GMO/Toxin Free USA reached a major milestone on May 26, 2022. We are officially 10 years old!
THANK YOU to all of you who have made this journey with us, and to all who have joined us along the way. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been educating and advocating for clean food and agriculture for 10 years.
We need your help to sustain our work for the next 10 years and beyond by contributing to our 10th anniversary fundraising goal of $10,000 and 100 new monthly subscription donors by the end of June.
Start a monthly subscription donation. $3, $5, $10, any amount makes a difference.
We began as a private Facebook group and a small public Facebook page and have grown far beyond that.
When we first entered the scene in 2012, Facebook was a burgeoning platform with the potential to reach millions of people each week. Our success and impact depended on Facebook. But at the time, we saw many organic advocates using pictures of tomatoes with sharp teeth, syringe needles poking into various fruits and vegetables, and other similar types of scaremongering images.
It was clear to us that this kind of advocacy wasn’t an effective strategy. Our mission out of the gates was to “harness independent science and agroecological concepts to advocate for clean and healthy food and ecological systems.” After all, the science was already showing the existing and potential harms of GMOs and the related pesticides. The science and reality were scary enough without having to resort to conjuring images of vegetable monsters.
We used visual creativity paired with peer-reviewed science with the goal of creating mass consumer rejection of GMOs and growing the market for organics. We felt strongly that educating the public would be more effective than fearmongering.
Our first official Facebook page campaign, Boycott Kellogg’s GMOs, launched at the end of January 2013 and went through Earth Day in April. Most people in America didn’t know what a GMO was. Our goal was to grow the FB page from 3,000 followers, where it was at the time, to 10,000, to educate along the way, and to affect Kellogg’s sales in the U.S.
Our plan worked. On Earth Day, we crossed 20,000 followers. We were the first advocacy organization to test a consumer food product for GMOs and glyphosate as part of a public awareness campaign. Our supporters shared our graphics and helped us educate and grow the page by thousands every month. Within a couple of quarters, Kellogg’s U.S. sales began to decline.
We continued this strategy, putting in 50, 60 and 70 hour unpaid, volunteer work weeks for the following 5 years. Reading. Keeping up with important news. Researching the science. And creating appealing graphics to promote the science and the news. It was 4 of us burning the midnight oil: Diana, Luan, Janet, and our amazing science guy who doesn’t like to be named.
Tens of thousands of followers grew to hundreds of thousands. With those supporters sharing our posts, we were reaching millions of eyeballs each week. Our all time high was 12 million people reached in a single week. Our content was strong and our reach was organic. We never paid a penny to promote the information we shared.
One of many accomplishments was the launch of the first-of-its-kind database of studies documenting harm from GMOs and related agrichemicals, which we continue to update when new studies are published. There are over 2,000 studies in the GMOResearch.org database. The public has something to point to when the GMO industry or their trolls attempt to claim there is no science showing harm from GMOs.
Our activism wasn’t just online. We’ve traveled throughout the U.S., and even to Canada and Europe, to educate the public about the harms of toxic GMOs and pesticides.
But in 2018, something happened. Facebook’s algorithms began to change and our organic reach was significantly suppressed. FB began favoring paying advertisers. Frankly, we relied solely on our creativity, skills, and time, and didn’t fundraise enough to have a marketing budget. So we couldn’t advertise even if we wanted to. Our supporters were increasingly telling us that not only were they not seeing our posts, but that FB prevented them from sharing our posts – missing share buttons and other suspicious glitches.
Today, in 2022, we reach 500,000 to 2 million people per week, much less than in previous years. While these numbers aren’t anything to sneeze at, we need to find ways to grow if we’re going to beat corporations like Bayer-Monsanto.
That’s why we need your support more than ever – to help us educate new audiences on other platforms. The GMO/chemical industry continues to develop new toxic products, bringing them to market more quickly than ever with the help of our corrupt regulatory agencies. It’s more important than ever that we broaden our reach.
Together, we can win. The sales growth of organic foods is outpacing conventional food growth. But conventional food sales still account for over 80 percent of food purchases today. We have a ways to go and can’t rest on our laurels. We have to build on our gains and make sure that regenerative organic reaches 100 percent… for a truly GMO and Toxin Free USA. Europe is transitioning to regenerative agriculture and with enough public pressure, so can we.
For our 10th anniversary, in June we’ll be launching our first ongoing podcast, “Fork the System”. We will delve deeper into important topics and connect with audiences who prefer video and audio podcasts on platforms like YouTube and Spotify.
Adding videos and podcasts to the mix is much more involved and time-consuming than creating graphics for Facebook. Your recurring or one-time donation will be an investment to help us continue educating the public in new ways.
With your help, we can continue to provide the information you need to make informed choices, to speak with your wallet and to move the market. Healthier choices means healthier people and a healthier world. With your help, we can reach millions more people. We can continue to demand accountability from our government agencies and grow our impact. Together, we will win against the Bayer-Monsantos of the world.
Start a monthly subscription donation.
To your health and the health of the planet,
Diana, Luan, and the GMO/Toxin Free USA Team
Congratulations and thank you!!
Hoping to contribute more again soon!