Photo: Screen Capture/PermacultureNews on YouTube
Geoff Lawton has taught more than 6,000 students in over 30 countries on how to grow food in the most efficient and ecologically friendly way possible through permaculture design science, so he knows as well as anyone what a healthy ecosystem and healthy plants should look like.
And as you’ll see on Lawton’s video clip of both a thriving natural prairie landscape and a GMO cornfield used for feeding animals in factory farms, the GMO cornfield has many weaknesses in terms of its negative effects on environmental and human health.
In the clip, Lawton starts off in a biodiverse prairie ecosystem teeming with life and cover crops and then proceeds to take viewers across the street to a giant monoculture GMO cornfield.
“There’s a great diversity of plants here of all types, this has supported huge herds of animals grazing through in sequenced events,” Lawton says while first examining the prairie.
Lawton finds a completely different scene after crossing the road.
“An Insane Way to Think About How We Produce Our Food”
The difference between walking through a prairie landscape, with tons of plant diversity and cover and depth in the soil, and a GMO cornfield is almost too different for words to adequately describe.
“This is not farming. This is a plant factory on the ground,” Lawton says, comparing each corn stalk in the field to ‘clones.’
Considering that genetically modified corn and soya crops are produced in laboratories by Monsanto and Bayer scientists, it’s not a surprising comment.
They really do look like clones, with little if any variation between each plant.
“There’s no life here at all,” Lawton added in a scene that appears to be out of a sci-fi movie.
“This is a way of converting fossil fuels into money through food, that’s all.”
The big corporations that mass produce GMOs call them “sustainable,” but after watching the video below it’s hard to imagine how anyone could think that way.
Lawton demonstrates how the soil is almost completely devoid of thickness, depth, nutrients, and cover crops, showing what many organic and permaculture farming advocates have feared for years: the weakness of monoculture farms’ soil.
These farms are sprayed with massive amounts of chemicals including Monsanto’s Roundup, which was declared a ‘probable human carcinogen’ in spring 2015 by the World Health Organization’s top cancer research group, the IARC, the ‘International Agency for Research on Cancer.’
Each corn and soy plant is genetically modified to withstand large chemical spraying events without being harmed.
Check out the video in the player below and let us know what you think in the comments section of this post.
Do we really want to spend our hard-earned money on monoculture farms like the one shown in this video? Or is it time for a different approach, and a return to regenerative farming practices?
Watch here and decide for yourself:
Thanks for reading! You can learn more at Geoff’s website here. This article was first published in September 2016 updated in February 2024.
If you’d like to support the organic food industry, I highly recommend checking out the incredible and delicious pasture-raised meats, supplements and foods from Paleo Valley (On Sale Here Today Only)! My favorites are the organic whey protein, organic bone broth protein and organic ACV capsules (try a bottle at a discounted rate of 85% off here).
You can also try your first box of organic, pasture-raised meat here from Wild Pastures here (a new company from our friends at Paleo Valley – 20% Off Your First Box (Click Here to Try It)
***************
Thanks for installing the Bottom of every post plugin by Corey Salzano. Contact me if you need custom WordPress plugins or website design.
About Nick Meyer
