Bayer Bought Monsanto?

Fun fact. A real big selling Bayer product that helped build their vast fortune from their stock and catalog about 115 years ago.
 

Attachments

  • Bayer_Heroin_bottle.jpg
    Bayer_Heroin_bottle.jpg
    6.8 KB · Views: 38
Farm Boy said:
Metal, that would probably be those monocultures at work, which I'm constantly fretting and swearing about when I mention mowing ditches, or draining wetlands, or discontinuing set aside programs. But the illiterate will continue to pat themselves about banning safe chemicals from hicks while not funding the effective programs or stopping mosquito fogging thier neighborhoods for west nile, oh boy. MOOOONSAAATAAAN.....

Hell, it might even be the neonicitinoids. And if it is, the solution is still almost certainly stopping mowing the ditches* and reintroducing set aside programs. Imagine that. Bugs need undisturbed nests and flowers to feed on.

*More expensive than it sounds. If you just stop mowing you get trees, not natural grass and prarie. You have to reintroduce with seeding, then you have to burn in the spring instead of shredding. Then people have to be willing to put up with tall cover alongside the roads, and people don't hunt deer like they used to.
Click to expand...

So its the Mosquito control methods employed by the CDC ?
You might well be onto something but the CDC uses chemicals as a last resort as they learnt with DDT helping breed mosquitoes whom have chemical immunities.

If it becomes more expensive to get the bees to come pollunate arigculture maybe it could incentivies farmers to set aside part of there lands as nature reserves. But I suspect that it will have to be regulated at the federal level and well Republicans hate regulations.
 
Farm Boy said:
What I do then is put the pipe down for a while, harden the buck up, take a good look at what other hard men and women are saying about the things they know best, and attempt to make myself useful. But that's an "ought," not an "is," and firmly resides in the realm of aspirational rather than "to do."
Click to expand...

I think trying to be "useful" might be part of the problem. I suppose our fundamental discrepancy is to whether or not things are okay as they are, or not. Me, personally, I think we're ******. You could call that pessimistic, however I have never lost my optimism nor hope. Some people want to be watering cans, some people want to be wrecking balls, it's nice we're not all the same :lol:
 
Farm Boy said:
Go figure. Beekeeping by order breeds the genes too thin, people blame neonicitinoids which don't drift in wind pollinated fields(no flowering plants for bees), unrelated case to unrelated chemical, next stop vaccines.
Click to expand...

Lexicus said:
I'm pretty sure I remember reading quite recently that the whole bee die-off thing is not even true anyway.
My concern is mostly that I think Monsanto has a lot of unethical business practices, not that I'm trying to prove we need to return to some kind of rural idyll because modern agriculture is fundamentally evil or whatever. But "company uses chemical and tries to cover up adverse health/environmental effects" is not, to my mind, a hugely sensational or world-shattering idea.
Click to expand...

well, then you read wrong. the european honey bee certainly is not gonna go extinct any time soon. but that is not the issue and never was. they are being bred by the billions all around the globe. it is literally all the other pollinators that are suffering, being reduced drastically. wild bees, butterflies, flies, whatever. those are more important for pollination than the european honeybee (since they have a broader spectrum and are perfectly adapted to local flora).

if you want to read up on bees I recommend Jürgen Tautz, kind of the leading German authority on all things bees. fantastic man, met him recently.

why not try to make a move towards permaculture instead of monoculture? why not pay more for your produce if it's actually worth it? at least here in Germany it's way too cheap anyway. I'm sure the same does not apply for America, fresh high quality produce is incredibly expensive as I've heard?

monoculture with insane amounts of herbicides and pesticides imply is not sustainable in the long run. it is also not needed to feed us, at all. we are still throwing out way, way too much food. I honestly cannot blame Argentinian farmers or African farmers for using roundup, but surely we are in a position to do better?
 
Tbf we want to be throwing out a lot of food...
 
Yes, monocultures. They're bad. I agree, I've been yammering about them myself, so don't feel the need to convince me! I, however, am duly obligated to try and explain at least some of the things I know that don't appear to be popularly considered, probably. I've been trying to spell out what fighting monoculture looks like. It looks like programs that involve setting aside ground, often rotating on a 4 or 5 year cycle, to fallow off and provide undisturbed, untreated habitat for native plants and animal life. It involves regrowing native plant and animal life, primarily alongside roads, because roads criss cross and provide the literal connection between patches that is necessary for some types of life to be mobile and thrive, rather than have them pocketed and islanded. There need to be set aside programs, at least here, because if there are not, then you cannot. The pricing on the ground correlates to the most profitable short term use of the ground. The taxes then flow from that, the mortgage flows from that. If you don't use the ground efficiently, you will not long control it. The profit margins are not there. Then, the ground will inevitably be controlled by somebody who will cave to the use of it that clears profit. The same thing with the ditches. Local municipalities can afford a couple guys and a couple mowers. Ditch seeding/burning programs(local for me) are more intensive.

None of this requires removing chemical controls and forcing the reimplementation of some sort of pre-industrial agricultural fetish. That's probably counterproductive, it just trades pastoral dream blindspot miseries for the boogeyman of the hour. That said, serioiusly. Seriously I've been on board for years with the government coordinating efforts to make sure there are actually local fresh produce producers scattered all about the country. If they're small scale, low petroleum, high skin cancer operations, fine. Like I said, it's not a bad living. It just has a different set of harms.
 
Farm Boy said:
, however, am duly obligated to try and explain at least some of the things I know that don't appear to be popularly considered, probably. I've been trying to spell out what fighting monoculture looks like.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your post and for your perspective! I think you are much more familiar with the reality of the subject than I am. I did really get a little amped up about permaculture and pre-industrial methods of agriculture. I know that a few farmers in Europe manage to do it, but they can only survive by catering to very specific businesses, for example they deliver high class restaurants. There was a nice documentary about that recently, it is in German sadly:

Of course feeding the world with permaculture and without the use of instecticides nor pesticides is utopian and simply not feasible at all, but who knows what'll happen in the next 50 years :) We're heading straight for lab-grown meat, after all, and that was definitely science fiction 50 years ago.

Lexicus said:
I did not. What I read was about domestic honeybees, not wild pollinators.
Click to expand...

A honey bee (or honeybee) is any member of the genus Apis, primarily distinguished by the production and storage of honey and the construction of perennial, colonial nests from wax. In the early 21st century, only seven speciesof honey bee are recognized, with a total of 44 subspecies,[1] though historically seven to eleven species are recognized. The best known honey bee is the Western honey bee which has been domesticated for honey production and crop pollination. Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees.[2] Some other types of related bees produce and store honey and have been kept by humans for that purpose, including the stingless honey bees, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees. The study of bees, which includes the study of honey bees, is known as melittology.

No Apis species existed in the New World during human times before the introduction of A. mellifera by Europeans. Only one fossil species is documented from the New World, Apis nearctica, known from a single 14 million-year-old specimen from Nevada.[9]

there is no "domestic" American honeybee per se. it was a neophyte introduced by the European settlers, one of the very few domesticated bees, and it wildly replaced the actual domestic bees (and other pollinators). but I get what you mean tho.
 
Last edited:
It's an interesting dilemma. Human power raising one's own food and for maybe 50-100 more persons is a good living. It's active, it can be eco friendly. But it's so easily abused. I am literally terrified at the prospect of the rise of 21st century sharecropping from hell. Once it's out of sight, it's out of mind. People worrying about Roundup causing cancer when there is sunlight and hoes has convinced me of that.
 
My overall assessment of the toxicity of glyphosate is this: I would eat up to 20 mg on a dare, would eat 20-100 mg for sufficient payment, wouldn't go above 100 mg or dose repeatedly despite animal studies showing no effect until doses are far higher.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom