Consolidation of the Food System

Many of you may already be aware of the ever consolidating power of big food. There would be no big food without big agriculture. And there would be no big agriculture without the big pharmaceutical companies creating the chemicals these farms use to pump out massive quantities of genetically modified crops to be heavily processed and refined into “food stuffs”. The government subsidies help to ensure we fund all of this whether we intend to or not.

I wonder how many of you have seen any food labels recently and noticed at the very bottom of the ingredient list where it says “may contain bio-engineered foods”. This is a relatively new label and after further research you will find that this label only identifies products which contain detectable amounts of genetically modified materials. So, maybe to some this is a misleading way to label, you see that “may contain label” and know for sure it has GMO, you put it down, look at the next one that is not labeled accordingly. You think, this must not have GMO ingredients. You are wrong, it is just so heavily processed that they could not detect the GMO ingredients.

The best way to ensure you are not consuming GMO ingredients (other than not consuming processed foods and oils) is to buy all certified organic products. USDA Organic does not allow for the use of GMO crops.

So, you may wonder why we don’t certify our production as organic if we follow all the guidelines. Well, there are many reasons for that. Mainly, all of our sales are direct to customers so we can be transparent about our growing practices and help to inform the consumer of how we grow and why we grow. Since we do not do any wholesale distribution, there is no need to certify our produce to ensure a premium price. Frankly, we don’t have the time to keep up with the records they would like us to keep. I’m not in school anymore so I’m not doing any homework, and if I did I won’t be sharing my work for free let alone paying someone to take it. Personally, my biggest reason, we have our own moral compass. We don’t need guidelines, oversight, audits or regulators to intimidate us to following the standards. We farm on a small scale to make less impact on our environment. We refuse to spray any chemicals because we don’t want to kill insects not targeted by the spray, or the biology of the soil through buildup of chemicals, or add to the problem of resistant weeds. Not to mention, we don’t want to buy chemicals from the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. We are farmers, not pharmers.

Above are a list of required records to keep for USDA organic audits.

You may hear me over an over again complaining about scale. Our gardens consist of beds that are 30” wide and either 100’ or 40’ long. We have one hundred 40’ beds and fifty 100’ beds (soon to be eighty). That’s 22,500 square feet of production space, which is just under 3/4 of an acre. The two of us work about 40 hours a week not including markets and produce food for 24 families a week and 2 farmers markets making ourselves a decent living. Oh, and we don’t even live there. Now think about how much food that is when you’re driving past that GMO corn monoculture farm and how much could be produced on that land. Look at the scale of Americas farms below:

The average farm is over 400 acres! That is a lot of wheel barrows of compost friends. No wonder they need to get their fertility from chemicals. Have you heard they are now restricting the use of these chemicals in many places? Have you seen that the farmers are very upset by these decisions? I myself, even as one who refuses to use chemical inputs, am not happy about this decision. Another of my reasons to not certify our production is to avoid over regulation. This to me is a sign of things to come.

Hmm Bill Gates buying up farm land like hot cakes… interesting? Maybe if you’ve been putting up with these blogs for a spell you’ve seen my denouncing of the World Economic Forum and their “Great Reset” agenda. I do not trust a non elected group of billionaires and multi-national corporations deciding what our world should look like, how to get there, or who gets to run it. I do not trust these entities and individuals to look out for the interest of the people or the planet over their pockets. And if you do not like the idea of consuming GMO foods, you should also be distrustful of the goals of this group.

Is Bill Gates using his wealth to buy up farm land to raise beef prices and make room for synthetic beef? I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist but this is all exactly why I started producing food. The larger food industry is full of insider interests and agendas. Our health and well being are nothing compared to the potential for us to purchase a product over and over, even if they have to spend billions to study what we crave.

Okay yeah, we know. Food can be addictive and the color red makes you hungry whatever. GMO foods, they are safe and scientifically sound and all the sprays they use dissipate and degrade and are safe for consumption in small quantities mhmm no problems. But you can’t tell me this isn’t the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen…

(Chef’s kiss // MUWAH) Cellular Agriculture at its finest. Your favorite celebrities meat grown out in a pitri dish and made into delicious cured food stuffs. Yum, how much would you pay for some of that?

But seriously, if you want to eat close to the Earth and know your farmer. This movement towards ultra processed food stuffs made from lab grown meat and GMO oils / crops filling up the non-meat meat-substitutes and slipping through the poor attempts to label these products are not for us. We want soil grown vegetables raised from seeds saved the previous season. We want soils built with organic matter that feeds and stimulates the biology to create healthy plants for us to eat in their whole form. We want a lot more, a lot smaller farms so people can share in the generational wealth that comes with land ownership and help to diversify and strengthen the resilience of our local food system. We want humanely raised meat from animals that get to enjoy a wonderful life on grass out in the sunshine with their kind doing the things they would do in nature. We want less regulations so the farmers can follow the market demand not the demands of the government. If the demand is for organic food without synthetic chemicals the farmers will follow the money, but if the government forces them to follow outrages demands then like Sri Lanka, the farmers will fail and so will the communities.

The issue here isn’t the organic growing practices, it is the scale. Broad scale crops like grains, rice, corn have long been dependent on large machinery and chemical inputs. To switch from these practices without any kind of gradual process or game plan is illogical and gives organic growing a bad name. That is why the answer is always more, smaller, better farms.

Farms are getting fewer, farmers are getting older. Traditional ways are long since gone. It is my opinion that if we don’t act by supporting local and growing our own food, the food system will become ever more consolidated. Most foods will come from a lab instead of a farmer. And as regulations become more stringent, it will become more and more difficult to get into food production. The only logically vision is that the process and manufacturing of food stuffs will fill the lack of farms, farmers, and demand for whole foods. This in turn will increase the demand for broad scale monoculture crops and farm land will further be consolidated as well as the production and distribution.

We all know what we need to do the help the planet. We need more plants and less politics. The government is not getting us out of this mess. The corporations have been profiting from it for decades. Only we as individuals and communities can say no to the non-sense with our purchasing power and our space. Grow whatever you can wherever you can. Guerilla garden if you have to. Ask someone who isn’t using their land if you can maintain a patch for a nursery or wildflower garden or food for yourself and family. Encourage your friends to educate themselves about the foods we eat and where they come from and how they effect our health and the environment. The smaller the operation the less dependent on plastics and chemicals it will be. So we must start at home to minimize the demand for large production models. We must diversify our diets to ensure we don’t end up with a corn famine like the potato blight in Ireland.

We appreciate you all for your support and your loyalty to local food. We see you ever week. If I’m not talking to you, hopefully we’ll see you this week. Or whatever local producers are in your area, because we are in this together. We need food, and to have food we need farms and farmers. Let’s not end up needing a processing plant in our food chain, because only a handful benefit when the production is in the hands of few.