Do you know the consequences of calling some food “organic” and others not organic?
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This Friday and Saturday, I will be attending the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) Organic Farming Conference (OFC) in La Crosse, Wisconsin. By the time I had hear about it last year, it was too late to go, so this year I had it marked on my calendar, and I contacted the organizers months ago about a media pass. Now with my cheap hotel room reserved and fuel in the car I’m all set to go. What will I find at the conference? This is the first conference of this type that I have gone to, although I have been to an organic show-and-tell shindig here at the UW, this conference will be new to me. From looking at the schedule, it seems that it is mostly oriented toward farmers, but there should be plenty for me to check out. The first thing I will see when I get there is the seed swap, which will be a first for me. There is a possibility that I will be able to interview someone about seed saving and/or backyard breeding. Otherwise I’ll take a good look around and maybe get some comments from people. Saturday will be an interesting day for me, though.
Continue reading… We’ve all heard about the tragic suicides of farmers in India, and we’ve all seen blame placed on Bt cotton. Vandana Shiva has been a leading finger pointer, saying that farmer suicides are due to genetically engineered crops (specifically, due to Monsanto), as in the April 2009 post From Seeds of Suicide to Seeds of Hope: Why Are Indian Farmers Committing Suicide and How Can We Stop This Tragedy?, instead of focusing on
Snow* is an evolutionary biologist and ecologist who’s been running an interesting experiment on wild radishes for more than a decade now. In the 90′s, when transgenic crops like Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybean were beginning to dominant the market (and the landscape), there were concerns that wild relatives would incorporate the transgenes and spread as superweeds. Corn and soybean, with their lack of compatible relatives in the US, are exempt from this concern. However, as more and more transgenic crops with compatible relatives come down the pipeline (and with some, like canola, already here) there needs to be some hard data on just how easily transgenes can persist and spread in wild populations.
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Now Serving 9 Billion video
Not too long ago, a few of us participated in the twitterpated webcast put on by Croplife, BIO and CAST called Now Serving 9 Billion: Global Dialogue on Meeting Food Needs for the Next Generation. We watched a live webcast, sent in questions, and followed the conversation in twitter with the hashtag #agcast. It was a pretty fun two hours because not only were people discussing the webcast real-time, the discussion was leaking into the webcast itself in the form of comments and questions being read from it. Very cool and 2.0-ish. Alex Rinkus from Croplife has provided a link to the entire webcast on Vimeo, feel free to watch the whole thing. I will make a few several comments after the fold.
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