

Scott: One thing I heard, this morning on the radio someone was mentioning this conference tonight. And they said, 'here's the thing that bothers me, you can think all you want about GMO's, but so many people are saying I'm against GMO's, I don't want them in my food, but then in the same breath, they're saying I want my big, crunchy apples and I want my sweet corn year round. And you can't have both.' What do you say to that?
Howard Vlieger: Well, as I said, I started alternative farming methods in 1989. My email address starts out as 'student of the soil'. And I have no problem admitting the more I learn, the more I know I don't know. And I looked at, I started farming in 1979, in 1989 we started using alternative methods. And I can't believe what I didn't know and I still can't believe today what I don't know. And I can't believe how wrongly dependent I was on someone else to know how to run my business. As far as a good, crunchy, sweet, long lasting apple, that's easy. You don't need to genetically modify it to do it. All you need to do is balance the nutritional and biological requirements in the soil, where you're raising that crop. I don't care if it's an apple or corn. When you have things in balance and healthy you will produce a nutrient dense, long lasting, satisfying product for food. There is not one single genetic modification that is on the market to this point and time, that has remotely proven that. And the poster child for that will be 'well we're gonna prove nutrient content so we're gonna make this golden rice and it's going to enhance the vitamin A content and everything's going to be honky dory and we're going to solve all the problems for blindness in these third world countries.
Well they don't tell you how much of that rice you'd have to consume on a daily basis to get the required amount of vitamin A in your diet for the goal that they want to achieve. They also don't tell you that the number one reason that that golden rice is not on the market and in production today is not because of the consumer resistance that you're not going to use my children as guinea pigs to try this thing out, it's because it won't perform in the field. They're testing it in test plot after test plot after test plot, and it's failing agronomically. But they don't tell you that. There is not one single genetically engineered crop to this point in time, that is proven in an independent study to have more nutrient density, more nutrition, or more anything improvement. The number one widespread use of genetically engineered crops to this point in time is herbicide resistance or it contains a toxin. A BT toxin. And they say 'well, we dramatically we will reduce the use of insecticide as a result of having this BT toxin. But guess what? They manipulate the numbers. Every BT hybrid is registered as an insecticide with the EPA. Corn, for example, you plant 34,000 plants of corn per acre, you're going to have 3 point 7-3 pounds of a toxin, or insecticide, present. Now they'll tell you it's natural, it's same as soil occuring. That's not true. It is not the same as the soil occurring bacillus thuringiensis. It doesn't break down like the natural version does. But lets consider the fact that we don't take into the equation, sure we maybe pulled off the insecticide on a few acres of corn on corn, but now we've put this BT on how many countless acres that we never used insecticide on before. So what did we do to the actual level of the insecticide or toxin applied to the environment? Again, it's their story, they can tell it like they want to.
Howard Vlieger has been a farmer for decades. He discusses gmo crops and how they are supposed to be better than conventionally grown crops. Hear how what he has learned about the reality of gmo crops throughout his career.
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