A Look at Our Podcast Chat with Carey Gillam
Carey Gillam: Author, Journalist, Speaker and Kansan. Find her at https://careygillam.com
Carey Gillam has survived years of attacks on her person and integrity at the hands of a notorious biochemical company. If you haven’t heard of Carey, I am willing to bet this first sentence signals suspicions about the name of the company in question.
Carey grew up familiar with the farming community in rural Iola, Kansas and continues to call Kansas her home. Her professional journeys have taken her from row crop farmers, ranchers, vegetable growers and orchard operators from across the United States. Through her travels, Carey has come into knowledge that required her to take her to begin investigating some glaring discrepancies between what she was witnessing and what she was being told to report. Upon her discovery, she did what any great journalist would do. She dug deeper. Carey spent as much time as she could with farmers on their farms and talking to companies like Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dow and DuPont, and their employees. She spent time talking to regulators, scientists and agronomists to understand the industry from a holistic standpoint. It became clear after a few years that the messaging she and other reporters were getting from the corporations that were driving agricultural policy, practices and products was different from what was happening on the ground. “They were telling us we weren’t seeing weed resistance. We weren’t seeing harm to biodiversity. We weren’t seeing the demise of pollinators that was tied to the agro-chemical industry. We weren’t seeing, you know, water quality problems that were tied to excessive use of fertilizers’, ...All of these things that they were telling us weren’t true. And so you first have to come to that recognition. What is true, you know, and we have to look at the hard facts, even if they’re painful or ugly, if we’re ever going to get to a better place.”
Through her books “White Washed” and the “Monsanto Papers” Cary has exposed that the company knew for many years that it was making people sick through its popular herbicide, RoundUp. Her journalistic studies have not only surrounded the hidden health costs of RoundUp, but also the financial impacts of the financial structure created by these companies. While showing me her RoundUp hat given to her by a farmer friend many years ago Carey reflected “They give them all sorts of stuff. But yeah, they very much believe, you know, Roundup was God’s gift to agriculture.” When she started covering agriculture in the late 90s, the farmers were still telling her the GMO crops and glyphosate made their lives so much easier and worked wonderfully. But by the mid to late 2000’s the farmers began noticing that it wasn’t working as well. The weeds were becoming resistant, and in response, the farmers started spending more money on additional inputs.
In addition to RoundUp, some Southern farmers had to begin hiring hand laborers to help them, so their costs went up, their input needs went up, and their soil quality noticeably went down. The farmers were losing pollinators. “Now,” Carey reflects, “farmers in many areas really are on this, this treadmill, this cycle, where they’re having to use Dicamba, 2,4-D, along with the glyphosate, and they’re having to buy these expensive seeds.” Carey reminded me of the importance of not blaming the farmers for perpetuating these issues.(Something the Common Ground Film also marked as vital.) Carey specifically calls out our public policymakers, government, lawmakers, and regulators who have been slow to recognize that we need a systemic change.
Carey recalled, interviewing a conservation scientist for USDA, hired to teach about the benefits of crop rotation and cover crops, “he said, I’m not allowed to say, use fewer synthetic pesticides. I will get in trouble if I say that out loud. Because the agrochemical industry just has such a dominance in Washington, DC. So it’s very tricky to overcome, I think, a lot of the political hurdles that we need to overcome, to get to kind of the simplified place of just going back to traditional farming practices and respecting Mother Nature and working with mother nature as opposed to trying to constantly fight, you know, we’re outsmart Mother Nature with newer, better, bigger applications of chemicals. It’s just, it’s not a good long-term strategy.”
Outlining Carey’s work seems like a lot of familiar doom and gloom, echoing popular criticisms of our lawmakers and large industries, but we wound down our conversation on a positive note. “I think that regenerative agriculture is an idea, and an issue that can’t be ignored, or turned away from at this point of where we are in the evolution of our environment, and of our health.” We see acknowledgement of it across the agriculture industry including the aforementioned businesses. Carey mentioned feeling like the black mark on Monsanto’s reputation in the early 2000’s has created a safer environment for journalists, like her, to ask questions and for farmers to feel more secure from various hostile reprecussions around their GMO genetics.
These Goliath companies are starting to look for a way to be a player in regenerative agriculture. We’re seeing acknowledgment of it in the halls of Congress, to a degree. Carey reports seeing a gradual shift around the edges of the political forces putting up walls to regenerative practices. “I see those walls starting to come down. And then I see you see farmers who are all over this, like, you know, Gabe Brown is not alone out there. There are hundreds and hundreds of farmers, maybe 1000s. I’m aware of hundreds who are actively working on this right now and saying, we’ve seen what happens when we don’t work with mother nature... it directly affects you. If you’re someone who eats food, or water, you’re affected by these issues, every single day.”
Carey recommends we check out the “IDEA Farm Network” for those looking for best practices built around crowdsources of scientific data around Regenerative Practices. If you would like to follow her work, you can find her on the websites The New Lede and The Guardian, check out her books White Washed and The Monsanto Papers. You may also see films she’s recently worked on Common Ground and Into the Weeds.
If you would like to listen to Charlotte and Carey’s conversation, please visit the podcast Kansas Rural Center Presents on your favorite app or at kansasruralcenter.org/podcasts there you will also find our backlog of episodes including and interview with Common Ground Film Director/Producer duo Josh and Rebecca Tickell.