Arsenic in Our Food

I came across a number of sources simultaneously this weekend that referred to arsenic in chicken manure. I used to use a chicken manure based “organic” fertilizer but I stopped when I found the OMRI report that showed that compared to other pelletized organic fertilizers that it had a very high level of arsenic. Now I think I know why. According to the movie and industry sources, arsenic is fed as part of a sub-therapeutic antibiotic in large poultry operations to help keep chickens healthy and put on more weight in inhumanely crowded and stressed out environments. I think we have to assume that arsenic is a marker that also indicates the presence of antibiotics (and other things? hormones?) since we know many antibiotics don’t break down even in hot composting operations. In the movie below and according to one of the conventional poultry industry’s lead magazines they mention that the “organic” form such as I guess is in Stutzman’s fertilizer is not as dangerous but that “Arsenic in chicken litter can convert to more dangerous forms of arsenic than those originally used in feed.” One example given in the movie is dust from the soil where chicken manure had been applied that had blown into people’s nearby houses by the wind.I stopped using this product over a year ago because arsenic is an element and can’t break down. Even though we may have adapted to exposure to small quantities of arsenic, after all we evolved with it in our environment and even use some forms of it in medicines, when we start building concentrations of it in our soils in order to grow a large number of developed and changing varieties of crops that this represents new territory that science still hasn’t caught up with.

I assume the only reason that these products are categorized as organic is because manure is simply not regulated in the organic standards the way that other ingredients are. Where there is arsenic my assumption is that there other sins as well such as antibiotics and other industrial chemicals that wouldn’t normally be allowed in an organic operation.I would like to see all such manures that we know contain additives that could never be considered organic otherwise except that they passed out of the rear end of an animal be banned. I am curious to hear if there is a reason to disagree with that, especially considering that there are so many other options to fertilize organically. I would like to see distributors voluntarily put a label prominently on the front of the bags that says “Contains ARSENIC” so people can decide for themselves whether they want to start salting their soil with this element. Better yet, until science catches up with us and we can show that products like this are safe and don’t have other antibiotics or other drugs maybe we should just stop using them. I can’t imagine that it would be a big cost difference to make this manure only using manure sourced from farms that aren’t spiking the feed or water with such toxic chemicals which they can only do because the animals will be slaughtered before they are old enough get sick enough from eating such poisons.

Another reason to stop buying these products is because they are derived from and support economically a style of farming that is eating away at the fabric of our country. The only place chemicals like this are used are CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding organizations) also known as feed lot in the case of beef in which tens of thousands to millions of animals are all kept in one place living on mountains of their own manure while everything is brought to them but very little is actually taken away or disposed of properly because doing so is “too expensive”. We shouldn’t support industries like this in any way since not even the food they create, while cheap, should be considered for human or other animal consumption.We don’t need this kind of industrialized agriculture supported by taxpayer through the USDA commodity programs in order to maintain adequate supplies of food for our country or the world. The United States has vast grasslands where millions of bison, deer, elk, and other animals grazed in such vast numbers that it could take days for a herd to pass someone if the were able to stay in one place to watch it. This improved the quality and fertility of the soil, created a more diverse range, and manufactured the most nutritious meat. This actually increased carbon retention in soils instead of burning and releasing it into the air. We don’t need to grow our food in large cesspools where the only feed animals get is food that people could be eating and that doesn’t have the complete nutrition that grasslands have for ruminants and the kind of food that they are most adapted to eating.

When you buy fertilizer like Stutzman’s then it is like saying “I like my meat raised in poop” instead of free range and that you want arsenic and drugs that you don’t need in your food. It brings up another point regarding foods that are labeled organic. It is hard enough to know enough what to ask someone even if you were buying all of your food directly from a farmer. It is impossible to walk into a supermarket when you realize how corrupt the organic standards have become since they were first introduced. There is also a morality story about people that want too much and will accept gifts from strangers in order to get things where when we look into it they have turned want into need. My conclusion is that we usually will be much better off learning to make the best of what we have and managing those resources instead of assuming that it is sustainable to always be relying on external inputs and resources  or that there is no risk by seeking things from far and wide hoping and believe that innovation will make our lives richer or easier. Personally, I doubt if that is the case.

http://www.worldpoultry.net/news/us-activists-push-for-arsenic-ban-8142.html


A River of Waste, The Hazardous Truth About Factory Farms

Tea Parties, Politics and Food

Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative member of the European Parliament has Tea Party envy. In an op-ed piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal last week he expressed deep anguish about how the parliamentary political systems prevalent in Europe, that are often fragmented at times by the number of minority parties, couldn’t possibly launch a Tea Party. He likes the one growing in our country that, if you get your news from other Newscorp companies, opposes all forms of government. Why the WSJ had to look so far abroad to find a loon that had something positive to say about what Newscorp has turned into a laughing stock by continuously misleading it’s customers is unclear unless it is that third party verification was all that was missing to convince someone that was still undecided about what the Tea Party really stood for. Actually, at this point, that is becoming less and less clear as the people claiming that banner have such widely varying views that the only common ground they universally seem to have is be unemployed opportunists and devoid of any knowledge whatsoever about any policy complexities on one hand and history on the other that explains what has been tried and what the results are likely to be based on government action or inaction.

What confuses me about the TEA Party isn’t their goals-a more sensible government or to create a wealthy country that isn’t falling behind the rest of the world in wages and employment. I have yet to hear them take on one issue, however, that change things in a meaningful way. As a suggestion of a particular policy to start with I would like to suggest that they take on the government’s intervention in the food supply. Halt all direct to farm subsidies for commodities for instance. Granted no one from the Midwestern states could be elected on a platform like that because the economy of that region is dependent on tax funded corporate welfare that has been driving people off of their family farms and politicians are dependent on large money donations from those corporate entities they created because regular folks couldn’t be counted to vote as often as needed to keep our ruling parties in power.

I haven’t heard one speech by a politician this campaign cycle that addresses the corruption that has turned our capital in Washington D. C. into a cesspool that permeates and trickles all the way down to the local level. Opening that discussion would invite a lot of finger pointing that would end up being pointed back at the person who started it so people are afraid to talk about anything that real. Unfortunately, we have seen all too often that the people that cry out loudest are often the worst offenders so there isn’t a lot of trust or much love of people who claim that they are going to reform things. The last President that tried that, Jimmy Carter, got his head handed to him on a platter. The President that followed claiming to champion such things, Ronald Reagan, was merely a puppet for people that said one thing while doing the exact opposite, not even bothering whether it was legal or not, drug running, exchanging arms and money to terrorist states for hostages, assassinating political opponents, implementing the largest tax increase in history up to that time, and just saying no to drugs while becoming the largest importer of hard drugs into this country to raise money for illegal covert operations. When all of this information became public the opposition party barely made any attempt at all to prosecute because these activities had such broad acceptance at the highest levels of government that instead of collecting evidence about the criminal activity they were busy destroying it to make sure they never got caught. Yet this is the party that will probably be voted back into office as the majority party this fall.

As we go into the next election cycle happy with the mythological baggage we have collected over the last few decades hardly anybody will bother themselves to become educated about even one problem that we have as a nation because our basic needs have all been satisfied. Even the poorest American has access to transportation, cheap food (not good food), and more entertainment available in more ways than ever. Even though the country is headed for decades of very hard times that will be made worse by a lack of leadership, planning, and management we can’t possibly be bothered much by that because our bodies and minds are full.

The enormous cost of our health care system, our financial commitments to the elderly that will most certainly be broken, & the debt we are leaving our children are things that won’t be forgotten as long as there are people around to curse the day we ever walked the earth.

Planning on Permaculture?

One of the things I like about Permaculture is that it is largely conceptual and adaptable to every biome. It can be difficult getting to know your biome and understand what kind of problems you might be willing and have the resources to tackle. There isn’t one book that I know of that would answer anyone’s question about how to design a one size fits all Permaculture scheme since biomes can vary in so many ways.

 I have taken an approach that marries the best of organic agriculture, ala Eliot Coleman , with Permaculture principles which look at permanent agriculture systems from an engineering viewpoint. Permaculture concepts are nothing new. Farmers and other people that lived closely with the land have been practicing what would seem like to them the obvious for thousands of years. Placing your home near water and light, planting trees to cool and warm the house and yard, arranging the garden space so that things that need the same level of care were concentrated in the same area a few basic permaculture principles that fit into this category. The books and the concepts mostly became necessary to discuss because we today are so far removed from having to live in the real world that we are no longer aware of it.

 I am asked for resources and I have posted links to many fine books on my blog/website to suggest some that I feel are original sources that other books are derived from. Other than that you should make use of all the sources of information at your disposal. In the United States I would contact the local extension office and Master Gardeners associated with the land grant university in the state for a list of trees and edible and useful plants that will do well in your area. Prior to planting you can refer to Permaculture resources to see if they can help with the implementation. One common feature is building swales either to trap water, guide water to a storage area, or drain it away depending on your need. You might want to consider planting without irrigation if you can design a system that can largely do without it.

 Extension offices often can point to other resources such as small farm educational programs and water and manure management information and sometimes even grants to help you pay for projects. The US Department of Agriculture works with conservation districts that promote the sustainable use of the land and conservation of clean water resources, a concern for any land owner. Conservation districts often have free or almost free plants and trees that are native to the area. The one in our area also has a manure spreader that can be borrowed for free.

 If your focus is on forestry then you will have to become an expert on managing forest resources and you should get to know everyone in your area that is doing the same thing you are so you can learn from their experience. Get to know the fruit and vegetable farmers. Find out which varieties do well and what kind of cultural practices are common to your area. Find out what works for sure and why before you start to experiment on your own. The same goes with livestock. Get to know someone who seems to be doing things well, perhaps by being one of their customers at first, before you decide to buy a bunch of stuff only to find that you don’t like doing it or you were unprepared to care for the project or see it through to the end. The best piece of advice I can give you is to be patient.


You might want to start living solely off of your own resources right away but that takes time and you and your land will have to transition to that goal. Pick a small number of project areas and start building them out. To get started add a few fruit trees, bushes and some livestock, even if it is just a few chickens that you raise for eggs, to create your first community. Learn to think about the things you plant and raise as communities, because they are and understanding how they can work together will help you more than anything. The richer and more diverse the community the less work you will have to do to protect and nurture it otherwise. Start planting and building the infrastructure for your food forest a bit at a time, maybe a thousand square feet, and care well for it the first few years until it seems like it can take care of itself. When that seems like it is working well for you then do more or try a bigger plot. You might be in transition for 20 years but do it in such a way that the next person to come along can see the value of it and will be able carry on with your project.

What Is In Your Food System?

With the news report that Vladimir Putin had banned further exports from Russia of cereal grains like wheat and barley it comes to my mind again today how fragile the food system is in the United States and how the industrialization of growing, processing, and delivering food creates a weak system not to mention one lacking in basic nutrition. Having reconnected with many people in the Los Angeles area recently I began to imagine what would happen to the tens of millions of people in that area, many of them trapped in valleys surrounded by mountains, with little water, and almost no usable land in which to grow food if any one of the known and expected natural or manmade catastrophes were to occur. Being completely dependent on a remote food supply isn’t a situation I would willingly put my family in.

Aside from the creeper disasters like drought that slowly erode an area’s ability to produce food, we have the super volcano in Yosemite ready to go off at any time, an eight foot bulge at a plate convergence running 100 miles up the coastline of Oregon, and wildly variable weather like that which caused late blight to reappear this week again in New York. We will have to wait to see if it creates the kind of destruction to whole fields of crops like it did last year. Too much rain might fall drowning fields or making it impossible to collect a usable crop. Many combinations of all of these and our dependence on the Interstate Highway System that won’t work if people are attempting to flee an area create a multitude of potential crises, some of which might make the atomic bombs I was drilled repeatedly to protect myself from in grade school by hiding under a piece of wood look like a welcome scenario.

Maybe it was this aspect of growing up in the United States that has lulled us into a state of euphoric bliss and denial that anything could ever go wrong. After all, we survived the atomic bomb, the Nazis and Soviet Union, the Korean and Cold War and at the same time were fed the same kind of propaganda that every dictator uses “we are the best country”-meaning that everyone else is second class, “people envy us for our freedom”-the rest of the world exists in oppressed slavery, and “God bless America”-yes we really are that much better than everybody else. With that kind of one-two punch why would anybody ever take off their party shoes?

I remember how unhappy my daughter was once when a family decision was made not to bring certain types of entertainment into the house. My wife and I could not understand what the fuss was about but our thinking is much more like the generation that lived through the dust bowl and Great Depression whereas my daughter is like most people today, needing to be entertained and not understanding the limits we put on spending for consumer goods. Her generation has forgotten the happiness of a long drink of cool clean water after a hard day’s work or what it is like to eat after not having had food for a while. For the most part we take cool clean air and protection from the weather for granted and most of us would be terribly unprepared if we had to live outside without these things.

I am sure that it seems implausible to many people that we should prepare for a disaster on the magnitude of the ones discussed here and reported widely elsewhere. It would make sense to think about our food systems, though, for other reasons. Many people believe that we shouldn’t be eating as much cereal grain as we do. No animal on the planet evolved to live on as much cereal or corn as we eat or feed cows and hogs to fatten them up. We feed them to animals to fatten them up the last few weeks of their life and we eat them because they are cheap to grow and lend themselves to mechanized industrialized processes, not because they have the nutrition we need and despite the fact that they are hard to digest and cause a multitude of health problems.

Cereals and corn make us feel good because they release energy quickly and we have associated that sugar rush and addiction with good health. Sometimes feeling good isn’t so good for you, like the skin rush you get when snorting brown heroin, one of the hazards I was exposed to during my time in the U. S. Army. I survived that and lived to tell the tale so I imagine anyone could decide to make any change they want, if they are strong enough, have the right kind of friends, and realize that in order to be a friend first you have to be strong and true to your real needs and self.