For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Millions Against Monsanto page, Environment and Climate Resource Center page and our Missouri News page.

This article first appeared in Acres USA
magazine, November 2013.

Expressing gratitude for food, health and family is a consistent thread woven through every culture, ethnicity and political ideology. Food is our common denominator; it provides sustenance and brings us together. But when we become removed from our food system, when food is abundant and seemingly “cheap,” we run the risk of taking it for granted. That’s a dangerous place to be.

Martha Folk and Bernadette Dryden work diligently on preserving the connections between farmer and consumer. Together with a small group of individuals, they formed Slow Food Katy Trail, the mid-Missouri chapter of Slow Food U.S.A. One of their projects brings farmers into city schools to introduce children to the people who feed them. Through their taste buds, children learn that farm-fresh foods taste best.

Folk and Dryden’s mission, along with local food advocates all over the globe, is to anticipate, celebrate and appreciate seasonal and regional foods, and help others fall in love with the food traditions which define our lives over time.

Unfortunately, in a fast-food nation where food tastes the same regardless of your geographic location, and where we can find strawberries in supermarkets any time of the year, it becomes all too easy not to know, or care, how food gets to our plates.

Memory of a Potluck
At our mid-summer Slow Food potluck at Margo McMillen’s Terra Bella Farm, just outside Columbia, Missouri, Folk stood back from the buffet table, smiled contentedly and announced: “This is what summer tastes like.” She was admiring plates piled high with sliced heirloom tomatoes, cucumber salad, watermelon wedges, peach salsa, sweet corn pudding and tall sweating glasses of basil lemonade. We all chimed in with our own accolades and took an unspoken vow to never take this bounty for granted.

McMillen describes her farm as a “diverse landscape” of 160 rolling acres, divided into pasture, woods, crops and a historic homestead. Her mission is to provide “food for the local community, arts for all, and health for the rural community, including farmers.”
 
She  tries  to  set  an  example  for  her neighbors, showing them how to have bountiful harvests with greater diversity and fewer chemicals. But on this warm summer night, she casually mentioned some damage she’d witnessed to her grapevines. She didn’t know what hit them — a fungus, a disease; she wasn’t sure.

So after the dishes were scraped, chairs folded and guests scattered, my husband and I set out to investigate and photograph the damage. How sad, we thought, that this fruit will fail to develop and produce an abundance of sweet concord juice.

Damage Identified, Problem Magnified
Still curious to learn what damaged her vines, McMillen passed our photos along to a grape and wine expert at the University of Missouri who declared a verdict of 2,4-D drift.

Terra Bella Farm is nestled between neighboring farms that produce commodity GMO corn and soybeans, engineered to resist spraying with the herbicide glyphosate. But as any good farmer knows, weeds naturally develop resistance to the herbicides designed to kill them. So as weeds become increasingly problem- atic, farmers pull out stronger and more dangerous herbicides from their arsenal, most recently,  2,4-D and dicamba.

Manufacturers advertise and county extension agents recommend these stronger chemicals, offering guidance on how to spray to minimize drift. But these products are not without risk to the farmer’s health, the farmer’s children’s health, our environment and our food security — a piece missing from manufacturers’ marketing.

McMillen explains that “2,4-D and dicamba are prone to volatilize in hot weather, moving vaporous clouds to new areas that might be even miles away.”

“All homeowners and producers of specialty crops are at risk of this movement, which can occur even by the safest methods of application,” says Steve Smith, director of agriculture at Red Gold Premium Tomato and Food Products, in Elwood, Indiana.

As chairman of the Save Our Crops Coalition, Smith petitioned the USDA to hold off on approving new GMO commodity crops engineered with resistance to 2,4-D and dicamba until their environmental impact could be better assessed. But Smith warns that if the crops are approved for release, herbicide applications will increase and occur during times “when surrounding vegetation is most vulnerable.”

“The risk is great and the odds of receiving compensation is low,” Smith adds. “Not every spray event will result in problems, but if there are 100 million acres of dicamba applied in the Midwest, and only 2 percent result in problems, that is exposure coming from 2 million acres onto someone else’s property.”

Why We Can’t All Get Along
With support  from  agri-business, the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance “Food Dialogues” events promote the notion that GM crops are safe, and that there’s room for all kinds of agriculture. But the chemicals used with GM crops are not safe, and when one family farm loses their crop, and income, due to another farmer’s use of chemicals, some American farmers will lose their freedom to farm. For local food consumers, the damage spells disaster.

Dave Scurlock, a viticulture outreach specialist at Ohio State University and Doug Doohan, with OSU’s horticulture department, report that grapevines in nearly every vineyard they visited this year have shown symptoms of 2,4-D injury. One vineyard located near a soybean field suffered a 2,4-D drift incident which resulted in a complete crop loss.
 
R. Thomas Zumpfe of Dove Landing Vineyard in Nebraska has been working on legislation “to restrict the use of 2,4-D and dicamba during certain months of the year to stop the loss of grape crop and vines due to herbicide drift.”

But grapes, and field and greenhouse tomatoes aren’t the only crops at risk. Scurlock and Doohan say, “Broadleaf plants are 100 times or more sensitive to 2,4-D than to glyphosate.” And herbicide concentrations as little as 1/1000th of a field rate can cause harm. With “imminent introduction of 2,4-D and dicamba- tolerant soybeans,” they say we can expect more non-target crop damage.

Trees are at risk too. According to an arborist who has worked on McMillen’s farm, “Trees all over the county are dying this summer.” And it hasn’t been due to drought or excessive heat.

Barton Holmquist, a member of the Nebraska Grape Board, worries not only about the continuous toxic effect to his vines, but also to man. “If my grapes are showing so much toxicity, what about me and my neighbors?”

Good question. We know that birth defects and certain cancers are greater among populations exposed to chemicals such as 2,4-D and dicamba. These chemicals put our children — our future — at risk.
 
For example, in the early 1990s, Klaas Martens, a well-respected farmer in New York State and a fellow member of the Organic Farming Research Foundation board, was personally harmed  by a “chemical cocktail” containing 2,4-D, leaving his right arm paralyzed for part of a year. That’s when he gave up trying to chase weed resistance with more chemicals, and became an organic farmer.

Martens cites “the old German weed scientist, Dr. Rademacher,” who in 1939 told his students that “herbicides would become short-term fixes to weed problems. They would never become long-term solutions.”

In addition to farmer illness, Martens understands that we are all at risk from the chemicals in our environment. “No one can escape what is in the water, the air and all around us.”

Red Alert: Save Our Crops, Save Our Health and Protect Our Economy
Losing access to local fruit and vegetable harvests due to off-target herbicide drifts comes with another set of costs: increased rates of chronic disease related to poor diet.

In August, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report showing that simply eating more servings of fruits and vegetables could slash our nation’s rising health care costs and return billions of health care dollars to the U.S. economy. UCS estimates a savings of $17 billion, just from cardiovascular disease alone.

If we lose access to fresh fruits and vegetables, we lose access to nature’s preventive medicine.

How can we even begin to add up the full costs of losing our local food economy? How do you put a price on the taste of a vine-ripened heirloom tomato, or the experience of biting into a juicy, just-picked peach? How do we begin to calculate the loss of our pollinators? Or the fragrance of native flowers?

I sense we are at a watershed moment in our agricultural history. We must stop the new generation of GMO crops, with resistance to 2,4-D and dicamba, before it’s too late.

Mother Nature is giving us a warning. It’s up to us to pay attention, sound the alarm, and save ourselves.
 
Take Action
McMillen says she’s  heard “the  way to deal with grief is to tell the story over and over.” Let’s join her. Tell your stories of herbicide drift, crop loss and pesticide- related illness. Talk to your legislators. Invite them to your farm, ask them to dinner. Try calling our Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack at 202-720-3631. Together, let’s connect the dots and blow holes in the myths spun by agribusiness and chemical corporations.

Let’s be grateful this season for our harvest, and our voices. Now is the time to speak up and out for our children, our food and our rural communities: no more chemical warfare.

I wish you a blessed Thanksgiving feast to nourish your good health.

Resources:
Beyond Pesticides: www.beyondpesticides.org

“Birth malformations and other adverse prenatal outcomes in four U.S. Wheat-producing states,” Schreinemachers, D.,
Environmental Health Perspectives, July 2003: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241584

“Dicamba,”
Journal of Pesticide Reform, Spring 1994: www.pesticide.org/get-the-facts/pesticide-factsheets/factsheets/dicamba.

DriftWatch: National Specialty Crop Site Registry: driftwatch.org.

“The $11 Trillion Reward: How Simple Dietary Changes Can Save Lives and Money, and How We Get There,” Union of Concerned Scientists, August 2013.

“Herbicide Drift Plagues Ohio Vineyards in 2013,” Doohan, D., and Scurlock, D., Ohio State University.

“Organic, Specialty Crops, and Gardens Caught in the Crossfire: The War on Roundup Resistant Weeds Threatens Impending Harm,” Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service: www.mosesorganic.org/attachments/broadcaster/Obonline215.html#11

“Pesticides Will Kill the Planet,” Margot Ford McMillen,
The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2013: www.populist.com/16.15.mcmillen.html

Pesticide Action Network of North America: www.panna.org/currentcampaigns/24D

Save Our Crops Coalition: www.saveourcrops.org

Melinda Hemmelgarn is a registered dietitian, freelance writer and radio host based in Columbia, Missouri. Listen to Food Sleuth radio online at www.kopn.org. You can reach her at foodsleuth@gmail.com.

©Melinda Hemmelgarn