Arden Andersen, DO, MSPH, PhD

‘We will start building bio-farms’: Clean meat company Aleph Farms talks growth ambitions 14-May-2019 By Katy Askew Israeli cellular meat start-up Aleph Farms has secured a fresh injection of capital that will enable it to bring production of slaughter free cultured meat to commercial scale. HTTPS://WWW.FOODNAVIGATOR.COM//WE-WILL-START-BUILDING-BIO- Cargil is one of the significant investors in this project making Aleph the second culture meat company Cargil publicly adm...its to investing money. Farmers must take notice that the status quo of growth hormones, antibiotics and pesticides being needed for farming is not supported by science nor public demand. The push for cultured meats, meat substitutes such as the now commercialized Impossible Burger are all answers to consumer demand for cleaner, safer meats. It took 30 plus years for fish farming to significantly replace wild caught fish around the world. Look 30 years in the future and you will see cultured meats significantly replacing standard meat farming, which will also significantly reduce demand and the market for GMO corn and beans. See more

A recent posting on twitter by USDA researchers:"Two of @USDA's top scientists today reaffirmed the United States' commitment to science-based decision-making at the G20 Agricultural Chief Scientists meeting in Tokyo." Too bad they confuse natural science with political science. We know that rain forests generate 95% of their own rain - so destroy the forest, destroy the rainfall, you're left with drought. We know that the oceans produce 50% of the global oxygen supply and we... also know there are growing oceanic dead zones around the world from MAN-MADE POLLUTION, especially PESTICIDES and FERTILIZER. These pollutants are from science based agriculture, and all reduce the oxygen production from the oceans. We also know that we cannot conserve our way out of the environmental crisis. We must proactively sequester atmospheric carbon and agriculture. Sequestration of carbon into soil humus can legitimately be done in 5 years to make the US carbon neutral, even with current emissions. It additionally would reduce or eliminate the needfor pesticides, therefore the pesticide and fertilizer run-off, and thus significantly reduce the dead zones in the ocean. It would make farmers more financially sustainable/profitable, food quality better, and help stabilize the local weather patters. The higher the soil carbon, the more consistent the local evaporations-transpiration which feeds the local rainfall patterns, reducing droughts and floods. This is natural science at work.

Green New Deal Part A Environment/Climate Change: There are two issues to address. 1. Clean up the current mess. 2. Replace toxic technology with clean technology. The current problem in which we find ourselves regarding the environment destruction/pollution will not correct itself in the short term by merely replacing fossil fuel technology with renewables. This IS THE KEY point. We must clean up/clean out/reverse the existing greenhouse/pollution gases. If your garage is fu...Continue reading

Per the Wichita Business Journal, Kansas has 239,578 people without health insurance, (2016). Expansion of Medicaid purportedly covers 150,000 low income Kansans, but still leaves 90,000 Kansans uninsured while spending $1.26 BILLION (150,000x$8400/person) in TAX PAYER money! Significant Medicaid funds go to private insurance corporations and PBM’s (Pharmacy Benefit Managers). As a primary care office seeing Medicaid patients, we often call a New York office to get prior app...roval for care. Why are Kansas tax dollars going to New York? Direct expansion without overhaul will send tens to hundreds of millions of dollars out of state. You want republicans to sign off on expansion? Then overhaul the system and stop the ridiculous waste of tax payer Medicaid money that never actually goes to low income patient healthcare. Consider that the U.S. ranks 35th on the Bloomberg Healthiest Countries 2019 Assessment. Australia, 7th in the 2019 Bloomberg healthiest countries assessment, spends about $5300 per person. Spain, rated #1 spends $3248. Overhaul to match the Australian spending mark would cover 230,000 Kansans (nearly ALL uninsured Kansans), WITHOUT SPENDING ANY ADDITIONAL TAX PAYER FUNDS. How? Return Medicaid management to public employees with strict performance measurements; integrate direct primary care, negotiate down costs of drugs, labs, and radiology, and pay for minor health complaints, such as sore throats, minor injuries, medication refills, at office visit rates, and non- emergency room rates. As a primary care physician with many Medicaid patients, I know overhaul is realistic. https://www.bloomberg.com//spain-tops-italy-as-world-s-hea

"Ghana was one of 13 West African countries selected for the piloted survey of the System for Rice Intensification (SRI) from 2014 to 2016 as part of activities of the West Africa Agricultural Productivity Program (WAAPP). During the time frame, adaption of the project to lowland systems were largely successful." "The group behind the survey have asserted that if 100 percent of rice farmers in West Africa had used SRI in 2017, rice self-sufficiency would already have been ach...ieved with a 5 percent surplus. Thus, replacing rice imports with rice grown in the region would have saved US$4.16 billion in foreign exchange for 2017 alone. When this method was applied in some selected areas in the country, irrigated system yields reached 3.76 hectare (t/ha) under conventional practices, while yields were 6.46 t/ha for SRI. In rainfed lowland systems, conventional practices yielded 2.63 t/ha as compared to 5.3 t/ha for SRI" My Comment: Rice yield in Louisiana is around 8.5 tons per hectare, higher than what is listed above. However, one must consider that this is using extensive amounts of fertilizer not used in Ghana in the SRI. So using appropriate nutritional fertilization and sap testing from HortiNov to fine tune foliar sprays we can double these current yields with non-GMO varieties and without the use of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. All this aside, the Ghana research proves that it is not gentic engineering of crop varieties we need in order to feed the world, rather we simply need to apply already known technology. Technologies such as SRI don’t garner a lot of political campaign contributions from biotech and chemical companies so to perpetuate the big lie of GMO’s to feed the world.

Hello everyone. We certainly have a lot of political debate continuing into the Christmas season. The more flamboyant the political mud slinging, the less we hear about things that really matter, such as food production and agriculture. Industry lobbyists would like everyone to believe that the world will starve to death without genetic engineering of our food crops and points to CRISPR technology as the next generation of benevolent gifting to agriculture and starving humans...Continue reading

Congratulations to Laura Kelly on her successful election as the next Governor of Kansas. Hopefully she will be able to reverse some of the neglect in our public systems - education, roads & bridges, mental healthcare, prison reform, equal rights, environmental pollution by pesticides and industrial wastes, Native American sovereign rights, increasing incidence of developmental delays in children, and healthcare overhaul to correct run-away costs, lower coverages, and the extraction of Kansas dollars by insurance and drug companies. She does have a big hill to climb. My prayers and best wishes for her success.