Getting your Zzzzzz’s

Last Friday I posted a photo of a power point slide from a presentation that I went to, all about farm safety.  We all joked about how funny the slide was, how a bit over the top it was, and maybe far fetched.  But then I got a comment on my blog that day from a wife of a farmer in North Dakota.   She wrote:

While this slide takes it WAY over the top and is quite comical, I do believe that lack of sleep for farmers is a big issue that everyone kind of sweeps under the rug. I totally understand that when there is work to be done, it MUST be done and that sleep becomes not a priority during the high times of farming. But it is simply not healthy and potentially dangerous to be operating on few hours of sleep for days on end. Not saying that it hasn’t been done for years, it is totally something I worry about as our farm is 20 miles from our house and requires him to commute back and forth during harvest/planting/etc. While I don’t believe that ENFORCING a nap time for farmers is the way to go, I think it’s an issue that many farmers don’t take seriously enough. There has got to be some happy medium where you aren’t compromising your life due to lack of sleep all while still “making hay while the sun shines”. Thanks for the giggle today!

I realized that all fun aside, she did have a very good point.  Statistically people who have 6 to 7 hours of sleep a night are 2 times as likely to be involved in a sleep-related crash as those sleeping 8 hours or more!!  So it’s really nothing to joke about.  When we were sitting in the class they did a survey and over 60% of us said that we had driven while drowsy or tired, or even dozed off while driving.  I wasn’t really that surprised by the number at first, but then when you think about how dangerous driving in those situations can be for you and for other drivers, it was a sobering statistic.

One of the first things that you hear when someone mentions a farmer is usually something about hard work.  Something about how they are up with the sun and don’t rest until all the chores are done.  And most times, that is true, although I’m up before the sun today to write this blog not feed the cows I still count it as a little bit of work.  And the phrase, like in the comment above, “When the sun shines…” has come out of my mouth many times in this line of profession.

But all of that aside, we can’t beat out the reality that we might be putting our lives in danger by making those sacrifices.  Just last year a young kid fell asleep at the wheel and hit our house, literally drove into our house (which is one heck of a story in itself for another time).  He was very banged up and while recovering now, I doubt whatever he was doing to stay up was worth the pain he went through.  And he’s extremely lucky, 100,000 crashes are because of someone falling asleep at the wheel, which accounts for more than 1500 deaths a year!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect farmers to not get up before the sun, and I fully understand that coming in May with this little baby and harvest coming in right after my own sleep will more than likely be down to null, but maybe it needs to become more reasonable to rest your eyes in the afternoon so that when you do head back down the road towards home after a long day, you can up your chances of getting there in one piece.

So thank you Jenny for adding a little serious to my slide last week, you hit the nail on the head with an issue that as you put it, “…sleep for farmers is a big issue that everyone kind of sweeps under the rug.”

**You can read more about what Jenny is up as a farm wife and photographer in North Dakota by checking out her blog….http://prairiecalifornian.com/

New Farm Policy?

We went to our annual safety meeting this week and this turned out to be our favorite slide of the whole day:

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Not sure how this will work on a farm but we might be willing to try haha! Happy Friday!

GMO Labeling in Oregon

Another round of GMO talks has started at the legislature and all around Oregon.  This issue has, although failing in both California and Washington in recent years, come to Oregon to see if it can get a foothold.  I testified last week with a panel of other farmers to talk about why I don’t think that mandatory labeling of foods that contain GMO products is a good thing.

Because of the limit time allotment and the other farmers on the panel, I spoke only to what GMO labeling I felt could do to the specialty crop industry, what it means for businesses in Oregon and what it means to me as a consumer and a soon to be mom.  Obviously this issue is larger that just what I covered, but read knowing that again, I was on an entire panel covering those other areas that I might be missing.  You can read Marie Bower’s Testimony on her blog as well by clicking here.

Chairwoman Hoyle and Members of the Committee,

Thank you for having me here today.  My name is Brenda Frketich and I’m a third generation farmer from St. Paul.  My 1,000 acre sustainable farm grows wheat, grass seed, clover, hazelnuts and vegetables.  While I don’t grow any GMO crops now, I think that the future of agriculture not only in Oregon but in the nation is moving towards using new technology. 

 I am against the labeling of GMOs for a few reasons.  Even as a farmer who doesn’t currently rely on GM technology for the specific crops on my farm, I can see that labeling will quickly add to the level of fear and emotion that people have behind the subject of GMOs in their food.  And in turn I feel like it will put farmers in this state at a terrible disadvantage.  Not just in a marketing sense, but also for future research.  Right now being a grower in mostly specialty crops, research for our sector is not being funded.  Not because those development can’t help our industry, but because fear has caused consumers to move away from those products that are produced using GMO technology. 

 A good example of this is in the hazelnut industry.  Oregon has a long tradition of growing hazelnuts, we actually produce 98% of the US hazelnuts right there in this state.  About 25 to 30 years ago blight came into our area and started to kill off our orchards, today we rely on anywhere from 4 to 5 sprays a year along with hours and hours of pruning to keep our trees healthy, and even then for many of our orchards it’s a losing battle.  As many of you have possibly seen there has been a boom in planting, because Oregon State University, after 20 years of research has come up with a gene that can be bred in the trees to help resist the blight, moving that number of sprays down to one, maybe even zero!  This is great for our industry and for our state to be competitive on a worldwide level, but it took 20 years to get this research done.  Research that could have been accomplished much faster if the money for gene mapping technology could have been available.  Not to mention the continual amount of research that could have continued to take place in the past 2 decades helping us work to combat pests such as filbert worm or the stink bug that continues to plague our orchards today.  These are the types of advances that we need to be researching and working towards, if you start to play into the fear of the use of GMOs however, these dollars for research will never come forward.

 In business to be successful you have to produce a high quality product, while at the same time trying to be the lowest cost producer.  And while GMO has time and time again proven to be a safe and not nutritionally different than their non-GMO counterparts I think that this option of being able to grow GMO crops in the future will be instrumental in farming here in Oregon.  If you start to add labels to the food which farmers produced, in a healthy, sustainable way, usually more sustainable than compared to their non GMO counterparts, you are now taking away some of the marketing advantage that those farmers rely on.

 The cost alone of re-labeling products will be a burden on our state.  Not just for farmers, but for processors as well.  Pricing that includes extensive testing, and at whose cost? I agree that there is a market for businesses who want to use non-GMO crops in their food, just like there is a market for organically grown produce.  But I think that if companies want to take advantage of that market, then they can label their products non-GMO, they have that right.  The cost burden should be on them however.  While I was at Bob’s Red Mill just last month I was told that they were coming out with a line of products just like this, labeled non-GMO.  They said that they felt there was a market for it, so they were taking the burden on themselves to make that label.  They aren’t however labeling their products that they do use GMO crops in as “containing GMO”, I’m guessing this is because they know this would be a disadvantage for them in marketing this line.

 But it’s not just about us farmers and businesses, this issue is also about consumers.  As a consumer myself, as a wife and a new mom in the near future I understand how fear can create a lot of power especially in issues such as what you feed your kids and family.  But when I take a step back from the benefits that go directly to the farmers, and take a look at arguments from the perspective of an everyday mom in the grocery story buying food’s perspective, all I see is a lot of fear marketing.  Fear about what is in our food, and not much of anything significant to back that up.  Fear that can be caused by a label that really doesn’t mean anything but somehow provokes me to not want to buy the food.  The label “Contains GMO” implies that there is some derogatory nutritional difference, that it might be unhealthy, and that you are taking a risk in feeding this to your family.  When the reality is that it just might be healthier for your family like in the instance of golden rice which contains vitamin A.  In some cases all it means is that a sex chromosome was removed so they can harvest oysters for us to enjoy fresh in the summer.  Or that they altered a gene that was already in the plant allow the plant to grow with a fraction of the water, a costly and scarce resource for many. 

 So as you can see I’m coming to you not just as a farmer and a business woman, but also as a consumer.  I agree that GMOs should be continually tested, to monitor how this technology can be used to help farmers and consumers alike and continue to help with food safety.  But I feel that labeling these products right now will only drive the wedge deeper between the emotional decisions and fear marketing that is being used to deter people from making informed and rational decisions about their food.

 Thank you for your time.

So what do you think…should labeling of GMO products in Oregon should be mandatory??