TOXIC FARMS, TOXIC FOOD : CONTROL THE FOOD, CONTROL THE WORLD!

                                                 Effect of fracking on tap water

IT'S CALLED 'FRACKING', AND IT'S WHAT 600,000 NEW FRACKING WELLS AND WASTE INJECTION SITES ARE DOING ALL OVER AMERICA! THE RESULTS ARE LEAKS INTO OUR GROUNDWATER, ONTO OUR FARMLANDS ALL ACROSS THIS NATION! FARM ANIMALS ARE DYING "MYSTERIOUSLY", THE LANDS THEY GRAZE ON, THE GRASS THEY EAT, THE LAND ITSELF AND THE HUMANS WHO OWN THEM ARE BECOMING TOO TOXIC FOR LIFE! TOO TOXIC TO LIVE!

A new technology known as hydraulic fracturing - or fracking - has made it possible to extract natural gas from "unconventional" resources trapped in rock formations thousands of feet underground. While this can BE SAID to "help provide energy for America's future", it also poses a very real, a very large, new dangerous threat to humans, to wildlife, and to the environment we all must live in.
Toxic chemicals are used during fracking that can infiltrate and contaminate habitat, waterways, grasslands, farm produce, fruit trees, and even the drinking water that people and wildlife depend on.

With these NEW wells and the hundreds of thousands of old fracking wells and waste injection sites in the U.S., it’s not just LIKELY that our food supply already contains water, plants and animals (meat) contaminated with fracking chemicals, it is CERTAIN! And there is plenty of proof . We've all heard a lot about drinking water contamination, including video proof that people’s water is catching on fire straight out of the faucet (there are MANY videos if you Google, but CBS did a piece on this, so see http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7362579n), that shouldn’t be our only concern.
Contamination of crops and farm animals that feed on pasturelands and winter hay/fodder, animals raised for OUR food are also sources of exposing humans to fracking chemicals in massive amounts. 

I offer the story of five farm families, from an article found at  http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_27073.cfm. This was the article that cinched my need to offer this blog to you.

<<Their names are Carol, Steve & Jackie, Susan, Marilyn & Robert, and Christine. They share a bond. Two bonds, actually: They all own, or owned, farms. And those farms, along with their own health and the health of their farm animals, have all been ruined by fracking.
The oil and gas industry, along with federal regulators, would have you believe that injecting trillions of gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth is harmless.

But tell that to Jacki Schilke of North Dakota, who lost two dogs, five cows, chickens – and her health – after 32 oil and gas wells sprouted up within three miles of her ranch. Or Christine Moore, a horse rescuer in Ohio, who sold her farm after a well went up five miles from her farm, creating an oily film on her water and making her too sick to care for her horses.

Of course, not all farm animals are destined for the food chain. Those unfortunate enough to live near fracking wells can tell us a lot about the potential danger from fracking chemicals to our own health. Farm animals have the same susceptibility to disease that we have, but because they are exposed continually to air, soil and groundwater, and have more frequent reproductive cycles, they exhibit diseases more quickly, presaging human health problems. A study involving interviews with animal owners who live near gas drilling operations revealed frequent deaths. Animals that survived exhibited health problems including infertility, birth defects and worsening reproductive health in successive breeding seasons. Some animals developed unusual neurological conditions, anorexia, and liver or kidney disease.

What causes those health problems? Among the hundreds of toxic chemicals used in fracking are arsenic, benzene, ethylene glycol (antifreeze), formaldehyde, lead, toluene, Uranium-238. and Radium-226. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ list of common health problems from exposure to fracking chemicals includes autism, asthma, cancer, heart disease, kidney failure, infertility, birth defects, allergies, endocrine diseases and immune system disorders.

Farmers fighting back
Thankfully, many farmers are fighting back.  Here are the tales of five farmers on the front lines of the fracking fight who are heroically sharing their tragic stories with the world in an attempt to expose the lie that natural gas is “cleaner power.”

Carol French, dairy farmer and cofounder of Pennsylvania Landowners Group for Awareness and Solutions (PLGAS). Carol’s Bradford County farm is surrounded by nine gas wells. Earlier this month, Carol posted to the Fracking Hell Facebook group that she had just lost three calves in nine days. “I have heard from other farmers with ‘changed’ water having similar problems,” she wrote. At the September 2012, Shale Gas Outrage protest in Philadelphia, Carol told the crowd how, two weeks after their water changed, her daughter developed a fever and diarrhea that turned to blood. She lost ten pounds in seven days. Watch Carol’s speech.

Steve and Jacki Schilke North Dakota ranchers. There are 32 oil and gas wells within three miles of Steve and Jacki’s 160-acre ranch. Jacki blames the wells for the loss of two dogs, five cows and a number of chickens, as well as the decline of her own health. Her symptoms began a few days after the wells were fracked, when a burning feeling in her lungs sent her to the emergency room. After that, whenever she went outside she became lightheaded, dizzy and had trouble breathing. At times, the otherwise fit 53-year-old, can’t walk without a cane, drive or breathe easily. She warns landowners against making deals with frackers: “They're here to rape this land, make as much money as they can and get the hell out of here. They could give a crap less what they are doing here. They will come on your property look you straight in the eye and lie to you.” Watch Jacki talk about her experience.

Susan Wallace-Babb, Colorado rancher. One day in 2005, Susan Wallace-Babb went out into a neighbor's field near her ranch in Western Colorado to close an irrigation ditch. She stepped out of her truck, took a deep breath and collapsed, unconscious. Later, after Susan came to and sought answers, a sheriff's deputy told her that a tank full of natural gas condensate less than a half mile away had overflowed into another tank. The fumes must have drifted toward the field where she was working, the deputy said. The next morning Susan was so sick she could barely move. She vomited uncontrollably and suffered explosive diarrhea. A searing pain shot up her thigh. Within days she developed burning rashes that covered her exposed skin, then lesions. Anytime she went outdoors her symptoms worsened. In 2006, she moved to Winnsboro, Texas, a small town two hours east of Dallas. In 2007, Susan testified in Congressional hearings on the health impacts of fracking. For three years her symptoms gradually improved, until she could work in her garden and go about her normal daily routine. Then, in early 2010, Exxon launched a project in an old oil field 14 miles away and began fracking wells to get them to produce more oil. Within months, Susan’s symptoms returned. Watch Susan’s testimony at the Congressional hearings.

Marilyn and Robert Hunt, West Virginia organic farmers. The Hunts own a 70-acre organic farm in Wetzel County, where they raise goats, chickens and cattle. When the landman from Chesapeake Energy approached the Hunts to lease their mineral rights, Marilyn did some research then turned down the offer. But that didn’t stop Chesapeake from, as she told ShaleReporter.com, “stealing gas from both sides of our property.” In 2010, Chesapeake received a permit for land disposal near her property and dumped waste on her land. “The water got little white flecks in it, and we started to get sick,” Marilyn said.  “We lost a whole lot of baby goats that got gastrointestinal disorders from drinking the water.” Some of the baby chicks her daughter was raising died of nervous system failure, and the ones that survived were deformed. Interestingly, though, the cattle that drink from the spring water on the highest point of her property were spared any adverse impact, leading Marilyn to believe it was the water contaminated by the fracking waste that caused the illnesses.

Christine Moore, Ohio horse rescuer. Christine Moore and her family lived a dream life rescuing horses deep inside Ohio’s Amish country. When a well was fracked five miles from her house in January 2012, Christine went door to door, begging her neighbors not to lease their land for fracking. But most of the town, many Amish and Mennonite, didn’t listen. Two months after the well near her home was fracked, the water went bad. An oily film formed across the surface of the water in her horses’ bowls. The water inside her home, pumped from her well and filtered through a softener, began giving her severe stomachaches. She sent her horses to a no-kill shelter in upstate Ohio and, in July, sold the property to her neighbor who, according to Tuscarawas County records, has oil and gas exploration leases on multiple properties. Watch Christine describe how fracking destroyed her horse farm.>> <end quote>

In an article published December 17, 2012, titled 'Fracking Our Food Supply', The Nation reported on the Schilke ranch in North Dakota. [SEE: http://www.thenation.com/article/171504/fracking-our-food-supply# ]

<<In Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry is already on a tear—drilling thousands of feet into ancient seabeds, then repeatedly fracturing (or “fracking”) these wells with millions of gallons of highly pressurized, chemically laced water, which shatters the surrounding shale and releases fossil fuels. New York, meanwhile, is on its own natural-resource tear, with hundreds of newly opened breweries, wineries, organic dairies and pastured livestock operations—all of them capitalizing on the metropolitan area’s hunger to localize its diet.

Tonight’s guests have heard about residential drinking wells tainted by fracking fluids in Pennsylvania, Wyoming and Colorado. They’ve read about lingering rashes, nosebleeds and respiratory trauma in oil-patch communities, which are mostly rural, undeveloped, and lacking in political influence and economic prospects. The trout nibblers in the winery sympathize with the suffering of those communities. But their main concern tonight is a more insidious matter: the potential for drilling and fracking operations to contaminate our food. The early evidence from heavily fracked regions, especially from ranchers, is not reassuring.

Jacki Schilke and her sixty cattle live in the top left corner of North Dakota, a windswept, golden-hued landscape in the heart of the Bakken Shale. Schilke’s neighbors love her black Angus beef, but she’s no longer sharing or eating it—not since fracking began on thirty-two oil and gas wells within three miles of her 160-acre ranch and five of her cows dropped dead. Schilke herself is in poor health. A handsome 53-year-old with a faded blond ponytail and direct blue eyes, she often feels lightheaded when she ventures outside. She limps and has chronic pain in her lungs, as well as rashes that have lingered for a year. Once, a visit to the barn ended with respiratory distress and a trip to the emergency room. Schilke also has back pain linked with overworked kidneys, and on some mornings she urinates a stream of blood.

Ambient air testing by a certified environmental consultant detected elevated levels of benzene, methane, chloroform, butane, propane, toluene and xylene—compounds associated with drilling and fracking, and also with cancers, birth defects and organ damage. Her well tested high for sulfates, chromium, chloride and strontium; her blood tested positive for acetone, plus the heavy metals arsenic (linked with skin lesions, cancers and cardiovascular disease) and germanium (linked with muscle weakness and skin rashes). Both she and her husband, who works in oilfield services, have recently lost crowns and fillings from their teeth; tooth loss is associated with radiation poisoning and high selenium levels, also found in the Schilkes’ water.
State health and agriculture officials acknowledged Schilke’s air and water tests but told her she had nothing to worry about. Her doctors, however, diagnosed her with neurotoxic damage and constricted airways. “I realized that this place is killing me and my cattle,” Schilke says. She began using inhalers and a nebulizer, switched to bottled water, and quit eating her own beef and the vegetables from her garden. (Schilke sells her cattle only to buyers who will finish raising them outside the shale area, where she presumes that any chemical contamination will clear after a few months.) “My health improved,” Schilke says, “but I thought, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing to this land?’”

Schilke’s story reminds us that farmers need clean water, clean air and clean soil to produce healthful food. But as the largest private landholders in shale areas across the nation, farmers are disproportionately being approached by energy companies eager to extract oil and gas from beneath their properties. Already, some are regretting it.
Earlier this year, Michelle Bamberger, an Ithaca veterinarian, and Robert Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, published the first (and, so far, only) peer-reviewed report to suggest a link between fracking and illness in food animals. The authors compiled case studies of twenty-four farmers in six shale-gas states whose livestock experienced neurological, reproductive and acute gastrointestinal problems. Exposed either accidentally or incidentally to fracking chemicals in the water or air, scores of animals have died. The death toll is insignificant when measured against the nation’s livestock population (some 97 million beef cattle go to market each year), but environmental advocates believe these animals constitute an early warning.

Exposed animals “are making their way into the food system, and it’s very worrisome to us,” Bamberger says. “They live in areas that have tested positive for air, water and soil contamination. Some of these chemicals could appear in milk and meat products made from these animals.”
In Louisiana, seventeen cows died after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid. (Most likely cause of death: respiratory failure.) In north central Pennsylvania, 140 cattle were exposed to fracking wastewater when an impoundment was breached. Approximately seventy cows died; the remainder produced eleven calves, of which only three survived. In western Pennsylvania, an overflowing waste pit sent fracking chemicals into a pond and a pasture where pregnant cows grazed: half their calves were born dead. The following year’s animal births were sexually skewed, with ten females and two males, instead of the usual 50-50 or 60-40 split.
In addition to the cases documented by Bamberger, hair testing of sick cattle that grazed around well pads in New Mexico found petroleum residues in fifty-four of fifty-six animals. In North Dakota, wind-borne fly ash, which is used to solidify the waste from drilling holes and contains heavy metals, settled over a farm: one cow, which either inhaled or ingested the caustic dust, died, and a stock pond was contaminated with arsenic at double the accepted level for drinking water.
At almost every stage of developing and operating an oil or gas well, chemicals and compounds can be introduced into the environment. Radioactive material above background levels has been detected in air, soil and water at or near gas-drilling sites. Volatile organic compounds—including benzene, toluene, ethylene and xylene—waft from flares, engines, compressors, pipelines, flanges, open tanks, spills and ponds. (The good news: VOCs don’t accumulate in animals or plants. The bad news: inhalation exposure is linked to cancer and organ damage.) >> <end quote>

THAT ARTICLE FROM THE NATION HAS PHOTOS OF CATTLE BEFORE AND AFTER CONTAMINATION. THEY ARE HARD TO LOOK AT. THE ARTICLE ALSO HAS SOME VERY GOOD DOCUMENTATION, CHARTS, ETC. PLEASE READ IT ALL. THEIR PRESENTATION HERE IS ALL-TELLING:
http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/user/17/Fracking%20Farmland%20615px.jpg

Many are screaming and scrambling to tap into shale, to extract the small amounts of oil or gas that can be had from that, but wouldn't it be CHEAPER AND BETTER if we spent our money on something, ANYTHING but OIL??? ANYTHING BUT OIL!
NO ONE WHO LIVES NEAR SHALE DEPOSITS WOULD RATIONALLY WANT TO ENDURE THE CONTAMINATION, THE TOXINS THAT THAT WILL CAUSE TO BE INTRODUCED INTO OUR ALREADY TERMINALLY ILL ENVIRONMENT!

ARE WE CRAZY, ARE WE BAT-GUANO INSANE?

WILL WE JUST KEEP POISONING OURSELVES TO GET AT OIL? TO GET RID OF OIL'S WASTES? ONLY FOOLS OR SUICIDE-INTENT PEOPLE WOULD DO THAT!

IF YOU LOOK AT THE MAP ON THE NATION'S WEBSITE, YOU WILL SEE HOW MANY ORGANIC FARMS ARE IN THE AREA OF THE INTENDED SHALE OIL SITES. LOOK AT HOW MANY ORGANIC FARMS WILL BE WIPED OUT! LOOK AT HOW MUCH THAT WILL IMPACT THOSE OF US WHOSE HEALTH DEMANDS ORGANICS TO LIVE!
SOME OF US ARE INDEED SO SENSITIVE TO CONTAMINANTS, TO CHEMICALS, PESTICIDES, SO-CALLED FERTILIZERS, THAT ORGANICALLY GROWN FOODS ARE OUR ONLY HOPE FOR LIFE!Could Fracking Come To Your Town?
This map shows regions where shale gas deposits have been discovered, which may be locations for drilling and fracking now or in the future.
http://www.nwf.org/~/media/Content/Environmental%20Issues/Fracking/Shale-Map-916x564.ashx

OTHER SOURCES FOR YOU TO EXAMINE:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/7349:frackings-health-and-environmental-impacts-greater-than-claimed

WITH A HAT-TIP TO GERMANY FOR CONSIDERING BANNING FRACKING, "'Germany could join other European countries and ban the fracking method of shale gas extraction, according to Germany’s Environment Minister Peter Altmaier.'"
http://rt.com/business/germany-fracking-ban-environment-492/
Flaming methane-filled tap water and radioactive cows? That may only be the tip of the iceberg.(SEE VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/methane-water-radioactive-cows-fracking-pa_n_849893.html
A TWO-PART DOCUMENTARY ON EFFECTS OF FRACKING ON HUMANS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24KhFnE9b-s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l5JAhcaRKs
Some of these people are only looking for either $$$$ of more oil/gas...and have fallen for the LIES, as usual!

I BLOODY WELL DO NOT WANT TO DIE FOR A LACK OF FARMS THAT CAN SUPPLY ME WITH LIFE-SAVING FOOD, OR WATER SUPPLIES I KNOW ARE FREE OF SUCH DEATH!
I DO NOT INTEND TO DIE FOR AN INCREASE OF OIL OR NATURAL GAS SUPPLY FOR AMERICA OR ANY NATION ON THIS EARTH!
I WILL NOT DIE FOR OIL, FOR ANY 'ENERGY' THAT IS UNSUSTAINABLE!
I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO WONDER IF THE NATURAL SPRINGS THAT SUPPLY MY WATER ARE CONTAMINATED!
I DON'T WANT MY GRANDCHILDREN TO LOSE ONE MORE INCH OF GOOD EARTH TO "PROGRESS", i.e. TO OIL!
WE ARE BEING ERADICATED  BY OUR FALSE SENSE OF NEED FOR MORE, MORE, MORE OIL! WE'VE ALREADY AGREED TO TOO MUCH POISON IN OUR WORLD!
WE ARE BEING IRRADIATED, POISONED WITH GMO POISONS, FRANKENFOODS, ADDITIVES OKAYED BY THE MURDERING FDA, AND SPRAYED WITH TOO MANY TOXINS TO SUSTAIN LIFE FOR MUCH LONGER, MY FRIENDS!
THE WORLD HAS LITERALLY GONE TO WAR OVER OIL MORE TIMES THAN I CARE TO COUNT! NO MORE OIL WARS! FIND A BETTER, CHEAPER, CLEANER SOURCE OF "ENERGY"!

Dumbed-down Americans who will believe their government can do NO wrong, who daily swallow the tons of garbage/propaganda put out for them to eat up each day, will hate the above video, but listen to the PEOPLE who are suffering from this! Can we believeTHEM? YES!A VERY WISE MAN SAID LONG AGO THAT...
"When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money."
HE WAS RIGHT!
LEARN OR PERISH, FELLOW HUMANS! LEARN! LIVE!