Why should people who love regenerative organic food take a stand for peace? Here’s one of many reasons:

Decontaminating land poisoned with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers is a wicked problem, but farms sown with cluster bombs and land mines are beyond the power of agriculturalists to recover, no matter how regenerative their practices.

It would take 1,100 years to remove all of the unexploded ordinances, if no new ones were laid.

The U.S. is not a party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions and has been sending them to Ukraine.

Here’s another reason to oppose war:

The same genetic engineering techniques used to make Frankenfoods are also being used to create biological weapons.

The use of biological weapons, cluster bombs and depleted uranium, are war crimes under the international treaties that ban them. These weapons have been outlawed because they disproportionately kill defenseless people—95 percent of the time.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress, No More Money for War!

Share your vision for peace with a Planting Peace bumper sticker! We will send you a “Planting Peace Negotiate Don’t Escalate!” bumper sticker for any donation amount. Click here to donate

By Scott Faber, EWG:

“Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently pleaded with Congress to reform farm policies to serve the “many and the most,” not the few, citing data showing family farms lagging behind their bigger neighbors.

Maintaining the status quo on farm policies “leads towards too many producers, particularly small producers, struggling to cover their costs, too many rural communities languishing, and . . . outdated agricultural policies . . . that all too often reinforce systemic inequities,” he said.

‘This path works for a few who have done what American agricultural economics has for too long required of them: to get big or get out.’

Another path, Vilsack concluded, recognizes the need for greater equity in food and farm programs and the “undeniable” challenges of climate change. This path, he said, “compels us to take transformative action.”

We must ask ourselves: do we want a system that continues to force the big to get bigger and the small . . . to get out?’

Let Congress know there’s a mass movement of farmers and foodies who aren’t going to tolerate a business-as-usual approach to the Farm Bill!

Take Action: Demand a Better Farm Bill!

Read ‘Farm Bill for the Few?’

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola:

Anthropological research suggests laughter and humor are genetically built-in, and that humor, historically, has functioned as “a social glue.” The critical laughter trigger for most people is not necessarily a joke or funny movie, but rather another person.

Laughter is contagious. The sound of laughter triggers regions in the premotor cortical region of your brain, which is involved in moving your facial muscles to correspond with sound.

While children laugh on average 300 times a day, adults laugh only 17 times a day on average.

Suggestions for how to get more laughter in your life are included in this article.

Read about the health benefits of laughter and more

Joint statement from Lanka Organic Agriculture Movement, EarthRestoration, Navdanya, Regeneration International, and Organic Consumers Association:

Agribusiness cartels and media articles stated that Sri Lanka’s economic chaos was caused by the government forcing the country to go organic.

These articles’ familiar false narratives, untruths, and language style show spin doctors wrote them from a PR company employed by pesticide/big agriculture cartels. They were cut and pasted by poor-quality journalists who did not fact-check.

The narrative was that the government forced farmers to become organic by banning chemical fertilizers. This caused crop failures and food shortages, which caused the riots causing economic chaos.

This is a gross distortion of the truth by falsely connecting dots. The economic chaos was not caused by the country going organic, as it hadn’t gone organic. The government was only planning to do so in the future.

Sri Lanka’s Economic Troubles

Sri Lanka was in severe economic trouble due to the build-up of financial debt caused by a combination of factors that began with the crippling financial drain, infrastructure damage, and social disruption of the decades-long civil war.

Read about why the ban on chemical fertilizers and agrochemicals was not to turn Sri Lanka into an organic country; it was to reduce Sri Lanka’s crippling national debt and more.

Max Goldberg, Founder, Organic Insider:

Into the Weeds: Dewayne “Lee” Johnson vs. Monsanto Company

“The film follows the heroic plight of Lee Johnson, a groundskeeper from California, who suffers excess exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate weedkiller Ranger Pro, a commercial-grade variant of Roundup — the most widely used herbicide in the world.

Unbeknownst to him, exposure to this toxic chemical — one that is linked to cancer, kidney and liver disease, endocrine disruption, and microbiome disruption in humans, soil, insects and plants — would soon lead to Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and litigation against Monsanto itself.

Critical to the whole case was something known as The Monsanto Papers, a collection of documents that were obtained during the pre-trial discovery process, where prosecutors received access to a slew of internal Monsanto emails, texts, studies and reports. The scientific manipulation, collusion with the EPA, harassment of journalists, ghostwriting and other previously unknown information all painted a clear picture to the jury about what Monsanto knew and how it operated, both of which helped secure a victory for Lee Johnson.”

Learn about “regulatory capture”, what allowed this entire story to unfold in the first place.

OCA can promise you that we will not give up our common struggle Hasta la Victoria, until victory. We intend to shut down the biolabs; drive GMOs, toxic pesticides, and chemicals off the market; expose unregulated and unlabeled gene-editing and synthetic biology as just another manifestation of reckless genetic engineering, and educate and mobilize the grassroots so we can build an organic and regenerative future where food as medicine, planting peace, and participatory democracy are the norm, not just the wished-for alternative.

But we need your help to carry on our crucial, indeed sacred, mission.

We thank you for your ongoing support. But if you haven’t donated recently, please consider giving us a donation today.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Make a tax-deductible donation to Regeneration International, our international sister organization

Order your OCA “Planting Peace” bumper stickers from our Minnesota office

USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) writes:

“In collaboration with Native American plant authorities, NRCS plant material centers, and university specialists, has assembled a series of culturally significant plant guides and technical notes for each NRCS region. These guides can help Native American tribes and NRCS field offices to establish and manage culturally significant plants and restore traditional gathering sites.

These guides provide information and images of plant species that play a significant role in the lives of Native Americans involved in cultural activities utilizing plants.The guides feature one native plant species each, and provide botanical identifying features, morphology, general information about the plant’s reproductive biology, range, distribution, and habitat requirements.

Each guide has a horticultural section with tips on how to collect seed, propagate and grow the plant, and how to maintain existing stands of the plant with standard and indigenous horticultural practices.

Guides also contain cultural information about where the plant grows, when and how it is harvested, how it is prepared and used, and its general role in maintaining tribal ethnicity.

There is a list of possible seed and container sources, a bibliography of references, and images if available.

Pertinent links to other sites containing ethnobotanical species abstracts are also included.

Click here for a list of plants for which we have Culturally Significant Plant Guides.”

Destiny Herbers, Flatwater Free Press
writes:

“Land ownership on the Winnebago Reservation had gone in only one direction—away from Native tribes and farmers. Until recently, when several tribes decided to change that.

“When you asked a student at my high school what a farmer looks like they would tell you a white guy with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat on,” said LaPointe, senior director of business operations for Ho-Chunk, Inc. “They didn’t see themselves as farmers, they just thought that’s what the white guys do. And we just let them use our land to do that.”

That perception is rooted in a century of reality. The tribe only owns roughly 27,000 acres of its 120,000-acre reservation, after U.S. government actions directly or indirectly led its farmland to pass into non-Native hands— mostly white farmers.

But that reality is starting to change. In the past five years, three Nebraska tribes—the Winnebago, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska—have bought a combined 3,000-odd acres of farmland that was once theirs.”

Read more about why tribes often pay far more for land and why food sovereignty is so important to them.

By Susan D’Agostino, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

AI Godfather’ Yoshua Bengio, Excerpt:

“Depending on how cautious we end up being collectively, we could more or less contain the risks with national regulation and international treaties. It’s important, like for nuclear treaties, to have minimal standards across nations. The harms that AI could do are not bounded by national borders.

There’s no 100 percent guarantee that nothing bad will happen. Even if we had an international treaty that bans AI more powerful than some level, somebody will disrespect those constraints. But delaying that by, say, 10 years would be great. In that time, we might improve our monitoring. We might improve our defenses. We might better understand the risks.

Time is of the essence, and regulation can reduce the probabilities of catastrophes or, equivalently, push back the time when something really bad is going to happen. Or minimize the amplitude of what may happen.

Unfortunately, the dropping of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki really is the reason why governments came around the table and were willing to discuss, despite the Cold War. I hope we don’t need to have that level of catastrophe before we act. But it may come to that.”

Read more: Susan D’Agostino, PhD interviews Yoshua Bengio about why AI needs regulation

Morgaine Lee, Natural Grocers, writes:

“Gathering maple tree sap to make sweet syrup for food and medicine is an ancient practice created by the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wabanaki people of northeastern North America. From pancakes to salmon, the sweet syrup was, and still is, used to cure meats, sweeten bitter medicines, and bring a warm sugary and woody flavour to breakfasts and dinners alike. This thousands-of-years-old tradition continues to offer a spoonful of manganese, potassium, and antioxidants with its syrupy sweetness.

There is a common misconception that organic and conventional maple syrups are not all that different. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While the use of pesticides may not be common, they are still used in conventional syrup production, including the use of glyphosate. But there’s so much more to organic maple syrup production. The organic certification includes an extensive list of requirements to protect biodiversity in the sugar bush (forest of maple trees) including other plants, animals, and microorganism. Other plants, animals, and insects are encouraged to live in and around the maple trees, keeping the soils rich and diverse, as opposed to monocropping. In Vermont, these specifications also include maintaining a range of young and old maples. To protect the soil and water in the area, nearby roads must be kept to a minimum and tapped trees cannot be marked with prohibited substances like synthetic paints. There are limits and specification for how many taps per tree and where to place them. Organic maple syrup certification means sustainably keeping whole forests biodiverse and thriving.”

Read more

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