“Misinformation, disinformation and outright lies are what our conventional food system runs on.”

“As the new film, Organic Rising, created by Pulitzer Prize and Emmy award-winning filmmaker, Anthony Suau, points out – today’s food crisis is the civil rights movement of our time….”

From Christina Sarich, at Natural Society:

“Organic farming and gardening clearly isn’t just the old-timers way any more. It’s the way of a sustainable world. Younger farmers are coming into the fray more so than at any other time in our history except the 1920s, largely in response to our dilapidated and corrupt agricultural system.

Canada’s health minister Rona Ambrose meets with GMO activist Rachel Parent

From Global News:

From Global News

“For more than a year, Parent has been lobbying – speaking at schools, rallies, sending letters by courier – in the hope of securing a meeting with Ambrose.

Parent admits after more than a year of lobbying she was beginning to lose hope that a meeting would happen.

Then, in September, Global News asked Ambrose if she would meet with Parent. Ambrose said she would.

So they just stop counting? — GMO vote strangeness in California and Oregon

Miles Mathis on the GMO vote in Oregon:

“A couple of years ago I showed you how Monsanto (probably) stole the California GMO Proposition 37. They just did the same thing in Oregon. As I did in 2012, I have been following the vote count closely. This was easy since we got live updates from Oregon’s own state election site. As they did in California, when the vote got close, they just quit counting and reported final numbers. This despite the fact no final numbers have been tallied. No final numbers were ever tallied or reported in California, and it looks like no final numbers will ever be coming out of Oregon, either.

In California in November of 2012, the early numbers went against GMO labeling, but late numbers went for it. The late precincts were in the big cities, where yes on 37 was around 65-70%. So as the night wore on, the vote moved closer and closer to 50/50. Curiously, the vote counting stalled that night and the (final) result was reported, despite the fact that no real final result had been tallied. More than a week later state officials admitted many millions of votes had still not been counted, even in close races like Prop 37. Those complaining were told the State had a month to report final numbers.

Studies find pesticide use is linked to incidence of depression in farmers

From Lauren Rothman, at Vice Munchies:

“Life on the farm ain’t easy: the dawn-to-dusk hours, the physical toll of work in the fields, the variability of the weather, and the incredibly low net pay are just some of the factors that call to mind the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s 1963 “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” the tale of a desperately impoverished South Dakota farmer who ends up killing his wife, his five children, and finally himself.

The Bard’s song might be decades-old, but new evidence compiled by researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggests that serious depression among farmers is a real contemporary issue, one that in some cases can lead to farmworker suicide. The culprit, according to the NIH? Pesticides, which farmers both inhale and absorb through their skin as they apply them to their crops. These dangerous chemicals, researchers found, alter farmers’ brain chemistry, increasing their risk of depression by up to 90 percent.

Brain – Gut Neuroscience, in “Nature”

From Sara Reardon, on Nature.com

“The field is going to another level of sophistication,” says Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “Hopefully this will shift this image that there’s too much commercial interest and data from too few labs.”

This year, the US National Institute of Mental Health spent more than US$1 million on a new research programme aimed at the microbiome–brain connection. And on 19 November, neuroscientists will present evidence for the link in a symposium at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC called ‘Gut Microbes and the Brain: Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience’.

New European study correlates raw milk with fewer colds and infections

Via Realmilk.com

“Raw milk opponents and doctors strongly warn against the consumption of unpasteurized milk for infants, children and pregnant women, arguing that these individuals are more susceptible to illnesses that raw milk could cause. However, a new study that took place across Austria, Finland, France, Germany and Switzerland shows a connection between the consumption of raw milk and lowered rates of colds and infections among children. This study clearly relates Raw milk and lower infections in children.

The study, detailed in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, aimed to assess the effects of consumption of raw vs. boiled vs. industrially processed milks on common infections (including coughing, runny nose, fever, ear infection or diarrhea) in babies’ first year of life.

Israel bans water fluoridation

From Douglas Main, in Newsweek:

“On Tuesday of this week (Aug. 26), Israel officially stopped adding fluoride to its water supplies. The decision has “been lauded by various rights groups, but criticized by many in the medical and dental communities as a serious mistake,” as the Times of Israel put it.

The tasteless, colorless chemical is put into water for the purpose of reducing cavities, but critics say that it amounts to mass medication, and forces people to consume the substance whether they want to or not….”

Trending towards an end to marijuana prohibition; now how about raw milk?

From Quartz:

There are three marijuana ballot initiatives in today’s midterm elections—in Alaska, Oregon and Washington DC—where voters will decide on outright legalization of recreational marijuana. In a fourth ballot, in Florida, voters will vote on a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution, which would legalize medical marijuana.

Initiative 71 in the nation’s capital is the only ballot that looks certain to pass. The remaining three are expected to go down to the wire.

Would you invest in “Beetcoin”?

From Caitlin Bowling, on Louisville Business First:

You read that right — Beetcoin, not Bitcoin.

Slow Money Alliance, a collection of regional networks that invest in small food enterprises, introduced the Beetcoin concept on its website a week ago.

Slow Money Alliance is about “taking some of your money out of Wall Street and doing something with it that you understand,” said Woody Tasch, founder of Slow Money Alliance.

Beetcoins, which are investments in small enterprises, cost $25 to start off, though people can donate more. The goal is to raise $50,000 which will help fund two small business projects. One business will receive a $40,000, three-year, zero-interest loan, while the other will get a $10,000 loan.

Control of agriculture seen as key to America’s political subjugation of India

From Colin Todhunter on Global Research:

“The World Bank/IMF/WTO’s goals on behalf of Big Agritech and the opening up of India to it are well documented [6]. With the help of compliant politicians, transnational companies want farmers’ lands and unmitigated access to Indian markets. This would entail the wholesale ‘restructuring’ of Indian society under the bogus banner of ‘free trade’, which will lead (is leading) to the destruction of the livelihoods of hundreds of millions [7,8,9].

Moreover, Monsanto, Walmart and other giant US corporations had a seat at the top table when the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture was agreed with the US [10]. Monsanto also controls the cotton industry in India [11] and is increasingly shaping agri-policy and the knowledge paradigm by funding agricultural research in public universities and institutes: it is the “contemporary East India Company.” [12]