Thank you. Howard Fleager and then Don Hoggestraat and Larry Green will be the third speaker. Welcome, Howard.

MR. FLEAGER:

Thank you. I’d like to start off my little section here with something just a little bit different. I’ve got a poll I would like to exercise a second. All the people in this room who support independent family farmers would you please stand up and applaud? Thank you. It looks like I’m the only one that got a standing ovation. I’m here representing a company called American Growers Foods. It’s a farmer owned company. It’s based here in Minnesota. The issue I would like to discuss for the most part is the GMO issue. I’ve heard a lot of supposed comments today about how everybody is representing farm organizations saying that the GMOs their customers want this accepted into the market and the use of sound science. I haven’t seen any sound science that proves that there’s anything safe about GMOs. I’ve got a whole packet right here which is just part of the information that proves there are many things to be concerned with about GMOs, the health risks with them. Our company in the last year’s time has been several trips to Japan in working on getting our certified chemical free grain exported to that country. There is no restriction for importing GMOs into Japan. The government officially says it’s okay for them to come in, but when they passed that law they also passed another law that said any and all GMOs that come into this country will be labeled and sold as such. And when we talked one on one with the buyers over there, they all had the same comment about GMOs. We thought this European money crisis was the big plague for not being able to export our products into the Eastern rim, and we asked them how soon they thought that they’d get over this financial crisis and they’d start buying what we had to sell. Their answer simple was, after they laughed, they said, you don’t have anything we want to buy. The Japanese people are scared to death of genetically modified organisms, or GMO crops. The most consistent comment that they made was, we will watch the children in the United States for the next ten years. I’m going to read just a couple excerpts from some research that’s been done both in the United States and throughout the world on GMOs. One of them talks about the fragments of artificial genes inserted into foods were detected in the brain cells of baby mice in research done by Dr. Walter Duffler (ph) at the Institute of Genetics at the University of Cologne. Some may probably say, well, that don’t matter what happens to mice. Well, there’s also research that’s proven that after Roundup beans have been processed and fed to dairy cows, it carries a very high estrogen level through the milk. And estrogen has a very detrimental affect on our young people and their health. Let’s see the scientific proof that says GMO is sound. When Monsanto was questioned about these different issues, they said, oh, we didn’t test that. I want to address one thing right now to the farmers in this room. No farmer in this room has got the right to bitch about a price when they’re giving money to a company for a technology fee that that company’s whole goal is to take over your rights as an independent producer. You are financing their ventures to take over your farm. You don’t have the right to bitch about it. If you’re dumb enough to buy the GMOs, you don’t need it. I’ve tried the GMOs on my farm, I don’t need them. I’ve proved that BT corn yields less. I’ve proved that Roundup beans yield less. The whole agribusiness industry wants control of the food supply and with the contracts that they’re putting in place and having the farmers sign when they buy the genetically modified crops. That’s the direction that they’re heading. Before I get shut down, I’ll give one suggestion to the panel. Hopefully you got a little relief. I’m not on your case. Let’s make the GMO issue simple. Let’s label all of it and let the consumer decide whether it be here in America or abroad. Thank you.