roundup ready sugarbeets banned

post #6

He never said Hitler but I think that is who he is talking about here.

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eat more kale

Ah thanks, didn't catch that. Haypoint is pro-GMO so I was looking for it from the anti's. Good to see both sides like to use Mr. Hitler.....

Are you talking about in your garden?

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ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

Sorry Paul, but did you read the whole article?

Quote from the article...

Years of Reproductive Disorders from GMO-Feed

Rats photo #1Surov's hamsters are just the latest animals to suffer from reproductive disorders after consuming GMOs. In 2005, Irina Ermakova, also with the Russian National Academy of Sciences, reported that more than half the babies from mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks. This was also five times higher than the 10% death rate of the non-GMO soy group. The babies in the GM group were also smaller (see photo) and could not reproduce.

In a telling coincidence, after Ermakova's feeding trials, her laboratory started feeding all the rats in the facility a commercial rat chow using GM soy. Within two months, the infant mortality facility-wide reached 55%.

http://www.psrast.org/miceprefnge.htm
This report has a very detailed report done by a young man, comparing GM fed mice vs. non-GM fed mice.

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I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.

There is also some concern that the GMO beets will cross with regular beets and another crop. There may be native plants that it can cross with too. That is the sort of thing that needs to be ruled out before GMO plants are grown.

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"Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?" Hobbs
"I'm not sure that man needs the help." Calvin

Patt - this is Moldy, rancher's wife. not sure if this is what you're asking or not. Sugar beets are different from red (or yellow) garden beets. Lots bigger, white, and hard (they remind me of jicima). We live in the heart of sugar beet country, but don't raise them. any farmer that can grow anything without some kind of herbicide or pesticide I really admire. that being said, I don't think that we could provide enough food to feed as many folks as we do without the chemicals.

I didn't know that beets took lots of chemicals to grow, but I know they take quite a few to process into granular sugar. And the smell of processing is awful - kind of a cross between following a loaded cattle truck and burning sugar on the stove.

Don't know enough to make a statement on OPs points 2-4, but for 5...well, I just know that here, they don't start harvesting until after a good frost, so beet harvest starts Sept-Oct ish and lasts until it's done - could be January, could be March. I suppose the industry could move south to Argentina, but I don't think tropical countries would present much competition for sugar beets (now, cane might be a whole 'nother issue).

I kinda hate to see RUR anything that is going into the food chain. I just think we are messing with things that we have no clue as to the long-term effects.

Huh? What needs to be ruled out? The concern for cross-pollination?

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I'm an environmentalist, left wing, Ron Paul loving Prius driver with a farm. If you have a problem with that, kindly go take a leap.

I am talking about standard beets vs. sugar beets. Do sugar beets have something that makes them somehow needier. We have a very large market garden yes.

I buy about 50lbs of organic sugar a month for my bakery, I think it all comes from cane though. I believe it is all grown in Florida too. Seems like maybe cane is the better way to go. Thanks for your info.

Sugar beets were developed from mangels which have long been grown for stock feed. I've supplied many HT members with Mammoth Red and Golden Eckendorf seed the past 3 years. Sugar beets, mangels, and common beets are all the same group and can cross with each other. Chard is also in the same family but a different group. There are no Beta vulgaris wild relatives that I know of so there should be no concern about cross-pollination using that excuse.

Martin

It takes 2 years for a sugar beet to set seed. When grown for sugar, they are harvested after one season. So, there is little chance of farmed sugar beets to produce seed to cross-pollinate.

The seed is grown in rather isolated areas, as I understand it, to prevent cross pollination. From what I understand.

Not to totally push your thought aside - I understand the concern, it is something to consider. But, in the way things are done, it is somewhat remote?

--->Paul

I haven't gerown sugar beets, but one of the major sugar cooporatives is about 50 miles from me, and beets are a common crop as close as 15 miles from me.

Sugar beets are far, far more fragile & fussy than my normal crops - corn, soybeans, oats. They easily get swamped with weeds, they have a lot of insect, nemetode, and virus issues.

Hey, I was looking up some info on them, & ran across this web page. It'a wonderful essay of how beets were grown about 15 years ago, before RR-beets.


http://www.sweetbeet.com/growernet/R...aisebeets.html

He really gets into it, the insects, the fertility, the weed problems, and how prices are arrived at.

He even addresses the 'sugar subsidy' someone else mentioned here, which anyone in agriculture knows is not true - there is no taxpayer money going to sugar growers.Yes there is a quota system that prevents other govt's dumping subsidised sugar upon us, but there is no bonus money going to beet growers.

Rather than me flapping my fingers, take a look at what he wrote about it if you have 15 minutes or so. Seems very nicely written.

As to your beets, it is so hard to compare a garden to a 100 acre field of something.... I suspect you do well with your beets and with direct marketing you make a profit. And that is all that one needs. But if you were selling to a bulk commodity market - as those odf us growing corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar beets, etc do - then the insects, weeds, and fertility needs to be much better controlled to give a uniform, high-yield crop that competes with Mexico, Brazil, China, etc. If you read the web site I mentioned, you will note sugar beets run deeper roots, os the tap some sub-soil that your other crops likely don't get to. That means they get 'free' nitrogen that other crops didn't get to. But, if you grow commercially and 2 out of 6 years you have beets, then suddenly that deep fertilizer gets used up & you need to replace it.

There is no such thing as a crop that you don't need to fertilize..... I see that over & over & over in these threads, and it just isn't so. If you haul a crop away, you are taking nutrients away from the soil that needs to be replaced. Your beets just aren't producing enough to notice what is missing in your soil..... If you really pushed the beets, it would be a different story. imho

Well, I babbled on anyhow. Check out the link I provided.

To your question, sugar beets are related to but very different than the red beets you grow. They pull a lot of N out of the ground to make the sugar. They are real, real sensitive, very delicate crop compared to other common grain crops. They need very special soil as they are a root crop, and need rock free ground but do not like it too wet. There are some insects & soil 'bugs' and vruses that build up if you plant then too often in the same area.

Compared to what I normally grow, they would be a very, very fussy crop in my mind.

--->Paul

I just said we don't use chemical fertilisers not that we don't fertilise at all. I will read the article in the morning, need to toddle off to bed!

Don't mention cane very loudly. Cane is one problem the U.S. has with Cuba. There continues to be a movement to allow cane from Cuba to be imported into the U.S.

My problem with cane is that it is being phased out in the USA. Hawaii is so far away it proves more $$$ to plant houses than cane over there any more.

And in Florida the tree huggers got the govt to buy back the cane land and turn it into swamp again. I'm sure there will always be some; but much of the cane is going away in the necxt couple years.

Some of you don't like Walmart & what that means to USA jobs & quality.

Kinda how I feel about importing foods into the USA.....

Otherwise, sugar cane is one of the more efficient deals there is. Just needs a real specialized growing area, doesn't work in most areas.

--->Paul

You are quite correct and that's why this ban makes no sense. Canola, corn, and soybeans are annuals and thus could contaminate an adjacent plot in their single year of life. The Beta vulgaris family needs to reach two stages of maturity in order to propagate. Farmer A and Farmer B can grow and harvest two different lines of sugar beets from now into eternity with zero chance of crossing as long as they obtain seed grown under controlled conditions. The only concern for crossing would be if two separate seed producing entities were in close proximity and that is usually not likely.

Beet pollen is very light and may travel 5 miles under certain favorable conditions. There is no certain method to prevent crossing other than being certain that no other Beta vulgaris is being grown for seed within the 5 mile radius. I've grown regular beets for seed and Mammoth Red Mangels last year. This year it's my Soldier beet paired up with an old European variety. Presently growing Yellow Cylindra beets with some to be stored over the winter to produce seed next year. In every case, I've not worried for a moment about crossing since nobody else that I know of is involved in similar projects within 5 miles. I do have a Ferry-Morse field station about 8 miles NE and Seminis with a similar site about the same distance NW. Pioneer field station about 6 miles away. Northrup-King has contract growers 10-12 miles north of me. I know that three of them are not involved in any Beta vulgaris. If Ferry-Morse has beets, no concern as a NE wind would be as rare as a blue moon here. Every one of those field stations are well aware of what the other stations are growing so as to avoid the slightest chance of contamination. Seminis fields look like a sea of white with beds seemingly a mile long and covered with cloth. Half to prevent crossing from other crops in the fields and half to backyard gardeners.

With that, my take on this sugar beet banning is that it makes no sense at all. No crops are being contaminated, no farmers are in danger of prosecution due to contract violations, and the end product is no more dangerous than that produced via previous methods. And don't think for a minute that our civilization will ever decide to live without sugar. Sugar beet sugar used to be almost strictly a European thing. Sugar rationing continued well after WW2 was over. Big money was spent to set up a factory locally during WW2 to process sugar beets and my stepfather grew them until 1950. I wasn't involved but always wondered about the beet plow that was hidden in the weeds and still the only one of its kind that I've ever seen.

And if there's a slightest talk of a potential sugar shortage, the populace will never stand for it. There is no care about where it comes from as long as it is pure sugar. We last had such a thing in late 1989. Nine years before, I had visited the 3 combined largest sugar warehouses in the world in Durban, RSA. I saw real mountains of sugar or enormous tonnage! You have to see it to believe it and I was only in one of them! When the US shortage hit, there was an embargo against trading with RSA. A Paquebot friend was master of a Safmarine bulk cargo ship which was built for bulk sugar transport. I still have the Lloyd's List Index listing for that ship's sailing; "Durban for Colombo For Orders." That usually means in ballast and looking for a cargo. But, unknown to the insurers, there were 20,000 tons of brown cane sugar on board. Colombo was supposedly just for bunkers with no mention of cargo. From Colombo was direct to Bangkok where it was off-loaded during Christmas 1989. Couldn't wait for the whole load to be bagged while the sugar commodity prices kept going up. Three weeks later, ship showed up in Singapore with a cargo of about half of that in pallets with 4# bags of sugar which had been originally designed for 2 kilos. Next voyage was Singapore-Bangkok-Singapore with the other half delivered second week of Feb 1990. To avoid international scrutiny, same ship was involved in transshipping the other half of her original cargo. But America had sugar!

Martin

I don't have a horse in this race. As you know, we moderators are not allowed to have opinions or biases. But, the one thing I do know is the ban on RUR sugarbeets would probably not increase the use of other herbicides...it would just continue the common practice of using migrant workers to weed the sugarbeet fields. The sugarbeets fields here in Minnesota are pretty much kept weed-free by migrant workers. Consequently, if RUR beets were allowed, thousands of migrant workers...illegal and otherwise...would have to find work elsewhere....or stay in Mexico....and "you-know-who" would lose part of his "amnesty" voter base.

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This is the government the Founding Fathers warned us about.....

that could be anyone historically in the big two parties.

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this message has probably been edited to correct typos, spelling errors and to improve grammar...

"All that is gold does not glitter..."

Just another rigged deal.

The end result will be an increase in the price of sugar. Has nothing to do with farming. Almost half of our population is on some kind of feeding assistance and sugar is their staple item. It's free the government provides it.

The third world workers need more energy to produce all the stuff that we consume. They now have money so they can buy sugar, and sugared products. With the new regs sugar will cost more.

The six mega banks are now investing in commodities big time. Expect major profits, and super bonuses.

What does it matter if a few farmers lose their tails? The profits are what matters. Health? We have a new bill to take care of that.:1pig::1pig: