By Laura Garber, Hamilton
The crisis of our time is hidden in our food.
Our current state of affairs is an opportunity for us to see that some of the biggest problems we face today are interrelated. It would be really easy to start to solve them, if we pay attention to and address just one of the important root causes. In the United States 280 million pounds of Glyphosate (commonly known as RoundUp Herbicide) are sprayed annually. Glyphosate kills microbes in the soil, kills weeds, kills the micro-biome in your digestive tract, leaches into water killing aquatic plants and damaging fish, and earns a very few people a very lot of money.
Since Glyphosate came into popular use in 1974, the year I was born, tremendous changes have occurred in agriculture and society. Those changes can be seen in environmental imbalances, rising rates of autism, gluten intolerance, obesity, the emergence of more and more virus-related syndromes and illnesses, a widening socio-economic health disparity, the diminishing vitamin and mineral content in most foods, and super weeds.
This is not a coincidence. Glyphosate is toxic. Its presence in the environment is lasting, damaging, largely ignored, hidden, and misrepresented by the companies that benefit from its sale and use.
We can change this, and it would actually be pretty easy to do for ourselves as Montanans. We can just Stop Spraying Roundup, right now. Appreciate the dandelions in your lawn, buy Montana certified organic wheat, lentils, and beer so as to avoid exposure to Glyphosate residue and to promote farmers and farming practices that focus on chemical-free foods. We can demand the Montana Department of Agriculture to stop promoting chemical-agriculture and the use of Glyphosate (and the many other toxic ag chemicals that are so wantonly used without the full spectrum of their toxicity being revealed). We can demand the MT Dept of Ag put our health and safety as Montanans at the very top of the priority list, which would mean an outright ban on Glyphosate in all its brand names, uses, and forms. We can insist that the MT Dept of Agriculture’s course and focus shift toward regenerative agriculture. Regenerative Agriculture puts soil health first and foremost and will help to heal the soil, heal our guts, heal our children, heal the disparities that are driving us apart, and heal our Montana Agriculture Way of Life.
Please take action today. Please be part of a solution and a change that we will all benefit from. Stop spraying RoundUp, ask your workplace or church to stop spraying, call the MT Dept of Agriculture and ask them to stop supporting chemical agriculture and to support Montana farmers in transitioning to regenerative agriculture. Inform yourself about the hidden threat to agriculture and society that hides in our food and haunts our Montana Agricultural Way of Life. Again, please take action today.