One of the reasons that environmental activists seem to be mean spirited twits spreading disinformation for personal gain is that this is true. They are social predators, entrepreneurs of sorts, who make their way in life exploiting the troubles of others. Their creative energies are squandered in trying to identify some segment of society that has related problems, and then trying to organize them into a rent seeking grievance group. The oblique benefits the social predator gets are jobs in organzations such as NGOs, government offices, political organizations and publications.

Consider this twisted article.

As bad as the annual flood of cheap corn is for our health -- nutritionally worthless high-fructose corn syrup, cheap feed for confined animals pumped full of antibiotics and hormones -- it may be even worse for the environment.

Bolstered by government subsidies that have averaged about $4 billion annually since 1995, U.S. production accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world's corn output.

Grain, especially corn, is poverty food as well as a strain on the environment that sucks the life out of soil. That it is cheap is irrelevant.

Subsidies skew markets, often in ways that harm the economy as a whole, and make life harder for non-subsidized producers. It's the same effect as minimum wage laws, unions, guilds or other methods of artificially improving the prosperity of some at the expense of the rest. It's a wealth transfer from the very poorest to the not so poor.

The US not only does 40% of the world's corn it does nearly half of its soya too. What's the point? Is that bad in some way? It's a nonsense assertion, a non-argument.

Every year, the USDA reports, corn farmers dump more than 10 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer onto their fields -- a heavier dose than for any other crop by a factor of nearly three. . .

This annual cascade of "artificial fertility" (as the farmer and activist Jason McKenney calls it) parches soil of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. It crushes biodiversity and makes soils reliant on more fertilizer. According to McKenney, less than a fifth of that nitrogen makes it into corn plants.

It's no more artificial than rain, which delivers 7% of the very same stuff to every field on the planet. Well, those that get rain anyway.

But why so much more than other crops, and why is so little utilized? Part of the reason is that the Illinois Soil Nitrogen Test (ISNT) used to calculate fertilizer needs is wrong. We don't have a very good understanding of how to measure nitrogen in soil and prescribe amendment since there are a lot of related factors that influence outcomes. Everything depends on everything else, it's all muck and mystery. Corn uses a lot of nitrogen and impoverishes soil, but increase in use of nitrogen - and thus yield - has not been shown to have an understood relationship to application. Sometimes adding nitrogen increases yield but sometimes it just increases leaching. Current best guesses are that we have been applying way too much for corn, but way too little for soya. We've been comprehensively wrong.

The same is true for every crop. We just don't yet have a good grasp of how soil works. The organic nutters merely have a belief system. Some of their beliefs may turn out to be true but they have no scientific basis for those beliefs. It's sort of like creation science or astrology, all terminology and convoluted mumbo-jumbo that isn't reproducible.

Every year we learn more and bit by bit agriculture is improving. Knowing that the ISNT is wrong has shifted attention more toward balanced fertility, attention to all nutrients as well as timing in a context of living soil that hosts a whole meangerie of creatures, many microscopic, as well as the target crop plant. Many practitioners fell over laughing when the scientists announced their new plans since this is what many of them have been advocating for a few centuries, including me. I know, I'm older than dirt. There are defects in industrial agriculture galore, but mistakes and misue of technologies aren't critcisms of the technology. There's nothing weird about fertilizer. Too much or bad timing is harmful, but so is water when used improperly.

Archer Daniels Midland makes a killing off of our cheap-food system; a few mega-farms in the Midwest do OK as well. But for most people, and for the environment, what we get is a government-underwritten disaster.

I can't imagine a better place for greens, social-justice activists, and real-food enthusiasts to unite for change.

I can't either, it's perfect. They have ignorant notions about the wrong problems and prescriptions for change that will make things worse. Give them a little more rope and get it over with. Here, I'll hold it for you. . . this is how you tie the knot. Neatness counts! Not too much slack or you'll dance for a long time. A good sharp jolt at the bottom snaps things into place, or out of place actually, more quickly.

From another article, same author, same day - (I wonder if there's a bulk rate?).

The huge corn payouts encourage overproduction, and have helped sustain a long-term trend in falling prices. According to figures from the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, the inflation-adjusted global commodity price for corn plunged 61 percent between 1983 and 2002. Today a bushel, roughly 56 pounds, fetches about $2.

What commodity has not seen a long term trend in falling prices? That's true of most things. We are becoming more productive. Our subsidies don't much affect that. We have local surpluses when subsidies are tied to production, but agricultural commodities are fungible. If we don't do it then sombody else will. There would be short term ups and downs as the world system adjusted to change, but no real or lasting effect. We need to stop subsidies for our own local benefit not some pie-in-the-sky world altering reason.

Cheap corn, underwritten by the subsidy program, has changed the diet of every American. It has allowed a few corporations -- including Archer Daniels Midland, the world's largest grain processor -- to create a booming market for high-fructose corn syrup. HFCS now accounts for nearly half of the caloric sweeteners added to processed food, and is the sole caloric sweetener for mass-market soft drinks. Between 1975 and 1997, per-capita consumption jumped from virtually nothing to 60.4 pounds per year -- equal to about 200 calories per person, per day.

Bull crap. HFCS is cheaper than sugar. Period. ADM has nothing to do with that fact. They didn't create a market for HFCS, they sold into the market. More importantly, even if HFCS didn't exist the demand for sweets would be undiminished. Some other source would be used to satisfy it.

As the federal government dithers with its food pyramids and ruinous cheap-corn policy, low-income communities are organizing to gain control over the quality of their food supply. Meter's work in the Midwest and Herrera's in the Northeast represent the rumblings of a growing real-food underground -- an upsurge that challenges not just the hegemony of processed food, but also the social relations that allow it to thrive.

Ah yes, back to organizing again. That's the real issue here: a grievance, a group, a predator to organize and exploit, yada yada. Fletcherized snake oil, organic stiffy pills. They'll wake the dead. Donate now.

Ken Nielsen sent me this article from the wine, or should that be whine, section of the Telegraph: We want real food. It seems at first to be a common complaint about tasteless, carboard produce such as has become the norm in grocery stores in the age of non-seasonal produce at bargain prices. It's the price we pay to have cheap vegetables out of season. But it turns into a sort of dim witted advocacy for nativism though even organic foods get rubbished.

It started with a bunch of organic carrots. I bought them in a wholefood shop. They hadn't looked particularly promising - a sort of washed-out yellow colour - but I felt sure they'd do the job.

Back at home, I grated a couple and put them in a salad. I started munching on a forkful. It wasn't that the carrots tasted bland. Nothing so positive. There was no discernible taste of any kind. Not the merest hint of sweetness. I might as well have been chewing on wood shavings. . .

In nature, sweetness is often linked to rich sources of essential trace elements, including zinc, magnesium, copper and boron. Sweet-tasting natural foods such as ripe fruits, berries and honey contain minerals as well as sugars. . .

But fresh foods no longer taste sweet. Many are deliberately harvested while under-ripe, to lessen damage in transport and to extend shelf-life. In addition, they have been robbed of many of the trace elements they once contained, although this is disputed by some food scientists. A revolution in the way the foods are grown has taken away the very nutrients that once promoted good health. Our staple foods have been "dumbed down". As a result, Britain - like other industrial countries - is suffering a tidal wave of sickness.

Degenerative conditions, such as heart disease, arthritis, diabetes and asthma, are reaching epidemic proportions. One in three of us will be struck down with cancer at some stage in our lives. Mental illness, everything from depression to dementia, is also rife.

Could food really be responsible for the health catastrophe that has overtaken the western world? It seems scarcely credible. Yet the fact remains that our basic foods have been changed. They are now subtly different from those eaten by human beings through all of history.

Britain is 50 years into a mass experiment in human nutrition. We all eat basic foods that have been stripped of the antioxidants, trace elements and essential fatty acids that once promoted good health. Is it any wonder that our body-maintenance systems are breaking down in middle age or earlier?

Nitrogen compounds, the products of a worldwide chemical industry, are the powerhouse that drives modern farming. It's those small, white pellets - prills, as the manufacturers call them - that have degraded our everyday foods and led to the upsurge in ill-health.

Nitrogen fertilisers weaken plants by stimulating excess growth of sappy tissue with thin cell walls. Crops grown this way are more prone to disease, which is why they need constant spraying with chemicals to keep them standing. When fed to livestock, they are unlikely to promote health in the animals: hence the need for routine antibiotics. It's no real surprise that such crops are no better for people.

This is a crock of manure. The nitrogen compounds used to fertilize farmland do not degrade food. If anything they hugely enhance foods in the very ways this wanker complains about, helping them produce more sugars. They don't weaken plants, they strengthen them. And the higher sugar content - the brix - helps them fight off some diseases and sucking insects. It increases the protein content of animal forage which helps them to thrive and produce more nutritious milk and meat.

The British were once rather good at farming. As far back as Roman times, these islands off the north-west coast of Europe were regularly exporting wheat back to the mainland. They had been blessed with deep, fertile soils - a legacy of the post-glacial forest - and a mild, moist climate that was superb for growing a wide range of crops.

In the late 18th century, the island farmers developed a revolutionary cropping system that practically doubled the output of food. It was a clever way of alternating cereals with livestock-feeding crops, especially root crops and clover, which adds nitrogen to the soil naturally.

Admittedly, it wasn't an entirely original idea. The farmers of Flanders had been doing something similar for centuries. But British farmers were smart enough to pick it up and apply it on a grand scale. That's how they were able to feed the nation during the Industrial Revolution, a time of unprecedented population growth.

More manure. Britain had exhausted its farmland long ago, just as almost every farming society had done for eons. For a time it lived off imported fertility from its colonies. Better Living Through Chemistry

We [the US] issued three patents in 1790. Samuel Hopkins received the first one on July 31st. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson signed it. Hopkins had created a new process for making potash.

We derive the word potassium from potash. Potash is an impure form of potassium carbonate. We use it to make soap, glass, fertilizers, and gunpowder. It's a very important substance. It was our first industrial chemical.

During the mid-1700s potash-making became an American cottage industry. We used the burned-out ashes from wood fires. We leeched them in big iron kettles. Then we boiled the liquid and created a potash distillate.

For a while, our forest-rich land supplied not only our own needs, but England's as well. But now we'd cleared our land. We could hardly keep burning trees just to get at their ashes.

Hopkins used a furnace to reburn ashes. His process greatly improved the yield of potash as well as its purity. For the next 70 years America was the world's main potash producer.

Potassium wasn't the only agricultural nutrient imported from the Americas. Chilean nitrates from the Antofagasta Nitrates Company, owned by Chileans and financed by British merchants, provided the nitrogen before Haber and Bosch ever learned to make ammonia from methane. Peruvian guano was also a British monopoly.

Guano is accumulated bird dung. It can accumulate only in areas with dense bird populations and little rain, but in those special environments it can eventually form deposits many feet thick. As it accumulates and dries, it becomes a dense organic material that is very rich in nitrate and phosphate. . .

The word guano is a corruption of a Peruvian word huano, written phonetically in Spanish as guano and then mispronounced by English-speakers. As far as we know, the ancient Moche people along the Peruvian coast were the first people to exploit guano on any large scale, mining the offshore islands to support large populations on their irrigated coastal fields. The tradition was continued by the Incas, so that huano ranked with gold in some ceremonies, and nesting seabirds were placed under protection.

Guano usage dropped as the Spanish essentially destroyed Inca society, but the tradition was not lost. "Guano, though no saint, works many miracles," said a Peruvian proverb. One of the first acts of the newly independent Peruvian government was to exempt huano from taxes in 1830.

As the old Spanish silver mines gradually were worked out, or flooded, the Peruvians began to try to export guano. Trial samples were well received in England, and the Peruvian entrepreneur Quirós put together a consortium of Peruvian, French, and English businessmen who bought from the Peruvian government an exclusive licence to mine and export guano for six years. In 1840 and 1841 they mined about 8000 tonnes of guano, and exported it, mostly to England, at an enormous profit on a wave of favorable publicity.

What the industrial revolution contributed was mechanization rather than fertilizers.

In 1701 AD the Berkshire farmer Jethro Tull devised a simple seed drill based on organ pipes, which resulted in eight times as many grains harvested for every grain sown. Like most agricultural innovators since, he was vilified.

Tull is credited by some as being the first precision farmer. The son of a farmer, he trained as a lawyer, but financial problems drove him back to farming where he experimented and invented. He also invented a horse-drawn hoe to clear away weeds and in 1731 published his ideas in The New Horse Houghing Husbandry: or, an Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation.

It's interesting that organ pipes inspired him since that was also an early inspiration for computing devices and, if you look at it properly, a kind of education in mathematics and physics as well as sound and music. It's worth using a little of that math to contemplate the significance of Tull's seed drill. You could grow eight times as many grains as were sown. The precision depth and spacing of seeds was less wasteful of seed as well as increasing the yield. Looked at another way, you got to eat 7/8ths of the crop rather than a lesser percentage. And it would have been a lesser percentage of a smaller number to boot. The seed drill greatly increased the amount of available food. No wonder they wanted to hang him. He was the ADM of his time, sort of. Too successful to admire, only spite and envy would be appropriate from the grievance groupies of that era. Some things don't change.

It's easy to deflate the pompous prigs of the grievance industry and expose their greed and corruption, but there are real problems. Food isn't as good as we can imagine it might be. The environment is exhausted by our current efforts. We can do better.

But it's important to be realistic and tell the stories straight. These are the good old days. Food is better than ever, and it is produced with less strain on the environment than before, even though we produce much more of it. In the bad old days of yore - before nasty modern things like refrigeration and chemical fertilizers - kings would have traded their crowns for a chance to buy groceries at a commonplace modern store. We take fresh produce all year round for granted but it would have seemed a miracle not that long ago.

Our food is not only fresher, it is also safer to eat. Food borne pathogens are far less prevalent than in the past. We do lose some nutrition though, since most produce and a lot of grain harbored colonies of insects, or at least lots of their feces, to boost protein. And we lose some medicines since microbial colonies in foods were more common as well, giving us our antibiotics, and some fairly interesting hallucinogens, straight from the source. Ergot anyone? Want to get dosed and burn some witches?

We know how to make better food with less environmental damage, but we don't yet know how to do it for everyone. The nostalgia for a mythical past when we all had good, natural food is bunk. In the past the vast majority of people were hungry most of the time and ate what we would consider garbage when they ate at all. They lived short, sickly lives of back breaking toil. Today a larger percentage of a very much larger number of people eat like royalty compared to the past, yet 1 in 6 humans is still food insecure, and there are costs as well as benefits to wide spread food security. We eat too much and get too little exercise. We exhaust our land and water, we pollute our environment. We have made great progress and still have a long way to go.