GMO Food and Weed Killers

When I was growing up, we handled weeds the old fashioned way. My parents encouraged all of us to help pull them out by the roots. If you have ever had to pull dandelions out of your lawn, you know what a chore that was. They also had us collect Japanese beetles off the rose bushes and salted boiling water did a job on anything that tried to grow in our sidewalk cracks. We didn't know anything about being organic. That's just how it was.

After I got married, my husband and I bought our greenhouse and grew tropical houseplants for the wholesale market. We often worked until dark and there was no more time for pulling weeds by hand. With almost 5 acres of property, we occasionally used Roundup to kill the weeds along the buildings and fences. You can bet we were very careful to stay out of the spray and never used the Roundup sprayer to spray anything else. When you are growing plants for your living, you don't take chances.

Roundup was a very well known weed killer and Monsanto make a lot of money with it. Because you could carefully control where you used it, you could spray the weeds under trees with out hurting the trees themselves or keep your aisles clear of weed overgrowth without hurting your cash crops. Roundup is absorbed by the plant you want to remove and kills it from the inside out. Because it is absorbed into the plant, after a few hours, you can't wash it off. That was great for farmers who kept it well away from their food crops but times have changed.

Since Roundup was such a popular product, Monsanto made a business decision to increase sales by increasing demand. That doesn't sound so bad does it? What they did was to figure out a way to genetically modify plants so that Roundup wouldn't kill them. You see, with a crop like soybeans, if you had sprayed the weeds you would have destroyed your crop as well. Now you can spray the whole field and the soybeans will live while the weeds die. That makes harvesting the crop much easier which is better for the farmers and sells more product for Monsanto. Sounds like a win-win situation except that the consumer wasn't factored into the equation.

You see, you can't spray genetically modified crops like soybeans with the Roundup and not have them absorb the spray. Even though it doesn't kill them, there is still residual left in the plant and unfortunately, Roundup is very toxic to human cells. It isn't something that is going to kill you immediately like it did the weeds but the truth is, no one knows what the long term effect of this is going to be. Add to that the unknown affect foreign genes can have when spliced into common plant products and we are gambling with the nation's health. That is why informed consumers gathered together and refused to tolerate GMO foods in European marketplaces.

1. Become Informed - Don't take my word for it. Take some time and learn the truth about GMO food and what it means to your family. You can start with some of the websites listed in my links list or simply Google GMO and see what comes up.

2. Vote with your wallet - If enough people refuse to buy genetically modified food, manufacturers will stop selling it. After all, food producers don't have to use it and they will notice if sales drop off. They want your dollar.

3. Show your support for clean food - Join the Campaign for Healthier Eating in America. It 's free to join and together we really can make a difference.

4. Shop Smart - Download the free Non-GMO Shopping Guide

Made in the USA, they help the economy - Reusing glass, they help the ecology - Attractive, they help your garden get noticed...What's not to like?