On Saturday, February 14, 2015 at 10:45:45 AM UTC-5, songbird wrote:


if i don't want GMO crops, i have zero tolerance for
them, i don't see that as a problem, i do not want
GMO anything on my land. i am being forced to accept
contamination constantly.


When you have a zero tolearance policy, it frequently is
a problem. How about if I have a zero tolerance policy
with regard to some small amount of dust coming onto
my property when my neighbor mows his lawn? You could
come up with plenty of similar examples.




this is not an issue of a radical liberal, it's the
opinion of someone understands that if someone damages
me or my land it is a crime.

Apparenly prosecutors disagree. I don't see anyone being
charged criminally and looks like even in civil court your
side isn't winning.



personal property is
the issue and personal values. i don't want poison on
my land. i don't spray it any longer and i don't want
it in the air or in the water or in the dust or in
the pollen. what is hard to understand about that?


Nothing hard to understand. It's just that it's an extreme
position. There is no scientific evidence that GMO is poison.
And the courts apparently don't agree with you. I could
believe that my neighbor's dust is poison too.





Which doesn't surprise me, because in almost every case I've seen,
the environmental, hippie nuts are totally unreasonable. So, I wouldn't
be surprised that they had some extreme, zero tolerance standard
because they have an irrational fear of GMO and many other things.

it isn't irrational to want to keep our plants
uncontaminated by GMO technologies no matter if
those technolgies are found to be harmful later on
or not. i already think they have been shown to
be harmful so i do not want any of them around.


You're entitled to your opinion. Most scientists and the
courts disagree. So far, in all these two threads about GMO,
I haven't seen one actual scientific paper cited that shows
GMO is poison, dangerous or harmful.




in my own area there are GMO beets, corn and
soybeans grown (and probably others) these are forced
upon me in that i have no way to isolate my crops from
the surrounding fields. my only recourse is to not
grow them.

Why is that the only recourse? From what I understand, your
whole crop won't become contaminated. There is the probability
that some small contamination through pollination will occur.

how can i determine from looking at a soybean if it
is contaminated or not? i can't. same for corn, beets,
etc. the technology is invisible to the unaided eye
or easy other means of testing.


How can I determine if the small amount of dust from my neighbor
has contaminated my property? I think the point here is that science
says GMO is not harmful. And even if it is, if you wind up with .0001%
on your property, at that level it almost surely wouldn't be harmful.
Farms aren't clean rooms are they?



Given that rat droppings and worse are tolerated in crops for human consumption, it seems like an overreaction to me.

you complain about hyperbole and hysteria and the use of
negative phrasing, but you engage in it just as well.


I don't know what that has to do with what I stated. It's acceptable
for grain crops to have some minor contamination with rat droppings,
insects, etc. So, I don't see the big deal if it's similarly contaminated
with some negligible amount of GMO. If we had a zero tolerance, I can't
live with any contamination of anything in crops, it would be a pretty
crazy world.





i already have a non-GMO alfalfa patch growing that
has taken me several years to get going. if it becomes
infected with GMO alfalfa i will not know it, there is
no testing place i can send samples to that will verify
it as non-GMO without some expense to me. this is an
additional expense that was not there before. the same
goes for every other non-GMO crop that i grow that might
become infected from the surrounding fields.

That would seem to be a legitimate problem. The question
is, if there is a GMO crop nearby, what exactly is the range
of innocent contamination that's possible? If 90% of your
crop can get contaminated, then I would agree it's a problem.
If .01% typically can get contaminated, then it's a different
story and gets back to the zero tolerance issue.

no, the issue originally in question was whether i'm
being forced to use M technology. i am.

I see, so there is no room for reason. If one GMO plant winds up
on an acre of your property, game over, Monsanto is "forcing you".
That's extreme.


i have no way
to avoid it now that GMO alfalfa is out. it will only
be a matter of time before my previously uncontaminated
alfalfa patch will contain GMO alfalfa plants.


How about if the next door farmer who plants GMO, has an
irrational fear of non-GMO. My God! You're contaminating his
land, similarly, by some tiny amount of whatever you're growing
showing up there. If a soybean wound up in his corn field, OMG,
think of the catastrophe.




the low cost approach for annuals used to be that you
could save your seeds from year to year and know that
there was no problem. now for annuals to ensure non-GMO
seeds i'd have to source and buy them each time i plant
or risk contamination (and that forces you to trust the
seed growers to test and properly get things right).


The same question would apply. How likely is it that some
innocent contamination would then contaminate next year's
crop to the point that it doesn't meet non-GMO standards?

if there is one plant with a GMO residue of any kind
in it then it's one plant too many.

Now you're sounding like a typical nutty hippie.


this is my standard.
you may not agree with that standard and that's fine with
me, but i seem to recall some provision of the Constitution
i live under giving me rights to personal property and that
it cannot be taken away without due process or compensation.


Take it to the courts then. From what I see, they don't agree.
Probably because they apply some measure of reasonableness and
aren't extremist.





If it's easy to get it contaminated in just one or a few growing
cycles to the point that it's not certifiable as non-GMO,
then I agree that's a problem. It would force you to do
some testing and then start over with new seed when needed,
which would increase your costs.

yep, exactly. a cost i previously did not have
unless i wanted different seeds, but those used to
all be non-GMO by definition, they were all produced
by natural cross-pollenation or hybridization techniques
which do not operate in the same manner as what has
been done to derive many GMO crops.


So, you pass the cost on to your customers for your 100%
absolutely pure product that they are paying premium prices for.
Somehow I suspect that the buyers aren't the real problem at all.




for the biannuals or perennials it's worse because to
get an alfalfa field established takes several years or
to harvest a beet seed crop takes a few years.

the GMO folks don't care and have the courts and laws
stacked against the small gardener or the organic farmer.


How exactly did the GMO folks allegedly stack the courts?
Sounds like hyperbole to me.

no, read up on any case related to GMO contamination
these days.


I just read two cases that were cited here. I didn't see a thing
about GMO people stacking the courts. You made the claim, you
prove it.



i just found out about GMO apples. cripes, there goes
another crop the government is going to screw up. i've
just been forced out of the apple business.


No, it's just your whacky beliefs that are forcing you out.
It's like me running away from my house, claiming everything
is contaminated, I can't live here anymore, because some dust
blows over from the neighbor cutting his lawn.




instead of requiring GMO contamination to be remediated
by the GMO companies they just certify it all as ok and
then those of us who don't want it are forced to work
around their BS. and it is BS. whoever thinks that GMO
alfalfa was a good idea is a complete idiot, but they
fit right into the poisoner and big ag mentality which
has destroyed the land and poisoned the water and air.


Here comes the extremism. The big ag mentality feeds the
world. Won't someone please think of the starving children?

no, it really doesn't, the mythology of big ag is
false, in time it has shown repeatedly to degrade the
lands, to poison animals and to kill workers exposed
repeatedly to toxins, to pollute the ground water,
streams and rivers, to kill off large areas of what
used to be productive oceans, kill corals, etc.

it is a horrible and destructive scam.


No, you're a loon. Modern agriculture is feeding the world.
If we listened to extremists like you, we'd be back in caves.


the starving children is the usual response, but any
educated person who's actually studied the issue finds
that starvation is not an issue of production it is a
problem of social instabilities, poor distribution,
corruption and get this often it relates to degraded
environments brought on by, you can guess it, big ag.

Then we should all be starving here in the USA. There
goes that nonsense.



i can point you to many cases of productive systems
which can feed people that do not need big ag in any
manner. actual working results, not scams, not made
up, documented, solid.


Then go do it, put big AG out of business and make yourself
rich. Good grief.




this also includes my own experiences here in food
production. i can outproduce in variety of foods and
quality any of the farms around me and i don't need
*cides of any kind to do it.


most of the people who think this isn't a problem are
old and almost dead.

More hyperbole.

look up the age of the farmer and the trends...


Typical farmer isn't going to know squat about the safety of
GMO. You do many studies?




poisoners who spray large areas of
land. the problem is that to protect your own lands from
poisoners you have to have enough money to buy a large
enough space. poor folks and small growers aren't going
to be able to afford that much space.

One approach would seem to be to coordinate with your neighbors
so that you plant different crops, if you have the same crops,
they plant their GMO crop as far as possible from yours and
vice-versa.

they won't change a thing, i've asked repeatedly.


Given what I've heard here regarding your zero tolerance views,
I think they might have a reason.




i can only avoid contamination by not planting related
crops. as you can see above, i'm losing crop choices by
continued GMO developments. as it is i'm repeatedly
sprayed and polluted.

people who are doing this are not really understanding
what they are doing. any person with open eyes who
watches the natural world and the processes sees the
damage done to various organisms, the soil, the water
the air...


Sounds more like I just know it to be true. How does one
see with open eyes whether GMO is poison or not? What level
of glyphosate is toxic?



you may say that i no longer have any right to keep
GMO organisms from my lands, but i don't agree with you.
that is a moral argument as much as a scientific one,
right down to the root of it, the right of a person
to have an individual belief or a religion, the right of
the person to have property and to control the results
of their labor. if i'm growing any one GMO plant it is
not by choice. that to me is the definition of force,
but our society is moving beyond personal freedoms so
this is yet another version of that happening too. i
don't like it and i don't accept it and will work to
prevent it.


songbird

To me when not even one plant contaminating an acre is
acceptable, it's the definition of an extremist, loon position.
And that's my problem with the whole environmentalist movement.
It's extremist. In the end, virtually nothing is ever acceptable.