Organic Consumers Association sends Vedic plant believer John Fagan into farm country

Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is an industry trade group created by Ronnie Cummins, a disciple of anti-science activist Jeremy Rifkin, which funds numerous vassal groups to promote the work of their corporate clients. Two of them are a "lab" called HRI and Regeneration International. Now OCA is putting them together so Fagan, from the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, can teach real farmers about his alternative vedic plant approach.

Fagan, along with Maharishi graduate Paul Mills, who holds a "Ph.D." from the transcendental meditation school, was recently the subject of calls for retraction because of a JAMA article in which he claimed to have found traces of the mildly toxic herbicide glyphosate in urine samples in a southern California cohort. Not a problem, even if traces were found the compound can only be hramful to plants, but Fagan and Mills did not disclose their financial conflicts of interest; that he and Mills were selling glyphosate testing kits made by the "lab" that analyzed the samples and that Fagan founded it to do "custom" analyses for groups.

None of that matters to OCA clients, who don't seem to think much of their customers and are sending him and his beliefs in transcendental meditation for plants to talk to Nebraska farmers.

Nebraska already does pretty well for itself with science so OCA is instead selling the myth of locally grown. In doing so, they are mimicking efforts by their political allies in the energy sector, who have touted "local control" as a way to create a patchwork of local laws and regulations against natural gas that no company could ever satisfy. If regular food becomes too expensive due to hundreds of different local standards across the nation to comply with, organic food can gain market share. But organic farmer Graham Christensen doesn't talk about economics, he uses the ethereal language OCA prefers. “Many people have been left behind as industrial agriculture has replaced cooperation with competition, separating us from our connection to the soil and to each other.” You can almost hear him saying 'we don't own the land, the land owns us.'

OCA's goal is to revert from a modern agriculture system to a regenerative organic model. They say that will increase access to locally produced, nutrient-dense food - yes, they claim their process leads to more nutrients in food - and it will restore the soil health which is already great. Then OCA adds in more buzzwords about biodiversity, humane animal treatment before you kill them, and socialized farmworker rules.

Yet they leave out that they are dooming the developing world to starvation. They highlight regenerative rancher Del Ficke, who once managed 7,000 acres and now is down to less than 600. But he is fine with that because those 600 acres are 70 percent more profitable for him. It's a return to feudalism by organic land barons and mass famines for brown and black people who were not lucky enough to be born in Nebraska, where food grows comparatively easy. OCA cares about corporate profits, they just want it to be the profits of their clients, and they care about people, as long as they are rich, white Americans buying organic food.

John Fagan, Ph.D., founded Health Research Institute (HRI) to manufacture studies claiming he can find chemicals anywhere, and he kicked off the RegeNErate Nebraska workshop by claiming to have found the herbicide glyphosate in human breast milk, urine, drinking water and countless foods. His company will not test for copper sulfate, which is far more toxic than glyphosate but is heavily used in the organic process. That seems odd, until you consider that he thinks magical chants work better than science to grow food.

No one asked if he could levitate, the way Maharishi graduate Jeffrey Smith claims to be able to do.

Local afro-soul music group Wakanda One set the mood for the event. Wakanda is a fictional country in Africa created by Marvel for their comic books. Like Fagan's science, it only exists in the land of make-believe.

Here is John Fagan, "PhD" at a transcendental meditation school, talking about how vedic pandits are all you need to grow food. At least in your backyard garden. When billions die, he can just claim they didn't do enough chants to please Gaia.