Tag Archives: Agriculture

Joel Salatin: The Ron Paul of Family Farmers, by Ginny Garner

Posted on July 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

There are better, environmentally sounder, healthier ways to farm and eat than what agribusiness serves up. From Ginny Garner at lewrockwell.com:

Sitting on a picnic bench across from Joel Salatin on a beautiful day on Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, I am struck with how much the farmer, author and lecturer reminds me of Ron Paul: Mission-driven, a leader who has inspired millions around the world, a Christian, family man, libertarian, self-sufficient, charismatic, energetic, enterprising, optimistic, hard-working, a teacher, a communicator, a brilliant unorthodox thinker, confident yet humble, good-humored, athletic, frugal, and possessing a strong bearing and commanding presence. A great and good man.

If you type the question “Who is the most famous farmer in the world?” into Google, the result is Joel Salatin. He has appeared in many documentaries on factory farming and/or the rogue food movement including Polyfaces, Food Inc., Fresh, Revolution Food, Sustenance, Freedom From Choice, What’s With Wheat?, American Meat, and At the Fork. Ron Paul also appears in Farmageddon which shows government agents swat teaming family farmers for selling raw milk, destroying their animals and their livelihoods. Salatin has written 12 books, lectured all over the world, edits the Stockman Grass Farmer, and the self-described “lunatic farmer” shares his musings online.

Four generations of Salatins live and work at Polyface: Joel’s mother Lucille who originally owned the 550-acre farm with her husband Bill who passed away in 1988; Joel, Teresa, his wife of 40+ years, their daughter Rachel who does marketing for the farm, and son Daniel who has been managing the farm since he was 18, his wife Sheri and their three children. The farm provides food for 3,000 in the community and local restaurants.

At Polyface Farm simple farming methods are modified by new technologies. The farm is regenerative, sustainable and organic: no pesticides, chemical fertilizers or antibiotics have ever been used and seeds have never been planted. The carbon-based ecosystem is teaming with life. The movement of the animals and their meeting with grass on the farm is carefully and lovingly managed. High-tech fencing keeps the animals in and the predators out. The cows, chickens, hens, baby chicks, and rabbits look healthy and content and so does the team who work on the farm. People travel from all over the world to visit Polyface, take a tour, participate in summits, and learn how to start or develop their own farms.

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Fallow Land Plagues California Farmers Hit By Drought, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 2, 2021 | 3 comments

Drought is looming as a larger and larger fact of life in the western half of the US. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

We’ve documented (read here & here) this spring of a “megadrought” sweeping through the western half of the country and could be one of the worst in decades. This is troubling news because major water reservoirs have already dropped to dangerously low levels, cutting off access to farmers.

The latest US Drought Monitor map shows nearly the entire western half of the nation is experiencing some level of drought at this moment. Parts of the Southwest could be undergoing their second Dust Bowl as conditions continue to deteriorate.

According to Reuters, for farmers like Joe Del Bosque, located in Firebaugh, California, a third of his 2,000-acre farm is unseeded this spring due to extreme drought and the inability to source water.

About 40% of California’s 24.6 million acres of farmland is irrigated. State and federal agencies that regulate reservoirs and canals across the state do not have enough water to allocate to farmers. Many of them are leaving their fields unplanted as a result of the water shortage.

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Farmer Bill and the Great Reset, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on March 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s a toss-up as to which field Bill Gates brings more expertise: agriculture or medicine. It doesn’t really matter, all we have to know is that he’s a genius and he’s entitled to run the world. From Joseph Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

Unbeknown to most, Bill Gates has been buying up farmland across the U.S. through various subsidiary companies. At present, he owns about 242,000 acres of farmland, plus another 27,000 acres of nonagricultural land.

While many media outlets claim this makes Gates the biggest farmland owner in the U.S.,1 that may be an exaggeration, seeing how there are at least 50 other families that own far greater landmasses, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.2 According to a USA Today investigation3 published in November 2019, Bezos owns a respectable 420,000 acres, most of it located in Texas.

Is Bill Gates Too Powerful?

Either way, Gates certainly owns a sizeable chunk of U.S. farmland, which places him, yet again, in a position to have a significant impact on the direction of American agriculture and food production. In the video above, Russell Brand reviews some of these controversies.

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World Joe Biden’s Two-Front Battle Against Covid and Climate Change May Trigger Severe Food Shortages for U.S. Consumers, by Robert Bridge

Posted on February 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Taking farm land out of production and supply chain disruptions from Covid’s lockdowns and business closures may mean food shortages. From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.org:

In the United States, the local farmers, it seems, are being squeezed out of business, or paid not to grow food, while Big Agriculture is more concerned with exporting its supplies than keeping domestic food stocks safe and affordable.

In an effort to fight two wars at the same time – against a pandemic as well as purported climate change – the Biden administration risks putting the United States on a crash course with food shortages and soaring prices as early as this year.

Sealed up inside of his White House fortress, surrounded by a ring of steel and thousands of National Guardsmen, U.S. President Joe Biden has been busy signing off on a raft of executive orders without the nuisance of democratic debate and congressional prattling. One of those presidential actions envisions the conservation of 30 percent of the nation’s lands and waters over the next decade. Where will all of that protected land come from? Perhaps from Bill Gates, who now owns the deed to most of the farmland in the nation? Doubtful. The answer is from small, independent farmers, whose agricultural activities, the Democrats say, are responsible for 10 percent of the manmade greenhouse emissions purportedly frying up the planet.

While occupying the previously unknown ‘Office of the President-Elect’, the Democratic leader said he would pay U.S. farmers to “put their land in conservation” and live without their ‘cash crops.’ How much the tillers of the soil will receive has not been disclosed, nor if this program will be enforced upon farmers against their will.

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Gates Foundation is Also Destroying Africa’s Food Economy, by F. William Engdahl

Posted on September 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

Saints Bill and Melinda are pushing industrial medicine (vaccines) and industrial farming. From F. William Engdahl at journal-neo.org:

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The same Gates Foundation which is behind every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic from financing much of the WHO budget, to investing in favored vaccine-makers like Moderna, is engaged in a major project in Africa which is destroying traditional small farmer production of essential food crops in favor of monoculture crops and introduction of expensive chemical fertilizers and GMO seeds that are bankrupting small farmers. The project, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), is directly connected with key global institutions behind the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.

If we know the actual history of the Rockefeller Foundation and related tax-free undertakings of one of the world’s most influential families, it is clear that in key areas the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has inherited the Rockefeller agenda from the medical industrial complex to education to agriculture transformation.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working in tandem with the closely allied Rockefeller Foundation, is not only at the center of the orchestration of unheard-of severe economic lockdown measures for the much-disputed COVID-19 illness. The Gates foundation is also at the very center of the UN Agenda 30 push to transform world agriculture into what they call “sustainable” agriculture. A keystone project for the past 14 years has been Gates’ funding of something called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa or AGRA.

AGRA Fraud on Africa

When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation founded AGRA in 2006, joined by their close ally, the Rockefeller Foundation, they proclaimed their goal was to “tackle hunger in Africa by working to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa through the promotion of rapid, sustainable agricultural growth based on smallholder farmers.” AGRA promised to double the agricultural yields and incomes of 30 million small-scale food producer households by 2020.It is now 2020 and it has been a total failure in this regard. Notably,AGRA deleted these goals in June 2020 from its website without  explanation.Based on what they have done we can assume that was never the true goal of Gates and Rockefeller foundations.

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Bill Gates Secretly Dictates Global Food Policy Too, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on August 23, 2020 | Leave a comment

It looks like Bill Gates wants to be the most important and powerful man on the planet. From Joseph Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

Bill Gates has built a global empire around his technologies and “philanthropic” endeavors, the magnitude of which is now becoming increasingly clear. His sheer wealth has allowed him to become a veritable superpower in his own right. He’s not only risen to become the largest funder of the World Health Organization and the unelected global COVID-19 health czar but he’s also a secret powerbroker of the global food system.

As revealed in the AGRA Watch report,1 “The Man Behind the Curtain: The Gates Foundation’s Influence on the UN Food Systems Summit,” published August 2020, Gates wields powerful influence over global food and agriculture policy through his funding of a large number of organizations involved in agricultural development and policy making.

Gates-Funded Organizations Defend Gates-Funded UN Envoy

While Gates is just one man, his clout is significantly leveraged and magnified by the fact that he funds such a large number of companies and organizations that can then do his bidding on the sly.

When you see long lists of groups, you automatically think there are many players in the game when, in fact, Gates is the singular thread running through most or all of them. The AGRA Watch report2 makes a perfect case in point with the story of Agnes Kalibata.

Kalibata is the president of Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In December 2019, Kalibata was appointed special envoy to the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit by the secretary general of the UN, Antonio Guterres.

In response, 176 civil society organizations and farmer groups from 83 countries urged Guterres to withdraw the appointment of Kalibata due to her clear conflicts of interest with corporate actors. A second statement, signed by more than 500 academics and organizations, also opposed Kalibata’s appointment to, and her organization of, the Summit.

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Hungry? By Becky Akers

Posted on April 17, 2020 | 1 comment

The complex chain that gets food from farm or ranch to table is quite susceptible to disruption, and the coronavirus response is definitely disrupting it. From Becky Akers from lewrockwell.com:

id you know there’s a “USA Rice President?” Neither did I. But I bet she’s not nearly as noxious as the USA Vice Presidents.

At any rate, Rice President Betsy Ward advises, “If you see depleted rice shelves in your local grocery store, it is not a supply problem; it is a signifier of changing logistics in the retail market…”

I have no idea what that means. But like many of you, I love food. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say it’s indispensable, given that eating is among my favorite pastimes. I’d miss an appointment with Gabriel himself sooner than I would a meal.

That’s why the Rice President’s jargon raised my hackles. So do the shenanigans at grocery stores, where empty shelves replace the former abundance and obstructions block entrances, herding us into lines for admittance.

Equally distressing, supermarkets’ personnel have degenerated into Nazi Nannies who vie with Our Rulers in patronizing and bossing us. To cite one instance among many, Giant Eagle’s Laura Shapira Karet warns that she’s “[s]tressing to all Team Members and guests the importance of taking preventative measures outlined by the CDC”—that bastion of sparkling advice and pure motives—”particularly the need for anyone not feeling well to avoid visiting our supermarkets and GetGo locations.” Pssst, Laura: that’s no way to treat guests. Your job is to keep the boxes of cornflakes and mounds of oranges towering overhead; I’ll decide whether I’m up to the increasingly arduous task of shopping.

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These People Are Nuts: Pot Stocks Soar as Pot Prices Plummet, by Nick Kelly

Posted on October 1, 2018 | 2 comments

Growing plants is not usually a high-margin activity. From Nick Kelly at wolfstreet.com:

Beyond prohibition, it’s an ag business with no barriers to entry.

The stocks of cannabis companies have been on a wild ride, with some observers comparing them to the crypto-craze. Canadian based Tilray (TLRY), which went public in July at $17 a share and is trading on the NASDAQ, was in the $20 range until late August, when it started flaring like a supernova. By September 19, it briefly reached $300 a share, up 1,660% from its IPO price two months earlier. The market cap approached 29 billion, making it more valuable than Clorox, though it had only $17 million in revenues in the first half of 2018 and generated a loss of $18 million.

Then it plunged for the rest of the week. Smaller gyrations continued into this week. Today it closed at $131.30, down 56% from its peak, but still up 672% from its IPO price, with a market cap of $7.6 billion.

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Everything That Dies Does Not Come Back, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on June 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

There are some major drawbacks to factory food. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

There are a lot of industries in our world that wreak outsized amounts of havoc. Think the biggest global banks and oil companies. Think plastics. But there is one field that is much worse than all others: agro-chemicals. At some point, not that long ago, the largest chemical producers, who until then had kept themselves busy producing Agent Orange, nerve agents and chemicals used in concentration camp showers, got the idea to use their products in food production.

While they had started out with fertilizers etc., they figured making crops fully dependent on their chemicals would be much more lucrative. They bought themselves ever more seeds and started manipulating them. And convinced more and more farmers, or rather food agglomerates, that if there were ‘pests’ that threatened their yields, they should simply kill them, rather than use natural methods to control them.

And in monocultures that actually makes sense. It’s the monoculture itself that doesn’t. What works in nature is (bio)diversity. It’s the zenith of cynicism that the food we need to live is now produced by a culture of death. Because that is what Monsanto et al represent: Their solution to whatever problem farmers may face is to kill it with poison. But that will end up killing the entire ecosystem a farmer operates within, and depends on.

However, the Monsantos of the planet produce much more ‘research’ material than anybody else, and it all says that the demise of ecosystems into which their products are introduced, has nothing to do with these products. And by the time anyone can prove the opposite, it will be too late: the damage will have been done through cross-pollination. Monsanto can then sue anyone who has crops that show traces of its genetically altered proprietary seeds, even if the last thing a farmer wants is to include those traces.

To continue reading: Everything That Dies Does Not Come Back

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The Royal Society and the GMO-Agrochemical Sector, by Colin Todhunter

Posted on February 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

Is a once proud scientific institution being undone by corporate money and influence? From Colin Todhunter at counterpunch.org:

The Royal Society in the UK is a self-governing fellowship of distinguished scientists. Its purpose is reflected in its founding charters of the 1660s: to recognise, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. Its motto, nullius in verba, is taken to mean ‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts based on experiment.

In 2015, Steven Druker challenged the Royal Society to justify its outspoken and partisan support of genetically modified (GM) crops and to correct any errors of fact in his book ‘Altered Genes,Twisted Truth’. Not long after the book’s release, he wrote an open letter to the Society calling on it to acknowledge and correct the misleading and exaggerated statements that is has used to actively promote genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and in effect convey false impressions.

Druker cited specific instances where members of the Royal Society have at various times made false statements and the Society’s actions were not objective or based on scientific reasoning but biased and stridently pro-GMO. He argued that the Royal Society has misrepresented the case for GMOs and has effectively engaged in a campaign of disinformation.

Almost three years later, from what we can gather, the Royal Society has not responded to Druker.

In August 2017, Druker wrote:

“For more than 20 years, many eminent scientists and scientific institutions have routinely claimed that genetically modified foods are safe. And because of the perceived authority of their pronouncements, most government officials and members of the media have believed them. But when the arguments these scientists employ to support their claims are subjected to scrutiny, it becomes clear that important facts have invariably been misrepresented — either deliberately or through substantial negligence. And when these facts are fairly considered, the arguments collapse.”

He goes on to discuss an inaccurate publication on GM foods issued by the Royal Society in May 2016, GMO Plants: Questions and Answers, which claims to provide “unbiased” and “reliable” answers to peoples’ most pressing questions.

To continue reading: The Royal Society and the GMO-Agrochemical Sector

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