Plant Based
Beyond Meat Dirty Plant (Not a critique of vegan diet. A critique of the centralization of food production and an example of how scaling up can lead to big problems)
As I’m sure many of you arrive here from the newsletter, you may have also read “Kam”’s Digging Deeper about microplastics especially coming from our clothing and it got me thinking about all the natural fibers to make clothes from: bamboo, hemp, cotton, flax, alpaca and sheeps wool, leather. Anyone with enough land can easily grow these crops, or raise this livestock and produce their own home goods. Houses can be made from cob, a mix of straw and clay, and with regular upkeep one can build and maintain a cob house from materials sourced on their property for many generations (the oldest cob house still standing is 10,000 years old)What Is a Cob House?. Hemp can be used to make “hempcrete” for use in home building with minimal industrial processing. In 1941 Ford made a “bioplast” Model T made from hemp, flax, wheat, and spruce pulp composite materials. The vehicle even ran on an ethanol mix made from ethanol produced from hemp (Henry Ford's Hemp Cars). You may have learned by now my thought process: why are we so removed from nature, who benefits from removing us from nature, how are they profiting from removing us from nature? (They is the always unanswered question as they are all in cahoots and hide behind many faceless entities, but I digress already)
So who owns the land? Well, the government owns about 40%. About 60% is owned privately, however, roughly 36% of the US population are renters. So who REALLY owns the land? Banks? The State via taxation? Land cannot be owned? Own it or not, it can certainly be used wisely and I think the wisest use it to utilize the land to grow productive plants that can be used to create natural home goods that don’t slowly and also quickly pollute our communities. We can diversify our diets through locally grown, small scale, low input farms that grow seasonal fruits and vegetables even reviving old varieties with more flavor and nutrition rather than eating gas ripened, out of season, cross country, petrol based corporate farms’ gmo junk. Grass fed livestock is a great way to keep land from being tilled, and diverse forage can provide a varied diet for the animals as well as great food for pollinators, while building soil and capturing carbon.
Above you can see what has happened to the farmland really, we went from 7 million individual farms to just 2 million farms. These farms got bought up by a few, and they grew their farm size from about 200 acres to about 500 acres. That’s about 62% of farms being lost, and those few farms still running have doubled in size. These are not farms anymore, these are corporations. Corporations with stakeholders, and a lot of influence.
Now we see, it isn’t just big food who is buying up land and farms, it is big investors turning potential family farms into leasing opportunities. Who’s going to lease a giant tract of land other than someone from big food? See how this works? Big industry looks out for big industry because it’s really just one industry, exploiting the population by selling back to us the resources we work to extract and convert into energy and homes and roads. They sell us back our health, after they poisoned us through the water and air and food. We’ve been made addicted to sugar and sensory overload. Our data is used as a commodity, bought and sold and traded. What this all comes down to, is culture creation. By consolidating the media, the land, the manufacturing, the distribution, the influence… we are now in an artificially curated world.
Through AI generated targeted advertising based on your personal data, private industries and governments can now quite easily steer the direction of culture.
Aha. This World Economic Forum contributor says in 2019 humans are hackable. Then in 2021 he said our hackable human data needs to be kept out of the hands of the few. Woops, was that a warning or a heads up or a wink and nod?
Okay so what. Corporations run the world and rent everything back to us. They collect and sell our data to manipulate what we see to influence what we buy and do. They use power, money, and opportunity to influence governments for preferential policy. Fewer and fewer hands own more and more land, resources, media, food production, energy, communications, healthcare… should be fine and definitely not some concerted effort to centralize and monopolize you know… all of the above that would be a crazy conspiracy theory.
This is exactly what I mean when I say they have no intentions of doing anything about the environment. You and I however, have to change our lifestyles. (Not to mention, it’s quite a handy means to further land consolidation. Just outlaw farming and force farmers to sell their land to the government. Poor EU)
We can’t be farmers or cook pizzas, but they can fly around in private jets to go to conferences about how us plebs are causing climate change while they buy up everything to sell back to us with no regard for the environmental impacts of their actions. New regulations will cause manufacturing and production to move off shore where guess what, there are no stringent regulations preventing big industry from polluting the air and water. People in much of Asia where masks when outside because the pollution is so bad. If we stopped consuming useless, plastic, designed obsolete, trash wrapped, wanna be tchotch-ke junk and turned all the box stores into community run farms we could not only beautify and provide healthy food and education to local communities, we could lessen the demand for heavily polluting industries around the world. If we don’t cut back on consumption on our own they will come up with “green energy retrofitting solutions” and they will take our tax dollars to give to utility and energy companies and then they will sell it back to us and our children and grandchildren. Selling us back what we paid for.
75,000 acres that’s 37,500 farms like Full Circle CSA. I’ve always dreamed of jack hammering up parking lots for farms.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/#xj4y7vzkg
For you rebels out there, here is a website you can put the URL in from a site with a paywall and view it for free: https://www.removepaywall.com/
Look at what a small portion of land the food we eat is!? Barely more than the idle/fallow area. If anyone ever tells you we can’t feed the world, they are way wrong. We are just not utilizing the land thoughtfully. (Not to mention, we are already exporting a good bit of food) Imagine how much less farm land we would need if everyone who actually does have the privilege of land ownership would grow some of their own food, or even some for others. Imagine if instead of growing all of that gmo ethanol, we switched to producing textiles and plant based plastic alternatives. If communities were doing more to feed themselves, we wouldn’t need so much ethanol to cut into the fuels because we would need less fuels. If food was produced closer, and was processed less, you really wouldn’t need to transport it far. We are 7 miles and 14 miles away from our markets. We grow on less than 2 acres. 75 one hundred foot beds and 100 forty foot beds (2.5 feet wide) are all we use to grow enough food to provide the 2 of us a living. If we already owned our farm (and didn’t need to save and reinvest every cent back into securing a forever farm) we would easily be employing at least 2 others and producing exponentially more food. Moving away from a scale that demands mechanization would provide many jobs, and a localized economic boom. And that is the problem right there, a localized flourishing self resilient community would be the enemy to a system that demands dependence and big industry to survive.
Somehow, we have to get people back to the land. Land ownership is the best means to generational wealth. The reason we see such disparities today is based on discrimination and consolidation. Once it became unfashionable to keep people out based on laws and regulations, it was easy enough to use wealth and influence to buy up land and policy setting the stage for the course of American history. (What Role Homeownership Plays in Generational Wealth) Moving from a nation of independent farmers and workers to a divided country of people with no direction, drive, or desire because what is there to desire, drive, or have a direction for when everything is owned and sold or rented back to us. When the barrier to entry of any enterprise is too high or complicated for the average person to start up a business, new competition is kept out of the market. When the housing market is driven sky high by investing companies out competing families and individuals, a whole new class of renters is created (Why is BlackRock Buying Up Homes?). When all the farm land is owned and operated by a few, the food system is controlled. At what point are relationships too deep? At what point does influence, power, and money become a blatant impediment to the betterment of society?
We need to rely on plant based solutions. We can grow, propagate, share, save seed, and thrive when plants are the solution. We can’t let the scale of the solution require the need for a plant (factory) to industrially manufacture said solution to be sold back to us after we’ve paid for the plant to be built and operated in the first place (think grants, subsidies, tax breaks). The solutions really do grow on trees, and even money if you have a market for the fruit of those trees. Let’s get planting.
