The ruling ensures GMO farmers and Monsanto will be able to count their profits at harvest time. Photo credit: La Grande Farmers' Market

A federal judge on Tuesday said farmers can harvest their genetically engineered sugar beets this year, ruling the economic impact too great and that environmental groups waited too long to request that the crop be yanked from the ground and otherwise barred from the market.
Nearly all sugar beets planted are genetically engineered and the crop accounts for half the nation’s sugar supply.
U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White last year sided with the environmental groups when he ruled that federal regulators five years ago improperly approved the genetically engineered crop for market. White said in September that further environmental studies are required before the United States Department of Agriculture can decide the issue but didn’t decide the next legal steps.
In January, the Center for Food Safety, Earthjustice and several other groups and organic farmers asked White to immediately halt the planting and harvest of all genetically engineered beets while determining how to resolve the lawsuit, which was filed in 2007.

Click to read the rest of the Judge Allows GMO Beet Planting To Continue story.

Bust The Trust is a coalition of family farm, anti-hunger, religious, environmental and public policy groups concerned with concentration in agribusiness.

The farmers in the midwest of the United States are the backbone of traditional agriculture. Now they are starting to come together in their opposition to corporate agriculture. At this recent Iowa town meeting some farmers vent their frustration against the multi-national corporations that control agriculture. For more information go to the Bust Up Big Ag web site.

“We have been very happy with greenhouse tomatoes. I don’t think it will ever replace tobacco, but it sure helps. For a smaller farmer who can give it the attention it needs, it can be a good choice," says farmer Ryan Patterson. Photo credit: Southeast Farm Press

Chris Bickers of Southeast Farm Press reports,

When a row crop farmer gets into an enterprise that involves selling food products directly to the consumer, he has to ask how compatible these efforts are really going to be.
That is certainly the question Ryan Patterson and his father Phil of Broadway, N.C., had to answer a few years ago when they considered investing in greenhouses for tomato production on their tobacco/grain farm.
But now, 12 years later, the experiment has proved to have been a success.
“We have been very happy with greenhouse tomatoes,” Ryan Patterson says. “I don’t think it will ever replace tobacco, but it sure helps. For a smaller farmer who can give it the attention it needs, it can be a good choice.”
Tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses provide several benefits to a general farming operation. Perhaps the obvious one is improved cash flow — a greenhouse can generate product in times of cold weather when there isn’t much cash flow from traditional crops.

Click to read the rest of Greenhouse Tomatoes A Success Story.

After you get the munchies and chow down the corn chips make sure you toss the empty bag into the compost pile. Snack food giant Frito-Lay has just introduced what it is calling the first “100 percent compostable” chip bag, for its multigrain SunChips brand.
Every SunChips package is designed to fully break down in 14 weeks when placed in a hot, active compost bin or pile.
No mention whatsoever on the amount of GMO corn used in the corn chips. But the bag is compostable!

The popularity of living green walls is evident now that “plant and play” modular systems are available at garden centers nationwide. A company called Bright Green USA is bringing the vertical garden concept to the garden center market this spring. Previously the “living walls” have been only available to architects and designers on the landscaping side of the industry, but now the company has developed some merchandising and marketing material for garden centers.
Garden centers can either sell the vertical gardens pre-planted and ready to hang or they could sell the empty plastic modular components and add on the plants as additional sales.

Photo credit: BrightGreen USA

The various and numerous safety concerns of genetically modified food crops altered with foreign DNA is widespread worldwide. Those concerns are miniscule compared to the apprehension over genetically modified crops grown for drugs and vaccines or “pharming.”
Like their GMO food cousins, these GMO drug crops should not be grown until as much unbiased scientific research as possible is done on them, preferably as in these underground caverns of Controlled Pharming Ventures, known as underground pharms.

Scientists outside a grow chamber containing GMO plants grown for vaccines or medical properites in them. Photo credit: Wired

As Kristen Philipkoski writes in Wired magazine,

Researchers who want to grow genetically modified plants that contain pharmaceutical drugs are being forced underground — literally.
Environmental activists and regulatory agencies have not looked favorably upon “pharming” projects. They don’t trust that the transgenic plants, crops with foreign DNA added to their genome, won’t contaminate other crops. The result could be disastrous: Medications could make their way to people for whom the drugs were never intended. So an entrepreneur in Indiana has come up with what he thinks will satisfy regulatory agencies, if not watchdog groups. He wants to grow pharmaceutical-yielding plants in a 60-acre former limestone quarry in Marengo, Indiana.

Luis Bruno writes in Popular Science magazine,

Don’t tell anyone, but Doug Ausenbaugh has built an underground drug farm—in bucolic southern Indiana, no less. It’s cleverly cached in an old limestone mine near the hamlet of Marengo. There, carefully cultivated stalks flourish under the glare of artificial lights and the rainlike spatter of drip irrigation.
The facility, run by Ausenbaugh’s biotech startup firm, Controlled Pharming Ventures, in cooperation with researchers from Purdue University, is intended for growing pharmaceutical crops—corn, tomatoes, tobacco and other plants whose DNA has been altered to produce a vaccine or medicinal compound. Drug companies have hailed this new field, known as biopharming, as a low-cost alternative to traditional manufacturing. But environmentalists, food-industry officials and other critics have decried pharma crops—which aren’t meant to be eaten and in some cases are toxic to humans—because of the danger of contaminating food supplies.
The fears aren’t based on mere conjecture. In 2000, evidence of a genetically modified corn intended only for animal consumption showed up in Taco Bell taco shells. Aventis CropScience, the corn’s grower, quickly abandoned the product and was forced to pay $2.4 million to people who said they had suffered allergic reactions to it. Two years later, federal officials fined the biotech company ProdiGene $3 million for allowing pharma corn carrying an experimental pig vaccine to contaminate soybeans in Iowa and Nebraska. Regulations have since been tightened, and the young industry suffered a huge blow when biotech behemoth Monsanto abandoned its biopharming research in 2003. Although several plant-produced biopharmaceuticals are still under clinical evaluation, none have reached the market yet.
Going underground, Ausenbaugh says, will resolve many of the sector’s problems. The 60-acre mine in Indiana provides a formidable barrier between the grow room and the rest of the world, easing the burden of containment in several ways. It makes pesticides unnecessary (the space is free of bugs), and it reduces the threat of vandalism (the entrance is policed by armed guards).

Will everything on the planet be genetically modified in 25—50 years? I am glad I won’t be here to see it—or eat it!

A slide show of various urban farms and gardens from around the world…

As I have stated in previous posts, Corvallis (where I live) and the Willamette Valley of Oregon is a bread basket of farms producing large amounts of a wide variety of food. Just south of the Corvallis city limits is Sunset Valley Organics on the main highway going south to Eugene, Highway 99.
Organic production hasn’t always been the way Sunset Valley Organics operated. For years when one drove south to Eugene, all one would see was a commercial, non-organic corn operation. When they switched to growing blueberries they still grew them non-organically with chemicals. Over time, they noticed the quality of soil and plants on the 75-acre

Bob Wilt walks among the 75 acres of organic blueberries. Photo credit: Organic Connections

farm was diminishing. And despite the use of all the chemicals, they were still seeing an increase in the number of insects and evidence of fungal disease. Then eight years ago they switched to organic cultivation methods using compost and aerated compost tea. The soil and plants became healthier. The yields of the plants increased. The flavor of the blueberries became sweeter.
The amount of compost the farm uses is staggering as one observes when driving by the farm. On the south side of the highway are huge windrows of aging compost which they mulch the blueberries with in late summer. Click to go to the Sunset Valley Organics web site for more information about their farm. Click to read the article in Organic Connections magazine about Sunset Valley Organics.

For more videos about the Sunset Valley Organics operation

Dumb Thing #4 – Set up my grow beds over my fish tanks so I can’t access the fish tanks. Photo credit: The Aquaponics Gardening Blog

It’s good to be able to laugh at yourself, right? Especially if you are laughing about dumb mistakes that you’ve made that you can tell others about – hopefully so that they will avoid making the same ones It is with this spirit of philanthropy that I pass on to you, my fellow aquapons, the countdown of the top 6 dumbest mistakes I’ve made in aquaponics … so far…

Click to read The Six Dumbest Things Done In Aquaponics story.

Transgenic trout with "six pack abs." Photo Credit: University of Rhode Island

Thanks, but no thanks; I will stick with the puny, regular fish with no six-pack abs… From a University of Rhode Island press release announcing their GMO fish with six-pack abs,

A 10-year effort by a University of Rhode Island scientist to develop transgenic rainbow trout with enhanced muscle growth has yielded fish with what have been described as six-pack abs and muscular shoulders that could provide a boost to the commercial aquaculture industry.
Terry Bradley, a URI professor of fisheries and aquaculture, said his research into the inhibition of myostatin, a protein that slows muscle growth, has obtained “stunning results” in the last two years, with trout growing 15 to 20 percent more muscle mass than standard fish.
“Belgian blue cattle have a natural mutation in myostatin causing a 20 to 25 percent increase in muscle mass, and mice overexpressing myostatin exhibit a two-fold increase in skeletal muscle mass. But fish have a very different mechanism of muscle growth than mammals, so we weren’t certain it was going to work,” Bradley said.
According to Bradley, the number of muscle fibers in mammals is limited after birth, but in fish, muscle fiber numbers increase throughout their lifespan. Since inhibition of myostatin increases the numbers of muscle fibers, it had been a mystery as to whether inhibiting myostatin would cause an increase in muscle growth in fish.
Bradley and a team of graduate students spent 500 hours injecting 20,000 rainbow trout eggs with various DNA types designed to inhibit myostatin. Of the eggs that hatched, 300 carried the gene that led to increased muscle growth. After two years, most exhibited a “six-pack ab” effect, even though fish lack standard abdominal muscles. They also have increased musculature throughout, including a prominent dorsal hump that made them look like they had muscular shoulders.

Click to read the rest of the Scientists Develop More Muscular GMO Trout With Six-Pack Abs story.