The Pesticide Problem

The concept of spraying our food with poison chemicals has been so normalized over the last 100 years that most people, at least until recently, hardly give it a second thought. Now that we're finally paying attention though, let's look at what's really going on and address two common misconceptions about modern agro-chemicals. (I'll just use the term "pesticides" to refer to any kind of poison they put on our food. More specifically, there are herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, as well as other categories of industrial toxins that are used as growth accelerators, preservatives, and desiccants, but it's all poison and it's all bad in similar ways.)

Myth #1: I'm not a bug or a weed, so pesticides can't hurt me.
Fact: You are a living creature made up of billions of individual cells, made of billions of proteins and other organic molecules, relying on countless metabolic processes, with complex symbiotic relationships with bacteria and other microorganisms. We are one small part of a much larger, highly connected, living system called Earth. (And chances are, Earth is one small part of a much larger living system too.)

Pesticides do one thing really well: they kill. That's what "cide" means. Some cells die quickly when exposed to these toxins. Others can suffer through it, though not without other health consequences. The direct effects on human health from these poisons can, in fact, bring about a fate worse than death with diseases such as ALS, Parkinsons, endocrine disruption, auto-immune disorders, and dementia.

The bottom line is, these chemicals are extremely harmful to human health at any concentration. Maybe if they resulted in quick, abrupt death, the problem would be easier to understand. Because they diminish us gradually, it's harder to recognize their danger.

Myth #2: Pesticides harmlessly dissipate after a few months.
The pharmceutical industry loves to perpetuate this lie, but the truth is that these products never go away. Never might be an exaggeration, but a more reasonable estimate may be somewhere between 500-1000 years. There aren't many biological processes that can dissolve chemicals that are specifically designed to kill biology. They also bind very tightly to soil particles on a molecular level, protecting them from other forms of degradation. Once land has been contaminated with pesticides, that land is forever damaged. They can wash away and end up somewhere else (like someone else's land, a downstream water source, or the ocean), but they don't vanish. Our laboratory has tested soil samples from farms that haven't sprayed for 15+ years, from areas that have had no human activity for at least 40 years, and from depths up to one meter below the surface. Every single sample has shown exceptionally high levels of glyphosate contamination. This stuff is everywhere and it lasts forever.

Widespread Contamination

Can we avoid the problem by buying organic food? Unfortunately, no. We've tested hundreds of food products, both organic and non-organic, and nearly all of them are contaminated regardless of the labeling. There are probably several reasons for that. Straight up fraud probably explains most of it. Organic products sell for a lot more, and there's nothing within the industry to enforce organic growing standards. That creates a huge incentive to cheat. Cross-contamination, or "drift", may explain a lot of it too. If an organic farm shares a fence with a toxic farm, the pesticides from the one will seep across in the air, water, and run-off to contaminate the other. The perpetrators are never held accountable, so again, there are no incentives to act responsibly.

What if I know for a fact that a particular farm isn't going to lie to me and it's located far from any neighboring farm? Then can I trust it? Maybe, maybe not. Here's where the problem starts to look hopeless. A totally trustworthy farmer, located far from any neighboring source of contamination, will still probably have to import products from outside suppliers. It's nearly impossible to raise animals at any kind of scale without supplementary feed. Chickens and pigs need grain. Ruminants need hay to get through the winter. To vertically integrate grain, hay, and livestock production and still remain commercially viable is pretty close to impossible. So the trustworthy organic farmer will still end up importing contaminated feed from other sources, thus resulting in the unwitting contamination of his own products. (When we inititally tested the contamination levels in locally purchased chicken and rabbit feed, the levels were so high they went beyond the upper limit of our test range. We had to retest the samples at a higher range to ultimately determine that the animal feed was packing a hefty 1mg of glyphosate per kilogram of feed. That's insanely high.)

The same thing can happen with fruit and vegetable crops. Organic farmers need compost -- and lots of it. You can be a compost making specialist or you can be a fruit growing specialist, but it's nearly impossible to be economically competitive doing both. Most of the grassland these days is sprayed with a selective herbicide called Grazon. It kills all the weeds in a pasture except for grass, making it a popular product for hay growers and cattle ranchers. This poison is so insideous though, that if an animal eats grass or hay that has been grown in soil contaminted with it, then that animal will be contaminated too. Its manure will be contaminated, and any compost that's made from its manure will be contaminted. Then if that compost is added to a vegetable garden, everything in it, except for grass, will die. The only way to remove that contamination is to remove all the contaminated soil, bag it up, take it to a toxic waste disposal site, and start over.

The Solution?

The goal is pesticide-free food. But we can't buy it, and we can't import any products like animal feed or compost from off-site. The conclusion we've come to is that we must grow 100% of our own food ourselves, and we must be able to do it without importing any potentially contaminated products from outside. That means we need to make our own compost, grow our own animal feed, balance the growth rate of our pasture against the butchering schedule and size of our sheep flock, and manage this entire production line to fulfill the needs of our residents, guests, and staff. It's a monumental challenge, but it's possible and we have no choice.