Down the Rabbit Hole on Glyphosate and GMO's: Viral Video

This video has been making its rounds in shorter clips, but this one is the entirety of the speech and it is worth watching every minute of it. Take a few minutes to watch it, then feel free to stay for the rest of my ramblings.  This lady, Courtney Swan of RealFoodology.com, testifies before congress and it is pure GOLD.

I spent a portion of my career as an Environmental Health and Safety manager and engineer. My bachelor degree is in Biology. I spent a good portion of my weekly tasks reviewing chemical SDS's (Safety Data Sheets for those who don't know) and seeing what the action levels were to require our employees to wear protective equipment, for management to buy high priced ventilation, or send the process back to engineering and tell them to find a different chemical. So I read A LOT of these SDSs and got very familiar with the effects even a minute amount of a really nasty chemical could do to ruin a person's health for life. So when I unfortunately (or fortunately) lost my job a couple of years ago, I had a lot of down time to slow down and catch up on lots of subjects. Farming was one, and the food I loved to cook was the other. 

Much to my surprise today after seeing the above video in its entirety and searching for a current SDS for both Round-Up and the key ingredient of Glyphosate, the SDS is... incredibly clean.  Squeaky clean.  There is nothing in there that would raise the alarm bells for a Safety Manager, including myself.  Now we're getting into something.  According to what I saw in the SDS, I can basically drink the stuff, it's as harmless as water.  Tell that to the dandelions.  If you want your insides to look like this, go ahead and take a few shots.

I think we're just now starting to hit the tip of the iceberg, especially seeing all of the government waste, corruption, laundering of tax payer funds being exposed by DOGE; my search for an SDS made me watch the above video again, and listen more carefully this time.  Ms. Swan mentions two things that caught my attention: first, a lot of the ingredients of these pesticides and herbicides are manufactured in China (and with my experience with Chinese-sourced livestock minerals last year, I'm staying the hell away from anything "cheap" and not mined in the USA... that's another story for another day), and second, the WHO is the one sounding the alarm bells now on Round-Up/Glyphosate being a carcinogen.  Why... especially when the SDS doesn't classify it as... hardly anything harmful whatsoever?  

So, then I Googled "WHO Glyphosate" and saw a Reuters article titled Glyphosate Battle and well, well, well... things just got interesting.  Apparently, there has been A LOT of cover-up and intentional deletion in reports of carcinogenicity in animal studies using glyphosate.

"Reuters found 10 significant changes that were made between the draft chapter on animal studies and the published version of IARC’s glyphosate assessment. In each case, a negative conclusion about glyphosate leading to tumours was either deleted or replaced with a neutral or positive one. Reuters was unable to determine who made the changes.

"IARC did not respond to questions about the alterations. It said the draft was “confidential” and “deliberative in nature.” After Reuters asked about the changes, the agency posted a statement on its website advising the scientists who participate in its working groups “not to feel pressured to discuss their deliberations” outside the confines of IARC."

I think this pretty much tells me all that I need to know and just makes me dig in even further to what we're doing here on our farm.  From my experience, deliberate obfuscation and lack of transparency has been enough to shift my opinion without the need of any more digging.  I've learned to recognize when I'm being lied to.  Major kudos to Ms. Swan, RFK Jr., and the countless others who are much further along in this hunt for information and answers than I am.  Afterall, I'm just a simple farmer now.  If anything, what the article outlines is the amount of people who knew about this, and said nothing.  Not one whistleblower.  They are a house of cards and a slight breath of wind would knock it all down.  No one has an ounce of courage anymore.

Regarding health, science, and technology, I had always kept a finger on the pulse, but now I've had a chance to go a little deeper and at the same time take in what a lot of others were saying about the subject. When we decided to move back to Texas, I put my foot down and said we were buying the farm I always wanted and we were going to produce our own food.  It wasn't necessarily because I believed our food was poisoned, it was because I simply always wanted a farm and wanted to have a means of self-sufficiency; no need to rely on anyone else for my food. My dream career was always to be a farmer, and I had accepted that it would likely be a retirement dream and not a career. So when we had the opportunity to make it a mid-life reality instead of a retirement dream, we seized it fast. The goal was to produce food for ourselves and sell whatever excess we had. It also had to be corn-free, soy-free, and non-GMO, reflecting what is outlined in the linked video and based on my background knowledge of what a trace amount of chemicals can do to the human body. 

Fast forward 2 very short years later since we bought our farm, and I'm blown away by the overwhelming demand for our meats and eggs! Barely anyone knows we exist yet, and still we are selling out! I guess all this to say, a little bit of information and knowledge goes a long way. Knowing what I know about chemicals, I think a lot of damage done to our bodies and the environment is irreparable. But also knowing what I know about biology, the body and the environment both have incomprehensible means of healing itself. That's why we chose our regenerative agriculture methods and corn free, soy free, non-GMO feeds for our animals. Yes, it costs way more, but I think it's time to start robbing the corporate giants on the front end instead of letting them ruin us on the backend. 

To summarize this movement and the video: Corn and soy have had to be genetically modified to survive chemicals like the herbicide, Round-Up (glyphosate). Insecticides have had to be used to preserve the crops and now the crops have been genetically modified to be toxic to insects. The same chemical mechanism that kills the insects in GMO BT-corn (ripping holes in their stomachs from the inside out) is the same symptom that many people are experiencing (gut pain, etc). And it's all being treated as a hush-hush situation.  It's cheaper to pay them off in hundreds of settlements than have the whole company collapse.

The soil is depleted of nutrients and so we have vegetables that are nothing more than carbs with no nutrients in them, making us more hungry, and more fat with all the unnecessary carbs. Same thing with anything processed and boxed... no nutrients, more hunger, more unneeded carbs, more fat. More disease, more dysfunction, more cancer. If you want off this deadly merry-go-round, find a local farmer, find several. One of us alone can't feed your family, but we all can. 

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk. (This one's for you, Ted -- RIP.)