Above photo: Atlanta’s OG of black farming, K. Rashid Nuri, at Truly Living Well’s Old Fourth Ward farm. ERIK MEADOWS/CL FILE
“But the interesting parallel here is that the food is grown from the same source of war material – ammonium nitrate. So corn becomes the bullets.” – Rashid Nuri
Below is the audio and transcription of a July 2011 interview with urban farmer Rashid Nuri about both the history and impact of industrial agriculture.
The importance of understanding this history cannot be over-stressed. Rashid wisely begins by sharing the history of the west’s conceptualization of “the way that we think about ourselves and our relation to the material world that exists around us.” He notes that prior to this “man had a much closer relationship to nature than he does today.” He then comments about how this altered conceptual framework in our attitude toward nature has impacted agricultural science and systems that has both negatively effected our lives and has ultimately not been good for humans and the world overall. Rashid emphatically states also that rather than objectifying nature and trying to control it, it’s important to be in harmony with it because, for one, it can’t be controlled anyway and also nature will strike back.
Rashid stresses that it is by being in harmony with the natural world that we can grow healthy food for us all rather than using the dangerous, poisonous and unhealthy chemicals as applied in industrial agriculture.
And finally, and importantly, he says that vis-a-vis industrial agriculture that what’s important is to create the “alternative” which he has done in his natural urban agricultural work.
As from the transcribed 2012 interview with Rashid entitled “Interview: Learning from Rashid Nuri: Rebellions & Revolutions: Usually It’s about Food“, below is information about his background.
At the community radio station WRFG-FM in Atlanta, Georgia, I have a radio program entitled “Just Peace”, that I have been producing for more than two decades. In addition, however, my professional career has been in agriculture working with Black farmers across the South. So, I decided quite a few years ago that in addition to the vast array of justice issues I cover on the show, that it was important to provide listeners with information about food. Not only about the politics of food but most importantly “how to grow it.”
This was inspired thanks to Atlanta’s organic urban farmer Rashid Nuri who created the Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture. I had realized that if there was anyone in Atlanta, the United States or virtually anywhere in the world who understood the breadth of the history, the politics of food, and about organic production altogether, it was Rashid Nuri.
With a degree from Harvard University in Political Science and a masters degree in Soil Science from the University of Massachusetts, he is certainly well qualified to put it mildly. As an ‘organic’ farmer he said he had to unlearn virtually everything he acquired from the Soil Science degree, and I understand that as well.
In addition to all of this, in the 1990s Rashid worked under Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Espy (the first Black Secretary), as the Director of the Commodity Credit Corporation. Rashid had also lived and worked on agriculture issues in Africa and Asia for a number of years.
As you can see from all this impressive background, Rashid’s breadth of both the knowledge and analysis of the politics and history of food is significant. We are blessed he decided to create his organization here in Atlanta. So, since 2011, I have been interviewing Rashid once a month about agriculture and also opening the phone lines for listeners to ask questions about the topic at hand or organic production techniques, etc.
The July 2011 interview with Rashid Nuri was by me, Heather Gray, along with questions from co-producer Nadia Ali. The edited transcription of the interview is below.
July 2011 Audio of Interview with Rashid Nuri
We think that we can try to dominate and control rather than be in harmony with the natural order of things…Those chemicals kill everything that’s in the soil.
It’s supporting a system of agriculture production that is killing the earth. – Rashid Nuri
Heather Gray – Tonight we’re going to be talking with Rashid Nuri about industrial agriculture and compare that to, of course, natural or organic production. Rashid, I want to go into a bit of a history of this with you.
Rashid Nuri– Sure. Where do you want to start?
Heather – That’s a really good question because I know you know this so well. But I guess we should start at the beginning, right? Let me couch this in some sort of way by saying that throughout the history of agriculture we have been farming naturally, and then in the past century and a half this started to change a bit.
Rashid – Actually, it was a little before that. Let me try to explain. A very dear friend of mine gave me a book recently. It was an adult story but it began, “once upon a time” and I think that’s where we should begin. Once upon a time, man had a much closer relationship to nature than he does today. We’ve lost that closeness to nature. There are reasons why that has been lost, primarily because we have changed the way that we think about ourselves and our relation to the material world that exists around us. Let me take a minute to explain.
There are a lot of folks who come up to me and say “Oh, Rashid you’re a master of this and a master of that.” And I explain, “No, as long as I’m living, I’m going to continue to learn.”
At about 1600 (15th century), whenever Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was around, he created a new way of thinking. It was Newtonian physics, Newtonian mechanics. And what happened is, rather than looking for ways to be in tune with nature and the core of nature, man got to the point where he thought he could control and dominate nature. And the reason is that they were able to look at the universe and put numbers to it and be able to predict what was going to happen. And it was thought this was the way to approach all of agriculture and all of life.
The metaphor is this. If a watch is broken and you are able to take the watch apart and then you can see where all the parts fit, if there is one part that’s broken you can put it back in and make the clock work again.
But nature doesn’t work quite like that.
We are in an age now of wave theory, quantum mechanics as a way of looking at the universe. How this has been interpreted is that scientists today feel as though they can take apart nature and put it back together better than nature can do itself. And this is what we’ve done with agriculture. This is what we’ve done with all the life around us.
We think that we can try to dominate and control rather than be in harmony with the natural order of things. So this same paradigm has been brought to agriculture.
Then we skip forward to the 150 years ago you’re talking about. There’s a German called Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) who in his laboratory learned there were certain nutrients that plants needed at a minimum in order to be able to grow plants. He narrowed it down to nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Having isolated those elements for the leaves and the roots he stated a theory, which is called the theory (law) of the minimum. Whichever nutrient is available to the plants and then the minimum amount will determine that plant’s ability to grow.
So with that knowledge you go out and put fertilizer on the plants – not thinking about the soil – not thinking about the life in the soil – and isolating the plants from the soil and saying “We know more than God does.” So again, the thinking was that if we add nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to these plants, then we will be able to grow things.
And they did this for a long time, but it doesn’t work because there are certain elements that have been left out. They left out all the micro-organisms and micro-nutrients in the soil that, in combination, there is a symbiosis between all of these elements that helps plants to grow. So the scientists have taken over agriculture production instead of people looking at nature and seeing what nature has provided and how nature works together.
What they have done is say “we know better than nature does and we’re going to control or dominate what happens in the soil.” That has got us where we are today.
Nadia Ali – When you say it got us where we are today, are you speaking about all of the countries and agricultural communities on the planet or just the western ones?
Rashid – Well, that’s a very good point. I’ve got a book here called “Stuffed and Starved” by Raj Patel. And he’s talking about the hidden battle for the world’s food system. And what you’re finding all over the world is that western thought processes about agriculture have been exported all over the world. Everywhere you look. This is why you have a rush in Africa now to acquire that land. Africa has all the resources for everybody and the Chinese are coming in and trying to get it. Americans are invading through Libya to try to get the land. Arabs are buying all this land so they can export commercial agriculture and continue to dominate the populations. It’s a re-colonization of Africa. So, no, it’s not just America, and the western system its being exported all over the world. And that’s a problem.
When the dust bowl in America happened before the Second World War, during the depression, there were a lot of factors that came together. But agriculture production was reduced because of droughts. People didn’t have irrigation.
And then the Second World War war ended and you had all these surplus chemicals and all the chemical manufacturers and the munitions manufacturers wanted to keep making money. War is a very, very profitable enterprise. It has only been America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan where you had recession and wars at the same time. That’s never happened in history before. Generally, people make money and countries do very well when they’re dominating and winning wars.
After the Second World War they had all this ammonium nitrate left over that you use for gunpowder. What are they going to do with it? They said, “Wow! Let’s sell it to the farmers.” So they give it to the farmers and the farmers grow more crops, but the chemicals also kill everything that’s in the soil. Nevertheless, they’re still able to grow more crops.
Then they start subsidizing crops. It’s a very simple but complicated system if you understand it. They – the government – subsidize the production. Then, they use that surplus production to dominate the world politics by using food as a weapon around the world rather than guns. But the interesting parallel here is that the food is grown from the same source of war material – ammonium nitrate. So corn becomes the bullets.
Heather – What do you mean ‘food as a weapon’? How does that work?
Rashid – We’ll give you food if you do what we tell you to do. You have a lot of countries that were devastated after WWII. People need food. They have to eat and if your whole economy has been destroyed the Americans said, “we’ll give you food if you let us invest in your country and if you follow our rules.” They used the Public Law 480 program that came to fruition in the late 40s and early 50s, which was “Food for Peace“. You give us that political agreement that we asked for, and we’ll ship you tons of food.What does that do? It provides shipping transports to make money; the farmers make money because the prices get subsidized; the grain companies make money. Everybody makes money accept the folk in countries who are receiving the food. And then, in addition that food, there is an exchange for the raw materials in the countries receiving the food, and the raw materials are brought back to the United States to continue the industrialization process. It’s insidious.Along with this use of the chemicals in the food, you had the US government subsidize breeding programs with grains. And the principal grains around the world are corn, wheat, rice and then there’s cotton as well. Those are the four that really stand out that are commercial crops around the world.
Heather– And they are generally called commodities, right?
Rashid – Yes, they are commodities. They started breeding programs to hybridize the food and then they standardized it so that all corn is the same size and harvested at the same time.Then we had a man named Norman Borlaug. I have a hero and an anti-hero in agriculture. George Washington Carver is my hero. And Norman Bourlag is my anti-hero. This is the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Green Revolution (see note #1 below) – thinking it was helping people.But what Green Revolution has actually done is it has created greater poverty around the world rather than riches. The only folks that have become rich are the grain companies and the chemical companies that provided the inputs. The farmers themselves are starving. This is why you’ve got all the suicides today in India because of their relationship with Monsanto (and all the chemical laden seeds and fertilizers being sold to Indian farmers).
Henry Wallace sent Borlaug to Mexico where Borlaug began to conceive of the green revolution. Henry Wallace was Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture and he also ran for president back in the 40s. He had two terms as Secretary of Agriculture under Roosevelt.
These men were well intentioned. But the results of their thought processes and the paradigms in which they worked are where we ended up. This is why I talked about the science of the Newtonian mechanics that is of the thought and concept that we can dominate nature rather than be in harmony with it.
Heather– There’s an “assumption” that we can dominate nature.
Rashid – That’s very correct. There’s an “assumption” that we can dominate nature and we’re finding out every day that you can’t. Just look at the natural disasters that we’ve just witnessed in this century alone. This should let people know that you can’t dominate nature. The best that you can do is be in harmony with and in tune with nature which is the essence of natural urban agriculture.
So the hybridization (see note #2 below) of the crops means there’s certain things you have to have. You have to have fertilizer; you have to have chemicals for the pests; and you have to have irrigation.
Heather – Now when you’re talking about hybridizing you’re talking about this effort to sort of standardize crop production so you have corn that’s the same height and you have the same type of corn and so forth, right?
Rashid – That’s right. There’s some science behind that. The problem with hybridization is that the seeds (see note #3 below) cannot be put back in the ground. You can’t save your seeds and put them back the next year as farmers has always done. You can’t save a 10th and put it back the next year. So what you put back is going to be a throwback from the previous generations of seeds where the seeds have been crossed genetically and thus that keeps farmer in debt to and beholden to the seed companies that provide them with new seed that they have to pay for.
Heather – Whereas, since time began farmers have always saved their seed for next year’s crop.
Rashid – That’s exactly right. That’s where the concept of tithing comes from. Historically, you plant a crop and every 10 seeds you get back you save one and you eat the other nine. That’s where the concept came from. All through the Bible…this is what happened in Egypt with David and Joseph and those folks. That’s why churches have tithing now. It makes good sense. So with hybridization you can’t tithe. You have to go back to the seed company and you have to have the inputs for the seeds and monocrops to produce effectively – the chemicals – you’ve got to have the fertilizer, you’ve got to have the pesticides.
One of the major problems with hybridized food and monocrop culture, is that it is the antithesis of what you find in nature. You go out in the woods and you see everything growing. There’s a biodiversity – an echo-diversity. You’ve got all kinds of plants. You’ve got tall plants, short plants, trees, forests wherever you are. You’ve got the savannahs, the tall grasses, the short grasses. The grasses change over seasons. Just as the fruit goes through the season when you start in the summer and start off with berries and cherries, peaches and apricots, nectarines and eventually, in the Fall, you get your apples and your pears. The same thing happens out in the plains and the prairies where the grass grow. You have different kinds of grasses that grow at different times of the year. You have a biodiversity…and an echo-diversity.
You go to any of these countries that are practicing commercial agriculture and you see one thing in the field and that’s it.
Heather – Let’s talk a little bit about having that one crop in the field and also why farmers are committing suicide. But in the natural state of growth, we have an incredible diversity. So when there is that “sameness” as in having one crop in the field, it creates problems in any number of ways. What are some of those problems
Rashid – If you get a disease a “dis-ease” or an insect that’s going to eat it up everything and your crop is gone – the insects are saying “here’s lunch, let’s eat” – and in these circumstances the whole field is the same thing, the same crop – there is no diversity. Whereas if you have diversity out there – a diverse biosphere – you’re going to have good insects and bad insects. The good insects will ward off the bad ones. You have the different plants growing next to each other – companion planting – and the plants will repel insects and repel disease. It creates a balance that stays in harmony. You’re always going to lose some, but you don’t want to put yourself into a position of losing it all. And the easiest way to lose it all is to have one thing – one crop – out there. That’s the old nursery rhyme – “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” And this is what we have done in commercial agriculture – we put all of our eggs in one basket. So, therefore, you have to keep coming in with chemicals and keep spraying it with all the fertilizers to make it grow and with lots of water to keep it because you can’t do it without water. And it all becomes very precarious.
Heather – Years ago when there were problems with cotton growth, what was said I think was that the reason there was such a massive problem with this is that cotton was a monocrop. In other words there was tons of cotton in one field that provided the opportunity for the boll weevil to attack it.
Rashid – Yeah, I’ve got to tell you a little joke. The man from the department of agriculture called me up yesterday. The agriculture commissioner came out to visit us some time ago and we told him we had some cotton plants planted down there at the Wheatstreet Garden. So he wanted to have this man come out and trap the boll weevil that we may have on our cotton downtown. I said “well my friend it didn’t grow so you don’t have to worry about that.” But they were so concerned because they have eliminated the boll weevil in Georgia.
But the reason you have the boll weevil is multifaceted. One, farmers were monocropping. Cotton was the only thing they grew every single year. They mined the soil. They were not concerned about creating biological life in the soil. The soil is a living thing. It’s all a part of Mother Earth. You have to feed the soil. The soil is alive. You go out in woods and see the humus around and you’re going to find all kinds of like rolly-pollies, centipedes, millipedes, earthworms – there’s life out there – spiders, and all kinds of stuff that makes that soil alive. There’s mycelium in there, all kinds of micro-bacterias that are growing in the ground to make that soil alive – a living breathing thing.
You go out into the cotton fields and the soil is dead because its been mono-cropped. They were not enriching the soil. This is why George Washington Carver is so important. He taught folks about crop rotation and adding organic material back to the soil so the soil could be healthy and grow.
The boll weevil just sat here waiting every year. The boll weevils couldn’t wait for that cotton crop – some more cotton – let’s go get it! As a farmer you can’t allow for that. You have to rotate the crops and then the boll weevil would say, “Oh man, what is this soybean doing here?” This is one of the ways you can fool insects is by rotating of your crops. Keep moving the crops and the insects around.
Heather – What about genetically modified seeds – GMOs?
Rashid – It’s a very simple proposition. Rather than hybridizing/cross breeding plants where you have to go back a couple of generations to get the seed, scientists are taking genes and splicing them into the seed so that they will get the characteristics the chemical company wants. The principle one is BT Cotton – Bacillus thuringiensis – BT is a bacteria that kills bugs. Now, I will use BT but I don’t want a seed that has it in it. I will use the bacteria – it’s natural – to kill soft worms. I don’t use it very often because our soil is good, by God’s grace – let me knock on wood.
But they’ve taken these chemicals and…let me make it more simple… and use cotton as an example. They have round-up ready cotton. Round-up (see note #4 below) is a herbicide that kills all broad leaf plants. If you don’t want to have weeds in your field, you hoe your field. You don’t want to have something like weeds in your field to compete with the thing you’re trying to grow. So they’ll have round-up ready corn, round-up ready cotton, round-up ready soybeans that Monsanto has created. So they’ve inserted this gene into the seed itself so that it will kill all of the broad leaf weeds that emerge in the garden. So the only thing that will come up are the corn, cotton and soybeans.
Heather – So this adds more chemicals to the soil, more chemicals to the food that we’re eating and so forth. But you need to talk about what Monsanto is.
Rashid – Monsanto is a very large chemical company. They and DuPont are probably the biggest ones that make these agriculture chemicals. They invented round-up some years ago that is very efficient in keeping the broadleaf weeds out of the farmland. So they spray from airplanes, they spray it with tractors, they spray by hand. You can buy round-up to spray the cracks in your sidewalk. Round-up is the (main) drug for killing weeds.
Heather – What is it doing to us? To the soil, to the people, to global warming?
Rashid – It’s supporting a system of agriculture production that is killing the earth. Those chemicals kill everything that’s in the soil.
Heather – And it’s getting into our groundwater?
Rashid – Everywhere. Most often before they even plant they’ll go into the fields and with chemicals kill all the weeds that are there. Then they add the round-up to kill the things as they emerge from the soil so you just have the plants. And all of this requires fertilizer, tremendous amounts of irrigation, and pesticides. And every year you plant again, the plants and the insects become more and more resistant to all these chemicals.
Heather – So, I think this is really important because this demonstrates how nature will resist this science-based agriculture. You can’t dominate nature.
Rashid – To lead into where these suicides are coming from, you’ve got these farmers – as in India – who are convinced to use this new technology, which is making money for folks back here in the west. In using this new technology they borrow the money to put the crops in, and instead of making money they become further and further in debt.
In order to grow these crops it takes a tremendous amount of capital. So, if you’re farming on a very large scale, and can live on a small margin, because of the volume that you’re creating, you can make money. But if you’re a small farmer and you’ve been convinced to use this new technology that is foreign to your farming history, you have to go borrow money to put in this crop. You have to do this instead of saving seeds you had from last year and putting those seeds back in the ground – this is a problem.
One of the books I read about agriculture is by Sir Albert Howard – it’s called “An Agricultural Testament“. He spent many years in India using elephant dung to grow food.
Heather – And it was very effective, I’m sure.
Rashid – And the irony is that I’m using elephant dung now to grow food. That’s the principle ingredient we’re using.
Nadia – I’m curious about where you’re getting the elephant dung.
Rashid – Zoo-doo.
Nadia – That’s what I was hoping.
Rashid – No, we don’t have any elephants down there. Here talking about India – they would collect the dung from any place. From the animals that you have from the farm and use that as a fertilizer – pigs, cows, horses, mules, goats, chickens – all that and even human manure. In other places in the world people use their own waste to put back in the ground to feed the soil. But I wouldn’t touch it in this country. The simple reason is you think about what you put down the toilet your very self and if you would want some of that going back into your foods – no, I don’t think so.
Heather – So you’re talking about the chemicals in our diet – like the prescription drugs, etc. is another serious problem.
Rashid – So back to the farmer that would use the waste from his farm. He would also use the hay in his farm to make compost that he would put that back in the ground and grow his food. He would also save the seed from the previous year. He had a system of subsistence. Some people did well and they lived…they lived.
Heather – Most of these farmers, as in India, have never had to borrow money like this before and they were historically self-sufficient in that sense.
Rashid – So the west will say, “try our system it will work. Look what kind of yields you will get, but it’s going to cost you this much to get it.” Then each year you come back you’ve to get more and more of the fertilizers. You have to pay for the irrigation systems as you’ve got to make sure you have enough water because you can’t use these new technologies in agriculture without sufficient water.
The seed companies are also still trying to breed seed for drought areas – drought resistant seed and their having trouble with this.
This is still in the same Newtonian mechanic paradigm of science – as in thinking we know what the constituent parts are so we can take it apart and put it back together in a way that we can dominate nature. It doesn’t work.
Nadia – Rashid, I have two questions. One deals with irrigation that you’ve mentioned several times now that these hybrid genetically altered seeds require irrigation, but wouldn’t you need irrigation anyway? Doesn’t everything need water to grow? The second is, you’ve mentioned India several times. Is this unique to India right now or is this occurring around the globe.
Rashid – I’ll do the second one first. It is occurring elsewhere in the world but you have some of the most stark examples of this in India – folks committing suicide. You also have farmer’s associations and unions that have decided to protest the imposition of these western companies in India.
As far as irrigation is concerned, yes, you have to have water but you need more water with this high technology because it’s the technology that underlies it all. Part of the requirement is to use lots of water to get the chemicals down in the soil, to hold them down, and to help them uptake to the plants. You need more of it in order to get it done. The water’s not just to go down to the roots, the water’s got to get the stuff up into the plants so it takes more to suck it up.
Nadia – That makes sense. There is a caller on the line.
Caller (1) – Rashid, do you know of the company that produced the Agent Orange? And are you familiar with the incident in Bhopal, India where there was an incident with that chemical company that wiped out the entire village?
Rashid – What was Agent Orange? It was a chemical that killed all the crops and harmed the people. It’s a perfect example of the problem we have with this. Agent Orange was one of the most financially successful chemicals ever created and it was designed by Monsanto. The same people that are bringing the round-up into commercial agriculture. (see note #5 below)
Heather – Wasn’t Agent Orange first used in Vietnam?
Rashid – Yeah, that’s where it was used to defoliate the trees so they could see the Vietnamese as they were walking along the paths. With all the foliage in the tropical area you could not see the down to the forest floor. But if you defoliated it all then you could get the helicopters up there are that could spot the troops as they were moving along. But what did the Vietnamese do? They built tunnels – they went underground and you still couldn’t see them.
Heather – We need to say however that the problems with Agent Orange in Vietnam has been immense. The land has been destroyed.
Rashid – Not only the land, but the people got cancers and all kinds of bodily disease because of their exposure to Agent Orange. But from a business point of view it was one of the most successful campaigns that Monsanto had. They sold it to the government. So like I said, war is good for the economy.
As far as Bhopal, India is concerned it was agriculture chemicals that were being manufactured there. The plant exploded and poisoned all the people in a wide radius around the plant and killed tens of thousands of people. (Note: The plant that exploded was owned by Union Carbide and the explosion took place in 1984).
Nadia – My question has to do with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in this country. Can you explain please why if Monsanto and the chemicals it produces and other chemicals and companies like Monsanto, if they are so dangerous to us and to the planet that we’re living on, why are these things allowed by the FDA?
Rashid – It really is quite simple. They own them. You can buy a politician. And with all due respect to my political colleagues who may be listening, the American political system is for sale. He who gives big bucks gets what he wants. And the food and Drug Administration will not test to see if something is healthy. They will say that based upon the information they have received from the manufacturer who has agreed that they have tested these things, we feel that this is safe. There’s no safety there. Let me say that again. Just like an audit that you get from an accountant, based upon the information that has been provided to us, we think this is a good audit. We think this is a good chemical that we think ought to be able to come out to our people – to be sold to the people.
And you’ve got to also remember that companies send their representatives to Washington to be able to lobby within the government and take their seats within the government to represent their interests.
The US Trade Representatives? A couple of people in the higher rungs of that office all came out of the agriculture chemical industry. And you’ll find this throughout the US Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency – the very companies that are doing the polluting and destroying the planet have their representatives helping to make the decisions in Congress, and in the executive branch.
In Congress, if I give you $50,000 campaign contribution or through a political action committee and you get re-elected and you know what my point of view is on a subject, you’re going to listen to me because you want to get that money again so you can get re-elected. It’s an insidious system, but it’s the one we have. What do we do? We have to create the alternative.
Nadia – We have another caller.
Caller (2) – How are you doing brother Rashid? I respect the work you are doing in a basic and essential part of life that is just overlooked by everybody. It is very important. I just wanted to add this input. I have friends who have lived in the city of Atlanta all their lives. I’m a transplant as you may be able to tell. I know people who lived here as children and they told me there used to be a lot of fruit trees and a lot of trees that you could get food from that were growing wild in the metropolis and that this has disappeared.
And what you said about Agent Orange and things like that. I can remember when I was growing up in my native land and they had planes going over and putting these chemicals in that would kill mosquitos, for example, and I just think there was a larger plan to that in killing all these fruit tees so you could buy these foods from the store. I am thinking of that because of what you say regarding the political elements in these big cities, especially and with you being an expert, I wonder if you could give a little more information on that?
Rashid – He’s right. I’m not sure what I can add to that. There are a lot of political machinations that go on – people trying to control and dominate not only the world of nature, but the people in the world and a lot of it is quite insidious.
Again, we can sit up and rail against this, like the young man, but what I decided is that I need to create the alternative.
Here on the program on WRFG and the grace that you’ve given me with the opportunity to talk with folks on Just Peace, we can try to educate folks and help them to have a better understanding of these paradigms and how they effect us. But the real action comes from what are you going to do about it. And from my point of view, it is to create Truly Living Well where we are growing food naturally.
The brother talked about trees that used to be there. You come down to our site and we’ve got fruit trees at every site we have. It’s very important. If you come to me and say I’ve got 10 acres of land, I would say take half of it a grow fruits trees. That’s the first thing you should do and then start growing vegetables. Get your long-term food in. It is called edible landscaping. If you want to sit and have some shade there’s beautiful trees out there – why not get a fruit tree so you can eat it as well as get shade. That apple could hit you in the head and you could eat it and have your lunch. You don’t have to stay in the hammock all day. But let that land be productive.
I think grass is one of the greatest waste of resources that you could possibly have – there’s more fertilizer used on golf courses and lawns than there is in agriculture.
Caller (3) – Rashid, I am so glad you are on the show. My understanding from doing some research is that the PLU’s for the GMO’s starts with the 4 letters for it being a food and number 9 is for organics and number 8 tells you its conventional. It would be good if you could break down for the listeners what that is. My question also is, do you think chemtrails are a part of Monsanto’s dirty work.
Rashid – Yeah there’s a lot there. First the PLU’s are the codes that you find on the food – like cherries are 4045. I happen to know that because I like cherries.
Heather – What is the PLU?
Rashid – The PLU (Price Look-Up Code) is the standard number for any place you go in the country or perhaps in the world. If you go to the cash register or the self check-out you can put in the number of the commodity, it’s the same number at any store that you go in to. Once you know those numbers than its standardized and you can use that in any store across the country and I think around most of the world.
She’s right. The 9 is for organics. But the problem with that is this. The USDA organic standard is a patented phrase. It’s something that you buy. It’s oxymoric to me to have organic food at Walmart that was produced in China that would have an organic stamp on it. The Chinese have been busted out already for faking it and then you find this food right here in this country. And then you have US commercial farmers growing organic food as a market niche and their food is right next to the Chinese food so there’s a problem with that organic terminology.
The only way you’re really going to know what you’re getting in your food is to grow it yourself or go to someone you know who is growing the food for you.
Part of the work we do is to help people attain horticultural literacy. I think it’s extremely important for people to know who grows their food, the quality of their food and where their food comes from. If you come to our site you’re able to get food, you can see it right there in the ground growing and you’re able to bring it home.
So, just because it’s labeled organic doesn’t mean that it’s healthful and safe for you. You’ve got to know what it is.
And I would contend that anything that you buy that has more than five ingredients is not food. Somebody in a laboratory has created it. A carrot is a carrot. An apple is an apple. A collard green is a collard green. There’s no label on it that says this collard green is made up of all these different things that we put together. So just because that label says that it’s organic that does not mean that that is the best thing available to you.
What they’ve been able to create in America is these food scientists and the government has been able to create this perception that this food is good and it’s not necessarily so.Caller (4) – More and more when I go to the store and want to buy some fruit none of them have seeds anymore – not even the watermelons. Is there anywhere we can get fruits that have the seeds that have been grown the way we’re used to it?
Rashid – Yes, isn’t that an anomaly that you’re going to have watermelon that has no seeds? Or a grape that has no seeds in it? How is it going to reproduce itself? It’s a freak. You don’t find anything like that in nature. The best place to buy food is at the local farmer’s market and there are many around town.
Heather – Rashid, you can apparently buy organic beef but apparently it’s defined as organic beef if that cow ate organic corn rather than being grass-fed beef.
Rashid – I call that “in-put substitution” as the commercial farms put the cows in a feedlot, feed them grains and they’re still grain fed. Think about it. For those of you old enough to remember when they started this grain fed beef campaign back in the late 60’s early 70’s and then they got the nation hooked on this thing. When cows eat grass, that’s all they need. That’s the best argument you could have for a vegetarian. The biggest animals in the world – all they eat is grass.
Nadia – Rashid, you just said that grass was a waste of land.
Rashid – No, golf courses and grass in front of your house is a waste. If you’re raising chickens or if you’re raising cows I approve of that grassland.
Caller (5) – I want to give thanks to brother Rashid for the information that he’s giving. It is very, very real and very deep. If I want to grow my own trees what is the best way to tell the conditions of the soil.
Rashid – The key indication of the quality of your soil is the number of the earthworms that you find. If you don’t find any earthworms you know the soil is dead. Earthworms are going to come into healthy soil. That’s the best way to tell the quality of your soil. You’ve heard me say that if you build it they’ll come. If you build that soil and start adding organic material to it – adding compost to it – the worms will all of a sudden appear. I don’t know if they come out of the air or not but they’ll appear. I promise you this.
Heather – So as always, thank you yet again, Rashid!
NOTES
• Note #1: The Green Revolution: The initiatives, led by Norman Borlaug, the “Father of the Green Revolution”, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, credited with saving over a billion people from starvation, involved the development of high-yielding varieties of cereal grains, expansion of irrigation infrastructure, modernization of management techniques, distribution of hybridized seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides to farmers…
Health effects of the Green Revolution: The consumption of the pesticides used to kill pests by humans in some cases may be increasing the likelihood of cancer in some of the rural villages using them. Poor farming practices including non-compliance to usage of masks and over-usage of the chemicals compound this situation.In 1989, WHO and UNEP estimated that there were around 1 million human pesticide poisonings annually. Some 20,000 (mostly in developing countries) ended in death, as a result of poor labeling, loose safety standards etc. Wikipedia
• Note #2: Hybridization is the process of crossing two genetically different individuals to result in a third individual with a different, often preferred, set of traits.Plants of the same species cross easily and produce fertile progeny. … Such plants are referred to as cross-pollinated plants. Plant Life
• Note #3: The “hybridized” seeds (such as corn, soy, etc.) are created in laboratories by seed companies. It is not possible to replant these hybridized seeds. So rather than saving seed for next year’s crop, as farmers have always done, farmers have needed to purchase the seeds from seed companies. This represented, in the 20th century, a major power shift from the individual farmer’s control over production to corporate control.)
• Note #4: Glyphosate (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine) is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide and crop desiccant. It is an organophosphorus compound, specifically a phosphonate. It is used to kill weeds, especially annual broadleaf weeds and grasses that compete with crops….While glyphosate and formulations such as Roundup have been approved by regulatory bodies worldwide, concerns about their effects on humans and the environment persist. Many regulatory and scholarly reviews have evaluated the relative toxicity of glyphosate as an herbicide. Wikipedia
• Note #5: Agent Orange is an herbicide and defoliant chemical, one of the tactical use Rainbow Herbicides. It is widely known for its use by the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare program,Operation Ranch Hand, during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971. It is a mixture of equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. In addition to its damaging environmental effects, the chemical has caused major health problems for many individuals who were exposed. Wikipedia