Food Source Trust

A Farmer Defends Food

Michael Olson’s Food Chain Radio Show #1383

Do you trust farmers and food, farmers not food, or food not farmers?

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Farmers and food

Farmers not food

Food not farmers

Show me the results

Listen Now…

Guest: Dennis Bulani – 4rth Generation Saskatchewan Farmer, CEO of The Rack Petroleum,  Author of About Food: What a Farmer Wants You To Know

Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Americans’ Confidence in Food

74 percent trust farmers, but only 24% trust food.

Why do we trust farmers?  Thomas Jefferson may have said it best:  “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”

Why do we not trust food?  Consider what Farm Worker organizer Caesar Chavez said:  “Pesticides soak the fields. Drift with the wind, pollute the water, and are eaten by unwitting consumers. These poisons are designed to kill, and pose a very real threat to consumers and farm workers alike.”

Awhile back, the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance hosted a farm & food panel discussion at the International Biotech Conference at Chicago’s McCormick Place.

I was invited to sit on that panel with some very important people in production agriculture, including the President of the American Corn Growers Association, President of the American Soybean Growers Association, and President of the American Pork Producers.

I am not certain why I was invited to speak, but suspect it was for the same reason people put hot sauce in clam chowder.

At any rate, the panel’s discussion focused on the benefits of Biotech to production agriculture.  Make no mistake, the benefits are huge.

Having been a teenage herbicide, and weeded countless rows of crops under the blazing summer sun of Montana’s Yellowstone River Valley, I know first hand how blessed today’s farmers are with the new biotech control tools.

And yet, when it came time to deliver my closing remarks, I pulled out the hot sauce and addressed the biotechies seated in the audience.

“You have created a miracle,” I told the biotechies.  “You have made it possible for one farmer to grow 10,000 acres of crops without having to compete with weeds or insects!  You have made these farmers on the panel with me very happy, and you have made yourself very wealthy.  But…

“One day the people who eat your crops are going to come to you and say, ‘Hey… What’s in this technology for us, other than food that has been drenched in herbicides and infused with insecticides?’

“When that day comes, you are going to need an answer, so I suggest you come up with that answer as soon as possible.”

With that thought in mind, I am honored to host a farmer who is brave enough to defend his food.

Take the 2X2 Pledge

“Together, we can eat our way to economic security and personal freedom, and it won’t cost a dime and it will be so easy it will make you blush!”

Michael Olson’s Three Laws of the Food Chain

#1 Agriculture is the foundation upon which we build all our sand castles.

#2 The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in that food.

#3 Cheap food isn’t!       READ MORE