GMOs
Nathan Lange (Fri, 14 Nov 2014 10:28:30 PST)

One of the tiring rants of the participants in the marketing scheme
euphemistically called "organic" is their self proclaimed oppression
for having their very special products "contaminated" with GMO
pollen. For the past few years there has been an analogous legal
situation in commercial horticulture in California dealing with
so-called pollen contamination. See who you side with:

What if I decide to commercially grow seedless mandarins, sometimes
sold in the U.S. under the trademark name Cuties? Should I be able to
demand that all my neighbors within a certain distance of my citrus
orchard must now remove all their pollen producing citrus plants in
order to prevent pollination of my mandarins, all because I want to
profit from growing higher value seedless citrus fruit? What about
the bee keepers? In the past five years, seedless mandarin farmers in
California have threatened legal action against bee keepers over the
"trespass" of bees pollinating their mandarin orchards.
http://nbclosangeles.com/news/weird/…
By organic farming logic, the mandarin growers must be correct when
they argue that bee keepers hurt farmers. I don't agree.

My understanding is that the arbitrary USDA rules defining "organic"
recently changed yet again late last year, this time to reflect the
reality of wind transported pollen in agriculture, just as the
standards were recently lowered for "organic" meat and dairy products
in most of California to accommodate our recent drought. In reality,
in both of these examples, the end consumer products never changed at
all in any meaningful way. And too bad for the seedless mandarin
growers who can't redefine the word "seedless" to fit their needs
when those malicious trespassing bees show up.

Nathan

At 07:38 AM 11/14/2014, you wrote: