Overdose

My war on corn/maize, Roundup, glyphosate, chemicals is boring but there again when I am forced to drink it in my beer & milk, eat it in my bread & pasta, then I think it may be worthwhile, perhaps less so for my worn out body but when you think newborns are getting it in their mother's breast milk, it gets kind of frightening.

A walk along the local fields, next to the fenced off area in the right-hand top photo background which is the parish's drinking water well, shows my concern. On both sides of the green path, the maize has been sprayed with Roundup - the maize is green, everything else that was sprayed yellow or brown as it wilts.

A few metres away, a field of cereal has been given a helping hand with chemical fertiliser (whoops a bit too much in places) and will grow like crazy. It will grow so well that it doesn't want to ripen. So the farmer will get out the sprayer and give it a good dose of Roundup to trick it into thinking it needs to quickly ripen before it dies and loses the chance to do the natural thing and "multiply". 10-14 days later, the combine will then harvest the lovely golden sun-soaked ears of corn, along with the glyphosate.

I can't repeat it often enough - I understand the farmer's problems. I support them. Without their products, neither I, my grandchildren, a single Greenpeace radical activist or the Queen of England can survive.

It's not without reason that the German Greens have in the polls overtaken all political parties this week and if there was a snap election, which could happen as the German Labour coalition party is in a leaderless state of crisis and Conservative Merkel has said she won't stand at the next election, then we could well have a Green Party-led coalition Government.