Attack on Food and Farmers

and How to Fight Back!!

Aug 29, 2024

I join many others in excited anticipation of the upcoming Attack on Food and Farmers online symposium. I will be joining many great speakers to educate people about the importance of local, regenerative agriculture.

I will be presenting brief seminars on each of the two days, in addition to participating in the closing discussion. My two titled presentations (with abstracts) are:

Day 1 The Antidote to Industrial Agriculture is Below Our Feet

Abstract: Much of the controversy over modern agriculture and its alleged climate impacts stems from problems created by industrial processes – genetic modification of crops, chemical applications, confined feeding operations, etc. – which are then blamed on all agriculture without distinction. The contrasts between traditional agricultural stewardship and modern industrial rapaciousness are enormous: this is the difference between cows that destroy the planet and soil, and cows that reverse the damage caused by industrialism. This is a “tale of two cows,” but more, it is a tale of two visions of agriculture.

Day 2 The Battle Over Food Education

Abstract: Consumers are confused by two food-related voices perched like oppositional advocates, one at each ear: one voice says agriculture and livestock are the foundation of all the world’s environmental and health problems; the other says these same fundamental processes, properly stewarded, are the cure for the destruction caused by industrialism. Much like vaccine safety, gain-of-function origins, and the efficacy of masks, an active battle about the “real science” of agriculture is being waged in order to deceive consumers. The front line in the battle for food liberties is to properly educate people about soil, food, and agricultural science – it is not rocket science, but common sense. There is no real controversy, only obfuscation by corporate profiteers intent on preserving market share.

(With Dr. Meryl Nass.)

I recently pre-recorded Day 1 of my talks, and ran just a bit short of time toward the end and so I chopped a portion of my closing remarks. I share them here, and invite you and others (please share!) to join me on September 6-7 for the full event!:

….the ‘real science’ is incontrovertible. Cows are not the problem – their industrial torturers and slanderers are. Much the same deception is employed to peddle expensive ‘renewable’ gadgets that are anything but– reduce all analysis to carbon dioxide emitted during life use, and completely ignore the toxic chemical pollution generated to manufacture solar panels, EVs, windmills, and heat pumps. With cows, the liars engage in the same science-distorting spin, focusing on bovine CO2 and methane at the exclusion of the long list of chemicals and fossil fuels employed to replace them, and using the pollution occasioned by their unnatural CAFO imprisonment to malign the earth-saving cows that remain humanity’s ecological co-dependents.
Let us all get better informed that we may effectively counter the lies of our would-be corporate masters and defend not just cows – but defend our soils, guts, and grandchildren with cows. No human machination has or ever will replace them, any better than a Chinese coal-manufactured solar panel destined to pollute the land at disposal will ever replace the sun.
They are coming for our food – can you see? Synthetic meat production relies upon the same GMO monocultures as animal grains. Monsanto and Dow make money in agriculture selling chemicals without which their vaunted Frankensteinian ‘products’ will not grow. GMO cropping has mostly been driven by profits and proprietary control – patenting seeds, for instance – rather than by climate mitigation or saving the world from hunger. The goal is human dependency, not human or environmental health. It is the oldest motive in humanity, and it is alive and well in corporate America and globalist schemes to “save us” from cows. Bill Gates says we can feed the world with merely 150 cows, and extinguishing the rest. Then we can all kowtow at his feet for a bite of lab-cultured burger.

I thought ‘kowtow’ was a pretty fitting pun for Bill Gates’ arguments against cows….

I warmly invite you to learn more about cows, food, farming, and industrial plans to control them all!

David

Aug 29

I think the whole carbon conversation is a distraction, because all industrial farming practices (even of organic carrots), are heavy carbon producers, and industrially produced organic vegetables require CAFOs to supply the nitrogen in their compost at an affordable scale (organic tillage ag requires copious amounts of compost - very heavy and resource intense to apply - as well as depending on CAFOs for their cheap nitrogen supply stream) .

The bedrock of the justification for the perpetuation of industrial farming system is the wholesale deification of the green revolution. In Ag schools at land grant universities, among USDA extension agents, or among mainline agronomists, the orthodoxy of the green revolution cannot be questioned.

Norman Borlaug, a plant pathologist, is hailed as one of the central people to the green revolution, working with money from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations (shudder) to develop a hybridized wheat variety that produced higher yields and had lower disease pressure. This system did require the use of high amounts of pesticides and synthetic fertilizer to function properly. (I think productive varieties are a good thing, but productive varieties that require chemical inputs ensure the indebtedness of the farmer). Borlaug is famous for supporting DDT use long after it had been rejected by the public as overly toxic.

Although the green revolution is usually said to have taken place in the 1960s, much of the theoretical foundations were laid in the late 19th and early 20th century. Bosch extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere through CH4, and the development of various herbicides and pesticides. I have heard multiple accounts how polio’s symptoms were caused by synthetic pesticides that were introduced early in the 20th century.

Borlaug is hailed as the savior of the world, preventing 1-2 billion people from starving. And while I do think intensive agricultural production is preferable to non-intensive ag production (yield per acre is an important metric but not the important metric), the logic of the green revolution forces us to accept the whole soup of industrial farming practices instead of picking and choosing ones based on current scientific understanding of agronomy, biology and human health. And I can’t help but see the connection in ownership between ag chemical companies, large packaged food conglomerates and pharmaceutical companies. These form the chemical cartel, the owners of molecules that drive the modern world, and which for the most part are based on a faulty assumption: that we can reduce biological complexity to chemical simplicity. This is the theoretical foundation of the green revolution and it has yielded productive fruit, but at a grave cost to us all. Let us reevaluate the entire project, because there are turtles all the way down.

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1 reply by John Klar