Clean Energy and Sustainable Agriculture

I just did a 30-minute-long interview with a brilliant and charming woman in Atlanta: Mary Blackmon, CEO of Farm Star Living.  I encourage readers to check this out; the purpose here is to clarify and promote what farmers really do, while spreading the word on important trends in agriculture, like farm-to-table dining.

I began with the caveat that I’m not an expert in agriculture, but I believe Mary and I really did have a productive conversation, largely about how energy and farming come together in important ways, e.g.:

• We need lots of energy to pump around water (the “water-energy nexus” as they say) to irrigate our lands to grow our food.

• Climate change (caused in the main by our dependence on fossil fuels) is causing a host of problems associated with food, principally the loss of  arable farm land to desertification, and the devastation of the ocean ecosystems from acidification.

• Aeroponics and bioaeroponics are areas of intense interest of mine, as they offer so many terrific advantages over traditional chemical-based agriculture.

At a certain point, I mentioned casually that chemical pesticides cause cancer,as if that were common knowledge.  Mary asked me to substantiate that, and I really couldn’t, without interrupting the conversation and doing some research, which I obviously didn’t want to do.  I promised that I would make this the subject of some investigation the moment she and I hung up the phone, and that, if I’m unable to validate the idea, that I would happily retract it.  (I did say that two things are unarguably true: a) we are experiencing rising rates of childhood cancer, and b) this phenomenon has a cause; kids aren’t dying because the gods are angry with us; it’s because of something we’re ingesting.)

Keeping my word, I just Googled “do chemical pesticides cause cancer” and skimmed through a few of the mere 6.7 million search results that came up.  Apparently, it’s a subject that receives a great deal of attention.

Here’s an excerpt from the website that came up at the very top of this list – Toxicsaction.org:

Pesticides can cause many types of cancer in humans. Some of the most prevalent forms include leukemia, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, brain, bone, breast, ovarian, prostate, testicular and liver cancers. In February 2009, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry published a study that found that children who live in homes where their parents use pesticides are twice as likely to develop brain cancer versus those that live in residences in which no pesticides are used.

Studies by the National Cancer Institute found that American farmers, who in most respects are healthier than the population at large, had startling incidences of leukemia, Hodgkins disease, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and many other forms of cancer.

I’m sure Mary will want to do her own research and come to her own conclusions on the subject, but the consensus here looks quite clear from what I’ve been able to find.

Again, my hat’s off to Mary for her excellent work; I’m sure our readers will be as impressed as I was.