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To: Black Agnes
The bugs in your gut run the whole show.

"Bugs" are critical to a lot more "shows" than that.

A petri dish with this or that cell line isn’t the whole story wrt exposures via diet. There are literally thousands of microbes in your gut. We’ve cataloged very few of them. And what we’ve found is revolutionary. As it turns out, we need them for our own genetic expression and health.

Really, I don't need your "instruction" on this topic. You quite apparently don't know what I do much less what I advocate.

I was writing on this topic of the ecological damage portended by RoundUp ready products fifteen years ago. I was writing about relationships among sheath bacteria, ruminants, and weather five years ago. That study is why my daughter is studying host-specific soil microbe/plant root relationships at Stanford now. She'll be working in a lab dedicated to that study all summer. I've been reading the papers she finds interesting all year. You don't need to tell me about intestinal microflora.

I am not an advocate of RoundUp ready. I don't know where you got the idea that I was. Here's the point: Antibiotics aren't good for you, yet sometimes they can save your life. The same is true of soils, weeds, and herbicides. Weeds can disrupt the entire microbial chain that produces soil. It is true that herbicides can damage soil microbial communities. Which is worse? Nobody knows. We know even less about soil microbes than we do about what is in the animal gut. I have put 25 years of arduous labor restoring native plant habitat. NOBODY has done it as effectively as I have. I have university researchers and professionals visiting my place from hundreds of miles away.

RoundUp was critical to my success. This year, I used less than a quart of it on 14 acres. I don't like using it, but sometimes it is necessary. What I can tell you is that a landscape once overrun with weeds and possessing buy 60 species of plants is now 99.9% native with 371 species of plants, many of which require specific soil microbes to breed. Hence, those bacteria must be there.

What I don't like is Monsanto leveraging protection the public offered them wrecking a very useful tool any more than I appreciate condescending fear mongering from people who clearly have no interest in dealing with relative risk, pretending that there is such a thing as a 'no risk' option. Got it?

The amount of tilling farmers were doing to soils before the invention of RoundUp Ready products was VERY damaging to soil microflora, soil structure, and soil retention. The introduction of RoundUp ready products has vastly reduced much of that damage. That much is proven. True, the long term consequences are not known. So far, I'm not seeing much more than activist fear mongering driven by wealthy foundations with an interest in reducing global population by any means, including starvation.

What has not been admitted by the agricultural community, including many scientists, is the critical need for a pastoral rotation in soil development. Even then, one cannot simply plant grasses and expect the soil microflora to operate correctly. Post disturbance annual forbs play a critical role in developing that soil microbial community.

Guess who is the only researcher anywhere in the Western United States who possesses a landscape wrecked for 200 years by weeds that is now dominated by NATIVE post-disturbance annual forbs? That would be me.

If you knew how much work it is to crawl on your hands and knees for a decade doing work nobody else will do, if you understood the drive it takes, you would have been a bit more circumspect and a lot less condescending.

I grow my own heirloom vegetables and eat them within 30 minutes of picking because the chemicals they produce in response to picking are FAR WORSE than any pesticide available. These chemicals are for the most part, untested, yet they have stood the test of millennia for their ability to deter pests. That is why so many insects are host-specific; their larvae are tolerant to the toxins. You eat 5,000 to 10,000 times by weight naturally occurring carcinogens compared to synthetic chemicals. And yes, this information has been around for over 20 years.

This is about relative and competing risks among numerous hazards. Yet when has life been any different? I own a patent on a business method to manage those competing risks, a system of which a corrupt and incompetent monopoly government is incapable.

I'm going back to my Bromus carinatus harvest. I do it with a hand sickle, a plant at a time. It's going to be over 90° today.

239 posted on 05/31/2013 10:57:19 AM PDT by Carry_Okie (An economy is not a zero-sum game, but politics usually is.)
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To: Carry_Okie

I’ll encourage you to read this link then:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/feb/16/india-rice-farmers-revolution

“In a village in India’s poorest state, Bihar, farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide. Is this one solution to world food shortages?”

The GM and herbicides just might not be needed.

Shhhhh...


244 posted on 05/31/2013 11:01:43 AM PDT by Black Agnes
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To: Carry_Okie

You are wasting your time discussing no-till farming and what Monsanto and some other companies have done to help reduce topsoil loss. BTW, topsoil is our nations most valuable natural resource, imho.


245 posted on 05/31/2013 11:04:41 AM PDT by Neoliberalnot (Marxism works well only with the uneducated and the unarmed.)
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