Why Farmers Use Hormones

[Guest guest]

Why Farmers Use Hormones

By Larry Klein

www.westonaprice.org

The present system of food and agriculture in America is based on three

premises:

1. Food should be cheap

2. Farming is something that people do not want to do.

3. We should not have to spend our time deciding what foods are good for us and

for the land.

These premises have led to a system of agriculture characterized by extensive

and highly mechanized monoculture of corn and soybeans, cheap because of

overproduction, but dear in the toll on the land and human health.

Overproduction dates from the years when government-funded irrigation projects

created large surpluses of grain. Fertilizers and hybrid seed contributed to

this trend. Monocropping required toxic pesticides and herbicides but farmers

now worked in offices or air conditioned tractor cabs, a convenience that

protected them from facing hard choices between use of poisons and the price of

exposure.

As a corollary, a new system of livestock farming-dairying, beef, poultry and

pork-became the norm, a system that would absorb the surplus grain produced. It

was after the Korean War that the beef-cattle industry changed from grazing to

finishing beef for market at large-scale feedlots.

Cheap and plentiful water meant cheap grain. By 1975, for example, 42% of the

water in California irrigated feed crops.1 Finished beef became the standard

and dairy cattle were relegated to barns.

The new system created strong economic reasons for farmers to use hormones.

Feedlot animals were castrated for handling ease, although bulls can, in fact,

be handled safely. And even though a bull has clear advantages in terms of rate

and efficiency of growth over a steer, it is worth significantly less on the

sales floor than a castrated animal.

When bulls are castrated they must be given hormones to stimulate growth. And

because the grain cartels have succeeded in convincing consumers that cheap

vegetable oils are preferable to more expensive animal fats, the type of

hormones now used directs the growth into meat rather than fat.

These implants show the greatest gains on feedlot diets-grain instead of

pasture. Hormone implants conform the animal to feeding conditions and to the

market.

For every dollar spent on hormone implants, there are returns of seven to ten

dollars to the rancher.

Plant foods are not exempt under the industrial system.

Modern pesticides are hormones, mostly estrogen-type hormones, and the typical

crop gets ten applications of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, from seed to

storage. Monocropping makes pesticide use essential. The push for GMO's is

simple a push to build hormone-based pesticides into the structure of the

plant.

Modern soybeans produce hormones in the form of phytoestrogens. These are

marketed as panaceas-a good way to profit from the excess of soy.

" We're planting too many acres of soybeans, " says Tony Vyn, University of

Guelph crop scientist. " It's bad for the soil and it's bad for the pocket

book. " 2

Let's return to our premises. The first is that food should be cheap.

Cheap for whom?

It is certainly not cheap for those who live outside North America and live in

poverty because their countries' agricultural land and resources are producing

cheap sugar and bananas for export to America.

It is not cheap for those who are sick and for the society that absorbs the

costs of their sickness. It is not cheap food for those whose wells, lakes and

rivers are contaminated. It is not even cheap for huge segments of the American

population, living in depressed rural areas.

Is farming a profession to be avoided?

It is if the farmer cannot get a decent price for the fruits of his sacred

labor. It is if the barriers posed by health, safety and zoning laws prevent

him from selling directly to the consumer. And it is for the large-scale

producer who must seal himself off from the toxic clouds that envelop his

fields. He is no longer a farmer but a businessman. Laborers do his work. " And

strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be

your plowmen and your vinedressers. " 3

Does it matter what we eat or how we farm?

Does it matter if the fat on our steaks and the cream in our coffee is white

instead of yellow? Does it matter if our butter and egg yolks are golden or

gilded with vegetable dyes. Does it matter if our cheeses and our tamaris and

our pickles are created by artisans or spewed out by factories. Does it matter

if our fruits and vegetables are grown in rich and living soil. Does it matter

that hormones, nature's precious regulators, are being used in a profligate

way?

Weston A. Price teaches us that it matters.

These three premises have led to food that is cheap but worthless and a medical

crisis that is massive in scale.

These premises have pushed the yeoman farmer off the land and littered our

prairies with ghost towns. These premises have poisoned our land, our crops and

our livestock.

How do we divest ourselves of the industrial food-farm paradigm?

We start by changing the way we shop and the way we put food on our tables.

A friend from Ghana had this to say about America: " You mean that you eat food

grown by people unknown to you? " He was appalled at the thought.

Our ancestors spend most of their waking hours in the production and

preparation of food. Today we spend almost none. We have gone too far.

We need to spend more money on food and more time finding food that is produced

locally in sustainable and intelligent ways.

We need to purchase and prepare our food with love and wisdom, not fear and

abandon. If we do not want hormones in our salads, bread and meat, we must be

committed to purchasing plant foods grown in traditional ways and animal foods

that have come from pasture-fed animals.

We must spend our food dollars in ways that allow conscientious farmers to make

a decent living.

Our economic system, our landscape, our minds, our bodies can be

transformed-and that transformation starts in the marketplace and at the dinner

table.

References:

1. Orvelle Schell, Modern Meat, 1985

2. Farm and Country, February 16, 1998

3. Isaiah 61:5

Weston A Price Foundation

www.westonaprice.org

DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:

Money seems to drive many systems in directions which does not optimize

people's health.

[Guest guest]

Thanks for this very informative post. Your helping me make the committment

to buy organic!

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