Who is directing the war on agriculture and nutrition?

Government agencies, billionaires and pressure groups put world’s poor, hungry families last

Paul Driessen

Elite billionaire organizations and foundations, government agencies and activist pressure groups are funding and coordinating a global war on modern agriculture, nutrition, and Earth’s poorest, hungriest people. Instead of helping more families get nutritious food, better healthcare and higher living standards, they’re doing the opposite, and harming biodiversity in the process.

The World Economic Forum wants to reimagine, reinvent and transform the global food system, to eliminate greenhouse gases from food production. Central to its plan is alternatives to animal protein: meal worm potato chips, bug burgers instead of beef patties, and meat loaves and sausages made from lake flies, for instance. Fixing the WEF’s toxic workplace is apparently a low priority.

A UN Food and Agriculture Organization report advises that turning “edible insects” into “tasty” food products can create thriving local businesses and even promote “inclusion of women.”

Created to alleviate global poverty, the World Bank has decided the “manmade climate crisis” is a far greater threat to impoverished families than contaminated water, malaria and other killer diseases, hunger, or even two billion people still burning wood and dung because they don’t have reliable, affordable electricity. It has unilaterally decreed that 45% of its funds – an extra $9 billion in FY2024 – will be shifted to helping the poor “better withstand the devastation of climate change.”

(The Bank has also decided that even more of its taxpayer funding – $300-million instead of “only” $70-million – should be gifted to the Palestinian Authority, which pays terrorists to murder Israelis.)

Of course, most of the better and lesser-known environmental pressure groups are also deeply involved in food, agriculture and energy policy campaigns: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, EarthJustice, Friends of the Earth, Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way), Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, and countless others.

Like the rest of the “agro-ecology” movement, they deride and malign modern agriculture as a scourge inflicted by greedy mega-corporations. They oppose fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides and biotechnology. They extol “food sovereignty” and the “right to choose.” But their policies reflect top-down tyranny and bullying, with little room for poor farmers to embrace modern agricultural technologies and practices.

In addition to WEF, FAO and World Bank support, these hard-green organizations have the ideological, organizational and financial backing of the US Agency for International Development, EU agencies, and a host of progressive and far-left American, European and other foundations.

The US-based AgroEcology Fund was created by the Christensen Fund, New Fields Foundation and Swift Foundation. Its funding and programs are overseen by the New Venture Fund, which helps “charitable” and “educational” organizations direct funds to programs that align with what many characterize as neo-colonialist and eco-imperialist goals.

Other major players include the Schmidt Family Foundation, Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Ben and Jerry Foundation.

This is serious money – hundreds of millions of dollars per year in food, agriculture and climate change funding. It completely overshadows the piddling $9,000 that Kenyan farmer Jusper Machogu raised via donations to his “climate realism” website – much of it given to neighbors, so they could drill water wells, buy tanks of propane or get connected to the local grid.

And yet Mr. Machogu incurred the wrath of the BBC’s “Climate Disinformation Officer.” (Yes, the Beeb actually has such a position.) The CDO attacked him for “tweeting false and misleading claims” about climate change and saying Africa should develop its oil, gas and coal reserves – instead of relying entirely on intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar. Even worse, the farmer had the temerity to accept donations from non-Africans, including “individuals with links to the fossil fuel industry and groups known for promoting climate change denial.”

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is another major donor to agro-ecology outfits. It’s part of the legacy of guilt-ridden oil money from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. corporate trust – an inheritance that includes nearly 1,000 climate-related institutions, foundations and activist organizations.

As Canada’s Frontier Centre put it, “Every time you hear a ‘climate change’ scare story, [the person writing it] was PAID. He is a Rockefeller stooge. He may not know it, but his profession has been entirely corrupted.” Far worse, I would add, the writer and his (or her) organization are complicit in perpetuating global poverty, energy deprivation, hunger, disease and death – because the fearmongering drives destructive energy and food production policies.

Alone or collectively, these policy corrupters must not be underestimated in this war to preserve and expand modern energy, agriculture and global nutrition. Thankfully, there is increasing pushback. Many families simply do not want to be trapped in poverty, disease, mud-and-thatch huts, an absence of educational opportunities for their children, and a future of backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk labor in little subsistence-farming fields.

That’s especially so when films, news stories and cell phones present American and European farming equipment and practices – and the crop yields, wealth, health, homes, leisure time and opportunities that accompany those modern agricultural systems.

Poor farmers also see China, India, Indonesia and other countries rapidly industrializing and modernizing by using oil, gas and coal. They see rumblings of change in many countries that are intent on charting their own courses, with fossil fuels as the energy foundation for that growth. They’re rejecting the eco-colonialism and eco-imperialism that wealthy Westerners seek to impose on them.

They are getting the message that humanity has faced climate fluctuations and extreme weather events throughout history ... and survived them, dealt with them, adapted to them, prospered. That there is no real-world evidence that manmade greenhouse gas emissions – especially the trivial amounts generated by agriculture – have replaced the powerful natural forces that caused past climate changes.

They increasingly realize that organic and subsistence farming requires vastly more land – which would otherwise be wildlife habitats – than modern mechanized farming, to get the same yields. Plowing those habitats would decimate plant and animal diversity.

That locking up fossil fuels, and relying instead on biofuels and plant-based feed stocks for thousands of essential products, would require even more acreage. So would mining for massive amounts of metals and minerals to manufacture wind, solar and battery technologies.

Most importantly, they understand that humanity today has far greater wealth, far more knowledge, far better technologies and resources than any past generations.

To suggest that we cannot adapt to climate changes, or survive and recover from extreme weather events, is simply absurd. To suggest that farmers should revert to ... or remain stuck in ... ancient farming practices and technologies – to save the world from computer-generated manmade climate disasters – is eco-imperialism at its most lethal.

South Africa’s electricity minister recently said his country will not be “turned into a guinea pig for a worldwide Green New Deal.” Hopefully, all developing countries will soon apply that same attitude to anarchists who would use the world’s poor as guinea pigs in global agricultural and nutrition experiments.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.

Waging war on modern agriculture and global nutrition

Demands for organic or subsistence farming worldwide would devastate nature and nutrition

Paul Driessen

The World Economic Forum says the world faces a new crisis, “One-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from food production.” With the world’s population expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050, it is therefore “urgent” that we launch a “radical” and “comprehensive” transformation of the global food system – from “reinventing” farming to “reimagining” how food is produced, processed, distributed, consumed and disposed of.

Reinforcing this message, Stop Ecocide Now founder Jojo Mehta expanded on Greta Thunberg’s incendiary 2020 rant that “our house is on fire and you’re fueling the flames.” Farming is a “serious crime,” equal to “genocide,” Ms. Mehta told elites at the 2024 WEF meeting in Davos.

Their grasp of agriculture is epitomized by Michael Bloomberg’s suggestion that anybody can be a farmer: “You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, you add water, up comes the corn.”

Modern farming and its supposedly dangerous greenhouse gas emissions are a tad more complicated.

Modern mechanized farming employs oil derivatives as fuel for equipment and feed stocks for herbicides and pesticides, natural gas to dry grain and make fertilizers, and livestock to provide protein.

Tractors, trucks, farmers and livestock emit carbon dioxide, adding to the 0.04% of CO₂ in Earth’s atmosphere (equivalent to $40 of $100,000). Cattle emissions add methane to the existing 0.0002% CH₄ in the atmosphere (20¢ of $100,000). Nitrogen fertilizers add to the “dramatic” 200-year rise in atmospheric nitrous oxide (N₂O), bringing it to a still minuscule 0.00003% (that’s 3¢ of $100,000).

These emissions allegedly drive “cataclysmic” climate change and extreme weather, endangering all life on Earth. But then what caused five Ice Ages (including the Pleistocene Era and its mile-high glaciers, which ended 12,000 years ago), the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, and the Little Ice Age (1350-1850) to come and go?

Of course, natural forces can’t drive climate hysteria and WEF-Gore-Biden anti-fossil-fuel agendas. Fear-mongering political, activist, media and academic elites therefore ignore them.

In the Real World, the wondrous reality is that, after centuries of excruciatingly slow progress, agricultural advances over the past 75 years have been nothing short of astonishing. Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution employed plant breeding techniques that multiplied yields of vital grain crops, saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Since 1950, American farmers increased per-acre corn yields by an incredible 500% and other crop yields by smaller but still amazing amounts – while using used less land, water and fuel ... and fewer fertilizers and pesticides per ton of produce. Their exports helped slash global hunger and malnutrition even further.

Meanwhile, despite supposed impacts from manmade climate change, farmers in Brazil, India and many other countries have also enjoyed record harvests.

Multiple miracle technologies contributed. Hybrid seeds combine valuable traits from different related plants. Biotech seeds protect crops against voracious insects and destructive viruses, while reducing water and pesticide demand. Virus-resistant biotech cultivars have even replaced endangered papayas in Hawaii, cassava and bananas in Africa, and other crops.

Nitrogen (ammonia) fertilizers, synthesized from natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen, have joined phosphorus and potassium in supercharging soils. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide spurs plant growth and reduces water demand even further.

Long-lasting herbicides control weeds that would otherwise steal moisture and nutrients from crops – and enable farmers to utilize no-till farming that avoids breaking up soils, reduces erosion, retains soil moisture and preserves vital soil organisms.

Technologies developed in Israel make it possible to grow an amazing array of crops in the Negev and Arava Deserts, which receive a fraction of the annual rainfall that Arizona gets. Desalination plants turn seawater into 80% of Israel’s drinking water, dramatically reducing pressure on the Sea of Galilee, manmade reservoirs and groundwater supplies.

Israelis then recycle 90% of their home, business, school and hospital water – for use in agriculture, where drip irrigation delivers precise amounts of water precisely where crops and other plants need it, minimizing evaporation.

Huge high-tech tractors use GPS systems, sensors and other equipment to steer precise courses across fields, while constantly measuring soil composition, and injecting just the right kinds and amounts of fertilizers and herbicides, along with seeds, to ensure optimal harvests.

Not all these technologies are available across the globe. However, farmer can access information about both the technologies and the modern practices through online libraries and programs on cell phones.

Instead, this progress is under assault – by ill-advised or ill-intended, but well-funded organizations that want to turn the Green Revolution into Green Tyranny, Eco-Imperialism and global malnutrition.

Their hatred of biotech crops is intense and well-documented. But many also despise hybrid seeds. They want modern herbicides and insecticides banned, in favor of “natural” alternatives – which are often toxic to bees, fish, other animals and people and have not been tested for long-term harm to humans.

These agricultural anarchists also demand “natural” fertilizers, which typically provide a fraction of the nutrients that modern synthetic fertilizers do. At the very least, they want global organic farming, which would mean much lower crop yields per acre than conventional farming, and plowing many millions of additional acres of wildlife habitat and scenic land, to get the same amounts of food.

They say people in Africa, Asia and Latin America should practice subsistence farming – which they prefer to call “traditional” farming, Agro-Ecology, “food sovereignty,” or the “right to choose” “culturally appropriate” food produced through “ecologically sound and sustainable methods,” based on “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices.”

In plain English, Agro-Ecology is rabidly opposed to biotechnology, monoculture farming, non-organic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and even mechanized equipment and hybrid seeds.

You can imagine how Agro-Ecologists would react if African farmers wanted to assert their food sovereignty, self-determination and right to choose by planting biotech Bt corn, to get higher yields, reduce pesticide use, enjoy better living standards and send their kids to school. The agro-anarchists would vilify them as vile supporters of violence against women, land-grabbing corporations, expropriation of indigenous rights, genocide and other “crimes against humanity.”

They also promote “alternative protein.” They say Africa would be “the perfect laboratory” for testing new foods – such as “crackers, muffins, meat loaves and sausages” made from lake flies. In fact, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Popular Science magazine and many other outfits extol the virtues of “entomophagy” – the clever progressive term for eating bug burgers, instead of hamburgers.

They even offer recipes and techniques for processing “edible insects” into tasty, nutritious products that can improve diets and livelihoods, create thriving local businesses, and even promote inclusion of women. In fact, they say, bugs can have twice as much protein per pound as beef; grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, beetles, ants and cicadas make great snacks, desserts, guacamole and even entire meals; and mealworms have “an earthy flavor, similar to mushrooms,” making them excellent additions to brownies. Sautéed with a little salt, mealworms also make “protein-boosted potato chips.” Yummy!

Who are these guys – these agriculture and nutrition anarchists and revolutionaries? Stay tuned.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.

Innovating for a water-starved planet

Inspiration, innovation, perspiration and technology can overcome climate challenges

Paul Driessen

More than 3,400 years ago, God told Joshua to lead the Hebrew people across the Jordan River into the Promised Land that is now Israel. If they worked hard and followed his commandments, it would become “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

At least the central, northern and Galilee (Kineret) regions would; they generally received enough rainfall to sustain ancient nomadic and agricultural communities. The south, the Negev Desert around and below Be’er Sheva and Abraham’s famous well, was too parched for much more than camel stops. In 1900 Be’er Sheva was home to just 300 hardy souls, and even today most of the Negev gets a fraction of Arizona’s annual rainfall.

Nevertheless, national founder and first prime minister David Ben Gurion envisioned milk, honey and much more in a prosperous Negev. Today, time-traveling Israelites would be astounded to see a lake and 660,000 people in the bustling modern city of Be’er Sheva – and crops, livestock and small towns transforming the vast desert.

I recently joined other volunteers in the area. We were overcome by emotion at memorials to victims of Hamas’s barbaric massacres last October 7. But we also visited hospitals and schools, and met with grateful, passionate, resolute, resilient people. We painted and spruced up several less devastated kibbutzim and marveled at how fruitful the desert has become.

Endless acres boast fields of wheat, flowers and vegetables; lemon, orange, date, olive, apple and avocado orchards; and huge “hothouses” that actually keep temperatures from getting too hot, while controlling sunshine and insects, enabling farmers to grow tomatoes, eggplants, berries, bananas and other bumper crops to feed Israel and send abroad. 

We got dirty, weeding and pruning tomatoes, planting herbs and picking lemons. Scratches on my forearms still remind me that lemon trees have dastardly thorns. Who knew?

Israelite and Israeli commitments to inspiration, innovation and especially perspiration continue to pay dividends. They’ve fostered new technologies and techniques that turn dry wastelands into bountiful farmlands, using desalination, water recycling, drip irrigation and constant refinements. 

Some Israelis worry that manmade climate change will make the country’s water and agricultural challenges even more daunting. Others point out that abundant rains in recent winters have helped raise Sea of Gallilee water levels to their maximum levels for the first time in decades, and that more atmospheric carbon dioxide spurs crop and natural plant growth. 

Hebrew University astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv says the sun (not CO2) is the control knob for planetary temperatures, anyway. When the sun is more active, he explains, it sends out stronger solar winds, reducing galactic cosmic rays streaming into Earth’s atmosphere. That causes clouds to be less white, less dense and less reflective of sunlight, resulting in a warmer Earth. When solar activity decreases, Earth cools. Graphs of solar activity and ocean temperatures over thousands of years confirm this.

The climate debate matters less and less, of course, when people do what our ancestors did: adapt to climate changes, natural or manmade, by employing our creative talents to devise new tactics and technologies for living and farming in cold, wet, dry and changing climates.

Rely less on nature’s unreliable beneficence and goodwill, become less at the mercy of the elements – and be more self-reliant, resourceful and innovative, in housing designs, heating and cooling systems, more sustainable manufacturing, and beyond. Israel has set a good example in water use and conservation.

Desalination plants use ultra-filtration and reverse-osmosis to remove salts and minerals from seawater and brackish groundwater deposits. The leftover brine goes to the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

Israel’s eight desal plants annually produce 835 million cubic meters of expensive yet affordable safe drinking water for Israelis, Bedouins, and West Bank and Gaza Palestinian. (That’s 835 billion liters; 221 billion gallons.) Over 90% of Israel’s drinking water is desalinated, freeing up Sea of Galilee water that Jordanians can then purchase from Israel.

A vast water recycling system further aids in conquering deserts and droughts. Israel reuses over 85% of its water (with a goal of 95%). Treatment plants purify “graywater” from homes, hospitals, schools and businesses, so that farms can irrigate crops and polluted water stays out of rivers, streams and groundwater. The Shafdan wastewater treatment facility alone provides nearly 140 million cubic meters of clean, recycled irrigation water to Negev Desert farms every year.

Over half of Israel’s farm irrigation water is recycled graywater. Much of it is combined with urban and highway stormwater runoff and stored in hundreds of underground reservoirs, which local and regional communities also utilize.

Recurring droughts, growing populations and expanding agricultural needs underscore the imperative to build more desalination plants, treatment facilities and reservoirs in Israel and neighboring countries.

Drip irrigation delivers water slowly and directly to plant roots via a revolutionary network of hoses, valves and drip nozzles. That’s a monumental improvement over systems that spray water onto plant leaves and stems, resulting in significant loss through evaporation, especially in arid regions. Simcha and Yeshayahu Blass began developing the water-saving technology 65 years ago and established the Netafim irrigation products and services company to market their technologies and educate people worldwide.

Today, drip irrigation waters over three-fourths of Israel’s crops. However, only 5% of farms globally use the technology, due to a reluctance to change longstanding practices and the costs of replacing existing systems with initially expensive drip technologies.

Cutting-edge research continues apace in these and other water-related arenas, to further improve technologies, reduce their costs, decrease recycled water sediments that can eventually clog irrigated soils, optimize equipment efficiencies and crops’ water uptake, and promote the use of water-saving technologies in the United States and around the world.

Israel’s Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in the eastern Negev’s Kibbutz Ketura conducts research and teaches Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, African and Asian students how to utilize water and agricultural technologies and best practices. Led by Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed, it also teaches them to live and work together with other future scientists, farmers and leaders of different cultures, ethnicities and religions.

The institute understands that “in the hyper-arid, drought-stricken Middle East, one resource is more precious than water: Trust.” Since 1996, it has brought together more than 2,000 students to do research and engage in university-accredited programs. I’ve met some of them.

In a further testament to how far back these agricultural challenges go, Ketura is also home to a date tree called Methuselah because it was grown from a 2,000-year-old seed found in King Herod the Great’s palace and fortress at Masada, near the Dead Sea.

Perhaps instead of spending countless trillion of dollars trying to replace fossil fuels with wind, solar and battery technologies, we should focus on adapting to whatever climates we live in or encounter -- especially since China is building hundreds of coal-fired power plants to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, EVs, grid-scale batteries and transformers to sell to Western nations for that “energy transition.”

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor to the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)  and author of books and articles on energy, environmental, climate and human rights issues.

 

Cows on Trial in New York

New York lawsuit against beef producer JBS is doomed to failure. 

By John Klar | Mar 8, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags Articles, Climate Change, Opinion

 

(Photo by: Edwin Remsberg/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed suit against the world’s largest beef producer, JBS USA Food Company, claiming its false advertising of climate-remediation efforts induced consumers to purchase products that are not environmentally friendly. Essentially, an attorney is leveling climate science allegations against cows and livestock, claiming JBS can never achieve “net zero” in its operations. The issues raised by this case will put bovine grass-munchers center stage.

The JBS Suit

The crux of the lawsuit is the allegation that JBS “repeatedly assured the public … that they are taking substantial and definitive actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions … ” and yet engaged in beef farming. The suit alleges:

“Industrial animal agriculture … has a substantial environmental footprint. Beef has the highest total greenhouse gas emissions of any major food commodity, and beef production is linked to large-scale deforestation, especially in the Amazon rainforest, which further drives climate change by releasing greenhouse gases and eliminating trees and plants that absorb and store carbon dioxide (referred to as ‘carbon sinks’).”

Some cow facts will now be on trial. Not all of JBS’ cows are in the Amazon – one pilot project of 30,000 cows in Colorado was apparently grass-fed.

The lawsuit goes on:

“Even if it had developed a plan to be ‘Net Zero by 2040,’ the JBS Group could not feasibly meet its pledge because there are no proven agricultural practices to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero at the JBS Group’s current scale, and offsetting those emissions would be a costly undertaking of an unprecedented degree. As of 2021, the JBS Group’s estimated annual greenhouse gases were more than those of the entire country of Ireland, and the JBS Group plans to substantially increase its meat production over the coming years.”

Countering Carbon With Cows

The allegation that “there are no proven agricultural practices” to reduce JBS Group’s emissions is false, and yet the whole case hangs on it. There is no question that industrial agriculture harms the environment – especially from chemicals, erosion, and water loss. Major food producers such as Perdue, Tyson Foods, General Mills, and others are moving quickly to respond not only to consumer and regulatory demand but also to environmental urgency: It is not in their interests to destroy their own assets. And in the effort to reverse soil and environmental degradation, no player is more key than cows. The bovines attacked by James as environmentally destructive are actually the solution to the problems she raises, and JBS is way ahead of her in taking steps to implement that transition.

The cows themselves are in court now, in a tug-of-war between the world’s largest beef-producing corporation and the might of New York’s attorney general. But this is not Greta Thunberg’s bully pulpit – facts are required. Ample studies and entire books establish that cows rotationally grazed on grass rebuild soils and preserve water, supplant synthetic fertilizers with their manures, and sequester both carbon dioxide and methane in the soil. If JBS shifted enough of its existing industrial CAFO (concentrated animal feed operations) to grass-fed or rotational systems, it could sequester more carbon than its operations have released in the last five decades and offset some of New York City’s greenhouse gases to boot.

Clearly, James and her cow-slandering cohorts did not confer with soil scientists or evaluate the regenerative farming impacts of JBS’ plans to shift its grazing methods. Chickens and pigs, raised in massive industrial facilities, cannot be returned to the land effectively, but cows can.

Cows are the quickest path to restoring soils and sequestering carbon, which is why JBS and others are focusing there (and in reduced tilling practices) first. New York has set itself an impossible legal burden against JBS – it lacks the facts to win its case, however much faux environmental puffery is on display.

Climate Change and Farming

For Americans truly interested in reversing environmental damage, the JBS complaint offers an opportunity to delve more accurately into the loosely bandied notions that all cows are climate culprits, or that plant diets will help the ecosystem. Synthetic meats are made from mono-cultured GMO crops that destroy the soil microbiome and toxify humans – perhaps New York’s attorney general should file suit against the claims of that industry. Instead, she has leveled her legal sights at gentle, soil-nurturing cows.

It will be a challenge for JBS Foods to achieve net-zero by 2040, but it is possible with rotational grazing: it is not possible with EV cars, solar panels, or heat pumps that mine the earth, burn coal, and pollute yet again on disposal. None of those fraud-dependent schemes sequesters an iota of carbon dioxide like cows. The case is weakened by these factual problems, but, still, the state must prove that JBS acted willfully and not in good faith. All this without proving actual damages – the state has no consumer victims harmed by the alleged malfeasance that it vaguely alleges increased profits, a second factual hurdle. But it is the plaintiff’s burden to prove damages. Government-as-plaintiff cases without proof of actual harm seem to be trending in the Big Apple lately, as seen in the massive award against Donald Trump in his New York civil fraud trial.

Punishing Good Behavior?

The public must also ask, if James succeeds in this case, would JBS be barred from advertising its environmental clean-up efforts in the future? If so, will it help consumers (or the environment) if the company abandons legitimate regenerative farming transition efforts because there is no market return? Consumers want companies to try to make their products less environmentally destructive. James is punishing this company for that very effort.

The burden is not on JBS to prove that it can achieve its emissions goals by 2040  — only that it is trying to, in good faith. James and the state of New York, on the other hand, hold the burden of proof to establish the impossible: that JBS cannot meet its goals, and that cows cannot heal soils destroyed by decades of errant agricultural practices.

 

Read More From John Klar

Maoist New York Goes to Pol Pot With Urban Agriculture

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

There’s a story about an old Marxist who would address leftist rallies in Union Square a century ago as, “Workers and Peasants of New York City”. Leftists eventually transform farce into fact and that’s why New York’s number two mayoral candidate is touting a “New Agrarian Economy”.

It’s time to farm one of the most expensive and densely populated cities in the country.

Mao had kicked off China’s worst famine by demanding that wheat be grown everywhere. And New York City’s Maoists are following in his footsteps by trying to farm rooftops and parking lots.

Urban agriculture is one of those obscure lefty ideas so insane that few even believe it exists.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio had already created an Office of Urban Agriculture and the New York City Council, which is so crazy that it makes De Blasio look sane, had declared war on "food inequity", by vowing to grow food in one of the most densely populated cities on earth.

If your city is going to pot anyway, why not go to Pol Pot?

Urban madness doesn’t stay in cities so the 2018 Farm Bill created an Office of Urban Agriculture inside the USDA and is doling out millions of dollars in grants for urban agriculture like the one that proposes to turn residents of housing projects in Camden, New Jersey from “resident, to gardener, to farmer, and eventually to community urban agriculture leader.”

Camden is one of the most polluted and violent cities in New Jersey, so assuming anyone manages to grow anything, it’s even odds whether they’ll be shot or die of food poisoning.

New York City isn’t about to let New Jersey steal its crown and so Mayor Eric Eric Adams promised go give everyone in the city healthy food by growing it in the city with rooftop farms over schools and hydroponic farms in buildings.

Considering the current state of New York City’s public schools, growing lettuce on top of them might not be the priority: getting their students to read and do simple math should be. And the city already has plenty of hydroponic agriculture, but it’s mostly used to illegally grow marijuana.

Less than half of New York City public school students are performing at grade level in Math and English. It might be a better idea to have schools actually educate students, if Randi Weingarten will allow them, than to enlist them in some Communist harvesting scheme.

It was the Soviet Union that was infamous for rushing students to the fields to harvest crops resulting in a whole lot of wasted crops and wasted time for the students. The Soviet Union might not be the best model for New York City, but finally the old Stalinists and Sandernistas who infest its school system will get to live out their collective farming dreams.

New York City is already one of the densest, and most expensive, both in terms of land value and average salary, places in the country. Growing food in the city, instead of importing it from economically depressed upstate areas, or other states, makes no sense whatsoever.

But Adams insists that urban agriculture will, "aid our economic recovery, providing a new source of tax revenue and employment for New Yorkers."

Saner heads might wonder where these bountiful crops of urban wheat will grow.

“Perhaps surprisingly to some, at the end of the 19th century, New York City was one of the nation’s leaders in agricultural production. The counties I call and have called home — Kings (Brooklyn) and Queens — were, I was proud to learn, agricultural powerhouses,” Adams’ New Agrarian Economy report declares.

Adams fails to mention that the population of New York City rose sharply from around 1 million to 2 million between 1860 and 1880.  Today it’s over 8 million.

Back then there were also farms in what is now uptown Manhattan. Today, 32,000 people live per square mile in Harlem. The country farms of uptown Manhattan went away with the end of the Civil War. Brooklyn and Queens, which had more space, took longer to be overpopulated.

If Adams really wants a New Agrarian Economy, he needs to expel 80% of the city’s residents, tear down twenty thousand buildings, and then work to redevelop the land for cultivation.

Of course that massive effort to turn New York City into a postapocalyptic communal farm still wouldn’t work because one of the reasons that the city’s agriculture went away is that the land had been overexploited for centuries, and then tainted and polluted, until it was good for little more than paving it over, or hollowing it out as foundations for large buildings. A city.

There was a reason that the Indians let Manhattan go so cheaply and weren’t too picky about the other boroughs. The land wasn’t good for very much and the water was even worse.

The Dutch and then the English only found it useful as ports in a trading hub.

New Yorkers regularly died of disease because they were living on swampland and drinking polluted water. But it was all worth it so they could trade stocks and go out to the theater.

The great thing about ignorance is that you never realize when history is repeating itself.

New York City’s schoolchildren used to learn all this as basic history around the same time that the farms went away. Today they learn about equity and slavery while having absolutely no clue about the basic details that made the world they live in. That’s how you get urban agriculture.

Woke education and cultural illiteracy leads to stupendously stupid agricultural policy. Just as it did in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and in Communist China under Mao. The New Agrarian Economy closely echoes Mao’s “Grow grain everywhere” policy. And is as equally ignorant about the basic realities of agriculture as Mao’s second-hand Lysenkoism. (Link added by me. RK)

With every terrible Communist idea making a woke comeback, why not universal peasantry?

“New York City is a center of innovation and commercialization of new agricultural technologies,” Adams’ report claims. “As its new technologies develop fast, it is crucial that this economy maintain a similarly furious commitment to social justice.”

There’s no idea so insane that a leftist won’t adopt it and taxpayers won’t pay for it.

“New York City is a veritable fertile ground for urban agricultural exploration purposes, with its roughly 1,000 acres of green space at developments under the purview of the New York City Housing Authority,” the report claims. Never mind that your average housing project’s land is already covered in human waste and cigarette butts. And is meant to be recreational.

Or that 1,000 acres gets you one farm. There’s a million acres of land being used to grow corn in the state alone. How many people does Adams expect to feed from 1,000 acres of projects?

Adams proposes to start out by basing school lunch menus on “what we can supply from local New York City urban agriculture”. Using public school students, many of them minorities, as guinea pigs for Maoist urban agriculture projects in a polluted city would alternately starve and poison those students. And since New York schools are also used as general soup kitchens, also the homeless, and welfare recipients, it would also serve as a kind of eugenics program.

New York City’s government runs a welfare state that is tasked with providing free and cheap food. Adams would like to take that food supply and make it dependent on growing food on rooftops and housing project yards by “minority and women-owned businesses”.

This is what happens when you don’t teach kids about Communism.

Between all the buzzwords like “equity” and “food apartheid” is yet another doomed program that only seems to exist to vacuum up cash and government grants before failing miserably.

Meanwhile New York City is becoming more of a hellhole than ever.

Adams might want to consider using that massive “5,000 acres of vacant lots” (Iowa has about 26 million of acres of farmland) not to grow corn (which Iowa is much better at), but to house the homeless whom the city is currently putting up in $200 a night hotels at taxpayer expense.

New York City doesn’t need urban agriculture: it needs basic public safety.

Massive numbers of companies have fled New York City during the pandemic. Even Goldman Sachs is considering getting out. Between the lockdowns, the race riots, and the taxes, the city is a horrible environment for business. Instead of raising taxes to pay for urban agriculture, Adams might want to consider how to cut taxes and bring jobs back to New York City.

Maoism didn’t work in China. It sure as hell won’t work in New York City.

But getting the workers back to the land has the same magnetic appeal for 21st century lefties as it did for Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot. One of the densest cities in America is pursuing a bizarre project out of the fevered dreams of Mao and Pol Pot. And Democrats in D.C. have been funding such ventures in urban areas around the country at the expense of farm country.

It’s not pure ideological fanaticism.

Urban farming is a great way to steal grants and funding from family farms who actually need it, while plowing the cash into the same failed urban areas whose broken schools, broken housing, broken families, and broken everything already consume much of the tax dollars of their states.

America’s farmers are already struggling. Democrats are happy to rob them to finance bizarre Maoist experiments in growing carrots in housing projects.

“We were an agrarian economy at one time,” Eric Adams mournfully declaims.

But if he wants to be part of an agrarian economy, he can head upstate. The trouble is that Adams doesn’t actually want to live in a low-density farming community. Nor does he want to do the hard work of actually farming. Like the USSR or Mao’s China, our economy is becoming a figment of someone’s ideological imagination in which nothing but buzzwords are really real.

“You’re going to teach my young children a nutritionally-based education so they can learn this multi-billion dollar industry of urban farming,” Adams argues.

There’s no multi-billion dollar industry of urban farming. Nor will there ever be. But in a political economy in which Democrats can falsely claim that everyone’s going to get jobs installing solar panels and de-icing wind turbines, in which money and art are imaginary digital commodities, and the government can turn carbon credits into big business, unreality is a minor detail.

Like Pol Pot, Adams is dreaming of a great return to nature in the concrete canyons of NYC.

“They’re going to be skillful in it,” Adams babbles, as he optimistically invokes New York’s children getting jobs as urban farmers in an industry which pays unskilled Mexican laborers 40 cents for picking a 40 pound bucket of produce. “And these are the jobs of the future, because 40 percent of the jobs we’re training our children for now won’t be available because of computer learning and artificial intelligence. But we’re always going to eat.”

The jobs of the future will be planting rotten carrots on rooftops to be sold to the government.

Forget all the real jobs. Computers will do them. Especially once the minimum wage hits forty bucks. But we’ll always need someone to work a hoe in the neo-medieval future of New York.

The Left has been claiming for some two centuries that it’s the ideology of the future. But its future is the past. All of its ideas come down to a return to the medieval world, the lord and his sharecroppers, the peace of a timeless world in which men rise at dawn and go to bed at dusk, in which there are no questions, only a dogma to learn and repeat, life is nasty, short, and brutish, and in which everyone knows their place. Welcome to the progressive future.

Here’s your bucket.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Solar Panels Peddled as Farm-Friendly?

'Agrivoltaics’ are touted to rebuild soils and shade plants, but ask a farmer about that.

by John Klar | Mar 4, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Climate Change, Good Reads, Opinion

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Recent studies claim ugly fields of solar panels, widely derided as destructive of local agricultural production and rural views, are beneficial to plants, pollinators, and soils. One ongoing Vermont experiment explored how “agrivoltaic” farming shares sunlight that falls between panels and crops; a Minnesota study concluded that these arrays restore bees and nurture polluted soils. Ironically, such efforts falsely advertise solar arrays as “high-tech processes to help with traditional farming practices.” Plants and bees have done okay for eons without silicon panel installations. The environmental liabilities of solar panels far outweigh their claimed benefits — and doubly so with regard to agriculture.

Solar power enthusiasts claim crops improve panel efficiency by keeping them cool, helping farmers repair soils and increase crop productivity. Two recent studies demonstrated the scheme to package polluting solar panels as soil-saving.

The Vermont Study

The Vermont study posited that siting solar panels with crops will “enhance crop yields by providing shade from excessive sunlight” as well as “contribute to soil improvement by preserving moisture and preventing erosion.” Vermont is an ironic locale for the study, as it is about the worst state in the nation for clear, sunny days. Solar panels generally don’t need cooling (and don’t collect much sun) in Vermont. Conversely, plants grown in chilly, wet Vermont mostly don’t need drought protection or shielding from “excessive sunlight.”

The project was designed specifically for the Green Mountain State for other reasons:

“The selection of Vermont for this specific initiative is intentional. Researchers at the University of Vermont have been advocating for saffron cultivation as a means to support specialty crop farmers, ensuring their sustainability and preserving cultivated land for future generations.”

Saffron is a high-priced crop, permitting profitability despite Vermont’s fifth-highest real estate tax burden in the nation, inflated electricity rates that regressively fund solar panels, and skyrocketing land prices due to excessive state regulatory restrictions (aggravated by subsidies to “sequester carbon” by reforesting fertile farmlands). Instead of addressing these direct impacts on farmers, the technocratic answer is to plant saffron.

Out-of-state companies have been carpetbagging in Vermont for a century, selling farmers land-destroying gadgets that do more harm than good to the environment. From soil-compacting tractors to toxic chemicals like atrazine, glyphosate, and neonicotinoids, corporate America is always there to “rescue” Vermont’s farmers. Synthetic fertilizers that pollute Vermont’s waterways were subsidized by the same federal government that now bankroll solar panels, and the University of Vermont plans saffron farming crossed with rows of solar panels to “preserve cultivated land for future generations.”

The Soil and Bee Study

Another study by the US Department of Energy claimed that solar fields can become “breeding grounds for pollinators and native plants.” The research consisted of seeding the ground underneath solar panels with native plants and measuring the return of insects to the land “which had previously been fouled with herbicides and used for row crops.” It was discovered after five years that the populations of native bees had risen 20 times their initial levels, prompting the study’s leader to conclude, “This research highlights the relatively rapid insect community responses to habitat restoration at solar energy sites.” The purported conclusion was that such studies show “that solar farms … can generate clean energy while also supporting local wildlife.”

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Similar studies of houses of prostitution and maximum security prisons will show that they, too, can restore lost bee populations if seeds are spread in their wake over previously abused agricultural lands. Only houses of prostitution and prisons do not pollute the planet on the scale that solar panel manufacturing does. Coal burned to form silicon for voltaic panel production doubtless emits bee-killing chemicals. Solar panel recycling and disposal present daunting environmental challenges. Solar farms do not generate clean energy, and they certainly do not restore bee populations. It was the spreading of seeds that restored bees, not unnatural plastic installations from China.

The Serial Farm Killers

High-tech promises of increased productivity by American corporations are what killed the family farm, tainted US food supplies with cancer-causing chemicals, wiped out bee populations, eroded vast amounts of soil, polluted and drained vital water resources, and sickened the soil microbiome of millions of acres of prime agricultural land. Now the same snake oil sales force has been recruited to create lipstick-on-a-pig “studies” that claim even more high-tech gizmos will profit the soil and farmer.

Do Vermont farmers need to grow saffron when the state cannot satisfy out-of-state demand for local grass-fed meats? The same cadre of experts who would rescue bees by installing vast arrays of solar panels tells us cows are bad and humans must switch to synthetic meats grown from GMO-cropped plants dependent on chemical fertilizers and herbicides, killing bees and microbiome to spare the world from cows. But cows rebuild soils and sequester carbon far more efficiently than any technology yet devised by human hand. God created solar panels called blades of grass that are not manufactured in China and dispose of themselves harmlessly.

Solar Panel Planetary Destruction

The mad craze to “save the world” through Earth-destroying renewables is accelerating planetary destruction. Solar panels will pollute more than they “save.” Farmers see this clearly – witness the revolts against climate change regulations in Europe.

To energize the world with “clean solar energy” would require an estimated 92.7 billion solar panels completely covering America’s 11 smallest states: that’s a lot of saffron! Then there are the toxic, currently non-recyclable batteries used in EVs but also necessary to store all that solar energy for the grid: Any impact on bees there, or will some seed-casting counter the lithium and nickel pollution?

At a time when Marie Antoinette CEOs advise Americans unable to afford hamburger to feed their children cornflakes for dinner,  it is unsurprising that disconnected venture capitalists and grant-winning researchers portray solar panels as soil-building and plant-nurturing. The latest renewable energy skullduggery is that vast field arrays of solar panels feed bees and build soil, while soil-feeding cows must be eradicated.

Try selling that pitch to a farmer.

 

Read More From John Klar

California's A Mess, And It's Not My Fault, Part III

By Rich Kozlovich 

 

There's a lot of talk about so goes California so goes the nation.  Well, I'm not sure this holds true any longer.  California has been attempting to impose their values and views on the nation via economics.  

 

"Do what we want, or you can't sell your products in our state"

 

They've impacted car manufacturing over the years and now they're going to try and force farmers outside of California to change how they produce food.  And while I have a degree of sympathy as to how large corporations treat animals, it still remains that treatment isn't illegal.  Perhaps it should be, even I'm sympathetic with that, and unlike all these leftist misfits, I'm not agriculturally ignorant.  I grew up on a farm.  But the fact is, it isn't illegal, and that's the issue.

If I was a farmer I would drop California like a stone, and If I'm a huge corporate farmer, I would have separate operations just for California, and make them pay for it! Big time.  Also, corporate agriculture could create an entirely separate legal entity as an agricultural co-op just for California, and again, make them pay .... big time.  Is that a monopoly? I don't think so because they can still buy agricultural products from a host of other producers, but are those producers willing to cut their throats to appease California's misfits?  Maybe, then again, maybe not. 

How about a resistance movement among the states that passes legislation criminalizing California for preventing the sale of any legal product in California as restraint of trade between the states, which is an issue that falls under the purview of the Congress. 

At the beginning of 2021 California started enforcing a animal welfare law passed in 2018 requiring,  more space for breeding pigs, egg-laying chickens and veal calves. 

National veal and egg producers are optimistic they can meet the new standards, but only 4% of hog operations now comply with the new rules. Unless the courts intervene or the state temporarily allows non-compliant meat to be sold in the state, California will lose almost all of its pork supply, much of which comes from Iowa, and pork producers will face higher costs to regain a key market. (SCOTUS upheld the law)

Okay, so what's the big deal?  They can buy their pigs from California pig farmers, right?  After all there are a lot of pig farmers in California, in fact it's claimed there are pig farmers in every California county.  So, why do they need to buy out of state?   It's claimed almost all of it's pork supply come from Iowa, so clearly, there's more to this story than I know, and I can't find anything on it, so, I'll just have to leave it there.   But the fact is all these California pig farmers aren't capable of producing a lot of pigs, and certainly not enough to meet the needs of their state.  

Why? 

• Oh California! You Are a Mess! And It's Not My Fault 
• California is a Mess, And it's Not My Fault, Part II

 

The Manure Lobby: Farmer Fury in Europe

Paul Schwennesen February 13, 2024 @ American Institute for Economic Research

Farmer demonstrators in Lower Saxony, Germany. January 2024.

It started in earnest in Holland last year. Now, thousands of farmers are blocking the streets of Paris, and thousands more are torching tires in Brussels. The movement, which might be fairly termed a popular uprising, has spread across Europe, from the borders of Ukraine to the shores of the Greek Isles. As uprisings go, it’s fairly genteel — the main objective seems to be to generate enough media coverage to get the attention of parliaments. Nevertheless, the angst is real, and stems fundamentally from excessive government meddling.

Though there are a variety of complaints, the common element to them all is pent-up frustration with the level of centralized regulations affecting day-to-day farm life. According to a Dutch farmer I spoke to, “because of the government’s demands, farmers are getting into trouble. It’s nowhere as stupid as in the Netherlands.” He may be right, but it’s a sentiment shared across the continent. Farmers EU-wide are annoyed at rules that arbitrarily require fallowing4% of their land, frustrated with government toying with diesel prices, mismanaged Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments, and heavy-handed environmental regulations like mandatory nitrogen reductions. All these can be laid at the feet of meddling bureaucrats who have been attempting to micromanage the agricultural sector for decades. National Public Radio reports that French farmers feel that “too much regulation has lowered profits” and that they are at a “disadvantage compared to other farmers in the EU.” Ever-shifting regulations on organic certification and climate change have driven average farmers bonkers.

In Germany, farmers dumped manure in the streets of Berlin, starting a trend that has made manure dumping and spraying a poignant (and no doubt pungent) publicity move. Protesters in Brussels have doubled the advertising power by adding thousands of pages of EU farm regulations into straw choppers and manure spreaders to bury the perimeter fences of EU admin buildings. Tired of the regulatory horseshit, they are replying in-kind with a slurry of bullshit, cow shit, pig shit, and more. Thomas Jefferson, who “liked a little rebellion now and then,” believed that the blood of patriots and tyrants was the “natural manure” for the Tree of Liberty. It’s better, of course, that European farmers are using actual manure to make their point, but it remains to be seen whether this kind of publicity display will lead to a substantive shift in the trajectory of overregulation.

Regulations on farmers have been steadily growing since 1962 when the CAP was introduced. It’s aims at the time seemed reasonable enough (as programs invariably do) and were listed as follows: 

•     increasing agricultural productivity 
•     ensuring a fair standard of living for farmers 
•      guaranteeing the availability of supplies 
•     stabilizing the markets
•     establishing a secure supply chain with reasonable prices 
•      harmonizing competition rules across all countries

But as usual with innocuous-sounding government schemes, it is how these ambitions were to be achieved that bears scrutiny. And, in fact, the EU embarked on an extensive program of state control of agriculture: “to achieve these goals, an economic system of price and market support was put in place. This mechanism provided farmers with a guaranteed price for their products, introduced tariffs on external products and introduced state intervention in case market prices fell. Farmers received support according to their total levels of production.”

In short, CAP severed the farming sector from open-market signals, thereby effectively making farmers wards of the state. Indeed, if we use the traditional definition of socialism as the state ownership of the means of production, EU meddling in agriculture is as grand an experiment in socialist management as anything Lenin was ever able to accomplish. 

Given the EU’s predictable failure to achieve impossible bureaucratic mandates guaranteeing vague goals like “fair standards of living,” or “reasonable prices,” or “availability of supplies,” it is no surprise that farmers are taking to the streets. Moreover, as the CAP timeline shows, the years since the 1960s have seen a steady shift toward newer, sexier, “green” initiatives that have steadily strangled the farmers who had come to depend on EU payouts. Frustration with environmental laws is top of the list of grievances, from Spain to Sweden.

In many ways, the current protests represent a delicious irony. Farmers are using the publicity techniques honed by the Green lobby to fight back against the regulations spawned by environmental activists these past decades. Special interest politics cuts both ways, it seems. When a motivated and adequately organized group combines to concentrate its lobbying power on government, it generates foreseeable incentives for the ruling legislatures. 

Special interest groups, because they are relatively small, have much to gain from effective lobbying where they can extract great concessions at the cost of the wider public. Concentrate the gain, diffuse the pain is the name of the game. The Greens did this successfully for a generation, and now it is farmers who are taking a page from the playbook. They recognize, now that they have become largely beholden to taxpayer payments, that a noisy concentration of political pressure is the best means to keep the euros flowing. The prioritization of narrow interests over the broader public good is an old and familiar refrain—the protests are only noteworthy because they are forcing a previously successful interest group to concede to the will of a newly ascendant one.

And this, it hardly bears repeating, is precisely the trouble with excessive government involvement in free markets. In an effort to support the goals of one group, it inevitably intrudes on the ambitions of another, initiating a special interest spiral in which the only loser is the broader, disinterested public. Manure, as any politician will tell you, rarely runs uphill…

READ MORE

 

Paul Schwennesen is an environmental historian. He holds a Doctorate from the University of Kansas, a Master’s degree in Government from Harvard University, and degrees in History and Science from the United States Air Force Academy. He is a regular contributor to AIER and his writing has appeared at the New York Times, American Spectator, Claremont Review, and in textbooks on environmental ethics (Oxford University Press and McGraw-Hill). He is the father, most importantly, of three delightful children.  Get notified of new articles from Paul Schwennesen and AIER. SUBSCRIBE

 

 

 

America Next? Irish Farmers Face Killing 41,000 Healthy Cows Over Regulations to Fight ‘Climate Change’

By George C. Upper III October 28, 2023

 

More than 40,000 Irish cows are in danger of being on the receiving end of an “animal welfare catastrophe,” according to one farming politician, although it appeared more likely that the cows will be saved by applying government funds to wastewater management.

Ireland, which remained a member of the European Union even after the United Kingdom withdrew from the multinational body, has been granted an exception to rules designed to limit the amount of nitrate levels produced by agricultural activities. However, because of what the Irish Examiner called “water quality issues,” the country’s allowance of 250 kgs (about 550 lbs) of nitrates per hectare for some farmers will fall to 220 kg (485 lbs) at the first of the year.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, excess nitrate in the environment “exacerbates climate change and depletes the ozone layer.”

Nitrates enter the environment “from the use of synthetic fertilizers, the discharge of wastewater or the combustion of fossil fuels,” according to the UNEP, all of which would obviously be connected with dairy farming................To Read More..

Biden Joins Globalists to Undermine Farmers

Wildlife regulations endanger food supplies.

By John Klar October 04, 2023 @ Liberty Nation News

The most recent attacks on farming by the Biden administration unveiled recently are cloaked in wildlife protection regulations. At the end of September, a broad coalition of “farmers, cattle ranchers, hunters, landowners and energy companies,” according to Fox Digital, pushed back on the US Fish and Wildlife Service, claiming the rules are capricious, overly broad, and inflexible. Detailed analysis and balancing of economic impacts are being swept aside in order to extend protections to “threatened” as well as “endangered” species and remove consideration of economic impacts. This imbalance will greatly burden many farmers already struggling to produce healthful food.

Patented Food

Agricultural consolidation in recent decades has quietly eviscerated most of the mid-sized American farms that historically produced the bulk of Americans’ food. As with most federal food and agriculture regulations, large farming operations are more able to comply with complex regulations than smaller businesses. The expanded wildlife regulations will similarly hurt smaller farms, though even larger producers are crying foul.

There is a pattern to the destruction of independent farms and food production. Federal and state rules coupled with subsidies that favor large enterprises farming monocultures such as corn, wheat, and soybeans have steadily worn down small-scale farms. The advent of GMO technologies also favored large-scale production, dependent on chemicals and patented seeds. Inexorably, food has become patented in every facet.

Liberty Livestock

(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Not yet patented are animals, particularly cows. It is noteworthy that they are being targeted for their flatulence, while the noxious and exponentially more toxic effluent from swine and chicken farms goes uncondemned. However, the megacorporations that now dominate most American food production already control those industries indirectly, as they are dependent on grains that are patented and oligopilized. Cows, sheep, and goats can be raised solely on grass and bred without corporate consent.

Now, the globalist players have circled their cow-condemning wagons in concert. The United Nations, World Economic Forum, and World Resources Council (to the glee of PETA) have raised a cowcophany of derision against bovines that is anything but scientific: It is a colossal scam. Humanity is told it must eradicate 80-90% of meat from its diet to stave off that nebulous bogeyman, “climate change.” Cows on grass avoid chemical- and fossil-fuel-dependent grains entirely while rebuilding and fertilizing soils, sequestering more carbon dioxide than forests or anaerobic digestors. They also provide healthful meat. Bovines have become scapegoats, while the anthropomorphic warming generated by the Ukraine war is simply ignored.

In the midst of this war against cows, POTUS has announced expansions of rules protecting wildlife that threaten an already endangered food supply. The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) strongly opposes this regulatory creep:

“Federal regulations have a direct impact on farmers and ranchers, and over the years, the breadth and extent of that regulatory landscape have increased. AFBF has taken a stand against regulatory overreach and is working to reform the federal regulatory process and preserve farmers’ and ranchers’ land-use and water rights.”

The American Soybean Association observed in public comments that these new wildlife rules “impose stricter than necessary limitations for U.S. farmers and other stakeholders” and will “result in significant reductions to land values and impede the economic use of property for landowners … whose properties overlap with a listed species’ range.” The rules often provide weak guidance for farmers and ignore economic balancing of the impacts on wildlife and on farmers or food supplies.

There is a long history of politics either purposely or inadvertently creating carnage through interference with farming. Whether that’s Joseph Stalin killing tens of millions in the dekulakization of his newfound empire, including some six million Ukrainians, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward which took over farms and killed some 50 million Chinese in famine. The greatest resistance to such food tyranny is self-reliance and secure local food supplies, in fact, the polar opposite of the push towards synthetic meats and insect burgers, in the name of protecting endangered species and the world.

Read More From John Klar

Europeans war against food ignores water pollution

By Duggan Flanakin May 15th, 2023 14 Comments @ CFACT 

According to the World Health Organization, 31 million Europeans have no access to public sanitation and 48 million do not have piped water at home. At least 300,000 Europeans follow San Francisco’s practice of defecating openly – but in the countryside rather on public streets. But just as in the United States, water quality has taken a back seat to “climate change.”

On another front, the European Commission has adopted a “Sustainable EU Food System,” an initiative that intends to set agricultural policies for European farmers from the top down – by bureaucrats most of whom have never plowed a field. The Czech-based Society for Animals commented that a mandatory sustainable food system framework must cover areas related to the environment, climate, water, air, soil, the impact on farmed animals for food – as well as trade, transport, economic instruments, and strict food import rules.No farmers need apply.

Meanwhile, in once-prosperous Europe, the European Environmental Bureau reported in 2021 that over a fifth of all Europeans were at risk of falling into poverty or social exclusion because food is seen as a commodity and not a human right. Only bureaucrats can save Europe, they add. No farmers need be consulted.

The EEB declared that “it is absurd to expect that simply giving people information about the nutrition or sustainability credentials of food and relying on them (the people) to make the ‘right’ choice” is no match for the evils in the “food environment” manufactured by market forces. Only if policymakers “step up to their role as defenders of the public good,” using “all policy instruments at their disposal,” is there hope that European eating habits will be conformeed to the bureaucrats’ demands.

Chief among the bureaucratic “solutions” is the claim that “Europe has a moral responsibility to reduce the land and resources needed for our own food consumption.” The reason? We, they tell us, are living “in a world where fertile land is dwindling due to climate change and environmental degradation and global population is increasing.”

Curiously, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported in 2021 that the global value generated by agriculture, forestry, and fishing grew by 73 percent in real terms between 2000 and 2019, and total production of primary crops grew by 53 percent during the same period. Agriculture, they noted, employs 27 percent of the global workforce. [Real world fact: Increased levels of carbon dioxide over the past three decades have caused an 11 percent increase in green foliage over the globe’s arid regions.]

Part of this grand scheme has already been playing out in the Netherlands, where the government in 2022 announced a plan to buy up and close down up to 3,000 farms “near environmentally sensitive areas” to comply with European Union nature preservation rules. Specifically, agriculture is responsible for about half of nitrogen emissions that are alleged to be causing the disappearance of native species.

The European People’s Party stood up for the farmers, calling agriculture a “strategic sector” that delivers food security in Europe and beyond and plays a crucial role for the vitality and economies of rural communities.

The EPP set its sights against the proposed Nature Restoration law, noting that the implementation of existing nature legislation has led to bureaucratic nightmares and planning deadlocks that have endangered rural economic viability, food security, renewable energy production, and crucial infrastructure. Such laws, said the EPP, are a direct assault on property rights, and taking 10 percent of farmland out of production would be extremely irresponsible.

In March, to the chagrin of the planners, the farmer-citizen movement (BBB), created in 2019 in the wake of widespread farmer protests (tractors blocking highways, for example), won 15 seats in the Dutch Senate with almost 20 percent of the vote. The BBB’s aim is to fight the government plan to force farmers off their lands, reduce livestock and crop production – that is, to protect their livelihoods from the foibles of urban disrespect for those who feed them.

The battle is on in Europe for the future of farming – and in a world dominated by urban politics, farmers and other rural residents whose livelihoods for centuries have been intertwined with those of farmers are viewed as just “not with it.” After all, urbanites today eat heavily processed foods and are being introduced to such delicacies as artificial meat and crickets.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Biden Administration is continuing his former boss’ war on agriculture. According to a “study” funded by a $10 million grant back in the Obama years, fine particulates (dust and soot emissions) from farm operations are killing 17,000 Americans annually. Poppycock, says the Union of Concerned Scientists, citing other studies claiming fine particulates kill between 100,000 and 200,000 people a year. Back in 2011 EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson claimed fine particulates were responsible for a fifth of all U.S. deaths.

In both Europe and the U.S., the eagerness of urban “intellectuals” (bureaucrats) to attack farmers and rural residents has increased as globalist institutions have grown in wealth and power. Concentrated power is easier for the very wealthy to influence, and just as with the pharmaceutical industry’s vaccine gambits surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, the rules government creates always seem to benefit the rich at the expense of the common people.

There is little profit to the wealthy in replacing aging water and wastewater and sewer lines, cleaning rivers and streams of accumulated pollution, or even providing running water to those in isolated communities. To the bureaucrat, there is nothing sexy about enabling the hoi polloi to enjoy water recreation in cleaned up lakes and streams. The regulations they impose on farmers and rural areas do not affect their lives.

In Europe and America – and in developing nations as well – people who live on and from the land are fighting to protect their homes and families from the “wisdom” of urban elites. This is, ultimately, the great battle of our day. [Note: AIs require neither food nor water for sustenance.]

Author

• Duggan Flanakin

  Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow. A former Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr. Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas. A brief history of his multifaceted career appears in his book, "Infinite Galaxies: Poems from the Dugout."