For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Genetic Engineering page, and our Millions Against Monsanto page.

After trucking across the high plains for five hours, and casting
my eyes over perhaps 100,000 acres or more of winter’s still deathly
gray industrial farmland, I came face to face with the newly famous Dr.
Don M. Huber in the cave-dark meeting room of the Black Horse Inn just
outside the American Heartland village of Creighton, Nebraska.

On the morning of March 24, along with about 80 farmers and
Extension agents, I listened as Huber discoursed with erudition and
eloquence upon industrial farming practices that may be impacting nearly
every morsel of food produced on the planet, and that subsequently may
also be having staggeringly serious health consequences for plants,
animals, and human beings.

Huber is emeritus soil scientist of Purdue University, and a
retired U.S. Army Colonel who served as an intelligence analyst, for 41
years, active and reserves. In Nebraska, he stood ramrod straight for
three hours with no notes and spoke with an astonishing depth and range
of knowledge on crucial, controversial matters of soil science, genetic
engineering, and the profound impact of the widely used herbicide
glyphosate upon soil and plants, and ultimately upon the health of
animals and human beings.

Dressed in a conservative dark suit and tie, Huber set the stage
for his presentation by observing that he has been married for 52 years,
and has 11 children, 36 grandchildren, and a great-grandchild on the
way. He then began his formal talk framed by a PowerPoint slide bearing a
Biblical quote: “All flesh is grass.” – Isaiah 4:6. With this he
emphasized the foundational reality that the biotech grains we eat, as
well as the biotech grains eaten by cows, hogs, and chickens, are grown
in vast herbicide-treated fields.

For the domineering giants of industrial agriculture –
multinational corporations, universities, and governments – Huber’s
assertions about the impact of glyphosate, and the mounting scientific
questions about GMO crops, may be as significant and disrupting as
Martin Luther’s “heretical” act in 1517. That’s when Luther nailed his
95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany to
challenge the systemic problems in the almighty institutions of his era.

Luther disputed the claim that spiritual forgiveness from sins
could be legitimately sold for money. Huber and other researchers say
they are accumulating evidence that – along with the 2010 report
of the U.S. President’s Cancer panel which bluntly blames chemicals for
the staggering prevalence of cancers – raises profoundly challenging
questions about the chemical and genetic-engineering practices of
industrial agriculture. The challenge, if it holds up, has implications
not just for agricultural institutions, but also for the primary food
chain serving the Earth’s population.

Not an altogether new controversy, the complex matters of
industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and the far-flung use of
herbicides has been ominously and exponentially accentuated in the last
year by virtue of its ominous context: last summer’s epic oil
catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, the nation-ripping 9.0 earthquake in
Japan earlier this month, with its subsequent tsunami and nuclear
meltdown which is contaminating the nation’s water and food chain, in
combination with the statistical reality that on our planet of nearly
seven billion people, over a billion human beings – one of every six of us – is hungry.

All of this was brought into prominent public focus – both sharp
and fuzzy – in January of this year by the unlikely matter of alfalfa.

Challenges to the Web of Life

The seminar with Dr. Huber, sponsored by Knox County Extension
and the Center for Rural Affairs, commenced on a somber note. The
moderator announced that Terry Gompert, 66, a veteran Extension educator
and respected advocate for sustainable agriculture, and a man who had
played a key role in organizing the conference, had just suffered a
massive heart attack.  A moment of silence followed before Dr. Huber
began his presentation. Mr. Gompert died on March 25, the day after the
conference he organized.

At the conference, Huber’s talk was highly technical, yet he had
easy command of voluminous technical detail. For many, it must have
sounded like an alien language as he spun out the esoteric terms:
zwitterion, desorbtion, translocation, rhizosphere, meristemic,
speudomanads, microbiocidae, bradyrhizobium, shikimate, and more.

Huber spoke about a range of key factors involved in plant
growth, including sunlight, water, temperature, genetics, and nutrients
taken up from the soil. “Any change in any of these factors impacts all
the factors,” he said. “No one element acts alone, but all are part of a
system…When you change one thing,” he said, “everything else in the
web of life changes in relationship.”

That brought him to the subject of glyphosate, the most widely
used herbicide, most commonly recognized in the product named Roundup®.
Because it is so widely used, Huber said, it is having a profound impact
upon mega millions of farm acres around the world. More than 155
million acres of cropland were treated with glyphosate during the 2008
growing season, and even more by now. Subsequently, Huber said, this
chemical is having a sweeping impact on the food chain.