Boulder County allowing farmers to grow GMOs on open space after organic utopia didn’t materialize
Schlagel knows full well that farming public land in Boulder County is performative, visually and politically. As he wheels the John Deere around the cornfield he harvested in November, third-floor patients from UC Health’s Longs Peak Hospital on the east side of Longmont can watch him make the dust fly. He’s been willing to work within that constant judgment of Boulder County consumers.
But he’s not willing to lose his family farm raising crops that people won’t pay for.
“It’s hard for people living in the city of Boulder, and even on the western side of Boulder County, to understand what real agriculture even looks like,” Schlagel said. The crop bans were “a mandate from somebody that we’re going to transition to something better that is very naive. Because if there was something better, we would already be there.”
Now, after years of debate and voluminous series of reports and public comment, Schlagel and other Boulder County lease farmers can plant what they want. The farmers convinced Boulder County leaders that they couldn’t survive while adhering to prohibition of genetically engineered corn and pesticide coatings using controversial neonicotinoids.
Some Boulder County residents are still angry. They feel a new slate of Boulder County Commissioners sold them out after years of detailed public debate and a consensus to slowly restrict engineered farming methods. Based on staff recommendations and their own research, the commissioners voted 3 to 0 in December to reverse the scheduled bans and restore choice to the leasing farmers.
A better lesson than debating the merits of organic agriculture (which, IMHO, is more or less a tax on deluded rich people much like gambling is a tax on stupidity) is since when did Soviet agriculture become back in vogue? What is a county government doing sitting on ag land? Sell it off and stick to road maintenance.
But, but, but … if the government sells their surplus land … they won’t be able to CONTROL it. And CONTROL is what drives every little twit in government. How many more paeans can they control? How much more social engineering can they FORCE upon the plebes? That is all government appears focused on in the last 25 years. Fill potholes? Ha! Here in CA … the government (at all levels) places new tax increases on the ballot to fund the roadwork they should have been doing all along … but instead blow the budget on wokist nonsense. The taxpayers are being butt-raped by government
Through long experience, it has ceased to be a surprise when yet ANOTHER group decides that farmers don’t know what we are doing or what is good for us, but it does get tiresome.
The assumption is that we don’t care if we destroy the land, which is our most valuable asset, worth millions per far,
The assumption is that we don’t care if we poison our customers – without whom, we don’t have an income.
The assumption is that we hate and despise animals, despite having chosen to spend our lives working with them….. because people who don’t, know better.
The assumption is that sick, malnourished and stressed-out animals are somehow more profitable than healthy, PRODUCTIVE livestock.
But they watched a Disney-flim, so they know better than the people who actually Do. The. Job.
Absolutely! And as the farmer quipped … “if there was a better way (non-GMO “organics”) then we would already be doing it”. Duh! Hey government twits! The Free Market will CRUSH any and all of your stupid ideas.
Organic farming systems are, on average, 30% less productive than conventional agriculture. Those who practice it, make their profits by selling to the wealthy at inflated prices.
Those who advocate such systems on a world-wide scale, must be made to explain how they expect to feed the world high-quality food while reducing food production by 1/3.
We will probably have a taste of this over the next 12 months. Half the world’s protein is produced through the use of nitrogen fertilisers…… the price of which has been increased to the point where many of us are reducing plantings because the costs of growing crops with those inputs are higher than consumers are willing to pay, now. When the price of food rises, think about this.
“Organic farming systems are, on average, 30% less productive than conventional agriculture. ”
In these parts, it seems that most organic farmers are having bumper crops … of weeds.
Thistle farming in our neck of the woods.
Norman Borlaug, inventor of Golden Rice and often credited with thusly saving the lives of millions, possibly billions of people from starvation, once said “you can’t feed more than 4 billion people on an organic diet”.
Although Clarkson’s Farm is just calculated image rehabilitation, it’s refreshingly honest in that it shows, starkly, what actually happens when Clarkson’s desire to live a largely imaginary bucolic life as a farmer runs up against the reality of farming and the nest of bureaucratic regulations governing farming in the UK. I seem to recall that at the end of the year he worked out that he’d made approximately 44p a day in profit.
And that profit ONLY because he had opened an illegal store to illegally sell his produce direct to the public. And only sold because of his personal notoriety.
The same idiots who protest GMO foods and neonicotinoids will insist that the mRNA vaccines are completely safe and we should “trust the science”, despite the fact that there is no long term study to back up that claim.
DNA in GMO food is destroyed by chewing and saliva before it journeys on to your stomach. mRNA therapies combine with the DNA in your cells to produce cells with COVID genetic signatures in hopes that your immune system creates anti-bodies that will hunt them down and destroy them.
Those against GMO are usually in full favour of mRNA therapies.
Ouch! If leftists weren’t inconsistent … they’d have no consistency at all.
My only complaint of RoundUp Ready Canola is that Monsanto didn’t take into consideration how farmers operate. Neither did they do a very good job explaining how they wanted things to work. Monsanto sued farmers for the very common practise of keeping seed for sowing the following year. As a business decision, I wouldn’t take out a contract with Monsanto for that very reason.
“Monsanto didn’t take into consideration how farmers operate. Neither did they do a very good job explaining how they wanted things to work.”
Au contraire. It was crystal clear. And the reason Monsato had that provision is because it understood exactly how farmers traditionally operated.
If you accept the principles of evolution, then you are accepting that EVERYTHING you eat is genetically modified, and mostly at random without the slightest concern for the welfare of the eater.
Which might be why only a tiny fraction of the plant kingdom is actually human-edible.
Remember….
“Belladonna and Hemlock are herbs, and arsenic is a naturally-occurring mineral”.
Belladonna and Hemlock are herbs
They’re related to peppers and tomatoes; I have seen people get lockjaw from eating monstrously hot chicken wing sauce.
“Because if there was something better, we would already be there.”
Hello those pushing EVs powered by solar and wind! Are you listening?