i'm just going to POST THIS AS LOUD AS I CAN and crush all arguments-MONSANTO=root of all evil.

[CropGun]

251. Lot of heat for a little light.

I stumbled on this thread and went to the trouble of joining DU just to reply to it so this is my first (and probably last) post. Since Food Inc. seems to have become an instant cult classic, Monsanto seems to have supplanted Dick Cheney as the leftist antichrist. Monsanto is a big company and has some questionable business practices however it has merely adapted to a corrupt political system dating back to Credit Mobilier and before.

I have been a crop duster for the last 25 years so I've been out in the trenches for the entire GMO sequence. Since the advent of GMO it requires FAR fewer pesticides to raise a corn crop. The pesticides that are still used are FAR more benign from an environmental and toxicological standpoint.

Up until '96 or so a typical season would require preplant herbicides such as Triazines, first brood corn borer control with granules including Dyphonate, Parathion (until the late 80's), and late season root worm beetle controls. I sprayed every acre of corn ground within a 50 mile radius with methyl and ethyl parathion in late season--twice. Ethyl parathion is a great product although it is extremely toxic in acute dose. It has a very short half life, readily photodegrades and biodegrades. It does what it is supposed to do then goes away but is a huge problem around bees.

Today we use none of those products, in fact many that the feds don't like have lost registration. A couple of seasonal applications of Roundup is completely benign compared to what was going on out there 20 years ago. Of course I'm posting in a thread where some numb nuts alleges trauma after seeing a pet killed by Roundup so that typifies the type of ignorance that I'm up against in here. Did Rover stumble into the barrel and drown? My condolences.

The older raddled leftists in here will recall the great apocalyptic screeds of the 60s and 70s. "Silent Spring" and Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb". We were all supposed to be starving to death 20 years ago under that scenario. Why aren't we? Because we have figured out how to take up the slack with production agriculture.

If you want to do some digging at the UN website you will find that each person on earth is currently surviving on about a half acre of arable land. Maybe Ehrlich will ultimately be proven correct and just has the date wrong.

As far as Monsanto being guilty of spending money to function in the corrupt political system it is required to operate in I would like to point out that it is chump change compared to the environmental lobby. The Sierra Club alone has an annual budget of 100 million dollars and there are dozens of them.

As an industry (aerial application) we sit across the table from them at EPA meetings year after year while they attempt to guide the entrenched bureaucrats and earnest young earth muffins that populate that agency toward draconian solutions in an attempt to put us out of business. The '300 buffer proposal would damn near shut us down but we have managed to forestall that in the interim. They are able to outspend us by a couple of orders of magnitude.