Monsanto and the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS)

Reminds me of Nero, the Roman emperor and his fiddle.

Duh??

Monsanto’s inclusion in the Roundtable on Responsible Soy was a major breakthrough for the company, providing it with an opportunity to claim green credentials for GM soy.

I wondered how long it would take you to show up to defend your friends.

Hey, CG, how's it hangin'?

You just bustin' on me again with the imaginary 'shill' thing or did you have something substantive to add?

Fine either way. This is a discussion thread, after all. No one said the discussion had to be intelligent or imformed, now, did they? We will just go with the flow, right?

No one said the discussion had to be intelligent or imformed, now, did they?

Inform away. Tell us all about the studies that have shown GM foods to be safe for human consumption. Tells us all about how you feel the dominance of a single breed of, in this case soy, is better than agricultural diversity. The floor is yours.

PS, when you want to rip on someones intelligence, use spell check first to look more informed.

Another conspiracy! Right up your alley. How convenient!!

Another conspiracy! Right up your alley. How convenient!!

I notice you didn't deny it. How convenient.

That's right, CG.

I'm really an heiress to a buggy whip fortune and a very well connected (and highly paid) co-conspirator against free oxygen.

In fact, I am so busy co-conspiring during the day that I hardly have time to babysit you damned fools.

"It's a dirty job, but..."

Hmmm, still haven't denied it. ;)

OK, CG, one more time, at your insistence...

I am not a paid shill for corporation or government. I do not have co-conspirators or minions at my beck and call. Damn, you mean all this time I could have had all of this?

I am not privileged or super-human. Just possessed of ordinary common sense and concerned when I encounter nonsense deliberately disguised as knowledge. Also not afraid to call "bull@!$%#" when I do encounter it, which seems to be pretty often with your giddy little cult.

Nor do I cringe at being called a "troll", your term for anyone brazen enough to challenge and expose your sillier propaganda. You all have kept me busy Googling and reading for some 6 months now, fact checking Pamela's dubious "sources" and debunking her agenda-driven fictions, which you all comically parrot back and forth as gospel.

So, there is your denial, CG. You've had it before in response to your various unfounded and recurring accusations of "shill". No doubt, you will demand it again.

I must say, you are dedicated conspiracy theorists to the end!

You all have kept me busy Googling and reading for some 6 months now, fact checking Pamela's dubious "sources" and debunking her agenda-driven fictions,

Where is this debunking?

Publius Redux

Monsanto claims its RoundupReady crops help tackle climate change because they can be grown without ploughing the soil, known as 'no tillage' or 'conservation tillage' agriculture. Ploughing soil releases carbon dioxide (CO2)

Uh, you geniuses maybe want to pay a little attention to this detail before going off on your inevitable rant. Maybe just get yourselves accurately informed, for once.

If this is what you call debunking, try again. Monsanto claims lot's of things that aren't true, or are outright lies. Anyone's claims don't constitute truth without validation. In this instance you've proven nothing.

Here's some actual science to counter Monsanto's 'claim'.

No-till not always effective to store carbon

No-till should be thought of as just one of many approaches to carbon sequestration, and won’t work everywhere - especially not on poorly drained, clay soils - finds new research from Ohio State University. "The message here is that no-till is not applicable everywhere as a means of practicing carbon sequestration. There are situations where other carbon sequestration methods would be more effective," said Rattan Lal, a soil scientist with Ohio State's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. Full story: Ohio State University Extension

Your article points out, not that no-till is ineffective at sequestering carbon (it decidedly is effective) but, rather that the tillage practice is not applicable to all soil types. That is, if one is to produce a high yielding crop on some soils, then no-till is not the best choice.

...the study is not a criticism of no-till and its benefits, but simply a way of determining where the practice best fits and where other carbon sequestration methods may work better.

"In situations where no-till is ideal, it's a sustainable soil management practice that simply can't be ignored," said Lal. "It saves time, money and wear on machinery and its profit margin is much higher than plowing."

Lal said the results of the study are the beginnings of developing a soil ratings guide for applying different conservation tillage systems at regional and national scales

No-till practices, where they can be applied, not only sequester more carbon in the top 8 inches of soil - they offer the much more important feature of dramatically reducing soil erosion and runoff.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-case-for-no-till-farmin

A fundamental drawback of conventional farming is that it fosters topsoil erosion, especially on sloping land. Tillage leaves the ground surface bare and vulnerable to runoff, and each pass of the plow pushes soil downhill. As a result, the soil thins over time. How long this process takes depends not only on how fast plowing pushes soil downhill—and wind or runoff carries it away—but also on how fast the underlying rocks break down to form new soil.

Less often mentioned is the dramatically reduced expenditure of fossil fuel - about half the requirement for conventional tillage. Equipment for no-till cultivation is less costly to own and maintain, as well. About half as many man hours are expended, also.

So, where it works to grow an abundant crop, no-till practice reduces soil erosion and runoff, it sequesters more carbon, it reduces fossil fuel inputs and cuts cost and labor for the farmer. No wonder it is being widely adopted wherever possible by intelligent, thinking people.

Of course, it is not applicable in every circumstance...and, just as certainly, there exist Luddites who blindly resist this common sense advance as vigorously as they resist any progressive technology.

You are confusing facts with opinion, then, PD. The following deleted/censored comment consists entirely of facts. There is no opinion lurking, even between the lines. Just common sense facts.

#3.16: No till methodology -- a ton of soil conserved, a ton of carbon sequestered, a ton of diesel fuel left unburned and many tons of quality food produced. That's sustainability**.

It's all good.

.

**Sustainability does not require peasants toiling at stoop labor or starving populations. Too many people mistake 'medieval' for 'sustainable' - they're not the same thing.

The "savings under no-till" are borne out by comparison with all other productive farming methods, industrial or medieval. Moreover, the savings are real, measured and time tested. Hardly mere "Monsanto claims", various University analyses describe the advantages. The adoption of these techniques attest to their efficiency and practical effectiveness.

If you will trouble yourself to compare the efficiencies of no-till (where the technology is appropriate) with your preferred medieval subsistence farming scheme you will find the advantage goes to no-till, "petrochemical based" background costs included. Take heart, however; in some remote, marginal locations your preferred stoop labor and starvation model will prevail for quite some time. Just not in Iowa, probably.

Fact is, you have no viable Luddite alternative to modern agricultural technology that can begin to feed the world's growing population. Just denialists' pipe dreams and wishful thinking. And, of course, your trademark conspiracy theories, always the imagined conspiracies.

BTW, I have just the one user name and that is quite enough. You seem to have your hands quite full with one Publius, you should not wish for a clone even if you must imagine two or more to make it out as another of your famous conspiracies.

It does not sound like the therapy is going well since you still need to resort to name calling and disparaging comments to even attempt to justify an opinion.

I suspect that your still trying to get to first base with the therapist and have no idea what living in the "ego" is about at all.

**Sustainability does not require peasants toiling at stoop labor or starving populations. Too many people mistake 'medieval' for 'sustainable' - they're not the same thing.

You sure do have a poor opinion of the thousands of American Organic farmers.

Here's an interesting comment on how sustainable current industrial farming is.

"The commercial industrial technologies that are used in agriculture today to feed the world... are not inherently sustainable," Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro told the Greenpeace Business Conference recently. "They have not worked well to promote either self-sufficiency or food security in developing countries." Feeding the world sustainably "is out of the question with current agricultural practice," Shapiro told the Society of Environmental Journalists in 1995. "Loss of topsoil, of salinity of soil as a result of irrigation, and ultimate reliance on petrochemicals ... are, obviously, not renewable. That clearly isn't sustainable."

From Can Organic Farming "Feed the World"?

As for fuel use on organic vs. conventional, looks like the longest running study on the difference between the two systems says organic uses less fuel.

The widely referenced 27-year Rodale Institute Farming Systems Trial (FST) is the longest-running side-by-side comparison of organic and conventional corn and soybean production systems in the United States. The study compares a conventional farm that uses recommended fertilizer and pesticide applications with an organic animal-based farm where manure is applied and an organic legume-based farm that uses a three-year rotation of hairy vetch/corn and rye/soybeans and wheat. The two organic systems receive no chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

David Pimentel, a Cornell University professor of ecology and agriculture, was the lead author of this study and concluded that "fossil energy inputs in organic corn production were 31 percent lower than conventional corn production, and the energy inputs for organic soybean production were 17 percent lower than conventional soybean production." (3)

Of course only looking at the inputs of the food production system doesn't tell the whole story. We must also look at the environmental and health impacts of our current industrial farming practices to see the true cost of our cheap food is dramatically higher than the store shelf price.

I've not looked yet, but wonder what the cost of the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone has been? And, how one would even begin to calculate it?

Nice job of comparing apples to oranges, CG.

We had been discussing no-till un-till you came along and changed the subject back to full-till. Pipe dreaming will do that to ya.

Bear in mind that Pimentel was not looking at no-till methods (his and Rodale's "conventional" refer to the old fashioned soil wasting, fuel wasting, labor wasting ploughing and tillage). And his energy calculations skew heavily to fertilizer usage. If anything, he points out that more crop rotation would be profitable in conventional agriculture, and that is gradually being adopted out of practicality.

Pimental is all about the cost of fertilizers, and he assumes no limit to their availability to support the rather lofty average yields he assumes, especially for organic farming methods. Unlimited access to fertilizers is the case only for the conventional farming system, to which Pimental easily charges a cost.

Pimental and Rodale both blithely assume that free fertilizers and soil organic matter just magically appear, without cost or effort in organic farming systems. Nothing could be further from the truth or more misleading to the discussion. Fertilizers and fertility become a pivotal (but whispered) issue for organic cropping, and that is where yield per acre (PD's dreaded 'Enron accounting') must be factored with global census data into the long term sustainability equation.

See, in order for organic agriculture to feed the world, it would require vastly more acreage than is currently available for rotations of inedible crops to maintain Rodale's worshiped 'soil organic matter' (we'd have to clear more good land), and/or there would have to be vastly more livestock farming (I can hear PETA and the vegans screaming already) to supply adequate organic manure. So, organic has it's place where the local resources can support it and also as a hobby or novelty selling product into elite over-priced niche markets (think of Joel Salatin and his boutique Chipotle's pigs).

So, girls, who wants to whip out a calculatore and repeat Pimental's calculations using no-till technology? Anyone? I didn't think so.

If any of you would care to whisper the secret to unlimited free fertilizer in global scale organic systems, the next Nobel prize could be yours!

Wait, I thought we had a principle of separation of Church and State!?

The primary topic here PR is gmo.

The secondary topic seems to be your "ego" which will not allow a contrary opinion, question or evidence.

Classic! To an egotist there is no other. There is only"I". No one else can exist. It gets terribly lonely doesn't it?