A loophole buried in the Farm Bill would let new GMOs and engineered microbes dodge pesticide safety review entirely, and it’s still in the bill right now.

The provision creates new federal definitions for “plant biostimulants” and “plant-incorporated protectants.” That second term is EPA’s own name for GMOs engineered to produce their own pesticides. Some biostimulants are low-risk, but the definition is loose enough to let gene-silencing RNAi sprays and genetically engineered microbes hide under that label. RNAi sprays silence genes with no guarantee the silencing stops at the intended pest, and engineered microbes, once released, can reproduce and spread on their own with no way to call them back.

Congress has stripped related provisions before, and can do it again. The House passed its bill in April. The Senate Agriculture Committee advanced its version in September, but the full Senate hasn’t voted, so the two chambers still have to reconcile their bills, likely after the November elections.

Whatever survives that negotiation becomes law, and with the 2018 Farm Bill now expired, this is a good time to call.

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask for the staffer who handles agriculture policy, or use the form on this page to email your Representatives and Senators.

Tell them: strip the biostimulant and plant-incorporated protectant loophole from the final Farm Bill, and keep gene-silencing GMOs and engineered microbes subject to real pesticide safety review.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to Close the GMO Pesticide Loophole in the Farm Bill!

Food Bank News:

“Restaurants generate millions of tons of surplus food every year, yet less than 1% of that food is ever donated, according to ReFED.

A new tool from Food Rescue US, a national nonprofit, is addressing this issue by making it easier for restaurants to donate excess food to food banks, pantries, and other nonprofits. Food Rescue US created the tool in partnership with Toast, a provider of automated payments to restaurants, using funding from a ReFED grant. The three organizations announced the new tool at New York City’s Javits Center during Climate Week NYC (see photo, top).

Food Rescue US, which mobilizes more than 30,000 volunteers to pick up and transport food that would otherwise go to waste, has saved more than 206 million meals across 25 states to date. But relatively little of that has come from restaurants.”

From ReFED’s perspective, it just might be “the shift between food donation being heroic, to food donation being the standard” in restaurants.

Tom Perkins, The Guardian:

“New research has identified at least 485 chemicals used in US pesticide products that are linked to breast cancer, raising questions about the safety of food and other products at a time when early onset breast cancer rates are surging worldwide.

The new peer-reviewed paper, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a top journal from the American Chemical Society, highlights what public health advocates say are a range of deficiencies in how US pesticides are regulated. The review includes active pesticide ingredients, but also hundreds of so-called ‘inert’, or inactive, ingredients that typically do not undergo a thorough safety review.

The Environmental Protection Agency only considers each pesticide ingredient’s individual health risks, and does not consider the entire pesticide formula, or exposure to multiple pesticides.”

These chemicals are not just found in pesticides used on crops, but also in lice treatments applied to children’s scalps, home lawn fertilizers, and flea and tick treatments.

Editor’s Note:
André Leu, International Director of our sister organization Regeneration International, has been raising this concern for years, and the study backs it up. Regulators usually test one active ingredient at a time and treat everything else in the product as inert, so the formula that actually gets sprayed often isn’t the one that was reviewed. Leu argues that formulated products can be hundreds of times more toxic than the active ingredient alone, and that pesticides in combination can amplify each other. His recent piece lays out the research and where regulators fall short. Read “Serious Deficiencies in the Regulation of Toxic Chemicals”.

REGENERATION INTERNATIONAL

This World Food Day, October 16, 2026, farmers, researchers, activists, and communities from every continent will gather for a free 24-hour virtual summit on regenerative agriculture. The People’s Food Summit was created in direct response to the corporate capture of the UN Food Systems Summit and exists to connect and support the small-scale producers, pastoralists, and foresters who grow 70 to 80 percent of the world’s food.

This year’s summit takes its theme from Regeneration International co-founder Ronnie Cummins and his book Grassroots Rising, a blueprint for a global regeneration movement built on the conviction that the solutions to our planet’s greatest crises lie right beneath our feet.

Through regional panels, dialogues across continents, and research showcases, the summit will look at how soil, water, biodiversity, and communities are being restored around the world. Speakers include Oglala Lakota chef and activist Sean Sherman, whose organization NATIFS supports Indigenous producers and is bringing Indigenous food into schools and hospitals; Sumeet Sandhu, who is leading a bioregional regeneration initiative in Panjab; and Jennifer Judith Chox, who works with Indigenous youth in Guatemala to protect traditional foods and the milpa system.

The grassroots are rising. It’s free, virtual, and open to everyone. Join us.

Explore the full lineup and join the Regeneration International newsletter for updates.

Emma Snaith, The Guardian:

“As summer heatwaves intensify across the city, Gläser-Bligh carries about 20 liters of water to Linda once a week during the hotter months. It takes a couple of trips up and down stairs with a watering can to finish the job, but she has noticed the tree  is no longer wilting in the summer heat. Linden trees are a hallmark of Berlin, even lending their name to Unter den Linden boulevard. Their mature, dense canopies offer essential street cooling, while their blooms provide vital nectar for local bees.

Gläser-Bligh adopted the tree through CityLAB Berlin’s Gieß den Kiez project, which translates to ‘water your neighborhood’. An interactive map tracks more than 900,000 trees across Berlin and calculates the water needs of each one based on its age, species and local rainfall. This real-time watering data is what separates the Gieß den Kiez project from other tree maps around the world and allows volunteers to coordinate on a city-wide level.”

You can see the last time a tree was watered, log a watering, and color-coding indicates trees in critical need.

Most of us worry about how many ultra-processed foods fill grocery stores, and a new report from Yuka breaks down what the research says. It covers products that make up around 60 to 70 percent of the food supply in many countries, and over 60 percent of what kids in the U.S. and U.K. eat. Eight multinational companies control about 42 percent of the global food market.

The authors recommend checking ingredient lists and cooking more at home, and they say fixing this will take more than shopping smarter. They call for rules on marketing and changes to farm subsidies.

To help with your food choices, try the app out next time you go grocery shopping. Yuka’s app lets you scan the barcode on a food or cosmetic product and see a score from 0 to 100 right away. For food, 60 percent of the score is nutrition quality (based on Nutri-Score), 30 percent is additives, and 10 percent is organic certification. Scanning is free, and a paid premium version adds extras like a search bar and offline mode. Yuka started in France in 2016 and says about 80 million people now use it in 12 countries, with the U.S. as its biggest market.

Read the report: Ultra-Processed Foods, Decoding a Food Transformation with Major Health Consequences, by Yuka authors Julie Chapon and Gabriela Mourad Vicenssuto.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Your State Legislators to Ban Ultra-Processed Food From Schools!

Try the Yuka app: Yuka deciphers product labels and analyzes the health impact of food products and cosmetics.

Use our Regenerative Farm Map to find local unprocessed food.

Thank you for subscribing, following, sharing, volunteering, donating, and keeping us on this path for a better food system. With your support OCA was able to be an important part of the work to stop the planting of genetically modified corn in Mexico. We were a fundamental part in building that case.  In 2018, we tested Maseca corn flour sold in Mexico and found concerning levels of glyphosate and GMOs, with some samples testing as high as 94.15 percent GMO. That research fed into the Sin Maíz No Hay País (No Corn No Country) campaign, which we worked on with partners across Mexico.

This important work has been a collaborative effort with OCA’s two sister organizations. Regeneration International is a network of 700 partners and affiliates in 65 nations. Via Organica, our Mexico network, includes The Billion Agave Project, a teaching ranch, a restaurant, and an eco tourism program in San Miguel de Allende.

We have a team of more than 40 people in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Zimbabwe. We run two organic and regenerative research farms, in Finland, Minnesota and San Miguel de Allende. More than 300,000 people subscribe to our newsletter, and more than two million follow us on social media.

On October 16, World Food Day, we’re hosting the 6th annual People’s Food Summit, a 24 hour online gathering of farmers, researchers, activists, and communities from every continent, with speakers including Dr. Vandana Shiva.

Your support helps us invest in the outreach and education that bring more people into the movement. It takes resources to pay our team, acquire the necessary equipment and seeds for our on the ground projects, show up at meetings and speak out in spaces where Big Ag tries to control the conversation. Together we take meaningful action that amplifies our voices and creates lasting, healthy change in our food and farming systems and our communities.

If you can, please give today.

If a friend would like to follow along, they can subscribe to Organic Bytes for free.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Make a tax-deductible donation to Regeneration International, our international sister organization

Have you considered recommending a grant to OCA through your donor-advised fund?

We let you know about this questionnaire last week but are getting the word out about this again because election season is one of the few times candidates actually have to answer for where they stand on the food and farming system. Beyond Pesticides has sent a nonpartisan questionnaire on pesticides and organic agriculture to every U.S. House and Senate candidate this cycle, and some challengers are already answering with more depth than the incumbents they’re running against.

This is one of those times when being an engaged citizen can really have an impact. Beyond Pesticides is asking voters and organizations to send the questionnaire themselves to candidates in their own district and state, since candidates are more likely to respond to their own constituents than to a national organization reaching out on its own. 

There’s a step-by-step guide too, for pushing past talking points once you get an answer.

Every candidate who goes on record is one more person whose vote in Congress you can point back to later. Candidates have until October 16 to respond, so there’s still time to get your own representatives and challengers answering for where they stand on pesticides and organic farming. 

Find the questionnaire and the guide here.

Steph Guerra, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“Nature is the world’s worst bioterrorist is a common maxim in the field of biosecurity, a reference to the idea that naturally emerging pathogens cause far more deaths than any biological attack a terrorist could carry out. But the trope may soon be outdated. In an article published Aug. 6 in the journal Science, scientists demonstrated that trained  AI models can design novel viruses  as well as—if not better than—nature itself.  

Their experiment created viruses that infect bacteria, not humans. Still, much like the multiple  AI models that escaped  their test environments to hack other networks this summer, these newly revealed capabilities give biosecurity experts like me pause.

How do we keep enabling legitimate scientific progress, while also preventing AI from assisting in the creation of biological weapons?”

One prevention strategy is mandatory gene synthesis screening, an idea gaining traction among the highest levels of the AI industry and political leadership.

Dr. David Cox, BBC Science Focus:

“The importance of touch in social development perhaps isn’t surprising when you consider how modern humans evolved. Anthropologists now believe that Homo sapiens rose to become the dominant species through our nature as an intensely social species.

Rather than being shaped by conflict and competition, our success was fuelled by complex networks of caregiving, cooperation, shared labour and collective problem-solving.

As pointed out by James Coan, associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia, in the US, touch played an essential role in all this. Meaning, the human brain and body developed to expect the presence of other people and physical contact with them. When this expectation goes unfulfilled, the body mounts a stress response.”

Touch matters a lot because it’s one of the simplest and most efficient ways of signaling that social support is available.