The 3-Bell Ranch

Submitted to Wenatchee World on 3/28/2012:

Your local small farm is under siege. The threats are many and varied.

As the owner and operator of The 3-Bell Ranch, I am dedicated to growing GMO-free, pasture-fed beef, pork, chicken and rabbit. I screen all supplemental feed to be sure it's GMO free; this usually necessitates buying certified organic feed. I was dismayed when Monsanto succeeded in pushing GMO Alfalfa through this fall. Another threat, you know? Right now, my hay is safe; my neighbors have not planted GMO alfalfa, so my plants will not be contaminated by cross pollination. Down the road I may have to find a replacement legume for I simply refuse to feed my animals FrankenGenes.

Threats. In Michigan, the small farm Bakers Green Acres, is fighting the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) which is using the state Invasive Species Act to expand its jurisdiction beyond hunting and fishing to farming operations. They claim the Bakers Green Acres' heritage pig is a "feral" breed and must be destroyed or else DNR will arrest the farm family on felony charges and the DNR will shoot the pigs.

Threats. Just last month the FDA won its two-year fight to shut down an Amish farmer who was selling fresh raw milk in the Washington, D.C., region.

Threats. Farmers all around this country and Canada are facing law suits waged by Monsanto who claims that the farmers harmed the mega corporation when the farmer's seeds became contaminated by the patented GMO frankencrop genes. Some of these farmers had been carefully saving seeds for decades. Now their seed is ruined and Monsanto is suing them. What's wrong with this picture?

You can say, "I don't drink raw milk, so I don't care. You can say, "I don't eat pork, so I don't care." You can say, "I don't know that there's anything wrong with eating genetically modified food, so I don't care."

But we small farmers need you to care. Your voice will assure that we will continue to have food grown locally under sustainable practices. Your voice will protect our small farms from extermination.

We need you. Please speak.

I did not write the following text. It is an alert posted by NaturalNews.com, who have generously offered to allow anyone to spread the word-- using their text-- as long as the person cites the source.

Every link on this post leads to fascinating, if not somewhat terrifying information. It's worth an hour of your time, for sure... And it's worth a letter to your Congress representative as well.

Side note: I do not understand the purpose of targeting locally grown food, or the assault on small-scale farms. Our food  is about to become unbelievably expensive, yet while that is an inevitable fact, the government seems to be targeting local solutions. Am I missing something?

Top ten lies about Senate Bill 510 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) The Food Safety Modernization Act looks like it's headed to become law. It's being hailed as a "breakthrough" achievement in food safety, and it would hand vast new powers and funding to the FDA so that it can clean up the food supply and protect all Americans from food-borne pathogens.

There's just one problem with all this: It's all a big lie.

Here are the ten biggest lies that have been promoted about S.510 by the U.S. Congress, the food industry giants and the mainstream media:

Lie #1 - Most deaths from food poisoning are caused by fresh produce. Here's a whopper the mainstream media won't dare report: Out of the 1,809 people who die in America every year from food-borne pathogens (CDC estimate), only a fraction die from the manufacturer's contamination of fresh produce. By far the majority of food poisoning is caused by the consumption of spoiled processed foods, dead foods and animal-human transmission of pathogens.

For example, one of the largest food-borne killers according to the CDC is Toxoplasma gondii, a disease that people acquire from cat feces coming into contact with their food, which can happen right in their own homes (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/Vol5n...). Salmonella poisoning accounts for 553 deaths a year. As a reference for relative risk, over 42,000 people die each year from road accidents in the USA, meaning driving a car has a roughly 7600% higher chance of killing you than eating fresh produce. (http://www.driveandstayalive.com/in...)

In terms of food-borne illness, many of the deaths come from things like spoiled tomato sauce, spoiled canned foods and spoiled pasteurized milk. S 510, of course, does absolutely nothing to address these food contamination deaths, since those foods are considered "sterilized" at the time of sale.

Lie #2 - Under S.510, the FDA would only recall products it knows to be contaminatedNot true. S.510 merely requires the FDA to have "reason to believe" a food is contaminated. So right there, that means all raw milk will be targeted by the FDA because even without conducting any scientific tests at all, the FDA can say it has "reason to believe" the milk is contaminated merely because it is raw.

In other words, the FDA no longer needs science to outlaw a food product. It merely needs an opinion.

Is this "reason to believe" section really true? Yep, and here's how it was amended:

SEC. 208. ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION OF FOOD.
23 (a) IN GENERAL. - Section 304(h)(1)(A) (21 U.S.C.24 334(h)(1)(A)) is amended by
(1) striking ''credible evidence or information indicating'' and inserting ''reason to believe'';
(http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi...)

In other words, in negotiating this bill, the U.S. Senate removed the requirement that the FDA needed "credible evidence" in order to recall a product and, instead, replaced that with the FDA only needing "reason to believe."

It is utterly amazing that the U.S. Congress would give the FDA to conduct large-scale product recalls and even imprison people based entirely on what the agency "has reason to believe."

Last time I checked, the FDA held some pretty bizarre (if not downright moronic) beliefs, including this jaw-dropping whopper: The FDA literally believes that there is no food, no herb, no vitamin or supplement that has any ability to prevent disease of any kind. They don't even believe limes can prevent scurvy, and you'd have to nutritionally illiterate to believe that.

The FDA believes foods are inert and that all the amazing phytonutrients in those foods (carotenoids, antioxidants, therapeutic fats like omega-3 and so on) are utterly useless for human biology.

This belief, held by the FDA that has now been put in charge of the food supply, is the belief system of an insane government agency that has completely lost touch with reality while abandoning nutritional science.

Lie #3 - They didn't tell you that nearly 70% of grocery store chickens are contaminated with salmonella every dayYep, it's true: Amid all the fear-mongering over salmonella, everybody forgot to notice that the vast majority of fresh chickens sold at grocery stores every single day are widely contaminated with salmonella (http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c...). Yet S 510 does absolutely nothing to address this. It's not even mentioned in the bill.

In fact, it is these contaminated chickens that end up cross-contaminating the fresh produce in many kitchens across America. So the so-called "food poisoning" that's often blamed on spinach or onions often originates with the contaminated chicken meat people bring home and slice on their kitchen cutting boards.

Lie #4 - S.510 will exclude and protect small farmers. The Tester Amendment, which was finally included in S.510, excludes farmers who sell less than $500,000 worth of food each year from the more onerous paperwork and compliance burdens described in the bill. But this dollar amount is not indexed to inflation, meaning that as the U.S. dollar continues to lose value due to the Federal Reserve counterfeiting machine running at full speed (more "quantitative easing," anyone?), food prices will continue to skyrocket -- and this will shift even small family farms into the $500,000 sales range within just a few years.

In fact, a single-family farm with just four people could easily sell $500,000 worth of fresh produce a year right now, even before inflation. Remember, $500,000 is not their profit, but rather the gross sales amount. The profits on that might be only $50,000 or even less.

Furthermore, this $500,000 threshold means that small, successful farms that are doing well and would like to expand will refuse to hire more people or expand their operations. To avoid the tyranny of S 510, small farms will try to stay small, and that means avoiding the kind of business expansion that would create new jobs.

Lie #5 - The FDA needs more power to enforce food safety. The FDA already has the power to effectively recall foods by publicly announcing a product has been found to be contaminated. The FDA already has the power to confiscate "misbranded" products, too, and it could easily use this power to halt the sale of contaminated food items.

But the FDA simply refuses to enforce the laws already on the books and, instead, has sought to expand its power by hyping up the e.coli food scares. The ploy apparently worked: Now in a reaction to the food scare-mongering, the FDA is being handed not just new powers, but more funding, too! And you can bet it will find creative new ways to put this power to work suppressing the health freedoms and food freedoms of the American people.

Lie #6 - Fresh produce is contaminated because of a lack of paperworkThere is no evidence that requiring farms to fill out more paperwork will make their food safer. The real cause of produce contamination is the existence of factory animal farms whose effluent output (huge rivers of cow feces, basically), end up in the water supply, soils and equipment that comes into contact with fresh produce.

The food contamination problem is an UPSTREAM problem where you've got to reform the factory animal operations that now dominate the American meat industry. S.510, however, does absolutely nothing to address this. Factory animal farms aren't even addressed in the bill!

Lie #7 - The American people are dying in droves from unsafe fresh foodThe truth is that Americans are dying from processed food laced with toxic chemical additives, not from fresh, raw produce. Partially-hydrogenated oils, white sugar, aspartame, MSG and artificial food colors almost certainly kill far more people than bacterial contaminations.

The American public is also dying from pharmaceuticals -- anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 people a year are killed by FDA-approved drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/001894.html), most of which have been approved under the guise of blatantly fraudulent science and drug company trickery. The FDA doesn't seem to mind. In fact, it has been a willful co-conspirator in the scientific fraud carried out by Big Pharma in the name of "medicine." (http://www.naturalnews.com/027851_h...)

To think that the FDA -- the very same agency responsible for the Big Pharma death machine -- is now going to "save us" by controlling food safety is highly irrational.

Lie #8 - The FDA just wants to make food "safer"Actually, the FDA wants to make the food more DEAD. Both the FDA and the USDA are vocal opponents of live food. They think that the only safe food is sterilized food, which is why they've supported the fumigation, pasteurization and irradiation efforts that have been pushed over the last few years.

California almond growers, for example, must now either chemically fumigate or pasteurize their almonds before selling them (http://www.naturalnews.com/021776.html). This has destroyed the incomes of U.S. almond farmers and forced U.S. food companies to buy raw almonds from Spain and other countries.

Lie #9 - Food smuggling is a huge problem in AmericaOne of the main sections of S.510 addresses "food smuggling." Yep -- people smuggling food across the country. If you've never heard of this problem that's because it's not actually a problem.

Not yet anyway.

But there's a reason why they put this into the bill: Because they're probably planning on criminalizing fresh produce and then arresting people for transporting broccoli with the "intent to distribute."

Yep, farmers bringing fresh produce to sell at the weekend farmer's market could soon be arrested and imprisoned as if they were drug smugglers. Hence the need for the "food smuggling" provisions of S.510.

Soon, we will all have to meet in secret locations just to trade carrots for cash.

Lie #10 - S.510 will make America's food supply the safest in the worldActually, even with S.510 in place, America's food supply is among the most chemically contaminated in the world, second only to China. You can find mercury in the seafood, BPA in the canned soup, yeast extract (MSG) in the "natural" potato chips, and artificial petrochemical coloring agents in children's foods.

Eating the "Standard American Diet" is probably the single most harmful thing a person can do for their health. It's the fastest way to get cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Every nation in the world that begins to consume the American diet starts to show record rates of degenerative disease within one generation. This is the "safe food" that the U.S. Senate is now pushing on everyone.

Remember, with S.510, SAFE = DEAD. And the FDA says it wants to keep everybody safe.

Permission granted to reproduce and post this list with creditFeel free to share this list! Please give the courtesy of credit to this author and a clickable link back to NaturalNews.com. We are working hard to fight for freedom and educate the public about why we need to resist these "Big Government solutions" that trample over our Constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (which, in my mind, includes buying fresh produce at the farmer's market).

Thank you for your support.

<== According to CREDO Action, this is the number of people who have called the President's office as of January 24 at 9:39 p.m.-- TEN HOURS after I initially published this blog post, Tell President Obama: No GMO alfalfa.

Please... Make the call. Our food chain depends on everyone taking action now...

Even Whole Foods, Organic Valley and Stonyfield Farms have decided to throw in the towel and speak against mass commercialization of GE crops.

I am heartsick.

How it is that Round Up is able to kill plants?

It kills them by starving them. The active ingredient, glyphosphate, disables the plant's ability to take up minerals including iron, zinc, copper, manganese, magnesium, calcium, and boron. Glyphosate annihilates beneficial soil organisms, such as Pseudomonas and Bacillus bacteria that live around the roots.

If the PLANT can't take up this mineral then when you eat the plant, you don't get it either!

Glyphosphate can contaminate soil not just through direct application. It can drift in from someone else's farm-- or it can come in with chicken manure.  So, those of us who thought "If I get my fertilizer from animals, it will be pure and organic" are wrong. If the chicken ate glyphosphate, he'll shit glyphosphate.

If you haven't already done so, please call Mr. Obama's office and register your voice with mine in a stand against the legalization and distribution of GMO alfalfa.

President Obama - 202-456-1111

Call President Obama and urge him to reject GMO alfalfa today.

The following text is from:

Smith, Jeffrey M.. " Genetically Modified Foods - Spilling the Beans - May 2009." MBBSoftware: Software, Hardware and Web Development, Software Consultancy. Institute for Responsible Technology, 20 May 2009. Web. 24 Jan. 2011.

Worst finding of all—GMOs remain inside of us

The only published human feeding study revealed what may be the most dangerous problem from GM foods. The gene inserted into GM soy transfers into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines and continues to function.[26] This means that long after we stop eating GMOs, we may still have potentially harmful GM proteins produced continuously inside of us. Put more plainly, eating a corn chip produced from Bt corn might transform our intestinal bacteria into living pesticide factories, possibly for the rest of our lives.

When evidence of gene transfer is reported at medical conferences around the US, doctors often respond by citing the huge increase of gastrointestinal problems among their patients over the last decade. GM foods might be colonizing the gut flora of North Americans.

Warnings by government scientists ignored and denied

Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had warned about all these problems even in the early 1990s. According to documents released from a lawsuit, the scientific consensus at the agency was that GM foods were inherently dangerous, and might create hard-to-detect allergies, poisons, gene transfer to gut bacteria, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged their superiors to require rigorous long-term tests.[27] But the White House had ordered the agency to promote biotechnology and the FDA responded by recruiting Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney, to head up the formation of GMO policy. That policy, which is in effect today, denies knowledge of scientists’ concerns and declares that no safety studies on GMOs are required. It is up to Monsanto and the other biotech companies to determine if their foods are safe. Mr. Taylor later became Monsanto’s vice president.

The 3-Bell Ranch produces beef, pork, chicken, rabbit and hay.

I do NOT grow GMO crops. I will not feed my animals GMO frankencrops.

I do not want it in my farm's food chain. I do not want it in my soil. I do not want my farmland contaminated and permanently damaged. I do not want it in my body or in the food I eat.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find grains that have not been grown/ produced as GMO crops:

Corn: Not unless it's CERTIFIED organic.
Soy: Not unless it's CERTIFIED organic.

Genetically modified (GM) plants now include soy, corn, cotton, canola, and sugar beets.

I found an advertisement for weed-free hay published in the Back Country Horseman's newsletter. I went to the web site and learned that the grower achieved his weed-free planting because he sprayed herbicides on his fields. I want to know that my animals are not eating pesticides, herbicides and other -cides.

Furthermore, "Monsanto’s Roundup Ready resistant superweeds have already spread to at least 10 species of weeds and have infested millions of acres in 22 U.S. states since 2000".4 So, I decided I had to grow hay I knew I could trust. No -cides. No GMO genes.

Alfalfa is on the GMO hit list.

The following is an excerpt from the Blog, Monsanto's Roundup Triggers Over 40 Plant Diseases and Endangers Human and Animal Health:

"Roundup Ready crops dominate US livestock feed. Soy and corn are most prevalent—93% of US soy and nearly 70% of corn are Roundup Ready. Animals are also fed derivatives of the other three Roundup Ready crops: canola, sugar beets, and cottonseed. Nutrient loss from glyphosate can therefore be severe.

"This is especially true for manganese (Mn), which is not only chelated by glyphosate, but also reduced in Roundup Ready plants (see photo). One veterinarian finds low manganese in every livestock liver he measures. Another vet sent the liver of a stillborn calf out for testing. The lab report stated: No Detectible Levels of Manganese—in spite of the fact that the mineral was in adequate concentrations in his region. When that vet started adding manganese to the feed of a herd, disease rates dropped from a staggering 20% to less than ½%.

"Veterinarians who started their practice after GMOs were introduced in 1996 might assume that many chronic or acute animal disorders are common and to be expected. But several older vets have stated flat out that animals have gotten much sicker since GMOs came on the scene. And when they switch livestock from GMO to non-GMO feed, the improvement in health is dramatic. Unfortunately, no one is tracking this, nor is anyone looking at the impacts of consuming milk and meat from GM-fed animals."

The plant's lack of ability to take up minerals means the minerals are absent from our food. We need minerals.

"Alzheimer’s, for example, is linked with reduced copper and magnesium. Don Huber points out that this disease has jumped 9000% since 1990."

GMO organisms are considered experimental. Yet there is enough evidence to convince thinking people that the permanent damage to genes is NOT worth a continued effort in this direction.

Those of us who do not wish to produce crops contaminated with GMO genes have no rights. Our crops are contaminated by GMO growers and Monsanto sues us! AND MONSANTO WINS!

There is something radically wrong with this system.

Please join me in our concerted effort to fight our government to forbid GMO alfalfa from entering our food chain.