I haven’t watched the whole video yet but I feel confident enough in its value to go right ahead and offer the link. Also, sometimes things disappear almost instantly off the You Tube to never be found again.
One question comes to mind: are these farmers who are facing costs higher than even returns ( never even mind about ‘profit’) growing GMO shitcorn and GMO shitsoy shitbeans? Are they using the typical mainstream petrochemical cancer juice methods and inputs?
How are farmers who are growing FrankenFree CleanGenes shinolacorn and FrankenFree CleanGenes shinola soybeans doing? Do they have dedicated markets into which they can sell at a higher price? Are their material inputs costs and bills lower?
I just recently got back from the Acres USA Eco-Ag Conference for 2025, held in beautiful downtown Middleton which is on the outskirts of beautiful downtown Madison which is right in the middle of beautiful downtown Wisconsin. After a grand keynote talk among two celebratedly successful farmers, a member of the thousand-plus-member audience asked from the floor the following question: In these times of turmoil for farmers, were any of the farmers up on the stage experiencing any economic stress of their own? They all said they were experiencing no stress at all.
One was a thousand acre plus farmer. The other is a 5000 acre plus farmer.
Specialty markets. No stress at all.
Let the GMO Petrochemical Cancer-Juice mainstream farmers lose their farms. Let all of them lose it all. Let China, Bill Gates and J D Vance take all that land . . . which was the Trump Administration’s deliberate plan all along and right from the start.
Let the land stay vacant and un-agri-bizfarmed until new waves and cadres of Eco-Clean Bio-Correct non-toxic farmers are ready to take over all that land on their own terms. That is the only way I can see for agriculture in America to be repaired and restored.
There was something else I was able to notice at the Acres USA conference without being detectably nosy about it. And that was . . . how many Canadians came to this conference in the teeth of the Boycott America movement? And were/are they boycotting America generally and making a special exception for this conference? Or are they among the non-boycotters? I did not ask any of them about that because they did not come here for politicrappy chickenshit questions like that. They came for the farming science and farming practice. These conferences are indeed a College of Agronomical Knowledge.
So my feeling is that there were almost as many Canadians as usual at this conference. The biggest group was from Alberta, especially Northern Alberta. The next biggest group was from Prairie Canada in general other than Alberta. There were at least two farmers from Quebec. I think I heard there was a person from the Atlantic Maritimes. I don’t know about Ontario. Or Newfoundland.
There was also a Vendor Display Business Guy from Alberta. In an informal discussion after the conference was all done, around a table under some beers, I learned that he consults to farmers totalling a million acres or so. And that some of those farmers are using equipment bigger than anything i have heard of here in America. For example, liquid-inputs application booms spreading a hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip. Or boomtip to boomtip, if one prefers. And they have to get every operation right first time every time without delay or any hitch in the amazing feats of logistical performane necessary to even gather all these machines, inputs, etc. at the right place at the right time. And the growing season is a strict and rigid 120 days ( and maybe even less in some bad super-winter years). So they can’t take a single chance on the newest and shiniest theories, approaches, etc. He is working to bring them step by step slowly away from mainstream approaches towards the oldest tried-and-truest of the non-toxic parallel approaches. I learned some interesting stuff about conditions in the High North ( not far from Northwest Territories or the Yukon). And how to do what inputs and operations there and why. Hopefully I will be able to integrate and understand what I think I have learned from that informal discussathon.
free trade breeds cash crops for exports. see the pre civil war south. its a form of agriculture that ruins the land, and denies a countries ability to be food secure.
instead force those farmers into growing what we need. even if you have to pay them.
If people or government try to force the GMO cancer-juice shitfarmers to try growing any other way, they will just double-double down on their love for their sacred God-Emperor Trump. And they will violently resist any effort to change the way they farm.
The only “force” which would work would be the impersonal “force” of losing money, losing markets, losing farms, losing land. Seeing enough “fellow-shitfarmers” losing all they have might terrorize the remaining ones into adopting nice clean eco-green methods. IF! . . . that ever even happens, the parallel dissident farmers exemplified by the Acres USA community would be happy to help them learn the better way if any time even remains. Farmers like Gabe Brown ( 5,000 acres), Gary Zimmer ( 1,000 acres), Rick Clark of Indiana ( 1,200 or so acres) , Will Winter of Georgia ( a few hundred acres) and so few other farmers that they could all be named by name would be eager to help, teach and train.
But I don’t think that will happen. Most of the mainstream shitfarm agri-biz-land will pass into the strong hands of Bill Gates, China, Warren Buffet, J D Vance, and other such. That much ownership concentrated in so few hands would make it logistically easy for a Land Reform government to seize it all with zero compensation and re-homestead it all over again. But only to chemo-clean eco-green bio-correct farm-seekers. And some of that land could be given over to voluntary co-ops. Some could be given back to the Indian Nations which still legally own it under International Treaties with the United States Government. Some of it could be given back to the living descendants of the Black Farmers from whom it was stolen in the decades after the Civil War.
But I think this whole agri-historical cycle will just have to play itself out first, play itself out to the bitter end.
In the meantime, the ” food system” will bifurcate into a Mainstream Fake Shitfuud System growing fake shitfuud for the masses and a parallel Counter-Mainstream Real Shinolafood System growing real shinola food for the classes. And for those individual mass-member persons who are willing to go without something else in order to block out the money to buy real shinola food.
So what can the sort of people who read Ian Welsh do? Pay whatever price they have to in order to buy at least some real shinola food in order to keep some real shinola food growers in business; both as an ongoing source of real shinola food and as an example to those among their neighbors with eyes to see.
And there are already several million people paying a shinola price for shinola food who have never read Ian Welsh. So it is more than just we happy few.
Imagine 50 million suburbanites learning what shinola methods are and how to apply them to their own gardens in their own yards. That would be 50 million people coming to learn and sense the difference between shitfuud and shinolafood. Once they learn that difference, they may start squeezing or even strangling their budgets for whatever meager discretionary spending they have on non-food items in order to re-direct that meager discretionary income towards shinola food at a shinola price.
I think the proper approach for seekers-after-shinola-food is best laid out in this little article by Mark Ames called Elite Versus Elitny.
” Class War For Idiots / eXile Classic / November 29, 2009
Elite Versus Elitny
By Mark Ames ”
As Charles Walters Junior once wrote decades ago on the relevant page of a book he wrote called Angry Testament, the “house intellectual” for the National Farmers Organization, a man named Butch Swaim, once said . . . ” Before there can be a revolution, there first has to be a revolution between the ears”.
(Did Noam Chomsky ever hear of Butch Swaim? I doubt it. Did Noam Chomsky ever even hear of Charles Walters Junior? Probably not. But I feel confident that Charles Walters Junior heard of Noam Chomsky.)
Here is what appears to be a readable pdf of that book, if you are willing to create an account for yourself in order to “borrow” it for downloading and reading. it may be free but the very top of the screen hosts an earnest request for money to help keep the lights on and the churchmice fed . . . which only seems fair. https://archive.org/details/angrytestament0000char/page/366/mode/2up
Here is something I just saw called: ” Memphis-based Black farmers’ group opting out of Trump administration assistance program “. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsTDrT-IIbE
I am not sure I understand this and I suspect there is much that hasn’t been explained.
This seems to be worth understanding and following over time.
Several months ago I saw a you tube titled in part ” Black Farmers boycott the United States” and then some other words. In the comments someone offered a website to a very complete list of Black farmers and how to possibly contact them for buying food.
I didn’t offer it at the time and then it disappeared never to be findable again, at least by me. That is why I sometimes offer hopefully-useful You Tubes before the situation has ripened to full relevance, because they are often a use it Right Now or lose it Forever situation.
I suspect Black farmers are likely to be antiMAGA. Some other categories of farmers may be antiMAGA as well. Or at least nonMAGA. Directing more food-purchasing money towards them and away from MAGA farmers could help weaken an economic pillar of MAGA power and strengthen an economic pillar of antiMAGA. And since we are in for a multi-decades-long grinding Cultural and Economic Civil Cold War at the very least, we have to do what we can to attrit and degrade MAGAmerica by supporting antiMAGAmerica. One side will eventually survive by crushing the other side into functional social and economic extinction. Which side is one on?
That said, we live in an impure world and so I am an impurist. Actually, we live in a very impure world so I am a very impure impurist. What that means to me is that, since supporting chemo-clean cancer-free agriculture against petrochemical cancer-juice agriculture is the most important thing to me in the food sector; if I am faced with the binary choice in any one particular situation or another of either buying eco-clean biologically-correct food from a MAGA farmer or buying eco-filthy biologically perverted petrochemical cancer-juice food from an antiMAGA farmer . . . I will buy the clean safety food from the MAGA farmer . . . in that particular instance.
Supporting eco-agriculture is the Primest Directive of all to me.
You were seeing a lot of Albertans because the opposition to US policy is lowest there, in the broader Alberta population largely due to the fact that their economic mainstay is viewed as less vulnerable to tariff pressures and because they are so incredibly pissed off (with justification) at a central Canadian consensus that has it’s head so far up its ass that it can see daylight at the end of the tunnel. (As a Westerner living undercover in the East, I’d say that watching Carney cut Guilbeault was the most personally satisfying political event I’ve witnessed in years if I hadn’t also seen him quietly blade Freedland two months prior.)
Northern Alberta – I assume you met folks from up near Peace River if they have operations of any significant size – is solid, solid Reform Party country, (Reform later merged with the Progressive Conservatives to form the right wing of the current Conservative Party of Canada). Politically and culturally, they would be among the least likely groups in the country to boycott US travel. Hell, the area broke something like >10% for the People’s Party – surprised they weren’t taking the opportunity of being abroad to break out the MAGA hats. Like much of the rest of the conservative movement they’ve lost sight of what conservatism is about and are mainly adherents because it speaks to their religious and cultural beliefs and because the gutless centre of the party is willing to sacrifice principle when it comes to keeping their support. (Sorry, was starting to get a bit ranty there…)
In terms of the farming, what I think you view as bigger operations are the norm where I’m from (Saskatchewan). Average for the province is sitting around 1,500 acres – and that includes a raft of hobby farmers. Back when my Dad was still in the game, we were right up there in terms of acreage but the big boys are now significantly bigger, running 15 to 20 thousand acres or more.
All of that is constant crop because the land (among the best in the world for our crops) and the inputs make it possible – as an example, folks around us are pretty reliably punching out 70 bushel an acre wheat (with one friend who’s still in the game confiding that they did over 100 [!] on some land this year). I’ll take high input, constant crop all day long – I’ve seen starvation and it sucks.
I have a couple of shares this sunny, cold morning. One is related to all the dc posts about shit chemical corn and Trump destroying US farming with tariffs, then pretending to come to the rescue of farmers– after specifically helping Argentine beef farmers undercut US beef farmers (their product also full of hormones, bleach and other chemicals) with a giant subsidy given to the Millei government of tens of millions of US tax dollars. Here’s the Donald at a small campaign rally. As covered by Due Dissidence, Suzie Wiles made him go out on the campaign trail; all of 700 hooting MAGA CHUDS showed up to hear about Trump admin “affordability” scams, so they had to put up a big curtain and cut the room in half to make it look crowded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGcu2XeTxXM&t=653s
He couldn’t stay on script about “affordability” with his blatant lies that “the economy is Great, prices are going down, we have never been so great people are saying I’m better than Washington, Lincoln”, etc. So he went off on a tangent about how he threw some of the “hundreds of billions” we’re making on tariffs to help the farmers so now they are doing “great” and so relieved. Which meant things weren’t going good, accidental reveal.
But he couldn’t stay on topic and soon devolved into the Ku Klux Klan hour with long riffs about how subhuman Somalis and Afghans and Ilhan Omar are which got the mouth-breathers all riled up. He pronounced Ilhan as “Elon”, a rather interesting Freudian slip.
Then he dug way back into the Fox News culture war bag and dragged out “the War on Christmas” from 2015 and blathered on and on. One would think given how government support for Zionist Ideology is central to his admin, this is a little off cue, should the Zionist snowflakes have to hear “Merry Christmas” and nothing about Hannukah?
This morning Business Insider did a dog bites man story, actually a story about a Fish (US Society) rotting from the head down. Consumers have started “stealing” from their corporate masters because they know they are getting ripped off and turnabout is fair play. It’s not just actual criminals either it’s middle class people who are frustrated and angry about the lack of . . . affordability under Trump just as under brain-bleed Biden. Shocking!! How dare they not know who has a license to steal and who shouldn’t?
Lastly, speaking of scams, Zelensky wants to resist holding elections as corruption scandal are pushing Uncle Sugar to push him out of power. It’s the eternal Victim Card in the Fascist Ukraine, the Constitution said he had the right to declare Martial Law due to the “unprovoked” Russian “invasion” after they outlawed speaking Russian, referred to Russian-speakers as “creatures”, put up statues to Hitler’s pal Stepan Bandera after tearing down the ones to victory in the Great Patriotic War or with Catherine the Great in them, etc. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/pressure-zelenskyy-trump-election-war-rcna248611?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
The “Servant of the People” party serves them with eternal, losing war. It’s named for a TV program with a cocaine comedian, so we all know how Legit it is and how well it’s served Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, etc. and not the Ukrainians, esp. the men who get grabbed off the streets and thrown into vans and then are given a gun with no training and are on the front, dead or permanently injured, within less than a week . . .
Oh, yesterday a couple of sources, Yanis Varoufakis and a masterful presentation by Colonel Douglas MacGregor, covered how Russia has opened a “corridor to Odessa” and will soon have that as part of Russia (& linking up to the Moldova-Transnistria border) within some months, along with the other 4 or 5 provinces that will be taken up to the Dnieper, plus Crimea, etc. Heck of a job Ms. Lindsey Cracker Graham and all the NeoCons.
Col Doug Macgregor | Russia Opens the Odessa Corridor — NATO’s Worst Fear Begins – YouTube
Many commenters claim this is AI because he doesn’t cough or clear his throat. This is likely true. Yet clearly it is his research, writing and ideas, so I don’t think this is “fake news” or wrong. I’m not a fan of AI but I think if it was used to improve his delivery that is not the end of the world.
I pause from plucking parley leaves from stems preparatory to making a pesto to comment on a piece of PBS propaganda titled: Seizure of rogue oil
tanker off Venezuela signals new US crackdown on shadow fleet
With a headline like that, you know what’s coming. The article is filled with phrases like strongman Maduro; illicit cargos from Russia; world’s worst actors; blatant violation of the rules, etc etc. Without context you’d think they were talking about the Trump administration, but this muck was presented with no sense of irony.
Pathetic as Ian might say.
I don’t know why I bothered looking at that article. Must be a masochistic tendency. Now back to more contemplative and healthy pursuits.
A most pleasant and propaganda free Sunday morning to anyone who may be reading this.
and look what bill clinton did to small family farms in japan. lucky japan did not buckle, their rice surplus feed a lot of people when Thailand’s rice crops failed due to drought.
everything clinton did was to exert corporate control over the worlds populations. lucky japan used tariffs and other barriers to protect their small farmers.
“Bill Clinton’s trade policies, particularly during his presidency, aimed to open Japanese markets for U.S. agricultural products, which included rice. However, these policies have been criticized for negatively impacting small farmers in both Japan and Haiti, as they often favored larger agribusiness interests over local producers. Democracy Now! National Archives
Bill Clinton’s Impact on Japanese Rice Farmers
Trade Policies and Their Effects
During Bill Clinton’s presidency, trade policies significantly affected agricultural markets, including rice farming in Japan. His administration aimed to open Japanese markets to U.S. agricultural products, which included negotiating trade agreements that favored American exports.
Consequences for Japanese Farmers
Increased Competition: U.S. rice exports, supported by subsidies, created intense competition for local Japanese rice farmers. This led to challenges in maintaining their livelihoods.
Market Access: While Clinton’s policies aimed to enhance market access for U.S. products, they often resulted in Japanese farmers struggling to compete against cheaper imported rice.
Long-term Implications
The emphasis on U.S. agricultural exports under Clinton’s administration has had lasting effects on the agricultural landscape in Japan. Many small farmers faced difficulties sustaining their operations due to the influx of subsidized foreign rice, which undermined local production efforts.
Overall, Clinton’s trade policies, while beneficial for some U.S. farmers, posed significant challenges for small rice farmers in Japan, highlighting the complexities of international trade and its impact on local economies.”
again, without subsides and barriers, this could not have been accomplished. clinton types went haywire over this, i remember it well.
The result was the Malawi Revolution, a revolt against the supposedly “free trade” conditions set by foreign-aid donors. Malawi’s president defied the World Bank and subsidized fertilizer and seed — a course of action that has lifted farmers from poverty, nearly tripling crop outputs in two years.
— https://fpif.org/free_trade_doesnt_help_agriculture/
First we need to dismantle one of the great myths that free trade helps farmers and the poor. It does not! Attempts to leave farmers at the mercy of the free market only hasten their demise.
The focus on export crops for trade has meant increasing yields, with farmers becoming dependent on chemical inputs. Many have stopped rotating their crops, instead devoting every acre to corn, wheat, or some other commodity crop and creating vast monocultures that require still more chemicals to be sustained.
This has destroyed our biodiversity. Vast industrial farms require costly equipment for planting and harvesting, increasing the capital intensity of agriculture. As costs rise, prices fall in markets flush with surplus.
As prices fall, farmers need subsidies, which are available to big growers and agribusiness only. Land values and cash rents increase. This encourages heavy borrowing.
Rich landowners get richer and young farmers cannot afford to get started. An agricultural bubble economy is created. Inevitably it crashes as subsidies fail to keep pace with falling crop prices. Farms go bankrupt. Free trade in agriculture starves our farmers.
——
Reality: Large landowners who control most of the best land often leave much of it idle. Unjust farming systems leave farmland in the hands of the most inefficient producers. By contrast, small farmers typically achieve at least four to five times greater output per acre, in part because they work their land more intensively and use integrated, and often more sustainable, production systems. Without secure tenure, the many millions of tenant farmers in the Third World have little incentive to invest in land improvements, to rotate crops, or to leave land fallow for the sake of long-term soil fertility. Future food production is undermined. On the other hand, redistribution of land can favor production. Comprehensive land reform has markedly increased production in countries as diverse as Japan, Zimbabwe, and Taiwan. A World Bank study of northeast Brazil estimates that redistributing farmland into smaller holdings would raise output an astonishing 80 per cent.
Myth 7: The free market can end hunger
Reality: Unfortunately, such a “market-is-good, government-is-bad” formula can never help address the causes of hunger. Such a dogmatic stance misleads us that a society can opt for one or the other, when in fact every economy on earth combines the market and government in allocating resources and distributing goods. The market’s marvelous efficiencies can only work to eliminate hunger, however, when purchasing power is widely dispersed. So all those who believe in the usefulness of the market and the necessity of ending hunger must concentrate on promoting not the market, but the consumers! In this task, government has a vital role to play in countering the tendency towards economic concentration, through genuine tax, credit, and land reforms, to disperse buying power towards the poor. Recent trends towards privatization and deregulation are most definitely not the answer.
Myth 8: Free trade is the answer
Reality: The trade promotion formula has proved an abject failure at alleviating hunger. In most Third World countries exports have boomed while hunger has continued unabated or actually worsened. While soybean exports boomed in Brazil – to feed Japanese and European livestock – hunger spread from one-third to two-thirds of the population. Where the majority of people have been made too poor to buy the food grown on their own country’s soil, those who control productive resources will, not surprisingly, orient their production to more lucrative markets abroad. Export-crop production squeezes out basic food production. Pro-trade policies like NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) and GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) pit working people in different countries against each other in a ërace to the bottom’, where the basis of competition is who will work for less, without adequate health coverage or minimum environmental standards. Mexico and the US are cases in point: since NAFTA, the US has had a net loss of 250,000 jobs, while Mexico has lost 2 million, and hunger is on the rise in both countries.
————– https://maryknollogc.org/statements/trading-justice-local-impact-global-economic-decisions
Costs of trade: Rather than experiencing real benefits from trade liberalization and intense promotion of international trade, the most impoverished people with whom we live and work and the environment are bearing the burden of the process. In many countries we have seen good laws meant to protect the worker and the environment weakened or ignored. We have seen whole sectors of the economy in which poor people were participating, such as small scale and subsistence farming and small, locally owned businesses, destroyed.
Integrity of creation: The environment is also threatened by trade agreements that see environmental protection laws as trade barriers or promote unsustainable development such as highly industrialized, mono-crop farming of cash crops for export. This type of farming is usually wrought with environmental consequences as the small farmer’s intimate connection to the land is lost and with it a theology of care for creation and knowledge of the most locally-appropriate and sustainable farming practices. In the Philippines an integrated economy that enabled people to live has been replaced by banana exports where people work on land that they do not own earning not enough money to live a dignified life as before. Deforestation and clear cutting for profit or to make way for large single crop fields also threaten the loss of animal habitats, desertification in once-fertile areas, and the intensification of damage from natural disasters.
—————— https://divinista.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/422/
How the Global Food Market Starves the Poor
———————-
Lincoln knew tariffs would crush the cash crop slave economy in the south.
FDR imposed protective tariffs to favor agro-industrial recovery on all fronts ending years of rapacious free trade.
—————–
without tariffs and a muscular new deal. a good chunk of americas farmland is geared to selling to china, whats called cash crops. we now import 64% of our food. thanks bill clinton.
and farmland all over the world is being geared for the same thing.
so why do these cash crop corporate farmers think that their crop is better than someone else’s?
the chinese will most likely buy where its the cheapest. so i am sure the cash crop farmers in north america will need slaves, just like the south had to compete.
we can see we were going in that direction years ago. today the homeless are not victims of free trade capitalism, they are considered criminals against free trade capitalism.
the new deal would not have worked without the smoot-hawley tariffs, and the smoot-hawley tariffs would not have worked without the new deal.
Here is another catastrofucking decomplishment imposed on Haiti: the effective extermination of the Haitian ( ” cares-for-itself”) Creole Pig and the forced demolition of the Haitian ag-system/culture that depended on that pig. I had always thought that this was another of Clinton’s gifts that keep on giving , but the timeline of this initiative seems to be from before the Clinton period.
Here is a video which would best belong in the by-now some-time-ago ” What Black folks are thinking” post. But commenting access on that post was welded shut by passing time, so I bring it here.
I only just for the first time heard about the concept and actions of “delineation” , the emerging acronym ” FBA” ( for ” Foundational Black Americans”), etc. I think these things will become more widely known of over the next few years and we will see if it has an undeniable impact or not.
different clue
Here is a little video about ” Governor Of Iowa PANICS After Corn Farm Prices Reach All Time Low!
Farm Report
10K subscribers ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaHyseMca4g
I haven’t watched the whole video yet but I feel confident enough in its value to go right ahead and offer the link. Also, sometimes things disappear almost instantly off the You Tube to never be found again.
One question comes to mind: are these farmers who are facing costs higher than even returns ( never even mind about ‘profit’) growing GMO shitcorn and GMO shitsoy shitbeans? Are they using the typical mainstream petrochemical cancer juice methods and inputs?
How are farmers who are growing FrankenFree CleanGenes shinolacorn and FrankenFree CleanGenes shinola soybeans doing? Do they have dedicated markets into which they can sell at a higher price? Are their material inputs costs and bills lower?
I just recently got back from the Acres USA Eco-Ag Conference for 2025, held in beautiful downtown Middleton which is on the outskirts of beautiful downtown Madison which is right in the middle of beautiful downtown Wisconsin. After a grand keynote talk among two celebratedly successful farmers, a member of the thousand-plus-member audience asked from the floor the following question: In these times of turmoil for farmers, were any of the farmers up on the stage experiencing any economic stress of their own? They all said they were experiencing no stress at all.
One was a thousand acre plus farmer. The other is a 5000 acre plus farmer.
Specialty markets. No stress at all.
Let the GMO Petrochemical Cancer-Juice mainstream farmers lose their farms. Let all of them lose it all. Let China, Bill Gates and J D Vance take all that land . . . which was the Trump Administration’s deliberate plan all along and right from the start.
Let the land stay vacant and un-agri-bizfarmed until new waves and cadres of Eco-Clean Bio-Correct non-toxic farmers are ready to take over all that land on their own terms. That is the only way I can see for agriculture in America to be repaired and restored.
mago
Well, hey dc, you said a mouthful. May it be so.
different clue
There was something else I was able to notice at the Acres USA conference without being detectably nosy about it. And that was . . . how many Canadians came to this conference in the teeth of the Boycott America movement? And were/are they boycotting America generally and making a special exception for this conference? Or are they among the non-boycotters? I did not ask any of them about that because they did not come here for politicrappy chickenshit questions like that. They came for the farming science and farming practice. These conferences are indeed a College of Agronomical Knowledge.
So my feeling is that there were almost as many Canadians as usual at this conference. The biggest group was from Alberta, especially Northern Alberta. The next biggest group was from Prairie Canada in general other than Alberta. There were at least two farmers from Quebec. I think I heard there was a person from the Atlantic Maritimes. I don’t know about Ontario. Or Newfoundland.
There was also a Vendor Display Business Guy from Alberta. In an informal discussion after the conference was all done, around a table under some beers, I learned that he consults to farmers totalling a million acres or so. And that some of those farmers are using equipment bigger than anything i have heard of here in America. For example, liquid-inputs application booms spreading a hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip. Or boomtip to boomtip, if one prefers. And they have to get every operation right first time every time without delay or any hitch in the amazing feats of logistical performane necessary to even gather all these machines, inputs, etc. at the right place at the right time. And the growing season is a strict and rigid 120 days ( and maybe even less in some bad super-winter years). So they can’t take a single chance on the newest and shiniest theories, approaches, etc. He is working to bring them step by step slowly away from mainstream approaches towards the oldest tried-and-truest of the non-toxic parallel approaches. I learned some interesting stuff about conditions in the High North ( not far from Northwest Territories or the Yukon). And how to do what inputs and operations there and why. Hopefully I will be able to integrate and understand what I think I have learned from that informal discussathon.
spud
free trade breeds cash crops for exports. see the pre civil war south. its a form of agriculture that ruins the land, and denies a countries ability to be food secure.
instead force those farmers into growing what we need. even if you have to pay them.
different clue
@Spud,
If people or government try to force the GMO cancer-juice shitfarmers to try growing any other way, they will just double-double down on their love for their sacred God-Emperor Trump. And they will violently resist any effort to change the way they farm.
The only “force” which would work would be the impersonal “force” of losing money, losing markets, losing farms, losing land. Seeing enough “fellow-shitfarmers” losing all they have might terrorize the remaining ones into adopting nice clean eco-green methods. IF! . . . that ever even happens, the parallel dissident farmers exemplified by the Acres USA community would be happy to help them learn the better way if any time even remains. Farmers like Gabe Brown ( 5,000 acres), Gary Zimmer ( 1,000 acres), Rick Clark of Indiana ( 1,200 or so acres) , Will Winter of Georgia ( a few hundred acres) and so few other farmers that they could all be named by name would be eager to help, teach and train.
But I don’t think that will happen. Most of the mainstream shitfarm agri-biz-land will pass into the strong hands of Bill Gates, China, Warren Buffet, J D Vance, and other such. That much ownership concentrated in so few hands would make it logistically easy for a Land Reform government to seize it all with zero compensation and re-homestead it all over again. But only to chemo-clean eco-green bio-correct farm-seekers. And some of that land could be given over to voluntary co-ops. Some could be given back to the Indian Nations which still legally own it under International Treaties with the United States Government. Some of it could be given back to the living descendants of the Black Farmers from whom it was stolen in the decades after the Civil War.
But I think this whole agri-historical cycle will just have to play itself out first, play itself out to the bitter end.
In the meantime, the ” food system” will bifurcate into a Mainstream Fake Shitfuud System growing fake shitfuud for the masses and a parallel Counter-Mainstream Real Shinolafood System growing real shinola food for the classes. And for those individual mass-member persons who are willing to go without something else in order to block out the money to buy real shinola food.
So what can the sort of people who read Ian Welsh do? Pay whatever price they have to in order to buy at least some real shinola food in order to keep some real shinola food growers in business; both as an ongoing source of real shinola food and as an example to those among their neighbors with eyes to see.
And there are already several million people paying a shinola price for shinola food who have never read Ian Welsh. So it is more than just we happy few.
Imagine 50 million suburbanites learning what shinola methods are and how to apply them to their own gardens in their own yards. That would be 50 million people coming to learn and sense the difference between shitfuud and shinolafood. Once they learn that difference, they may start squeezing or even strangling their budgets for whatever meager discretionary spending they have on non-food items in order to re-direct that meager discretionary income towards shinola food at a shinola price.
I think the proper approach for seekers-after-shinola-food is best laid out in this little article by Mark Ames called Elite Versus Elitny.
” Class War For Idiots / eXile Classic / November 29, 2009
Elite Versus Elitny
By Mark Ames ”
https://exiledonline.com/elite-versus-elitny/
As Charles Walters Junior once wrote decades ago on the relevant page of a book he wrote called Angry Testament, the “house intellectual” for the National Farmers Organization, a man named Butch Swaim, once said . . . ” Before there can be a revolution, there first has to be a revolution between the ears”.
(Did Noam Chomsky ever hear of Butch Swaim? I doubt it. Did Noam Chomsky ever even hear of Charles Walters Junior? Probably not. But I feel confident that Charles Walters Junior heard of Noam Chomsky.)
” Angry Testament by Charles Jr. Walters”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126833600-angry-testament
Here is what appears to be a readable pdf of that book, if you are willing to create an account for yourself in order to “borrow” it for downloading and reading. it may be free but the very top of the screen hosts an earnest request for money to help keep the lights on and the churchmice fed . . . which only seems fair.
https://archive.org/details/angrytestament0000char/page/366/mode/2up
different clue
Here is something I just saw called: ” Memphis-based Black farmers’ group opting out of Trump administration assistance program “.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsTDrT-IIbE
I am not sure I understand this and I suspect there is much that hasn’t been explained.
This seems to be worth understanding and following over time.
Several months ago I saw a you tube titled in part ” Black Farmers boycott the United States” and then some other words. In the comments someone offered a website to a very complete list of Black farmers and how to possibly contact them for buying food.
I didn’t offer it at the time and then it disappeared never to be findable again, at least by me. That is why I sometimes offer hopefully-useful You Tubes before the situation has ripened to full relevance, because they are often a use it Right Now or lose it Forever situation.
I suspect Black farmers are likely to be antiMAGA. Some other categories of farmers may be antiMAGA as well. Or at least nonMAGA. Directing more food-purchasing money towards them and away from MAGA farmers could help weaken an economic pillar of MAGA power and strengthen an economic pillar of antiMAGA. And since we are in for a multi-decades-long grinding Cultural and Economic Civil Cold War at the very least, we have to do what we can to attrit and degrade MAGAmerica by supporting antiMAGAmerica. One side will eventually survive by crushing the other side into functional social and economic extinction. Which side is one on?
That said, we live in an impure world and so I am an impurist. Actually, we live in a very impure world so I am a very impure impurist. What that means to me is that, since supporting chemo-clean cancer-free agriculture against petrochemical cancer-juice agriculture is the most important thing to me in the food sector; if I am faced with the binary choice in any one particular situation or another of either buying eco-clean biologically-correct food from a MAGA farmer or buying eco-filthy biologically perverted petrochemical cancer-juice food from an antiMAGA farmer . . . I will buy the clean safety food from the MAGA farmer . . . in that particular instance.
Supporting eco-agriculture is the Primest Directive of all to me.
Carborundum
A lot to unpack there DC.
You were seeing a lot of Albertans because the opposition to US policy is lowest there, in the broader Alberta population largely due to the fact that their economic mainstay is viewed as less vulnerable to tariff pressures and because they are so incredibly pissed off (with justification) at a central Canadian consensus that has it’s head so far up its ass that it can see daylight at the end of the tunnel. (As a Westerner living undercover in the East, I’d say that watching Carney cut Guilbeault was the most personally satisfying political event I’ve witnessed in years if I hadn’t also seen him quietly blade Freedland two months prior.)
Northern Alberta – I assume you met folks from up near Peace River if they have operations of any significant size – is solid, solid Reform Party country, (Reform later merged with the Progressive Conservatives to form the right wing of the current Conservative Party of Canada). Politically and culturally, they would be among the least likely groups in the country to boycott US travel. Hell, the area broke something like >10% for the People’s Party – surprised they weren’t taking the opportunity of being abroad to break out the MAGA hats. Like much of the rest of the conservative movement they’ve lost sight of what conservatism is about and are mainly adherents because it speaks to their religious and cultural beliefs and because the gutless centre of the party is willing to sacrifice principle when it comes to keeping their support. (Sorry, was starting to get a bit ranty there…)
In terms of the farming, what I think you view as bigger operations are the norm where I’m from (Saskatchewan). Average for the province is sitting around 1,500 acres – and that includes a raft of hobby farmers. Back when my Dad was still in the game, we were right up there in terms of acreage but the big boys are now significantly bigger, running 15 to 20 thousand acres or more.
All of that is constant crop because the land (among the best in the world for our crops) and the inputs make it possible – as an example, folks around us are pretty reliably punching out 70 bushel an acre wheat (with one friend who’s still in the game confiding that they did over 100 [!] on some land this year). I’ll take high input, constant crop all day long – I’ve seen starvation and it sucks.
Mark Level
I have a couple of shares this sunny, cold morning. One is related to all the dc posts about shit chemical corn and Trump destroying US farming with tariffs, then pretending to come to the rescue of farmers– after specifically helping Argentine beef farmers undercut US beef farmers (their product also full of hormones, bleach and other chemicals) with a giant subsidy given to the Millei government of tens of millions of US tax dollars. Here’s the Donald at a small campaign rally. As covered by Due Dissidence, Suzie Wiles made him go out on the campaign trail; all of 700 hooting MAGA CHUDS showed up to hear about Trump admin “affordability” scams, so they had to put up a big curtain and cut the room in half to make it look crowded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGcu2XeTxXM&t=653s
He couldn’t stay on script about “affordability” with his blatant lies that “the economy is Great, prices are going down, we have never been so great people are saying I’m better than Washington, Lincoln”, etc. So he went off on a tangent about how he threw some of the “hundreds of billions” we’re making on tariffs to help the farmers so now they are doing “great” and so relieved. Which meant things weren’t going good, accidental reveal.
But he couldn’t stay on topic and soon devolved into the Ku Klux Klan hour with long riffs about how subhuman Somalis and Afghans and Ilhan Omar are which got the mouth-breathers all riled up. He pronounced Ilhan as “Elon”, a rather interesting Freudian slip.
Then he dug way back into the Fox News culture war bag and dragged out “the War on Christmas” from 2015 and blathered on and on. One would think given how government support for Zionist Ideology is central to his admin, this is a little off cue, should the Zionist snowflakes have to hear “Merry Christmas” and nothing about Hannukah?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
This morning Business Insider did a dog bites man story, actually a story about a Fish (US Society) rotting from the head down. Consumers have started “stealing” from their corporate masters because they know they are getting ripped off and turnabout is fair play. It’s not just actual criminals either it’s middle class people who are frustrated and angry about the lack of . . . affordability under Trump just as under brain-bleed Biden. Shocking!! How dare they not know who has a license to steal and who shouldn’t?
https://www.businessinsider.com/shoplifting-return-fraud-scams-consumer-crimes-amazon-retail-2025-12?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Lastly, speaking of scams, Zelensky wants to resist holding elections as corruption scandal are pushing Uncle Sugar to push him out of power. It’s the eternal Victim Card in the Fascist Ukraine, the Constitution said he had the right to declare Martial Law due to the “unprovoked” Russian “invasion” after they outlawed speaking Russian, referred to Russian-speakers as “creatures”, put up statues to Hitler’s pal Stepan Bandera after tearing down the ones to victory in the Great Patriotic War or with Catherine the Great in them, etc. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/pressure-zelenskyy-trump-election-war-rcna248611?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
The “Servant of the People” party serves them with eternal, losing war. It’s named for a TV program with a cocaine comedian, so we all know how Legit it is and how well it’s served Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, etc. and not the Ukrainians, esp. the men who get grabbed off the streets and thrown into vans and then are given a gun with no training and are on the front, dead or permanently injured, within less than a week . . .
Oh, yesterday a couple of sources, Yanis Varoufakis and a masterful presentation by Colonel Douglas MacGregor, covered how Russia has opened a “corridor to Odessa” and will soon have that as part of Russia (& linking up to the Moldova-Transnistria border) within some months, along with the other 4 or 5 provinces that will be taken up to the Dnieper, plus Crimea, etc. Heck of a job Ms. Lindsey Cracker Graham and all the NeoCons.
Col Doug Macgregor | Russia Opens the Odessa Corridor — NATO’s Worst Fear Begins – YouTube
Mark Level
In case the MacGregor link doesn’t work, try this– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwgeUSxvAgc&t=1608s
Many commenters claim this is AI because he doesn’t cough or clear his throat. This is likely true. Yet clearly it is his research, writing and ideas, so I don’t think this is “fake news” or wrong. I’m not a fan of AI but I think if it was used to improve his delivery that is not the end of the world.
mago
I pause from plucking parley leaves from stems preparatory to making a pesto to comment on a piece of PBS propaganda titled: Seizure of rogue oil
tanker off Venezuela signals new US crackdown on shadow fleet
With a headline like that, you know what’s coming. The article is filled with phrases like strongman Maduro; illicit cargos from Russia; world’s worst actors; blatant violation of the rules, etc etc. Without context you’d think they were talking about the Trump administration, but this muck was presented with no sense of irony.
Pathetic as Ian might say.
I don’t know why I bothered looking at that article. Must be a masochistic tendency. Now back to more contemplative and healthy pursuits.
A most pleasant and propaganda free Sunday morning to anyone who may be reading this.
spud
different clue,
agreed, i should have added land reform.
and look what bill clinton did to small family farms in japan. lucky japan did not buckle, their rice surplus feed a lot of people when Thailand’s rice crops failed due to drought.
everything clinton did was to exert corporate control over the worlds populations. lucky japan used tariffs and other barriers to protect their small farmers.
“Bill Clinton’s trade policies, particularly during his presidency, aimed to open Japanese markets for U.S. agricultural products, which included rice. However, these policies have been criticized for negatively impacting small farmers in both Japan and Haiti, as they often favored larger agribusiness interests over local producers. Democracy Now! National Archives
Bill Clinton’s Impact on Japanese Rice Farmers
Trade Policies and Their Effects
During Bill Clinton’s presidency, trade policies significantly affected agricultural markets, including rice farming in Japan. His administration aimed to open Japanese markets to U.S. agricultural products, which included negotiating trade agreements that favored American exports.
Consequences for Japanese Farmers
Increased Competition: U.S. rice exports, supported by subsidies, created intense competition for local Japanese rice farmers. This led to challenges in maintaining their livelihoods.
Market Access: While Clinton’s policies aimed to enhance market access for U.S. products, they often resulted in Japanese farmers struggling to compete against cheaper imported rice.
Long-term Implications
The emphasis on U.S. agricultural exports under Clinton’s administration has had lasting effects on the agricultural landscape in Japan. Many small farmers faced difficulties sustaining their operations due to the influx of subsidized foreign rice, which undermined local production efforts.
Overall, Clinton’s trade policies, while beneficial for some U.S. farmers, posed significant challenges for small rice farmers in Japan, highlighting the complexities of international trade and its impact on local economies.”
again, without subsides and barriers, this could not have been accomplished. clinton types went haywire over this, i remember it well.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jan-09-oe-barber9-story.html
Malawi’s ‘free trade’ revolt
The result was the Malawi Revolution, a revolt against the supposedly “free trade” conditions set by foreign-aid donors. Malawi’s president defied the World Bank and subsidized fertilizer and seed — a course of action that has lifted farmers from poverty, nearly tripling crop outputs in two years.
—
https://fpif.org/free_trade_doesnt_help_agriculture/
First we need to dismantle one of the great myths that free trade helps farmers and the poor. It does not! Attempts to leave farmers at the mercy of the free market only hasten their demise.
The focus on export crops for trade has meant increasing yields, with farmers becoming dependent on chemical inputs. Many have stopped rotating their crops, instead devoting every acre to corn, wheat, or some other commodity crop and creating vast monocultures that require still more chemicals to be sustained.
This has destroyed our biodiversity. Vast industrial farms require costly equipment for planting and harvesting, increasing the capital intensity of agriculture. As costs rise, prices fall in markets flush with surplus.
As prices fall, farmers need subsidies, which are available to big growers and agribusiness only. Land values and cash rents increase. This encourages heavy borrowing.
Rich landowners get richer and young farmers cannot afford to get started. An agricultural bubble economy is created. Inevitably it crashes as subsidies fail to keep pace with falling crop prices. Farms go bankrupt. Free trade in agriculture starves our farmers.
——
https://www.share-international.info/archives/hunger_poverty/hp_12myths.htm
Myth 6: We need large farms
Reality: Large landowners who control most of the best land often leave much of it idle. Unjust farming systems leave farmland in the hands of the most inefficient producers. By contrast, small farmers typically achieve at least four to five times greater output per acre, in part because they work their land more intensively and use integrated, and often more sustainable, production systems. Without secure tenure, the many millions of tenant farmers in the Third World have little incentive to invest in land improvements, to rotate crops, or to leave land fallow for the sake of long-term soil fertility. Future food production is undermined. On the other hand, redistribution of land can favor production. Comprehensive land reform has markedly increased production in countries as diverse as Japan, Zimbabwe, and Taiwan. A World Bank study of northeast Brazil estimates that redistributing farmland into smaller holdings would raise output an astonishing 80 per cent.
Myth 7: The free market can end hunger
Reality: Unfortunately, such a “market-is-good, government-is-bad” formula can never help address the causes of hunger. Such a dogmatic stance misleads us that a society can opt for one or the other, when in fact every economy on earth combines the market and government in allocating resources and distributing goods. The market’s marvelous efficiencies can only work to eliminate hunger, however, when purchasing power is widely dispersed. So all those who believe in the usefulness of the market and the necessity of ending hunger must concentrate on promoting not the market, but the consumers! In this task, government has a vital role to play in countering the tendency towards economic concentration, through genuine tax, credit, and land reforms, to disperse buying power towards the poor. Recent trends towards privatization and deregulation are most definitely not the answer.
Myth 8: Free trade is the answer
Reality: The trade promotion formula has proved an abject failure at alleviating hunger. In most Third World countries exports have boomed while hunger has continued unabated or actually worsened. While soybean exports boomed in Brazil – to feed Japanese and European livestock – hunger spread from one-third to two-thirds of the population. Where the majority of people have been made too poor to buy the food grown on their own country’s soil, those who control productive resources will, not surprisingly, orient their production to more lucrative markets abroad. Export-crop production squeezes out basic food production. Pro-trade policies like NAFTA (North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement) and GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) pit working people in different countries against each other in a ërace to the bottom’, where the basis of competition is who will work for less, without adequate health coverage or minimum environmental standards. Mexico and the US are cases in point: since NAFTA, the US has had a net loss of 250,000 jobs, while Mexico has lost 2 million, and hunger is on the rise in both countries.
————–
https://maryknollogc.org/statements/trading-justice-local-impact-global-economic-decisions
Costs of trade: Rather than experiencing real benefits from trade liberalization and intense promotion of international trade, the most impoverished people with whom we live and work and the environment are bearing the burden of the process. In many countries we have seen good laws meant to protect the worker and the environment weakened or ignored. We have seen whole sectors of the economy in which poor people were participating, such as small scale and subsistence farming and small, locally owned businesses, destroyed.
Integrity of creation: The environment is also threatened by trade agreements that see environmental protection laws as trade barriers or promote unsustainable development such as highly industrialized, mono-crop farming of cash crops for export. This type of farming is usually wrought with environmental consequences as the small farmer’s intimate connection to the land is lost and with it a theology of care for creation and knowledge of the most locally-appropriate and sustainable farming practices. In the Philippines an integrated economy that enabled people to live has been replaced by banana exports where people work on land that they do not own earning not enough money to live a dignified life as before. Deforestation and clear cutting for profit or to make way for large single crop fields also threaten the loss of animal habitats, desertification in once-fertile areas, and the intensification of damage from natural disasters.
——————
https://divinista.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/422/
How the Global Food Market Starves the Poor
———————-
Lincoln knew tariffs would crush the cash crop slave economy in the south.
https://www.abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/abraham-lincoln-in-depth/abraham-lincoln-and-the-tariff/index.html
—————————
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/how-to-crush-a-bankers-dictatorship
FDR imposed protective tariffs to favor agro-industrial recovery on all fronts ending years of rapacious free trade.
—————–
without tariffs and a muscular new deal. a good chunk of americas farmland is geared to selling to china, whats called cash crops. we now import 64% of our food. thanks bill clinton.
and farmland all over the world is being geared for the same thing.
so why do these cash crop corporate farmers think that their crop is better than someone else’s?
the chinese will most likely buy where its the cheapest. so i am sure the cash crop farmers in north america will need slaves, just like the south had to compete.
we can see we were going in that direction years ago. today the homeless are not victims of free trade capitalism, they are considered criminals against free trade capitalism.
the new deal would not have worked without the smoot-hawley tariffs, and the smoot-hawley tariffs would not have worked without the new deal.
and this is why trump will fail.
different clue
@Spud,
Here is another catastrofucking decomplishment imposed on Haiti: the effective extermination of the Haitian ( ” cares-for-itself”) Creole Pig and the forced demolition of the Haitian ag-system/culture that depended on that pig. I had always thought that this was another of Clinton’s gifts that keep on giving , but the timeline of this initiative seems to be from before the Clinton period.
” The complex story of the Creole pig’s significance to Haiti – and to its downfall”
https://www.wlrn.org/arts-culture/2025-02-10/creole-pig-haiti-crisis-documentary
One hopes enough of those pigs survived somewhere somehow to where the breed can be revived and redeployed if/when Haiti can set itself free to do so.
Curt Kastens
I thought that I would link this report of a medical study from India before someone else does.
https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/covid-vaccine-rumours-busted-as-aiims-study-reveals-the-real-reason-young-hearts-are-failing/ar-AA1SmdDg?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=693fc3d8e0ab4df589f612247d5c168a&ei=18
A moment of silence for the deceased please.
spud
different clue,
yep what the clintons did to those poor powerless people, were crimes against humanity!
different clue
Here is a video which would best belong in the by-now some-time-ago ” What Black folks are thinking” post. But commenting access on that post was welded shut by passing time, so I bring it here.
” Them Folks Have A Major Problem With Black Americans Delineating, Here’s Why ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5awfSPLtBgg
I only just for the first time heard about the concept and actions of “delineation” , the emerging acronym ” FBA” ( for ” Foundational Black Americans”), etc. I think these things will become more widely known of over the next few years and we will see if it has an undeniable impact or not.