The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.60: We've Missed the Point on GMO Food

Episode Date: October 23, 2015

This episode, I'm joined by farmer and writer Forrest Pritchard, whose September 22, 2015 column in the Huffington Post suggests that the battle to prevent the widespread use and human consumption of GMOs was lost a long time ago, and that GMO opponents' energy could be better put to focusing on the negative effects of, for example, the massive amounts of glyphosates used in conjunction with GMOs, and the scorched-earth effect they have had on our ecosystems. Pritchard's latest book is called Growing Tomorrow: Behind the Scenes with 18 Extraordinary Sustainable Farmers Who Are Changing the Way We Eat.

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. TheRuminant.ca is a website dedicated to sharing good ideas for farmers and gardeners. At The Ruminant, you can find past episodes of this podcast, essays I've written, a few book reviews, and a whole lot of photo-based blog posts, some of which were made by me and some of which were submitted by you. So I hope you'll check it out, TheRuminant.ca. And if you want to get a hold of me, editor at theruminant.ca or at ruminantblog on Twitter. Okay, let's do this show. Hey folks, today's episode features my conversation with Forrest Pritchard, who is a writer of best-selling farm books and who recently wrote a column for the Huffington Post that was

pretty thoughtful in its treatment of the subject of GMOs. And so I invited Forrest to come on and chat with me, and he did, and I think you'll enjoy the interview and I think you should read the article, which will be mentioned in the conversation and linked from theruminant.ca. So before we get to that, I just want to remind you that I would love to hear from you if you have anything to contribute to the podcast. I have been getting a few submissions on the question of what you do in the winter if it's not farming and if you need to make ends meet. I think it'd be great to give other farmers a lot of ideas of possibilities out there. I've had a couple of good submissions but so far neither of those two submissions have resulted in a recording. One submitter didn't want to record and one I'm still waiting to hear back from. So if you'd like to contribute to that

episode I'd love to hear from you. But here's a new question. I would like to do an episode on farming with children, as in the challenge of running a farm and also raising, I guess, young children at the same time. So if you have been there or are currently there and you've gained some insights, some tips for other new parents who are farmers, I'd love to hear from you. In either case, the winter work episode I'm working on or this farming with kids episode or any other insights that you'd like to share, anything you think other farmers would want to know about, get a hold of me, editor at theruminant.ca. You can text me 250-767-6636 and just tell me to get a hold of you. Or you can call my Skype number and leave a message. 310-734-8426. Okay, here is my interview with

Forrest Pritchard. Talk to you at the end. Forrest Pritchard, thanks a lot for coming on the Ruminant Podcast. Of course. Thanks for having me, Jordan. Forrest, I invited you on the show today because of a really thought-provoking article you wrote for the Huffington Post back on September 22nd. The title of the article is, We've Missed the Entire Point About GMO Food. And I thought I would just start with a pretty almost exact quote, slightly paraphrase of something from the article. So here we go. Love GMOs or hate them. When it comes to the bigger picture, it doesn't especially matter. The companies that produce GMO seeds and their affiliate herbicides have already

won. Can you explain what you mean by that, Forrest? what you mean by that, Forrest? Yeah, sure. I mean, our food landscape, you know, whether we're, you know, driving through town right now or having a sandwich or however we're listening to this podcast, is dominated by GMO food

and genetically modified organisms and, you know, just a few ingredients. And that's neither, you know, trying to have a dog in this fight one way or the other, I think is largely irrelevant to a boots on the ground kind of thing because it's already here. It is. It's what we it is it's what we it's what we do it's how we eat and in the article i'll make the point whether you're at ground zero having a sandwich or you know at the drive-thru or you're 35 000 feet in the air we can see it either way you know we can kind of hold it in our hands and eat it and then we can get way up and look down and and see you know two three hundred thousand acres of it all across the country.

That's just kind of a stepping off point. You know, we can get down into, you know, how we want to eat, how we prefer farming to be, you know, how we prefer, you know, our food choices to be available. But the fact is, that's, you know, 97 percent, 96's 97% of our food landscape in 2015. That's just the way it is. Yeah, you suggest this statistic that 9 out of every 10 bites that we collectively eat are created with GMO ingredients. Yeah, that's my understanding.

That's kind of hard maybe for a consumer to say, well, wait a minute, I'm not oils of any kind, which are in almost every food, processed food, bread, all those things, you are eating GMO products. So yeah, it's almost impossible without growing your own food, you know, shopping properly, almost exclusively at farmer's markets, um, did not be, uh, not be having a GMO food as a huge component of our diet, you know, beyond the normal conversation of, you know, whether it's safe to eat or not safe to eat. Um, well, that's a whole nother conversation. Um, but I guess the point I'm making is, is it's just, it's just that ubiquitous, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Well, Forrest, before we get on to talking about some of the concerns you think we should be focusing on with GMOs, I think it's probably important to situate the conversation in the context of your history, because I think it's relevant here. Could you take me back? I guess I'll suggest you start around the mid-90s in terms of, I think that's when you got heavily involved in your multi-generational farm, and just kind of take me through the last 20 years?

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I'm a seven-generation farmer, and in a cultural landscape where only one and a half, two percent of the population is directly involved in our food production, it's really easy to kind of talk past each other. So I think this is a great way to kind of bend that back into a place where we can all kind of get together. kind of get together. So in 1995, 1996, I graduated from college, and I wanted to take over my granddad's farm. He was a successful farmer for 60 years, all through the 20th century. And he was growing. He was a very progressive farmer at the time, which progressive farmer in the 50s, 60s, 70s meant met heavy chemical use, confinement, speed lots, heavy reliance

on machinery, which is all well and good for his time frame. And I kind of thought that if I just did what he had successfully accomplished, which was show up on time, work hard, get your hands dirty, work six and a half days a week, that's kind of the American dream that you can make a good over so that very first year being you know graduating from college with an English degree in a geology degree I had no illusion but I really knew what I was doing in farming so to that end I collaborated with a local local farmer who had about 20 years of experience growing corn, soybean, things of this nature. And we took half of our cattle farm, about 250 acres out of 500, and sprayed it off, killed it off with herbicide. And to put this in historical context, this was more or less the very first year where GMO crops and their affiliate purpose sides were really being pushed hard onto the market and were being widely adopted by farmers all across the country.

You know, under the pretense of these things being valuable agricultural tools, you know, kill off all the competing vegetation and have robust crops of corn and soybeans. It sounds good, right? So we did that, and at the end of the year, we harvested five tractor trailer loads of corn. And, you know, it was kind of like that Scrooge McDuck scene where, you know, a guy's jumping off the diving board into an ocean of gold, right? A five-tracker trailer is a corn. It's a substantial amount of grain.

And, you know, it was our, you know, we never planned to get rich off of it, but we planned to make a profit, like any reasonable business. And we thought reasonably we'd make a profit of about $10,000, enough to pay our taxes, our land taxes, some of our bills, things like that. And on the low end, probably $8,000. And when all the accounting was done between the price of the seeds, the herbicide, the diesel fuel for the tractors, crop insurance, all these things. Our net profit, well, I should say, the farmer came and he said,

well, the profit came out to $1,816, and I was devastated thinking that he meant $1,800 and $1,816, but what he really meant was it came out to $18 and $16. That was the profit on your crop, wow. Yeah, so I mean, you know, come on. That just raised so many specters of doubt for me. And I was confused. Crushed.

I was deflated. But most I was confused where, you know, somebody, you know, it's metric tons. It's railroad cars of corn going off of our farm. Who was making a profit off of it? It wasn't just disappearing into thin air. And it turns out it was practically everybody but the farmer. So I kind of stood back in the wake of looking at my fields, which had been sprayed with herbicide.

Now they were dead. These were perennial pastures um you know which were you know very sustainable um and i had dead fields i had 18 in the pocket and i was just about ready to you know tear it up into a million pieces and and blow it into the wind and go get a haircut and a pair of khakis and a real job but instead what we did was we rebooted the farm entirely. We went in the direction of organic, diversified livestock, raising hundreds of head of cattle and sheep completely grass-fed and finished on pasture, rebuilding our soils through carbon sequestration,

rotational grazing, trampling of pastures, animal manures, and then using pigs and chickens as omnivores to help accentuate that cycle of sustainability. And I make a full-time living now. We have 12 full-time salaries on our farm, and we sell at farmer's markets in the Washington, D.C. area year-round. And that's our story. I just want to clarify one thing. When you first tried going the more conventional route, did you end up trying out GMO seed

in that process or were you still using... Yeah. Yeah, you did. Okay. Yeah, that first year, I i couldn't say the exact variety um i believe it was pioneer at the time which later got bought out um but yeah it was in the it was in the wake of of uh of the zmo seed that was linked either with roundup or some glyphosate product um i don't think the patent had expired on Roundup at that point, so it probably was that variety.

Thank you for us. I just wanted you to tell that story because it just demonstrates that you've tried it. You've been there and you've radically changed how you farm and are now a huge advocate of sustainable practices, organic practices, that sort of thing. a huge advocate of sustainable practices, organic practices, that sort of thing. So just back to your article and some of the points you were making. So, Forrest, one thing that or what your article is really focused on is how those of us who are opposed to GMOs and to, I guess, industrial agriculture, with regards to GMOs, we tend to focus on as we already discussed just the fact that it exists and fighting against that

in which case you've made the point well we're kind of late for that it's kind of here to stay but in your article Forrest if I'm reading it right you suggest that in your view we should be focusing more on other potential problems with GMOs.

And you really focus on just the scorched earth approach to the main GMO crops, which are roundup-ready soybeans and roundup-ready corn, etc. And what that really means. And you use some really interesting satellite images to make your point, which is that prior to these fields being planted, I mean, we are dumping massive amounts of glyphosates on these fields and just killing everything in the farming ecosystem. Yeah, exactly. So it's a complicated, comprehensive question. You know, it starts as basic as the soil and goes all the way through for human health

So it's like, you know, can we talk about this for five hours five days, you know? Sure, we could so the the point of Now to try to make with that is if we get up at about 35,000 feet every April May June we can look down and see the fields Earth that should be green. You know, nature volunteers, something called spring. When trees bud with leaves and flowers begin to bloom and the birds and the bees and all these wonderful things, but we can look down or from the ground and see that it's brown, it's been killed off.

And that's not to say that, you know, organic or, you know, other more mainstream forms of agriculture don't also incorporate things like tillage and, you know, rotational plantings and things like that. But what's happening with the use of glyphosate and other comparable herbicides is we're not just killing off that vegetation. We're killing off soil microbe life. We're killing off desirable, necessary funguses and bacteria, which promote, you know, it's like the canary in the coal mine kind of thing.

Like, these are indicators of healthy, balanced ecosystems. And if we look at this stuff under a microscope, you know, I don't want to get too scientific about this stuff, but all these things are building blocks. It's like, you know, the corner of a house. You don't just go up to the corner of your house and yank out one fourth of it and then pretend like nothing happened. You're going to notice the breeze. Your house is missing. That's exactly what's happening when we're doing this stuff. We're applying these chemicals and we might not see all the dramatic consequences

long term. And the other kind of corollary to all this is, again, when we're driving along through, you know, 10,000 miles of cornfields, or, you know, looking down and seeing all this green, it's not the true picture. If you imagine a piece of, let's just imagine like a, you know, piece of grass paper, and put a little dot right in the center. Well, the rest of the earth around that is barren. It's just a little one square inch of corn and one square foot of dirt. And if you want to take a look at this, you can go to my website, forcepritchard.com.

I've got a photo of that around the website right now of kind of how dramatic it is. So I think it's really easy to kind of get the illusion that we're creating life, but it's like 99% death. I mean, not to be like, you know, too hyperbolic about it. I'm just trying to be factual. But it's interesting when you...

Go off the ground in the spring. Yeah, go ahead. Well, this is when you get to talking about that though i think other farmers immediately uh can infer what you're implying you know what's what's bad about that but but do you think most non-farmers just in hearing those facts like just just about the barrenness of everything around the corn are they are they going to be able to infer what you're implying is wrong with that? Or do you think we need to go deeper in explaining what might be wrong with a field that is completely barren except for these millions of stalks of corn, say? Yeah, yeah.

Well, let's go deeper with that. Who lives out in the desert? Okay. Like, what's our most iconic form of desolation? You know, a picture of a man walking through the desert, you know, with buzzards circling over his head, right? And for all intents and purposes, that is what we've created with this modern agricultural food landscape. It's essentially a desert with an occasional stalk of corn, probably comprising about 2%, maybe 5% out of 100% of a square foot. percent of a square foot uh with a you go up the stalk of corn and you've got a couple kernels of grain that are then going to be turned into uh not even human food right they're going to be turned primarily into ethanol or converted into chicken beef or pork not at the rate of one pound of grain to one pound of chicken but but two, three, as much as seven pounds of grain to make one pound of chicken, pork, or beef, respectively. And, like, what are we accomplishing? as opposed to a sustainable perennial landscape

where we're not only fixing things like soil health, taking carbon straight out of the air, putting it down the ground, but we're actually growing diversified, nutritious food. And our farmers are making a living from it. The reason I really liked your article and it made me think for us was just because, okay, first of all, I'll just jump back to the safety of the GMOs themselves. Not the caloric content, not the nutritional content, just the safety. I don't personally, I don't expect we're going to 30 years from now realize that, oh, the naysayers were right and that GMOs are actually bad for us. I think the science seems like it's pretty settled and I'm just, that's, that's,

that's, that's my view. And I, I just worry. And I think you, it seemed like you were implying, you know, this is well in your article that we, as, as the group of people that are devoted to as well in your article that we, as the group of people that are devoted to challenging the mainstream system, especially with regards to GMOs, are really focused on whether GMOs themselves are dangerous to human health and also, therefore, the labeling issue. And I think your article suggests, well, you know, there's, there's, there's other really important reasons to be concerned about GMOs. Just, just, just, just the, just the industrial system that they reflect, I guess, and what that means for our ecosystems and all the rest and, and, and ultimately human nutrition because of the empty calories that end up being produced, the mass quantity that doesn't necessarily reflect quality.

And so I guess I'm just wondering, my own view is that we need to focus on that more. And that most farmers, I think, when they think about these issues, that's what they're more concerned about because they're more versed in this stuff. I'm wondering if it matters. Does it ultimately matter what is spurring

a a non-farmer um to fight against gmos does it matter that they're completely focused on the safety and the labeling rather than the ecosystem effects or the the intellectual property effects or some of these other in my my opinion, more valid concerns? Well, yeah. I mean, I hear you loud and clear. It's a complicated question. I would say that knowledge is empowering. The more we know about our food system, the more we're able to affect changes that we

want. able to affect changes that we want. I think it has a cumulative effect of not only, you know, consumers who are, you know, now at this point, multi-generationally removed from the actual physical act of farming to get them more understanding about the complexities about the way our food system has evolved and to create positive peer pressure from an economic standpoint to influence agricultural change. Okay, so I'm just going to change tacks here for us. You've written a lot about farmer's market culture, and I think it's fair to say that that farmers

markets the way they tend to be structured in North America tend to be filled out by farmers who tend to be engaged in more sustainable practices so is that fair to say I better ask you that yeah that's that's that's entirely possible I don't know that to be a fact. Okay, well, let me just create a hypothetical that is not that far-fetched. Let's say that you have a farmer's market that is almost entirely composed of organic vendors, which my farmer's market that I attend with my farm is more or less, that's the case. I see a lot of my colleagues taking advantage of people's concerns and fears around GMOs by specifically advertising no GMOs on their table. And part of

me feels it's a little bit irresponsible because, I mean, for example, what I try and do when a customer comes up, I get customers coming up all the time and asking if my stuff has GMOs and an easy one is just to say, well, my stuff's organic and so it's not allowed to have GMOs. So don't worry. But I try and go further and say, look, at this farmer's market that features farmers growing mostly vegetables and whatever other stuff, you know, you are very, very unlikely to encounter a GMO anywhere at a farmer's market. Right.

And then if I have time, I'll say, look, these are the main crops that contain, that are GMOs. And, and so if you really think about it, unless you're talking about some non-organic meat at this market, you're not likely to encounter it and and whatever i'm what i'm getting at is i feel like we have a responsibility to take it a bit further in those conversations and point that stuff out and i think there's just a potential conflict of interest because as you pointed out before we're all profit seeking and there's nothing wrong with that and i'm just wondering if you think we have a responsibility or if it's not our problem. Well, yeah, I think, again, that's probably going to be a case-by-case basis.

I think that farmer's markets are the ideal place you go to ask questions. So if we want to have that deeper conversation or if we find someone that's promoting that and we want to question them about that, that's where you go. I mean, that's one of the greatest benefits of going to a farmers market you get to know your producer have these conversations promote education transparency coming and going to wit you know on the flip side of that coin for many years like this there's chicken commercials that were everywhere saying you know our

chicken is doesn't have any, no added hormones. You know, we saw that for like 10 years. Well, chickens never were given hormones. You know, it's like saying like, our chickens don't drive Mercedes Benz. You know what I mean? Yeah. Saying that is irrelevant,

but that was something on the other side of the coin that we're trying to, you know, kind of create a fictional, a fictitious pushback to say something that had no bearing on the product anyway. To say, you know, the chickens were raised outdoors, the chickens weren't raised with antibiotics or something like that, that wasn't relevant. But, you know, to say they weren't raised with hormones, that was a moot point, because no chickens are given hormones. raised with hormones, that was a moot point because they weren't nurturing their given hormones. On the same token, we see some of that pushback

against non-GMOs where that's probably a moot point, exactly where you point out, pick up the vegetables. You know, I think that needs to be called out, certainly on both sides, and maybe sometimes it's done with good intentions. So yeah, definitely a conversation to be having. Yeah, and, and maybe sometimes it's done with good intentions. Um, so yeah, definitely conversation to be having. Yeah. I mean, I just, it's why I was grateful for your article and,

and that it was published in, in a mainstream publication like, like HuffPo. Um, I just, I think, I think we need to do our best to stop stoking fears and try and get the average eater's understanding of some of the other problems with GMOs. You know, go a little deeper with people. And I think it could start with not stoking those fears by putting giant signs up on the market stall that say no GMOs when there's probably no GMO anywhere in that market, you know? Yeah, I agree. You know, that entire, you know, fear and anxiety and anger are certainly, you know, our lower human emotions.

And I think everyone would agree with that. our lower human emotions, and I think everyone would agree with that, and yet we have entire, you know, media and news and media outlets that are precisely set up to, you know, to stoke fear and anger and confusion and suspicion and all these things. So, you know, what are you going to do? What are you going to do with all that? At the end of the day, accept, try to enact positive change. And, you know, more than anything, I think that's what I was trying to do with this article,

was just to kind of point out, hey, we can see this. It's right around us. We can look out our windows. At ground level, we can look out our windows from an airplane seat and begin to ask questions that are maybe not more important than the nutrition and the labeling, but at least equally important. What effect does this have on our ecology? What effect does this have from a global standpoint?

Well, Forrest, before we say goodbye, I just want to ask you about your new book. The book you're really well known for is Gaining Ground, a story of farmers' markets, local food, and saving the family farm. And that was a bestseller, and I'm sure this new one is on its way to becoming one. That was a bestseller, and I'm sure this new one is on its way to becoming one. It's called Growing Tomorrow Behind the Scenes with 18 Extraordinary Sustainable Farmers. I thought you could tell us about it. First of all, I'll say it must have been a fun book to research.

Oh, man. As a full-time farmer, I just rarely ever got to travel more than just a couple hours in each direction. So last summer, I played some intentional hooky and flew around the country on a long, deferred vacation, still doing farm targets on the weekends, but flying to a bunch of farms all over the country, very different farms, multigenerational, different faces, different ages, all, frankly, growing very different types of food from all corners of America. Yeah, it was a labor of love, and I think it shines through on the pages. Do you want to quickly talk about one of the farmers you profiled in the book? Yeah, yeah.

you profiled in the book? Yeah. Yeah, so truly, it's, you know, the book ranges from Cape Cod to Santa Fe to the Puget Sound all the way down to, you know, Atlanta, Georgia. And such a,

so many fascinating farms. One of my favorite stories is some urban beekeepers in downtown Dallas. You know, when we think about farmers, we think about probably, you know, the traditional red barn on the hill and, you know, 100 acres of vegetables or cows and chickens in the distance.

But we don't think about downtown urban landscapes. And a really neat couple, Brandon and Susan Pollard, in downtown Dallas now for well over a decade have been putting out urban beehives onto rooftops, onto hotels, onto local businesses, and raising what's called zip code honey. We know for a fact that honeybees range about three to five miles. So they're putting bees in downtown Dallas, and the bees just, you know, just physically don't go beyond the city limits. So we know that all the honey that they're creating is being harvested through, you know,

banded lines growing in sidewalk cracks, flower boxes on windowsills, things of that nature. So not only, you know, are they growing food in the middle of Dallas, Texas, which is crazy enough, but these animals are actually harvesting the wild forage through negligent things we don't even think about as we go about our day. Just stories like that. It's just incredible, hopeful stories that are happening all around us. So where can people find the book, Forrest? Oh, wherever books are sold. So, yeah, it should be at almost every local bookstore around the country, certainly Barnes & Noble.

And if you are 100 miles from your local bookstore, you can just go on Amazon and grab it there. So, yeah, it's everywhere. Well, Forrest Pritchard, thanks very much for taking the time to come on the show. I really appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. And thanks for the good work you do. All right, that's it, folks.

So, look, before I say goodbye, please put your thinking caps on and think about an insight you could share with me to share on the podcast. It would really help me out because generating new episode content is challenging. And because I can't

and we can't keep relying on Scott Humphries and Dan Brisbois to carry the rest of us along in terms of content generation. So please get a hold of me. It will only take a moment or two, and I'll do all the rest. I'll get a hold of you, rig up the recording equipment, and we'll get something on tape that I'm sure your fellow listeners would love to hear. Editor at theruminant.ca. That's where you can email me to get the whole process started.

Thanks and have a great week. Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country Thinking some real soul searching and here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some fancy car To keep my love going strong so we'll run right out into the wilds and braces we'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be

like it was meant to be I'm sorry. for a banana in the tailpipe. You're not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe? It should be more natural, brother. It should flow out like this. Look, man, I ain't falling for no banana in my tailpipe! See, that's more natural for us. You've been hanging out with this dude too long.