of knowledge replacing wisdom."

Monsanto's Phosphorus Theft

Phosphate processing plant in
Soda Springs, USA, operated by Monsanto.
Source: The Center for Land Use Interpretation

Idaho black rock phosphate, and phosphorus in general, is a finite and non-renewable primary plant nutrient. Monsanto, instead of leaving it alone so it can be conserved and made available for use by generations of America's sustainable and organic farmers, turns it into the herbicide Roundup.

Next to clean water, phosphorus will be one the inexorable limits to human occupancy on this planet” wrote Bill Mollison in Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual more than 20 years ago .

Peak Phosphorus barely registers alongside it’s more gregarious, attention-getting bigger brother, Peak Oil. Yet, the implications are even more dramatic. While both peaks are associated with massive food shortages, unmitigated Peak Phosphorus would easily win the award for best disaster.

The latest research tells us that Peak Phosphorus is an issue we cannot afford to ignore any more:

… a global production peak of phosphate rock is estimated to occur around 2033. While this may seem in the distant future, there are currently no alternatives on the market today that could replace phosphate rock on any significant scale. New infrastructure and institutional arrangements required could take decades to develop.

While all the world’s farmers require access to phosphorus fertilizers, the major phosphate rock reserves are under the control of a small number of countries including China, Morocco and the US. China recently imposed a 135% export tariff on phosphate rock essentially preventing any from leaving the country. Reserves in the U.S. are calculated to be depleted within 30 years. Morocco currently occupies Western Sahara and its massive phosphate rock reserves, contrary to UN resolutions. – Western Sahara Resource Watch

From the Times Online:

Battered by soaring fertiliser prices and rioting rice farmers, the global food industry may also have to deal with a potentially catastrophic future shortage of phosphorus, scientists say.

Researchers in Australia, Europe and the United States have given warning that the element, which is essential to all living things, is at the heart of modern farming and has no synthetic alternative, is being mined, used and wasted as never before.

Massive inefficiencies in the “farm-to-fork” processing of food and the soaring appetite for meat and dairy produce across Asia is stoking demand for phosphorus faster and further than anyone had predicted. “Peak phosphorus”, say scientists, could hit the world in just 30 years. Crop-based biofuels, whose production methods and usage suck phosphorus out of the agricultural system in unprecedented volumes, have, researchers in Brazil say, made the problem many times worse. Already, India is running low on matches as factories run short of phosphorus; the Brazilian Government has spoken of a need to nationalise privately held mines that supply the fertiliser industry and Swedish scientists are busily redesigning toilets to separate and collect urine in an attempt to conserve the precious element.

Dana Cordell, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney, said: “Quite simply, without phosphorus we cannot produce food. At current rates, reserves will be depleted in the next 50 to 100 years.

Human excreta (urine and feces) are renewable and readily available sources of phosphorus.
Urine is essentially sterile and contains plant-available nutrients (P,N,K) in the correct ratio. Treatment and reuse is very simple and the World Health Organization has published 'guidelines for the safe use of wastewater, excreta and greywater.

More that 50% of the worlds’ population are now living in urban centers, and in the next 50 years 90% of the new population are expected to reside in urban slums. Urine is the largest single source of P emerging from human settlements.

According to some studies in Sweden and Zimbabwe, the nutrients in one person's urine are sufficient to produce 50-100% of the food requirements for another person. Combined with other organic sources like manure and food waste, the phosphorus value in urine and feces can essentially replace the demand for phosphate rock. In 2000, the global population produced 3 million tonnes of phosphorus from urine and feces alone.