I am 70, raised on a dairy farm and have had plenty of shit on my clothes over the years. The current farming methods in the U.S. are devastating on the land and peoples health. The tons of pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals are creating untold disease. The current farming practices are allowing billions of tons of top soil to head down rivers. If we dont switch to something similar to regenerative farming eventually, it might be years, the soil will not support the food needs of the world. I am not part of any group or follow any one in particular. The facts are easy to see.
Don't the greenies want to abolish the consumption of meat? Where do they think manure comes from? I guess farmers will have to ask their community to forgo the use of their toilets and enjoy the breeze as they do their business in his fields.
So the the government creates this mess and expects us to believe they have the knowledge and moxie to fix it. Never, ever going to happen no matter how many times the Minister of Truth tells us otherwise.
Dear Bill, I owned the ranch Las Moras just south of Chicoana, Arg. I encountered some of the squatter problems that you may have so I sold in 2014. I have been a farmer in 3 countries for 55 years and the statement that we can grow enough food with manure and compost is NOTHING BUT MANURE. To think that the elected officials are this dumb and uninformed is embarrassing for the country but they do not seem to mind ! "You just cannot fix stupid ! "
Well this is quite interesting commentary and a very complex complicated one at that. Hard not to draw lines in the sand and not get political. I grew up on my relatives family farms. Having been born in 1957 I feel that my generation is one of the last ones that has roots back to a farm. In today's political outlook at it when politicking these are what they want the public to think we are saving. In yesteryear it was quite a different scenario of the family farm and farming in general. Often relatives pooled together to own equipment. You had dairy cattle 20-65 head, and you had chickens, and your own bulls, you grew oats, corn, hay and soybeans in the midwest. In the Dakota's and more arid regions Durham wheat. Other areas grow nuts and oranges and fruit. You ground and chopped your own feed. You were diversified and you could make it on 300 acres or so. Not an extravagant living but a good one that started at 5:30 AM and did not end until about 9:30 to 10PM. As a kid I did not even know it was work I thought it was the greatest life ever! You learned a lot on a farm more than you ever will learn about how things work and where food comes from as a city kid. Take manure it was spread on your land and was a significant source of your fertilizer and in many cases your only but in that era you did not need as much for the scale of your operation. The ground itself had much more nutrients in it than today as well and by this I mean trace minerals which are all but gone today so what was grown was actually a considerably a better product/produce. For any doubting Thomas' it has been documented I believe in federal registers if you car to dig and read them. If you were having a hardship your neighbors pitched in and helped you so that you did not lose your farm. Fast forward and contrast to practices today. For one there are considerably more people in the world today - so farms evolved (not necessarily for the better). Today we have mega corporate farms. They are not diversified for the most part. There are milk farms across the country that have 12000 head of dairy cattle and more, and a complex down my Chicago that runs an operation the scale that can provide enough milk for all of St. Louis and Chicago alone. Hooray! We have farms that specialize in Hogs only as well as chickens only. These farms, more so the hogs and dairy, generate massive amounts of manure far many more than they can use on their land and it becomes regulated waste .aka a problem particularly if there lagoons fail from structural or weather. The lagoon pits have some potential to generate their own energy a plus but most do not. This production means draws huge criticism from the 98% of folks living on 3% of the land - for the mass producing farms of livestock for the quality of an animals live's prior to slaughter but is necessary to produce what is needed at what people want to pay is at issue. Grain farming another sector no longer can make it on 300 to 400 acres other than those in the high dollar organic sector. Many are several thousands of acres. In Canada where I hunt for geese in Saskatchewan one Hutterite colony farms 30 sections. For those of you from the city that may not know what a section is that means they farm 30 square miles of land. The days of helping a neighbor for the most part are gone. They most farmers not singling out any particular group, will let you go under so they can buy you out and increase their operations. Unfortunately the way it works is that grain farmers get paid for tons and bushels and not necessarily the quality of the grain - hence no trace minerals. They have to have fertilizer to gain the output that is required to make it. The massive tiling in the country, particularly the Midwest, has washed generations of soil down the Mississippi and created a very real and large dead zone in our Gulf where we used to shrimp and have created a huge dead zone. We also have lakes overloaded with nitrogen and phosphorous and huge water quality issues. So it is no easy task to turn back the clock and simply say lets go green and do it right now. These shortages will be real and they will be ugly and they will persist. I could go on but have said enough for you to get the idea of farm evolution and the problems that have developed. Had Bill know the war wold be an outbreak he may have picked the agricultural commodity markets as the trade of the decade for they shall surely rival oil - my guess in both cost and availability.
Neocons are a protein source. We could make a sport of it. Sell tags and have a nationwide hunt. Rid the country of these miscreants while alleviating the starvation. Sounds like a Win-Win to me :-)
Thanks Brad,its nice to hear from someone who understands farming and whats happening to the farmland.Sleepy Joe (Biden) should go back to sleep for the rest of his Presidency,he is clueless as to what is happening in this country.
Here in Sri Lanka, the President decided last year that henceforth (ie overnight) inorganic fertilizer was banned. This decision was lambasted by almost anyone who could add two and two without a calculator. Sure enough, one year later, crop yields have plummeted, costs to the consumer have skyrocketed and the country is passing the begging bowl around so-called friends (such as China, which has refused to allow the government to re-schedule its debts) for help out of this hideous own goal.
Now the hot meme is the US dollar is expiring and gold / commodity-backed currencies will replace it atop the heap. Many of us on the fringes have pondered alternatives to fiat currency, and so this becoming mainstream is a real sea change.
Which immediately arouses my contrarian curse. Ok, so exactly how does a gold/commodity-backed currency work? If gold or wheat declines (as measured in purchasing power to everything else), does the quantity of currency shrink to reflect this decline in value? Can the currency supply only expand if gold/commodities rise in relative value? Can the issuing central bank just keep emitting new currency without expanding the reserves of gold/commodities?
What about private banking creating new "money" by originating new mortgages and other loans? What's backing all this new privately-created "money"?
Lots of knotty questions, few if any detailed answers to how a gold-backed currency functions in actual markets. An idea can be great as an abstraction but the execution of the details is what differentiates an abstraction from a real-world system that's functional, transparent and thus trustworthy.
Can I convert my gold-backed quatloo into gold? If not, then what exactly does gold-backed mean?
As for digital currencies issued by central banks or private banks, how are these different from existing fiat currencies, which are for all intents and purposes, already fully digital currencies?
Even more contrarian: what if the demand for US dollars pushes the relative value higher despite the intrinsic flaws in fiat currencies?
I have to laugh at all the greedy companies who moved our manufacturing offshore. It is all coming full circle now and is damaging the country. We should have grown our own wheat.
Now maybe some creative type will figure how to reuse the lakes of manure at the feed lots where cattle await processing or the pig farms tons of manure..
I cant access my acct I went subscribe because that worked before it said as before a link was sent to my email as before click here to access my acct and i keep getting returned to the subscribe page. What do I do? John Camamis ps love you guys
I am 70, raised on a dairy farm and have had plenty of shit on my clothes over the years. The current farming methods in the U.S. are devastating on the land and peoples health. The tons of pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals are creating untold disease. The current farming practices are allowing billions of tons of top soil to head down rivers. If we dont switch to something similar to regenerative farming eventually, it might be years, the soil will not support the food needs of the world. I am not part of any group or follow any one in particular. The facts are easy to see.
Don't the greenies want to abolish the consumption of meat? Where do they think manure comes from? I guess farmers will have to ask their community to forgo the use of their toilets and enjoy the breeze as they do their business in his fields.
Too bad we can’t figure a way for the farmers to utilize all the “fertilizer” that comes from the mouths of politicians and progtardes.
We’d have a surplus of both fertilizer and crop yields…
So the the government creates this mess and expects us to believe they have the knowledge and moxie to fix it. Never, ever going to happen no matter how many times the Minister of Truth tells us otherwise.
Here's a link to what happens if you do try to "go organic": https://ourorganicwellness.com/amish-farmer-faces-250k-fine-jail-time-and-losing-his-sustainable-farm-for-processing-his-own-meat/
Dear Bill, I owned the ranch Las Moras just south of Chicoana, Arg. I encountered some of the squatter problems that you may have so I sold in 2014. I have been a farmer in 3 countries for 55 years and the statement that we can grow enough food with manure and compost is NOTHING BUT MANURE. To think that the elected officials are this dumb and uninformed is embarrassing for the country but they do not seem to mind ! "You just cannot fix stupid ! "
Well this is quite interesting commentary and a very complex complicated one at that. Hard not to draw lines in the sand and not get political. I grew up on my relatives family farms. Having been born in 1957 I feel that my generation is one of the last ones that has roots back to a farm. In today's political outlook at it when politicking these are what they want the public to think we are saving. In yesteryear it was quite a different scenario of the family farm and farming in general. Often relatives pooled together to own equipment. You had dairy cattle 20-65 head, and you had chickens, and your own bulls, you grew oats, corn, hay and soybeans in the midwest. In the Dakota's and more arid regions Durham wheat. Other areas grow nuts and oranges and fruit. You ground and chopped your own feed. You were diversified and you could make it on 300 acres or so. Not an extravagant living but a good one that started at 5:30 AM and did not end until about 9:30 to 10PM. As a kid I did not even know it was work I thought it was the greatest life ever! You learned a lot on a farm more than you ever will learn about how things work and where food comes from as a city kid. Take manure it was spread on your land and was a significant source of your fertilizer and in many cases your only but in that era you did not need as much for the scale of your operation. The ground itself had much more nutrients in it than today as well and by this I mean trace minerals which are all but gone today so what was grown was actually a considerably a better product/produce. For any doubting Thomas' it has been documented I believe in federal registers if you car to dig and read them. If you were having a hardship your neighbors pitched in and helped you so that you did not lose your farm. Fast forward and contrast to practices today. For one there are considerably more people in the world today - so farms evolved (not necessarily for the better). Today we have mega corporate farms. They are not diversified for the most part. There are milk farms across the country that have 12000 head of dairy cattle and more, and a complex down my Chicago that runs an operation the scale that can provide enough milk for all of St. Louis and Chicago alone. Hooray! We have farms that specialize in Hogs only as well as chickens only. These farms, more so the hogs and dairy, generate massive amounts of manure far many more than they can use on their land and it becomes regulated waste .aka a problem particularly if there lagoons fail from structural or weather. The lagoon pits have some potential to generate their own energy a plus but most do not. This production means draws huge criticism from the 98% of folks living on 3% of the land - for the mass producing farms of livestock for the quality of an animals live's prior to slaughter but is necessary to produce what is needed at what people want to pay is at issue. Grain farming another sector no longer can make it on 300 to 400 acres other than those in the high dollar organic sector. Many are several thousands of acres. In Canada where I hunt for geese in Saskatchewan one Hutterite colony farms 30 sections. For those of you from the city that may not know what a section is that means they farm 30 square miles of land. The days of helping a neighbor for the most part are gone. They most farmers not singling out any particular group, will let you go under so they can buy you out and increase their operations. Unfortunately the way it works is that grain farmers get paid for tons and bushels and not necessarily the quality of the grain - hence no trace minerals. They have to have fertilizer to gain the output that is required to make it. The massive tiling in the country, particularly the Midwest, has washed generations of soil down the Mississippi and created a very real and large dead zone in our Gulf where we used to shrimp and have created a huge dead zone. We also have lakes overloaded with nitrogen and phosphorous and huge water quality issues. So it is no easy task to turn back the clock and simply say lets go green and do it right now. These shortages will be real and they will be ugly and they will persist. I could go on but have said enough for you to get the idea of farm evolution and the problems that have developed. Had Bill know the war wold be an outbreak he may have picked the agricultural commodity markets as the trade of the decade for they shall surely rival oil - my guess in both cost and availability.
Neocons are a protein source. We could make a sport of it. Sell tags and have a nationwide hunt. Rid the country of these miscreants while alleviating the starvation. Sounds like a Win-Win to me :-)
Thanks Brad,its nice to hear from someone who understands farming and whats happening to the farmland.Sleepy Joe (Biden) should go back to sleep for the rest of his Presidency,he is clueless as to what is happening in this country.
Here in Sri Lanka, the President decided last year that henceforth (ie overnight) inorganic fertilizer was banned. This decision was lambasted by almost anyone who could add two and two without a calculator. Sure enough, one year later, crop yields have plummeted, costs to the consumer have skyrocketed and the country is passing the begging bowl around so-called friends (such as China, which has refused to allow the government to re-schedule its debts) for help out of this hideous own goal.
Now the hot meme is the US dollar is expiring and gold / commodity-backed currencies will replace it atop the heap. Many of us on the fringes have pondered alternatives to fiat currency, and so this becoming mainstream is a real sea change.
Which immediately arouses my contrarian curse. Ok, so exactly how does a gold/commodity-backed currency work? If gold or wheat declines (as measured in purchasing power to everything else), does the quantity of currency shrink to reflect this decline in value? Can the currency supply only expand if gold/commodities rise in relative value? Can the issuing central bank just keep emitting new currency without expanding the reserves of gold/commodities?
What about private banking creating new "money" by originating new mortgages and other loans? What's backing all this new privately-created "money"?
Lots of knotty questions, few if any detailed answers to how a gold-backed currency functions in actual markets. An idea can be great as an abstraction but the execution of the details is what differentiates an abstraction from a real-world system that's functional, transparent and thus trustworthy.
Can I convert my gold-backed quatloo into gold? If not, then what exactly does gold-backed mean?
As for digital currencies issued by central banks or private banks, how are these different from existing fiat currencies, which are for all intents and purposes, already fully digital currencies?
Even more contrarian: what if the demand for US dollars pushes the relative value higher despite the intrinsic flaws in fiat currencies?
The amount of comic comments here iss.... And it is all fact!
I have to laugh at all the greedy companies who moved our manufacturing offshore. It is all coming full circle now and is damaging the country. We should have grown our own wheat.
Now maybe some creative type will figure how to reuse the lakes of manure at the feed lots where cattle await processing or the pig farms tons of manure..
I cant access my acct I went subscribe because that worked before it said as before a link was sent to my email as before click here to access my acct and i keep getting returned to the subscribe page. What do I do? John Camamis ps love you guys