When I hear Green, I See Red

Lately we’re hearing a lot more about organic farming. I used to think they just didn’t understand. Now it just makes me mad.

I grew up in the 1930s, when all farming was organic. The modern pesticides, herbicides and animal medications which saved the world from starvation, had not yet been invented, or simply were not available to poor dirt farmers.

I spent many, many fall afternoons walking alongside a horse-drawn wagon, picking corn. Little, scrubby nubbin ears of corn, four to six inches long, every one a host to at least one worm. We just didn’t have the pesticides to kill whatever laid the eggs that hatched the worms. The horses tails were a solid block of tangled hair and cockleburs, from the plants that grew between the rows of corn, because we had no herbicide to control them.

Then, there were the animal diseases. Once our entire winter-supply-of-pork-to-be was wiped out by a sudden infection of cholera.

Travel to Iowa today and see endless vistas of cornfields, beautifully clean of weeds. Visit in late fall and see thousands of perfectly shaped, 12 to 14 inch ears of corn, enough to feed half the world, fatten half the world’s livestock and still have some left to make fuel for cars and trucks.
Herds of beautifully healthy farm animals are everywhere, protected by modern vaccines and nutrients.

Some people just can’t stand that. They have to look in every corner, hoping desperately to find something terribly wrong with this magnificent picture. In 1962, one Rachel Carson wrote a book called "Silent Spring". Millions bought her Chicken Little predictions and the modern environmental movement was born.

This movement brought about the banning of DDT. The use of DDT had almost eradicated malaria. There is no scientific proof that DDT causes the harm to humans or birds, attributed to this fully safe pesticide. And since its ban, malaria now kills some two million people a year.

The Greens have successfully thwarted U.S. domestic drilling for oil and gas, causing America to send billions of dollars to countries who use much of that money to develop and support anti-American activities. House speaker Nancy Pelosi says she is trying to "Save the planet". I guess her planet does not include the Middle East, where drilling is apparently okay.

Now Greens are increasing their assault on American agriculture by popularizing the mythical benefits of "organic farming".

People think Adolph Hitler was the bloodiest killer of modern times, but the tragedy of his concentration camps pales in comparison to the harm inflicted by environmentalists.

How do the Greens respond to these accusations? Dr Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defence Fund, may have revealed how some environmentalists really feel about human beings when he was asked if people might die as a result of the DDT ban: 'Probably...so what? People are the causes of all the problems; we have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.