Mom’s Soap Box

Four negative effects of industrial agriculture:

• Genital feminization of male humans and animals: This one always gets them where it hurts, but the industrial pesticides used in agriculture are among the class of chemicals that mimics or stimulates estrogenic activity in the body and are linked, or suspected of being linked, to decreased sperm counts and genital abnormalities in male animals up and down the food chain.

• Herbicides linked to cancer, neurological disorders: Nanaimo, British Columbia, has recently banned the use of herbicides on residential lawns based on the growing body of evidence that they’re linked to a host of cancers, reproductive problems, respiratory illness and neurological effects from learning disorders to full-blown Parkinson’s disease. The herbicides used on lawns are often just repackaged versions of the same chemicals, like Roundup, sold in bulk to farmers.

1. Antibiotics fed to livestock have created antibiotic-resistant bacteria: Called MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, these difficult to treat infections commonly only attack people with compromised immune systems and were once more commonly associated with hospital environments. They don’t seem to have developed forms that are very easily transmissible, but they keep showing up in farm environments where low-dose antibiotics are used as growth promoters and infection preventives.

• Plants absorb antibiotics from soil amendments: If you use manure from an animal that’s been given lots of antibiotics as a plant fertilizer, the plants will incorporate those antibiotics into their tissue. Even people who eat organic food, even people who have a totally vegan diet, can thus get our livestock antibiotics passed on to them in low, irregular doses - just about the worst possible way to take antibiotics. The genes that confer antibiotic resistance in bacteria don’t necessarily help them survive any better in the environment at large; which is why penicillin has become useful again, because the resistance genes faded from the active bacterial population after it fell into disuse. Maintaining regular exposure of bacterial populations to antibiotics puts positive selection pressure on antibiotic resistance genes.