After working for Gucci in Beverly Hills and spending a few years in Chicago, Michelle Miller found herself packing up to live amongst the cornfields of Iowa with her former boyfriend.
Miller, an avid anti-GMO activist that strictly purchased organic foods, looked out at her boyfriend’s cornfield, asked if he grew genetically modified corn, and was appalled when he answered yes.
“As a city girl, I had never really thought about the people behind my food. I had always just thought GMOs are drenched in chemicals . . . Monsanto and GMOs are the devil. But he looked at me like I had three heads,” said Miller with a laugh.
After he explained the benefits of GMOs to Miller and how GMOs help farmers use fewer and safer pesticides, a lightbulb moment struck her.
“I realized, if I’m this wrong about pesticides and GMOs, what else am I wrong about?” said Miller.
Miller's persona, the Farm Babe, is modeled after another social media influencer, the Food Babe. The Food Babe, also known as Vani Hari, is notorious for making false claims about food production and the agriculture industry.
The Farm Babe was born when Miller commented on a post of Hari’s that spoke negatively of GMOs. In the comment, Miller explained that they grow GMOs on their farm, and invited Hari to visit their farm for an exclusive look into the industry. Hari’s response was to immediately block and ban Miller from the Food Babe’s social media account.
After being blocked from the Food Babe’s social media page, Miller discovered a Facebook group called “Banned by Food Babe,” which, as it sounds, is a group of people that have been banned from Hari’s social media page. The most shocking part - the group has nearly 9,000 members.
Miller knew she had to become a voice for all of the farmers, scientists and agronomists that were being silenced.
A similar story of awakening is told by Vance Crowe, a former director of millennial engagement at Monsanto.
Crowe arrived for his job interview at Monsanto with high hopes that it would be everything he had been led to believe - an 80-story building surrounded in dark storm clouds where everyone wore sunglasses and black suits. He was “horribly disappointed” when it was nothing of the sorts. Crowe was greeted at the front door by a friendly woman named Holly who was wearing a sweater and had a ponytail in her hair.
Crowe’s intention going into the interview was not to get hired, but to get content for a blog article. The job title alone sounded like a joke to Crowe but going to the interview seemed like the perfect opportunity for him to see inside of Monsanto.
“If I find out that they are as evil as everybody says that they are, then I'm gonna go write the greatest tell-all book of all time . . . But if they’re not as evil as everybody thinks that they are, well, then you've just discovered maybe the most important problem in the history of modern civilization,” says Crowe.
Throughout the 7-hour interview process, Crowe worked hard to turn the tables around. Every time they asked him a question about management style or preferred working conditions, Crowe asked why Monsanto was causing Indian farmers to commit suicide or dumping poison into rivers.
At the end of the interview process, Crowe asked how Monsanto planned to train him for a role that would be deemed evil and hated by everyone. Crowe was told that he would be given a list of 50 people from throughout the company that he would sit down and talk with for an hour. When he was done with those 50 people, they would reevaluate, and he would be given a list of 50 more people.
“The lightbulb went off in my brain, like, oh my God, they're gonna let me run around this company and ask anybody anything that I want . . . I went from thinking this was a joke of a job interview to deeply, deeply wanting it,” Crowe says.
Over the course of his time in the industry, Crowe’s opinion of pesticide usage and GMOs changed massively, much like that of Miller’s. Unfortunately, this major awakening and realization of the truth behind food isn’t a common occurrence.
The negative media attention surrounding GMOs, and especially pesticides, is rarely silent. The media presence of anti-GMO and pesticide activists is strong and has a tendency to stir misconceptions, one of those being that organic means pesticide-free, according to Miller.
“I only bought organic because I thought it meant pesticide-free and it totally doesn’t. Sometimes organic farms use more,” says Miller.
Matt Turino, manager of the Sustainable Student Farm at the University of Illinois experiences this misconception firsthand. The Sustainable Student Farm is not certified organic but uses all organic practices. This means that naturally derived pesticides can be used on the farm, contrary to the popular misconception that organic means pesticide-free.
Turino suggests that this belief has its roots in the 70s and 80s when the organic movement first became extremely popular. Back then, it was true and common that organic farmers did not use pesticides. Miller, who used to be an avid consumer of organic food, admits that she used to hold the same belief.
Turino acknowledges that there are some organic farms that are able to be pesticide free, however that is not something the Sustainable Student Farm is able to do given the problems they face with insects such as the Colorado Potato Beetle.
As for the idea that organic farmers apply pesticides more often than conventional growers, Turino says this is because natural pesticides are not as potent. These reapplications, according to Turino, are an attempt to get the same life out of what a farmer would with a conventional pesticide.
Either way, organic or conventional, pesticides are a necessary tool for farmers everywhere. Miller says that the expenses to operate a farm are not cheap, and it’s not worth the risk of not controlling weeds or insects.
“If you don't control that, you're not going to be in business. If you lose your entire crop or your entire yield, you can't farm,” says Miller.
Crowe says that misconceptions, such as pesticides not being used on organic farms, may be partly due to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The Dunning-Kruger effect states that people tend to vastly overestimate what they know about something, especially when they first start learning about it. The idea behind this: The more a person knows about something, the less confident they are about what they know.
“What happens is, people watch one documentary, or maybe read two books, and their confidence goes from zero about, how much do you know about this subject, to like 90 to 95%,” says Crowe.
According to Crowe, people eventually hit a point where they stop wanting to learn about something because, the more they know, the more it contradicts things as they have known it.
Crowe says he experienced the Dunning-Kruger effect firsthand when he realized what he thought he knew about GMOs and pesticides was incorrect.
“I became really comfortable with being uncomfortable about how every time I learned something new it destroyed what I thought I knew before,” says Crowe.
This is why it is tough for consumers, according to Crowe, to listen to and understand pesticide usage in agriculture when they have no context or experiences to suggest why a farmer would use pesticides in the first place. Pesticides are solving a problem that consumers don’t even recognize, insists Crowe.
“The reason that consumers were so easily fooled or made to feel afraid of pesticides was because they have no concept of how much better they've gotten, because they didn't know farmers needed them ever at all,” says Crowe.
The chemical industry has evolved and improved an enormous amount over the years, contends Eric Ward, co-CEO of Ag Biome, a biotechnology company developing naturally occurring microbes that can protect crops from diseases, insects and more. Ward says microbes are a natural alternative to existing synthetic pesticides.
Microbes solve the problem of pest-resistance to synthetic pesticides. According to Ward, it is much harder for resistance to evolve to naturally occurring microbes because they make several different active principles rather than just one, like synthetic chemicals.
This natural alternative also saves chemical companies a lot of time and money in terms of development and regulation, says Ward. Government agencies ease up on the restrictions when it comes to naturally derived products.
Although breakthroughs are made and problems are solved with solutions such as natural alternatives, Crowe and Miller stress that farmers still face a mound of challenges in the growing season.
On the surface, most people only see farmers putting seed in the ground and making sure it gets enough water and sunlight, but disease and pest management is such an important factor as well, says Miller.
“I wish more people understood the challenges that farmers and growers face because it's really hard. And they just think, you know, you don't need chemicals . . . but they're so safe. There's so much regulation behind the safety of our food supply . . . I'm so comfortable with the food supply. And if you would have asked me that 13 years ago, I would have been like, oh my god, no, GMOs are the devil,” says Miller.
There are a million reasons, according to Miller, why we modify and apply chemicals to foods. Whether to make them more flavorful or to have a longer shelf life, every modification has a meaningful purpose.
“The science behind our food is incredible. We just need to understand and celebrate more, you know?” says Miller.
Miller alludes to a friend of hers that owns a 5000-acre vegetable farm in South Carolina that has machines swab and scan for pesticide residue on all of the vegetables. If the level of pesticide residue is too high, the entire load of vegetables gets rejected.
As a 5000-acre farm with 140 employees, the operation cannot afford to take that risk financially, especially with the responsibility of paying their employees.
Pesticide use is extremely regulated, Miller stresses. “It’s very important that they’re using them within these safe levels. Otherwise, they’d lose their whole business, you know, like there are tests in place. There are checks and balances to make sure that your food is healthy,” says Miller.
Cody Smith, a field sales agronomist at Helena Agri-Enterprises confirms there are, in fact, checks and balances in place. Smith mentions several toxicity and residue tests run by the Environmental Protection Agency. Smith said there is an intense process that takes place to ensure there are no flaws or toxicity issues before the chemical reaches the market.
The EPA is not the only governmental agency involved in regulation, according to Smith. There are multiple government agencies, universities, private research contractors and internal research sources screening chemicals during development.
Smith admits that the idea of our food being coated in pesticides is a scary thought, but growers would never do anything to intentionally harm the land or consumers.
Dan Froelich, an agronomist at Brandt, says it is important for consumers to remember that farmers are consumers. The food they raise is the food they eat, says Froelich.
Similarly, Crowe gives a parallel with farmer concerns over drinking water: “The person that has the highest interest in making sure those pesticides are safe, is the farmer that is going to drink that water and feed it to his kids and give it to his wife,” said Crowe.
Smith also acknowledged that safety is a common concern for consumers. However, he says that pesticide application is typically so minimal and diluted that by the time that food makes it to the table, it’s no longer an issue.
The people that should be most concerned about the safety factor are the growers handling the chemicals themselves, according to Smith. “In the two-and-a-half-gallon jug that just went over 25 acres, the person most at risk is the one pouring the two-and-a-half-gallon jug,” said Smith.
For example, at the Sustainable Student Farm, Turino reports that he suits up every time chemicals are applied, even though all the chemicals are natural and certified organic.
Ward says that the restrictions placed on pesticides are aimed toward the safety of growers, specifically the restriction that tells growers how soon they can enter a field after application.
According to Froelich and Smith, one of the other big concerns that surrounds pesticide use is impact on the environment. Both agronomists believe it is a big misconception that farmers don’t care about the environment.
Smith says the last thing any farmer would want to do is intentionally poison the land that has been feeding their family for decades or jeopardize the opportunity of future generations to tend to that land.
As for the effect of pesticides on the environment surrounding a field, there are precautions set in place, according to Froelich. Variable rate technology (VRT) allows farmers to apply chemicals at different rates across a field.
Froelich says there are so many technologies and systems nowadays to control the application of pesticides. However, it can become challenging when Mother Nature decides to change the wind direction and these technologies are thrown out the door.
While farmers are cognizant of the issues they face, according to Froelich, they are also considerate of their neighbors and their land. The last thing they want to do is cause problems with the people around them.
“The environment is something we all have been concerned about. Whether you're sitting in a city downtown in Chicago . . . or whether you're out here living in rural Chatsworth, Illinois, you have concerns about the environment because you may outlive a problem, but your kids won't,” said Froelich.