IGF-1, Milk and Cancer

Environmental Views
Alex A. Avery and Dennis T. Avery
August 9, 2007

CHURCHVILLE, VA—A new study published in an alternative agriculture journal has gained widespread attention by claiming that organic farming not only could adequately feed the world, it might even yield more food and require less farmland. It is a truly sensational claim.

In science, the more sensational the claim, the more robust the evidence needed to support it. This time, the evidence doesn’t stack up. In fact, the evidence fell so far short that the journal that published the paper also published not one, but two scathing and dismissive “editorial responses” in the same issue. This is anything but a ringing endorsement.

A simple comparison of the authors of the paper and critiques is revealing. The “organic can too feed the world” authors are a collection of urban academics without any agricultural experience. The lead author studies fossil squirrel’s teeth at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology. The others are with Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment. In contrast, the authors of the two critiques are an agronomist at the University of Nebraska, Kenneth Cassman, and Colorado organic farmer Jim Hendrix.

As Cassman put it, “their analyses do not meet the minimum scientific requirements for comparing food production capacity in different crop production systems.”

First, many of the studies they relied upon to support their claim simply aren’t reliable. One large data set (comprising over half of the “yield ratios” they used to estimate food production in the developing world) are merely guestimates of increased productivity from a questionnaire sent to activists running organic “demonstration” farms. That doesn’t even remotely approach “science,” especially when the returned questionnaires include implausible organic yield increase claims of more than 500 percent. Another large dataset used by the Michigan researchers is so questionable that a paper critical of it published in the journal Field Crop Research was titled “Fantastic yields in the system of rice intensification: fact or fallacy?”

Central to this entire debate is the shortage of organic nitrogen fertilizer, a.k.a. manure. Currently, there is only enough animal manure to support one fifth of current global crop production. They only way to get more organically is to devote more land to legume crops or animal pastures that fix more nitrogen—which would require billions of acres of additional farmland the world doesn’t currently have.

The Michigan researchers dismiss this sobering reality by calculating that, theoretically, enough nitrogen can be fixed by growing cover crops during fall/winter and between crops to make up the shortfall. As Dwight Eisenhower once stated, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from a corn field.”

The final, sadly amusing testimony to the fantasy world occupied by these researchers comes from the conclusion of their policy forum article, where they point to the shining example of Cuba as “one of the most progressive food systems in the world” where organic farming is successfully feeding a country. Ah, yes, the famed Cuban “agricultural enlightenment” brought about by the ending of Soviet industrial fertilizer and pesticide donations.

How has Cuba fared after “going organic?” According to unofficial statistics, Cuba suffers massive food shortages and rations basic food staples. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to these Cuban immigrants interviewed in a December 27, 2006 story on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition:

Joel Lopez, a skinny 19-year-old who arrived on Dec. 14, 2006 in Miami through the [immigration lottery], or Bomba as it is called in Cuba. Through a translator: “Everything is so surprising here, the cleanliness of the streets, the food, the shops. Well, there is no comparison. . . . I have been telling [my friends] about a Chinese buffet I went to. I told them about how you can serve yourself again and again!”

Sitting next to him is Louisa Martinez. Her husband was a baker in Cuba. But still for her, it’s the food that is the most dazzling. Through a translator: “Oh the food! Here there is a surfeit of food. Over there, there is a LOT of hunger. It’s terrible.”

So who are you going to believe: The urban pencil pushing elites, or the real farmers and real victims of the so-called “progressive food” movement?

ALEX A. AVERY is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues and the author of The Truth About Organic Foods. Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow at Hudson. Readers may contact them at The Center for Global Food Issues (http://www.cgfi.org/) Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.

Terry Etherton Blog on Biotechnology
By Terry Etherton
July 29th, 2007

Excerpt…

The latest American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) Marketbasket Survey was released in July, 2007. The informal survey shows the total cost of 16 basic grocery items in the second quarter of 2007 was $42.95, up about 4 percent or $1.61 from the first quarter of 2007. A total of 82 volunteer shoppers in 32 states participated in the latest survey, conducted during May. Of the 16 items surveyed, 14 increased, one decreased and one stayed the same in average price compared to the 2007 first-quarter survey. Compared to one year ago, the overall cost for the marketbasket items showed an increase of about 8 percent. Regular whole milk showed the largest quarter-to-quarter price increase, up 34 cents to $3.46 per gallon.As retail grocery prices have gradually increased, the share of the average food dollar that America’s farm and ranch families receive continues to decrease. “In the mid-1970s, farmers received about one-third of consumer retail food expenditures on average. That figure has decreased steadily over time and is now just 22 percent according to Agriculture Department statistics,” AFBF Economist Jim Sartwelle said. AFBF, the nation’s largest general farm organization, conducts its informal quarterly marketbasket survey as a tool to reflect retail food price trends. According to USDA statistics, Americans spend just under 10 percent of their disposable income on food annually, the lowest average of any country in the world.

Milk Price Trends

The most recent Marketbasket Survey has begun to track the prices of conventional milk, rbST-free milk, and organic milk. No surprises here - rbST-free and organic cost a whole lot more! More of the old “smoke and mirrors” marketing campaign of charging a whole lot more money for nothing. As readers of my Blog know there are no compositional differences within a fat category among conventional, rbST-free and organic milks.

For the second quarter of 2007, shoppers found the average price for a half-gallon of regular whole milk to be $2.22. The average price for one gallon of regular whole milk was $3.46. Comparing per-quart prices, the retail price for whole milk sold in gallon containers was 28 percent lower compared to half-gallon containers, a typical volume discount long employed by retailers.

The average price for a half-gallon of rBST-free milk was $3.01, 36 percent higher than a half-gallon of regular milk. The average price for a half-gallon of organic milk was $3.65, 64 percent higher than a half-gallon of regular milk.

These data agree with my own observations. I was in Minneapolis, MN the week of July 22, 2007 and did an informal survey of milk prices in several different grocery store chains. Interestingly, the differential between conventional and rbST-free was the same for the different chains - the rbST-free cost $1 a gallon more compared to conventional milk! Wonder how these stores got the same markup? That is fodder for another blog.

(Read more at Terry Etherton’s Blog)

Denver Post
By Jackie Avner
Article Last Updated: 07/27/2007 10:40:10 PM MDT

Excerpt…

I don’t like to buy organic food products, and avoid them at all cost. It is a principled decision reached through careful consideration of effects of organic production practices on animal welfare and the environment. I buy regular food, rather than organic, for the benefit of my family.

I care deeply about food being plentiful, affordable and safe. I grew up on a dairy farm, where my chores included caring for the calves and scrubbing the milking facilities. As a teenager, I was active in Future Farmers of America, and after college I took a job in Washington, D.C., on the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee staff.

But America no longer has an agrarian economy, and now it is rare for people to have firsthand experience with agricultural production and regulation. This makes the general public highly susceptible to rumors and myths about food, and vulnerable to misleading marketing tactics designed not to improve the safety of the food supply, but to increase retail profits. Companies marketing organic products, and your local grocery chain, want you to think organic food is safer and healthier, because their profit margins are vastly higher on organic foods.

The USDA Organic label does not mean that there is any difference between organic and regular food products. Organic farms simply employ different methods of food production. For example, organic dairy farms are not permitted to administer antibiotics to their sick or injured cows, and do not give them milk-stimulating hormone supplements (also known as rbGH or rBST). The end product is exactly the same - all milk, regular and organic, is completely antibiotic-free, and all milk, regular and organic, has the same trace amounts of rbGH (since rbGH is a protein naturally present in all cows, including organic herds). Try as they may, proponents of organic foods have not been able to produce evidence that the food produced by conventional farms is anything but safe.

Do organic production practices benefit animals? Dr. Chuck Guard, professor of veterinary medicine at Cornell University, told me that it pains him that many technological advancements in animal medicine are prohibited for use on organic farms. He described how organic farms don’t use drugs to control parasites, worms, infections and illness in their herds. “Drugs take away pain and suffering,” he said. “Proponents of organic food production have thrown away these medical tools, and the result is unnecessary pain and suffering for the animals.”

In order for milk and meat to qualify as USDA Organic, the animals must never be given antibiotics when they are sick or injured. On organic farms, animals with treatable illnesses such as infections and pneumonia are left to suffer, or given ineffective homeopathic treatments, in the hope that they will eventually get better on their own. If recovery without medication seems unlikely, a dairy cow with a simple respiratory infection will be slaughtered for its meat, or sold to a traditional farm where she can get the medicine she needs. I don’t buy organic milk because this system is cruel to animals, and I know that every load of regular milk is tested for antibiotics to ensure that it is antibiotic-free.

Organic milk certainly is not fresher than regular milk. Regular milk is pasteurized and has a shelf life of about 20 days. Organic milk is ultrapasteurized, a process that is more forgiving of poor quality milk, and that increases the shelf life of milk to about 90 days. Some of the Horizon organic milk boxes I’ve seen at Costco have expiration dates in 2008! There is a powerful incentive for retailers to put the ultrapasteurized organic milk on the shelf just before the expiration date, so consumers will think the organic milk is as fresh as the regular milk. After all, consumers are paying twice as much for the organic product.

Do organic production practices benefit the environment? In many cases, they do the opposite. Recently, Starbucks proudly informed their customers that they would no longer be buying milk from farms that use rbGH, the supplemental hormone administered to cows to increase milk production (even though the extra hormones stay in the cow, and the resulting milk is the same). The problem with this policy is that Starbucks will now be buying milk from farms that are far less efficient at making milk. Without the use of the latest technology for making milk, many more cows must be milked to produce the same number of café lattes for Starbucks’ customers. More cows being milked means more cows to feed, and therefore more land must be cultivated with fossil-fuel-burning tractors. More cows means many more tons of manure produced, and more methane, a greenhouse gas, released into the atmosphere.

I see Starbucks’ policy as environmentally irresponsible. When a farmer gives a cow a shot of rbGH, the only environmental cost is the disposal of the small plastic container it came in. But the environmental benefits of using this technology are enormous.

Attention all shoppers: Safeway is adopting the same misdirected policy as Starbucks, judging from the prominent labeling of milk at my local Safeway store: “Milk from cows not treated with rBST.” When I’m feeling particularly green, I drive past Safeway and shop at another grocery store in protest.

Consumers assume that organic crops are environmentally friendly. However, organic production methods are far less efficient than the modern methods used by conventional farmers, so organic farmers must consume more natural and man-made resources (such as land and fuel) to produce their crops.

Cornell Professor Guard told me about neighboring wheat farms he observed during a visit to Alberta, Canada: one organic and one conventional. The organic farm consumes six times as much diesel fuel per bushel of wheat produced.

Socially conscious consumers have a right to know that “organic” doesn’t mean what it did 20 years ago….

Full article at Denver Post.

BY: ALEX A. AVERY AND DENNIS T. AVERY

Excerpt… 

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Way back in 1946, the esteemed British medical journal the Lancet declared in an editorial that organic fanatics were making health and nutrition claims way beyond what the science supported. Oh how little has changed since then.

The media is once again pronouncing organic food superior based on science fad and the findings of a single study taken well beyond what the evidence shows.

The latest salvo in this debate is a simple study of processing tomatoes (the kind used to make paste and sauces) grown over the past decade by a group of California researchers. The researchers, led by Dr. Alyson Mitchell, report that irrigated processing tomatoes grown using organic methods contained roughly twice as much of two flavonoid antioxidants, quercetin and kaempferol.

These are the two most abundant “flavonoids” in our diet “linked” to reduction in some forms of cancer and lower blood pressure, which reduces the risk of heart disease and stroke. Link means “far from provent” in science, but the media thrives on rumor. Hence, the river of newspaper ink spilled in the past month on how organic vegetables and fruits “really are better for you” because they are “full of antioxidants.”

Whether the findings have any bearing on your health or on flavonoid levels in organic tomato paste at your local market are both completely unknown.

(Read on …)

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