Threats to Family Farms & Homesteading from Agri-Business and Groupthink
This research-based article details the multiple threats to good, community farming practices and small-scale organic/cooperative endeavors. The threats take the form of social engineering in the guise of “managed providers working for the common good of the majority of people,” when in effect it concentrates the wealth and resources in the hands of the few and leaves the average family farm and homesteader out in the cold, or worse. “Legislates” them right into illegality with previously legal practices (such as rainwater catchments systems, or sustainable family farms.)
An older article I recently stumbled across is particularly revealing of the mindset that governs this struggle: one characterized by that mindset’s reliance on “technology” and “mechanization” to provide a plethora of bountiful harvests. The article is entitled “8 Solutions for a Hungry World” and it lists those “solutions” as such:
1. Farm the desert – using a greenhouse that converts seawater to freshwater,
2. Grow with precision – using soil sensors to inform when water and fertilizer are needed,
3. Rebuild rice – the genetic engineering of the photosynthetic capabilities of rice,
4. Replace fertilizer – with a mixture of 300 natural microbes (now synthesized) for Nitrogen fertilization,
5. Re-map a continent – to target new farming technologies in Africa,
6. Use robot labor – to monitor, prune, and pick produce,
7. Resurrect the soil – biochar machines the size of shipping (sea-land) containers,
8. Make supercrops – more genetically engineered crops.
All of these proposed solutions (although possible) can (and probably will, if implemented) have far-reaching consequences. Items 3, 4, and 8 involve genetic engineering and manipulation of other species. Items 2 and 6 are unnecessary, replacing human labor with faddish gadgets that consume both energy and fuel. Item 5 concentrates and categorizes geographic spreads of potential profitability (a return to medieval serfdom, fiefs and all) instead of viable human communities.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
