This article seems too important not to pass it along. Scroll to bottom to sign a letter about genetic engineering:
ESSAY OF THE WEEK
The Dark Side of Nitrogen
Corn Industrial Ag
When was the last time you thought about nitrogen?
That’s what we thought. Yet with every bite you take-of an apple, a chicken leg, a leaf of spinach-you’re consuming nitrogen. Because plants, including food crops, can’t survive without a ready supply of available nitrogen in the soil.
It used to be that the amount of food a farmer could grow was limited by his or her ability to supplement soil nitrogen, either by planting cover crops, applying manure or moving on to a new, more fertile field. But all that changed about 100 years ago, when a technical innovation that enabled us to produce a cheap synthetic form of nitrogen ushered in the age of industrial nitrogen fertilizers.
For the last 50 years, farmers around the world have used synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to boost their crop yields and drive the 20th century’s rapid agricultural intensification.
But in their fervor to increase yields, farmers often dose their crops with more nitrogen than the plants can absorb. The excess is now causing serious air and water pollution, and threatening human health. Ironically, all that fertilizer may even be ruining the very soil it was meant to enrich.
Read the essay [ https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/dark-side-nitrogen-america-fertilizing-disaster ]
ACTION ALERT
One Last Push
Cathleen Enright
We have almost 29,000 signatures on our letter to Cathleen Enright, executive vice president Food & Agriculture, for the Biotech Industry Organization (BIO). Can you help us reach 50,000 by the end of this week?
Enright is responsible for keeping the OCA off of a panel at this coming weekend’s “Southbites: Feed Your Mind [ http://sxsw.com/southbites ]” session during Austin’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Interactive.
In a phone call with OCA, Enright said she didn’t want a representative of OCA on the panel because she didn’t want the conversation to turn into a debate about the health and safety of GMO crops and foods. According to Enright, that debate has been settled.
Um, we don’t think so. And neither do millions of others, including consumers, scientists, scholars and physicians.
That’s why we’ve written this letter [ https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/letter-consumers-dr-cathleen-enright-executive-vice-president-food-agriculture-biotech-industry ] to Enright, and are asking consumers to sign it. When we get to at least 50,000 signatures, we’ll ship the letter and signatures off to Enright-so she’ll know that not everyone thinks the GMO debate is over.
Background here [ https://www.organicconsumers.org/blog/gene-giants-kick-oca-sxsw-food-panel-discussion ]
Read our letter to Cathleen Enright [ https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/letter-consumers-dr-cathleen-enright-executive-vice-president-food-agriculture-biotech-industry ]
TAKE ACTION: Tell Cathleen Enright: The debate over GMOs is not over. [ http://salsa3.salsalabs.com/o/50865/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=15852 ]