jackson countyBarbara H. Peterson

Farm Wars

Why don’t I see Jackson County’s fight to ban GMO planting broadcast far and wide on sites such as Natural News, Mercola, and the Institute for Responsible Technology? Why are these sites backing labeling, while completely ignoring this? Why don’t we see support for the banning of GMOs in the biggest GMO sugar beet capital of the country? Why don’t we see “Just Ban It” slogans broadcast all over alternative news sites instead of “Just Label It?”

Hint: Money, money, money, money……. sellout!!! If you make money from the sale of products produced by the same companies that produce GMOs, you might not be very interested in cutting off those suppliers and decreasing your bottom line. It’s business as usual…

Take a real stand against GMO encroachment – Just Ban It!

“The organic farmers are afraid that growing sugar beet seed genetically engineered to withstand weed killer will taint their crops through cross-pollination.

“Indeed, they do want to squash us like a bug,” said Chris Hardy, a Talent organic farmer and chief petitioner for Measure 15-119. “This is about whether we are going to turn the keys to agriculture in the Rogue Valley over to a multinational corporation (Symantec AG) or we are going to say no and stand up to protect our family farms’ future.”

The sugar beet industry wants to protect a major source of the seed it relies on.

“We oppose any prohibition on the production of biotech crops in any county,” said Luther Markwart of the Sugar Beet Growers Association from Washington, D.C. “The reason it is important to us is there is what we refer to as basic seed that is grown in the county.”

That seed is shipped to the Willamette Valley, where it is used to produce a major portion of the commercial sugar beet seed used around the country, said Markwart. Nearly all the sugar beets grown in the U.S. are genetically modified to withstand weed killer.

Genetically modified sweet corn, feed corn, and alfalfa are also grown in Jackson County.”

http://www.seattlepi.com/news/science/article/David-Goliath-battle-over-GMO-sugar-beets-in-Ore-5182856.php

If you would like to get active in something that can make a real difference right now for organic farmers in our country’s biggest and baddest GMO sugar beet growing capital, support a GMO-Free Jackson County.

A Citizen’s Initiative

In 2012, Jackson county residents learned that a Swiss biotech company had been contracting with local landowners to grow GMO sugar beets on their vacant lots. Concerned that pollen from these genetically engineered crops would contaminate non-GMO crops in the area, several citizens stepped forward to address the situation.

Finding no recourse after contacting numerous governmental agencies, they drafted a petition to ban the growing of GMO crops in Jackson county. After collecting over 6700 signatures, the petition was qualified and will appear on the May 20, 2014 ballot as Measure 15-119.

http://www.gmofreejacksoncounty.org/

Barbara H. Peterson

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9 Responses to “GMO: Just Ban It!”

  1. Tim says:

    Don’t think of any one item that will win. Wars are not won with a single victory. It is the relentless assault from all angles that wears down the enemy. Labelling is just one cut, doing what the folks on the big island of Hawaii did is another. Destroying fields like they did in Europe is still another. Blockading seed plants like they are doing in Argentina is another.

    I know it seems hopeless but Monsanto is dying the death of a thousand paper cuts. It would be great to guillotine them corporately but that is not going to happen given how they own the government agencies.

    As simple a task can be as effective as anything. Email a company and asking if they use GMOs and when they replay “yes but it’s perfectly safe” reply back politely that “sorry you are wrong and I won’t buy your product any more”. It doesn’t matter if you never purchased it. You have put the issue on their radar. When a million people do it they adjust their plans.

    Support all the counties that are trying to ban it. That is the biggest victory because it gets neighbours talking and even small populations can have a huge impact.

    I posted the Jackson county link on both Mercola and Natural News forums and the views to the video of Howard Vlieger’s speech. It is 2 hours long but the views jumped from 17 to 135 in one day.

    Every cut quickens the day when Monsanto dies a deserving death.

  2. molecule says:

    Yea, you’re right. Thanks for the spelling correction. Saladin was a very cool 12th century philospher and moral leader. Under the banner of Muslim, from Khazaria no less, he lead middle east Christian libertarian populations against the waves of arrogance, stupidity, greed and waste spewed onto this earth by the so-called religious cursaders (whoops, another misspelling). Salatin is doing a similar thing, leading us against pretty much the same crowd.

    I’m not quite as pessimistic as you. The whole legal v. lawful choice chimera is a false choice. Both sides of this false choice are falling apart. Because both sides are dependent on enforcement by the gun. Evolution is a pleomorphic domain. The planets are well-regulated in their orbits. The seed, the root, the stem and the flower are well-regulated as well. Monsanto is not well-regulated. Men will spontaneously regain their strength by recovering their mortality and their righteousness, women theirs through courage and the try in their hearts, and children theirs through the power of innocence. This is a deep grassroots change which the goons and cluck-and-sucks of Monsanto are all missing out on at the moment.

    Taking a page from European history, we have always lost when we tried to survive, without thinking in terms of our unalienable participation in the evolution of collective consciousness — life, liberty and pursuit of happiness type stuff. I have absolute certaintity that the modern forces of stupidity, waste and greed will not prevail. They may go in hiding under rocks and hybernate for a few decades or whatever, but they won’t prevail forever. Inch by inch, we are organizing on pricicples that are higher than Monsanto and its minions are capable of understanding. We exceed them. This means that not only can we preserve notions of beauty, harmony and happiness, on our individual scales, but also on a collective one as well. Evolution is a pleomorphic domain and a new and higher moral terrain is starting to organize. Taking a page from our extension of European history, I’m calling for formations of Committees of Correspondence. Just one molecule dreaming here. All we need to do is expose these guys, in ways that these existentialist creeps can eventually grock. Monsanto, and the local farmers who by simple greed inadvertently volunteered to become its slaves, will become increasingly dependent on government by fraud, or they will collapse, or they will change. Government by fraud and deception will eventually go the way of all deceptions and frauds. When a government conducts warfare against its own citizens by deception and secrecy, it eventually collapses, because secrecy and deception can have no purpose other than a betrayal of trust. It will collapse on its own. If we don’t organize, anarchy will for a moment become the highest expression of lawful. Evolution is a pleomorphic domain. We win.

  3. Alan Donelson says:

    @Molecule January 30, 2014 at 4:36 pm

    With respect, I disagree. And I think you misinterpret Joel Salatin’s philosophy and arguments — or perhaps you refer to someone else named “Saladin”, whose name I do not know. We do have a helluva cosmic dilemma deposited on our doorsteps, one worth discussing here.

    As individuals, as a member of one or more “communities”, as a resident of a county and within the county perhaps also a city, subject to corporations within incorporated entities with highly abstract, hard-to-understand “legal” (in NOT lawful)standing, we now have to re-organize????

    Ain’t gonna happen!

    What did folks who appreciated the eventual, gradual collapse of the Holy (!?) Roman Empire do? Take a page from history, and do likewise! The same forces that have destroyed “advanced” human civilizations and nations alike, will prevail once again this time, too, in my opinion. I prepare accordingly.

  4. molecule says:

    Hi Alan,

    We are all individually responsible. I agree with Saladin … we have no right to know. We fall into a deep form of moral turpitude when we think we have a right to expect a government, local, state or federal, to behave in a socially responsible manner. They are in the pocket of Monsanto. They are hell bent on another agenda.

    At some point men are going to have to rise up out of the graves of their current moral stupor (the philosophy of let someone else fix it — when men know that in fact, there is no one else to fix it — there is no one else who will even hear their grievances. When they wake up, they will organize into local Committees. They will take copies of county tax maps and start coloring the offending farms in Monsanto red. It is morally pointless to imagine that a call to 911 will fix clear the groundwater, when an anti-social farmer (or fracker) is poisoning the county groundwater, and soils and plants of neighboring farms, whose farmers are dedicated to doing the right thing.

  5. Alan Donelson says:

    @Molecule January 30, 2014 at 2:01 pm

    Monsanto maintains their squads of lawyers and armed hitmen. Why can’t we have our Committees of Correspondence?

    Your question answers itself.

  6. molecule says:

    In the early part of the 1776 American Revolution, they called them Committees of Correspondence. This was before the 1792 Constitution. In the Articles of Confederation the delegates from ALL states resolved to ban slavery. The states then set up voluntary Committees of Correspondence, who then did the heavy “interviewing” when a trafficker was caught continuted the trade. The Constitution put slavery back in.

    The adjoining farmers apparently don’t feel strong enough to conduct “friendly little chit-chats” with antisocial farmers, who continue to poison soil and groundwater, and poison adjoing farms.

    Perhaps if there were some Committees of Correspondence, the damaged and offended farmers would then have a Committee of Assistance to go to. Each county could hvae a Committee of Correspondence, which could then maintain a map of which farms have been contaminated and which haven’t. Merely knowing that their farms had been mapped, they would then be publically identified as antisocial, for having inflicted harm on the future of Monsanto-free farming for all adjoining farmers, and for having poisoned the regional groundwater supplies for everybody.

    Monsanto maintains their squads of lawyers and armed hitmen. Why can’t we have our Committees of Correspondence?

  7. Marjie Abrahamson says:

    What Alan said. How did it get this far and as if labeling is going to help. That crap just has to go!!

  8. B. Talbert says:

    I can’t understand why everybody isn’t up in arms. If they just read some of the patents that bio-engineering business has put out there they would be appalled and scared. There are businesses existing in the US today that never should have been allowed to exist in the first place. But here we are now–stuck with the whole mess.
    I am all for banning GMO’s outright but it seems you might as well ban lying outright. I still think Dr. Mercola does a good job and Jeffrey Smith and en-theos is educating. People just don’t know the truth and too many are letting other people try to find it for them. Put petitions in prayer into practice as we need help from God. We have to ask.

  9. Alan Donelson says:

    AMEN! Barbara. Just like training dogs, black & white! Give these corporatists an inch, they’ll take the whole nine yards, sooner or later. They prefer sooner, of course.

    Those who propose or back half-ass measures (labeling) seem either complicit or fools. If the latter, they clearly have no clue the virulent strains of people (are they really human?!) they find themselves up against, right now. Virulence in the people who promote GMOs, virulent strains of crops. By their fruits shall ye know them. Clear?

    Just say no! BAN! (Thanks to Nancy Reagan for that tip!)

    Side note: Stop GEOENGINEERING, END THE DROUGHT! Connect the damn dots, people! CA’s governor won’t! He’s gone from having his head among the stars to placing his head in a dark place. Else, he’s wittingly complicit. I do not know which. Recall Mr. Brown before CA becomes a spitting image of his surname.