American Farmers On Verge Of Disaster

Grant's Pub

 

It’s been a tough road for the U.S. farming industry, which is seemingly beset on all sides. Agricultural commodity prices remain low, with spot corn and soybean currently fetching $3.62 and $8.99 per bushel, respectively, each roughly 22% below their respective 10-year average prices. 

 

Meanwhile, the ongoing Sino-American trade war continues to crimp overseas demand, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that soybean deliveries to China fell more than 80% year-over-year since September. That helped push soybean stocks to a record 3.7 billion bushels as of year-end 2018.  

By the same token, the USDA forecast Friday that corn plantings will rise 4.1% in 2019 to 92.8 million this year, an unwelcome development considering that “American silos are already bulging with the grain,” according to Bloomberg. Adding insult to injury, devastating floods have afflicted large swaths of the Midwest during the heart of spring planting season.  

The USDA estimates that net farm incomes plunged 16% year-over-year in 2018 to $63.1 billion, down from more than $120 billion as recently as 2013.  Rising operating costs play a prominent role in that shrinkage. According to the All Farms Index tabulated by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the prices received component fell to 84.9 in January from 95.1 in June, while prices paid registered 109.3 and has remained north of 100 since 2011.

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FARMLANDS (2018)

Lauren Southern 

 Details the plight of South African farmers.

Thank you for watching! Please share to spread the word.

Website: https://laurensouthern.net 
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Farmer bankruptcies swell to decade high in Farm Belt

Axios

 

U.S. farmers in the Midwest are filing for bankruptcy at levels the U.S. hasn’t seen for approximately a decade, the Wall Street Journal reports.

What's happening: Low commodity prices have been gouging U.S. farmers’ bottom lines for years now, exacerbated by increasing agricultural competition from Russia and Brazil. President Trump’s trade disputes, meanwhile, are adding salt to the wounds, as tariffs drive down prices and decrease profit for farmers.

By the numbers:

• In the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, twice as many farmers declared bankruptcy in 2018 as during the 2008 recession.
• In the 8th Circuit, which spans from North Dakota to Arkansas, bankruptcies shot up 96%.
• In the 10th Circuit, which includes Kansas, Colorado and parts of Oklahoma, bankruptcies were up 59%. Together, these three jurisdictions accounted for nearly 50% of all farm product sales in 2017, per the Journal.
• Last year, farm debt rose to over $409 billion, with the average size of loans in the 4th quarter reaching $74,190, the highest 4th quarter level in history.

Monsanto/Bayer Moving to Genome Edit Fruits and More

F. William Engdahl 
 
Not surprising, Monsanto, today hidden behind the Bayer logo, as the world leader in patented GMO seeds and the probable carcinogenic Roundup herbicide with glyphosate, is attempting to quietly patent genetically modified or GMO varieties of fruits using controversial gene-editing. The “beauty” of this for Monsanto/Bayer is that in the USA, according to a recent ruling by the US Department of Agriculture, gene-edited agriculture needs no special independent testing. The developments are not good for human health or safety, nor will it do anything to give the world better nutrition.

The agrichemical and GMO giant Monsanto, which today tries to keep a lower profile inside the German agrichemical and GMO giant Bayer, is moving into the highly controversial domain of gene-editing of new crop varieties. In 2018 as the company was being deluged with lawsuits over its use of the probable carcinogen, Roundup, Monsanto invested $125 million in a gene-editing startup called Pairwise. The link is anything but casual.

Former Monsanto Vice President for Global Biotechnology, Tom Adams, has taken the post of CEO of Pairwise. In short, this is a Monsanto gene-editing project. In a press release, Pairwise says it is using the controversial CRISPR gene-editing technology to create genetically edited produce. Among their goals apparently is a super-sweet variety of strawberry or apples, just what our sugar-saturated population doesn’t need.

CRISPR gene-editing, a stealth attempt by the global agribusiness industry to promote artificial mutations of crops and, as the world was shocked recently to hear, even humans, as in China, is being advanced, much like GMO crops falsely were, as solution to world hunger. Pairwise founder, Keith Joung, told media that their CRISPR gene-edited fruits, “will speed innovation that is badly needed to feed a growing population amid challenging conditions created by a changing climate.” How sweeter genetically-edited strawberries will solve world hunger he leaves to the imagination. Pairwise also says that gene-edited fruits would somehow also cut down on food waste. One has to be also skeptical there as well, even if it makes nice promotion copy. In addition to super-sweet strawberries, Monsanto plans to use its work with Pairwise to develop new varieties of gene-edited corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and canola crops. And because the USDA unfortunately has given the green light, the new genetically modified foods will undergo no independent testing for health and safety.

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Big Biotech’s big lie: National sciences group concludes GMOs do not increase crop production

Amy Goodrich
Natural News

Over the years, genetically modified crops have been a controversial topic of intense global debate. While proponents claim that GMOs are safe and needed to feed our burgeoning population, health and environmental groups are concerned about the lack of long-term testing on the impact of GMOs on the environment and human health.

Recently, the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), released a highly influential and comprehensive report, Genetically Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects, on the effects of genetically engineered crops.

A panel of experts spent two years producing a 400-page report, which is one of the most extensive reviews of genetically modified crops ever published. They pooled data from more than 1,000 existing studies on genetically modified crops. They interviewed 80 witnesses, and analyzed more than 700 comments submitted by the public.

The study committee concluded that genetically modified crops available to date are safe for human consumption and the environment. However, they note that the prevalence of herbicide-resistant crops has led to an increase in herbicide use and herbicide-resistant weeds.

Furthermore, they found that while GMOs may help farmers economically, they do not see the significant increase in yield promised by proponents that see GMOs as the best way to avoid world hunger.

The report comes at a critical time, as America and Europe are reassessing the place of GMOs in our food system. According to a Pew poll, more than half of Americans (57 percent) believe that GMOs are unsafe and should be labeled, while proponents say they don’t cause any harm and will help farmers meet the growing demand for food.

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15 Million Americans Suffer from Food Allergies: Could GMOs be to Blame?

Christina Sarich
Natural Society

Food allergies already affect more than 15 million Americans while things like gluten sensitivity hits a whopping 18 million individuals. What’s more, the cost for treating children’s food allergies is expected to rise to $25 billion per year. But biotech companies like Monsanto continue to claim they have no culpability.

Why are food allergies on the rise? Well let’s look at some obvious facts: Proteins in food are what most commonly cause allergic reactions, and when proteins are gene-spliced, the body has a harder time digesting them. We are eating gene-edited proteins in today’s diet that humans have never eaten before, and most of them have never been tested for safety.

• You can determine for yourself if this is coincidence or pre-meditated creation, but some of the most common food allergies are to soy, tree nuts, wheat, shellfish, peanuts, eggs, milk, and fish. Many of the items on this list have been genetically modified, or they hardly resemble their original state after corporate farming got their hands on them, as in the case of wheat.

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North Dakota Takes Bold Step Forward On Commercial Hemp Industry, Tells Feds To Stay Out

Huffington Post

North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple (R) signed a bill into law on Friday that lays the groundwork for a commercial hemp industry and explicitly cuts the federal government out of the state's licensing process.

House Bill 1436 establishes guidelines for the state's industrial hemp program and allows people to apply to grow the plant for either research or commercial purposes. With its provision for commercial hemp, the law goes beyond the federal Farm Bill, passed by Congress last year, which allowed some states to cultivate the plant, but only for research purposes and in more restricted pilot programs. 

The new measure builds on previous legislation that had legalized industrial hemp farming in North Dakota, but had gone largely unimplemented. Harsh federal restrictions on hemp have left some growers open to prosecution, making many states wary of pushing forward with cultivation. In addition to North Dakota, twelve other states have passed legislation to establish commercial industrial hemp programs, and a handful more have approved hemp production for agricultural uses or academic research. However, a number of those states have not actually moved ahead with officially establishing commercial hemp operations. 

North Dakota will join the five states -- Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vermont -- that actually implement the hemp laws they have on the books. The Hemp Industries Association, a nonprofit trade group consisting of hundreds of hemp businesses, recently reported that those states collectively planted approximately 125 acres of hemp crops last year.

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GMO Imports Causing Unapproved “Mystery GMO Plants” to Invade Ecosystems

Mike Barrett
Natural Society

Emerging as the world’s second largest importer of GMO crops, South Korea seems to be a big believer in feeding its citizens GMOs. Oddly enough, though, the country already has a government ban on their cultivation – likely as a means to protect its land from potential GMO dangers while still ‘benefiting’ from GMO foods. But despite an in-house ban and only accepting imports, GMO mystery plants have been taking root all over the country – providing hard evidence that GMO contamination is real and that even importing GMOs can disrupt a local ecosystem.

A National Institute of Ecology (NIE) monitoring report on the effects GMOs have on the natural environment showed GM corn and cotton discoveries across the country in 2013. Corn was found in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province; Gimje, North Jeolla Province; and Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province. Cotton was found in no fewer than fifteen locations.

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The Big Risk Of Nano-Materials In Your Food

RINF

The problem with nano-packages is that their powerful payloads may cause harm to those who eat them in their food.

With the arrival of globalization and due to monopolistic practices and technological advances, our food supply became dependent on a global system of production, distribution and manufacturing. Today, food is not anymore what we plant and harvest, but what others create in a lab, often times without the proper supervision and almost always without adequate testing.

If in the four previous articles of the Chemical Reality Series the point was to warn people about chemicals that reach our food supply, this one is a wake up call for anyone who is concerned with their health, even if health is minimally important.

As we have learned, unwanted ingredients are not only contaminating our food, but they are actually being used to test how humans react to their ingestion on what can be called a worldwide, open air experiment.

Recently, the organization Friends of Earth (FoE) published a report titled Small Ingredients, Big Risks, which details how the food industry uses technology to secretly add unlabeled metals such as silver to well-known products like cheese, chocolate, milk, soda, candy, soy, almond, and rice beverages, mints, gum, popcorn, salad dressing and oils, yogurt, cereal, crackers, pasta, and sports drinks.
 

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Isn't It Time to Stop Raiding Peaceful Farmers?

Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund

Open Source Seed Initiative aims to keep seeds free from patents

Natural News

 In a public ceremony on April 16, a coalition of farmers, scientists and sustainable food advocates launched the Open Source Seed Pledge, a parallel licensing system designed to keep seeds in the hands of the public and prevent them from being patented by private interests.

Plant researchers released the seeds of 29 new varieties of broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetables and grains under the pledge in a ceremony at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"These vegetables are part of our common cultural heritage, and our goal is to make sure these seeds remain in the public domain for people to use in the future," said plant breeder and UW-Madison professor Irwin Goldman, one of the pledge's co-authors.

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Brazilian activists launch petition to stop approval of GMO 'Terminator' seeds

Natural News

In today's globally connected economic environment, entire governments can be infiltrated by industry insiders who seek to further their business agenda. It's easy for government safety boards and commissions to be coerced into supporting a corporation's high-dollar demands. It's now very easy for corporations to conspire globally to take advantage of expanding markets in agriculture. Follow the money.

Genetically manipulated crops aren't the answer for feeding the world

Supporters of big GMO agribusiness are often deluded by the thought that they are feeding growing populations around the world. Realistically, genetically altered seeds have been changed at the molecular level, sometimes spliced with bacteria genes. This kind of DNA designer crop doesn't always interact well with the human body. Chemicals like glyphosate, mass applied in this agricultural system, disrupt the shikimate pathway of the good bacteria in the gut. Even worse, GM "Terminator" seeds are actually designed to make the seeds die in their second year, which definitely doesn't help farmers feed the world. The world's hunger slowly becomes more dependent on the GMO design, limiting food security.

Countries becoming guinea pigs at the mercy of those who think they knows what's best

As genetically altered seeds are peddled to governments for approval, entire populations of people may be at the mercy of a select few commissioners and board safety connoisseurs who are easily influenced by securing positions of power and influence. While experimental seeds are approved into a country's agriculture, people inadvertently become guinea pigs for lab-developed food. At the same time, farmers are trapped into being seasonally dependent on genetically altered Terminator seeds.

Terminator seeds transform hard-working farmers into dependent slaves

Highly controversial genetically altered Terminator seeds are lab-designed to die at their first harvest, making crops unable to reproduce in their second year. This immediately makes farmers dependent on corporate seed each growing season.

This inevitably consolidates all the power and control into the hands of the corporations who lab-engineer new seeds every year. This disturbing agricultural practice is anti-life, anti-independence and anti-health. Terminator seeds are really about control. Instead of working with nature and allowing nature to take its course in breeding heritage seeds each year, farmers are forced to buy experimental seeds and their chemical companions. Some GM seeds are designed to perform tasks like creating their own insecticide. While corporations take over and control the seed market, farmers are made to be their slaves.

Independent organic farmers are being silently robbed by Terminator seed cross-contamination

Independent farmers who refuse genetically altered seeds are also at risk. Organic farmers who use heritage seeds could face the harsh reality of cross-contamination as their real seed is contaminated by varieties of Terminator seeds. Completely organic crops are at risk of being infected, so to speak, as they are cross-contaminated by Terminator varieties. This may create a line of dying "suicide" crops within an organic farmer's field. Within one growing season, an honest, independent farmer could be robbed of the fruits of his own labor, silently. Terminator seeds could literally cut his prosperity quietly each year, subjecting his freedom to the controlling hands of GMO seed plotters.

Brazil activists seek to stop Terminator seeds with your help

In the country of Brazil, Congress is proposing a bill, (PL) No. 268/2007, that would allow exemptions to the ban on genetic use restriction technologies, as Terminator seeds are formally known. This bill would basically allow Terminator seeds to freely flow into Brazil's agriculture, cross-contaminating real seeds and putting farmers at the mercy of biotech firms. Filed by Rep. Eduardo Sciarra, this bill allows for marketing and production of "suicide" seeds that are engineered to become sterile in their second generation. A commission is set to vote on the matter soon; if a quorum is reached, the bill would appear for a final vote in the Brazilian Congress.

GMO Terminator seed activists have launched a petition to be directed to the newly elected President of the Judiciary Commission. The petition states clearly that Terminator seeds threaten farmers and food sovereignty in Brazil.

The links to the petition are below:
In Portuguese (http://change.org), in English (http://change.org) or in Spanish (http://change.org).

Sources for this article include:

http://www.etcgroup.org

http://www.change.org

http://www.junkscience.co.uk

No GMO: UK to Conduct Absolutely No GMO Trials in 2014

Natural Society

Though GM wheat and potatoes have been trialed in the UK in recent years, 2014 will mark the first year that no GMO trials will occur in places like Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. The director of GM Freeze, Helene Paul says, “We’re celebrating a GM-free 2014 in UK fields – long may it continue. We congratulate the millions of UK farmers and shoppers standing up for what is right for their businesses and families, and we’re standing right beside them.” This will be the first year since 2007 that no trials will be conducted and that none are expected.

According to the UK government “Defra currently has no [GM trial] applications under consideration.” As more people in the UK, including farmers and consumers rally to tell their government that they aren’t interested in GM foods, the mega-giants of the food industry have started to finally pay attention. GMO trials have come to a halt in numerous countries throughout Europe. Trials in France, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere have been completely stopped. This includes transgenic GMO trees recently planted in Saint-Cyr-en-Val, near Orléans that were recently destroyed due to activist insistence.

Read: Connecticut First State to Pass GMO Labeling Bill

Paul continued:

“No matter what it says, the GM industry just hasn’t produced anything UK farmers can use or that consumers want. Instead the industry colludes with the Government to rig public dialogues, botch consultations, remove necessary regulations and proposes using public money to force pro-GM “education” onto the curriculum.
The aims of the GM wheat trial were never clear, despite the legal requirement for this information to be public before consent for such trials can be granted. We know that over the longer term GM crops cause more problems for farmers than they solve, and GM Freeze still wonders why the many risks were taken for such an unclear goal – unless it was simply to attract funding for further GM research and development. Of course it is also possible the consent given was the result of an assessment process that lacked the necessary rigour to comply with the law.
In any case we hope that the science establishment in the UK has learned that there is plenty of important and highly productive non-GM research needed, and the UK should be aiming to emerge as a centre of excellence in these areas rather than pursuing unnecessary GM crops that no one wants.

This success comes despite the fact that the biotech industry heavily supports Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, who even said people who supported the GMO-labeling movement were ‘wicked.’

Twenty-Six Countries Ban GMOs—Why Won’t the US?

fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net

The Nation

The 2013 World Food Prize was awarded to three chemical company executives, including Monsanto executive vice president and chief technology officer, Robert Fraley, responsible for development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The choice of Fraley was widely protested, with eighty-one members of the prestigious World Future Council calling it “an affront to the growing international consensus on safe, ecological farming practices that have been scientifically proven to promote nutrition and sustainability.” The choice of Monsanto’s man triggered accusations of prize buying.

From 1999 to 2011, Monsanto donated $380,000 to the World Food Prize Foundation, in addition to a $5 million contribution in 2008. For some, the award to Monsanto is actually a sign of desperation on the part of the GMO establishment. The arguments of the critics are making headway. Owing to concern about the dangers and risks posed by genetically engineered organisms, many governments have instituted total or partial bans on their cultivation, importation, and field-testing. A few years ago, there were sixteen countries that had total or partial bans on GMOs.

Now there are at least twenty-six, including Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, Mexico and Russia. Significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries. Already, American rice farmers face strict limitations on their exports to the European Union, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and are banned altogether from Russia and Bulgaria because unapproved genetically engineered rice “escaped” during open-field trials on GMO rice.

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See also: The Case for labelling GMOs

Timeline of FDA raids on raw milk farmers, dietary supplement makers and natural medicine practitioners

Natural News

The US Food and Drug Administration has a long history of conducting armed, SWAT-style raids on farmers, cancer treatment pioneers and dietary supplement manufacturers. This list, compiled by the editors of NaturalNews, reveals only some of the hundreds of armed FDA raids that have been conducted in the last twenty-five years.

What you see from this is a pattern of government-sponsored terrorism against innocent Americans and small business people; all done in the name of "protecting" the public from milk, walnuts, vitamins, plants or fruit extracts. The real reason behind all this, of course, is that the FDA has long waged a campaign of fear and intimidation against natural product providers for the sole purpose of destroying the natural products industry and thereby handing Big Pharma a monopoly over health treatment medicines.

If you're skeptical of that conclusion, read the timeline and see for yourself. And if you're currently a farmer who might be targeted in a future FDA raid, be sure to read this helpful resource created by the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund entitled How to Survive a Farm Raid: http://www.ftcldf.org/farm-raids.html

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Agriculture: The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race

sott.net

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our Earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution gradually spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly gazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.

While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so- called primitive people, like the Kalahari Bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors.

For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only twelve to nineteen hours for one group of Bushmen, fourteen hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a better balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and ninety-three grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat seventy-five or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmers have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modem hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts founds well preserved' mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.

One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunter-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5'9" for men, 5'5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B.C. had reached a low of 5'3" for men ,5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the lllinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and lllinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A.D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood.

Compared to the hunter- gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly fifty percent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the preagricultural community was about twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the postagricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. " I don't think most hunter-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity." says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor, with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it's become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (Today just three high-carbohydrate plants--wheat, rice, and corn--provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.

Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn't take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, nonproducing elite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c.1500 B.C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth).

Among Chilean mummies from c. A.D. 1000, the elite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease. Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a Bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts-- with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies, for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New guinea farming communities today, I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 11 O-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modem hunter-gathers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Inuit and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus with the advent of agriculture an elite became better off but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls. One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter gatherers are rarely over one person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 time that.)

Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it's because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by extended nursing and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it's old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don't have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmer didn't want.

At this point it's instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest lasting lifestyle in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited us from outer space where trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a twenty-four hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. It the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day.

We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day,from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p.m., we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade and that have so far eluded us?

Related: The Devastating Effects of Agriculture: We're Getting Shorter NOT Taller and Our Brains are Shrinking, So is Farming to Blame?