Photographer Documents Dead Soil in a GMO Corn Field

Around the world, his cam­era cap­tured thou­sands of plants, ani­mals, and insects within the cubes, with entirely dif­fer­ent “worlds” of plants and ani­mals liv­ing as lit­tle as a few feet away from each other.

Childs recruited a friend, and together they set out to repli­cate Littschwager’s “crit­ter cen­sus” in a corn field in Grundy County, Iowa.

But whereas Littschwager’s cam­era cap­tured sev­eral dozens of insects wher­ever he set up his frames, Childs and friend found noth­ing stir­ring among the genet­i­cally engi­neered corn stalks on the 600 acre farm in Iowa, where they spent an entire week­end crawl­ing around on the ground. No signs of life with the excep­tion of an iso­lated spi­der, a sin­gle red mite, and a cou­ple grasshoppers.

“It felt like another planet entirely,” Childs said. “I lis­tened and heard noth­ing, no birds, no clicks from insects. There were no bees. The air, the ground, seemed vacant.”

“Yet, 100 years ago, these same fields, these prairies, were home to 300 species of plants, 60 mam­mals, 300 birds, hun­dreds and hun­dreds of insects,” Robert Krulwich writes. “This soil was the rich­est, the loami­est in the state. And now, in these patches, there is almost lit­er­ally noth­ing but one kind of liv­ing thing. We’ve erased every­thing else.”

How Monoculture Threatens the Future of Food

The “faster, big­ger, cheaper” approach to food is slowly drain­ing dry our planet’s resources and com­pro­mis­ing your health. The Earth’s soil is deplet­ing at more than 13 per­cent the rate it can be replaced. We have already lost 75 per­cent of the world’s crop vari­eties over the last cen­tury.  Over the past 10 years, we’ve had 100 mil­lion tons of her­bi­cides dumped onto our crops, pol­lut­ing our soil and streams… And genet­i­cally engi­neered (GE) crops are now speed­ing up the destruc­tive process by com­pletely alter­ing the com­po­si­tion of soil bac­te­ria in the fields where such crops are grown.

It’s imper­a­tive to under­stand that agri­cul­ture is a com­plete ‘sys­tem’ based on inter-related fac­tors, and in order to main­tain eco­log­i­cal bal­ance and health, you must under­stand how that sys­tem works as a whole. Any time you change one part of that sys­tem, you change the inter­ac­tion of all the other com­po­nents, because they work together. It is sim­ply impos­si­ble to change just one minor aspect with­out alter­ing the entire sys­tem, and this is in part why GE crops are not a viable alternative.

Dr. Don Huber’s research, which spans over 55 years, has been devoted to look­ing at how the agri­cul­tural sys­tem can be man­aged for more effec­tive crop pro­duc­tion, bet­ter dis­ease con­trol, improved nutri­tion, and safety. The intro­duc­tion of genet­i­cally engi­neered crops has dra­mat­i­cally affected and changed all agri­cul­tural components:

• The plants
• The phys­i­cal environment
• The dynam­ics of the bio­log­i­cal envi­ron­ment, and
• Pests and dis­eases (plant-, animal-, and human diseases)

One of the major mod­i­fi­ca­tions done to genet­i­cally engi­neered food crops is the intro­duc­tion of her­bi­cide resis­tance. Monsanto is the leader in this field, with their patented Roundup Ready corn, cot­ton, soy­bean and sugar beets, which can sur­vive oth­er­wise lethal doses of glyphosate—the active ingre­di­ent in Roundup. The work­ing premise is that by mak­ing the plants resis­tant to the her­bi­cide, farm­ers can increase yield by cut­ting down on weed growth. This premise has been found to be severely flawed how­ever, as farm­ers around the world are now los­ing acreage to glyphosate-resistant super-weeds at an alarm­ing rate.

According to the British Institute of Science in Society, the US has fared the worst, now com­bat­ing 13 dif­fer­ent glyphosate-resistant weed species in 73 dif­fer­ent locations.

But the intro­duc­tion of glyphosate-resistance has also had a direct impact on soil microbes. While the link between an her­bi­cide (which is directed toward plants) and soil microbes may not be imme­di­ately appar­ent, this rip­ple effect occurs because, again, it’s an inter-related sys­tem. In a nut­shell, her­bi­cides are chela­tors that form a bar­rier around spe­cific nutri­ents, pre­vent­ing what­ever life form is seek­ing to uti­lize that ele­ment from uti­liz­ing it prop­erly. That applies both to plants and soil microbes—as well as ani­mals and humans.

Click here to read the rest of this story at DrMercola.com.