Volume 5

A few weeks ago I was in Gansu State of China, doing a Groasis Waterboxx planting instruction seminar. We had a beautiful day, until a sand storm warning came through the phone. Half an hour later we were not able to see the sun anymore and the temperature dropped with over 8 ⁰C. In the beginning of 1900 China had 100 million hectares ‘real desert’. During the 20th century about 150 Million hectares of ‘manmade’ deserts have been added.

China was self supporting with its food during 5,000 years. This is something to admire as they fed over 1 billion people without using pesticides and artificial fertilizers. Since the introduction of ‘modern’ agriculture, they have lost 150 million hectares of once productive land, birds are hardly seen anymore and they import food now. We see the same thing happening everywhere else in the world: intensive agriculture based on killing wildlife and soil life after the introduction of pesticides and artificial fertilizers.

Everywhere we use artificial drip irrigation and we have gone so far that now four countries (Israel, Kuwait, Dubai, Qatar) have no fresh water anymore. This forces them to use sea water purified through the reversed osmosis technology. This type of purified water has no minerals and is like a poison for our body. When I buy a bottle of water I always check whether it is from reversed osmosis or from a natural source. Many countries are now producing their vegetables on water, they call this hydroponic growing. The vegetables lack natural minerals and mostly they are grown with the help of systemic insecticides mixed through the water. If an insect pricks in the plant or fruit, he dies. You can imagine how healthy vegetables from hydroponic production are with these systemic insecticides in them…bon appetit! So after killing the wildlife and the soil life, modern agriculture in cooperation with the food industry, is now killing men’s life. The strange thing is that worldwide agricultural universities support this way of production, although all facts prove that we’re going into the wrong direction. Like 99% of the scientists in economy lacked the courage to warn people for the criminals that have taken over a big part of the banking industry, now 99% of the scientists in agriculture lack the courage to warn the people for the disastrous way of agricultural production. The banking crisis of the last years gave courage to scientists in economy to criticize the present financial system. Maybe we first need more people to die of cancer, obesities, diabetes, Alzheimer and dementia until scientists in agriculture get the courage to put question marks to the way we are producing our food. Until now they call this ‘modern agriculture’. I prefer to call it ‘outdated agriculture’.

Pieter Hoff,
The Green Musketeer