by Rob Winfield
Director, Relocalization of Agriculture, EAU
I believe that the reason we are suffering under totalitarian, oligarchal politics is because of a degenerate culture, and the reason we have a degenerate culture is that we lost our productive capacity.It’s that gosh darn simple. I look around at what Americans do for work – very few of us are engaged in producing anything of value, myself included. The brilliant blogger Roissy, describes it better than I can:
Our society exists at a strange moment of economic limbo between two worlds — the past manufacturing based world and the future transhuman world — a limbo where paper pushing, legalistic gear grinding, government welfare administration, and service with a smile has infested like a toxic mold almost every tier of vertical and horizontal economic productivity. .
This is the problem in a nutshell. Everything else stems from that and that alone.How did we get here? It started with killing the family farms, and our new beginning begins with reviving the family farms. We have to unravel the this problem in the way it got raveled in the first place. Farms first, then artisan workshops which service the farms, and home canning/preserving kitchens that process and preserve the harvest. We have to reinvent civilization, after a fashion, from the ground up. We have to re-evolve society, and we can’t skip steps.Earl Butz was the Minister of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He wasn’t an evil man; but what he did had extremely evil consequences that he probably didn’t foresee. Here’s the relevant Wikipedia quote
In 1971, President Richard Nixon appointed Butz as Secretary of Agriculture, a position in which he continued to serve after Nixon resigned in 1974 as the result of the Watergate scandal. In his time heading the USDA, Butz revolutionized federal agricultural policy and re-engineered many New Deal era farm support programs. His mantra to farmers was “get big or get out,” and he urged farmers to plant commodity crops like corn “from fencerow to fencerow.” These policy shifts coincided with the rise of major agribusiness corporations, and the declining financial stability of the small family farm.. . . He was featured in the documentary King Corn, highlighted as the person who started the rise of corn production, large commercial farms, and the abundance of corn in American diets.
Another thing Butz probably didn’t foresee was Peak Oil. Industrial Agriculture is defined as “using land to turn oil into food.” Industrial Agriculture requires 10 calories of oil to produce 1 calorie of food, and that’s before the food is delivered to an energy intensive supermarket, and Americans drive their cars to the market and back to buy the food.The cheap food regime requires massive subsidies. This article states:
Eligibility for farm subsidies is determined by crop, not by income or poverty standards. Growers of corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice receive more than 90 percent of all farm subsidies: Growers of nearly all of the 400 other domestic crops are completely shut out of farm subsidy programs. Further skewing these awards, the amounts of subsidies increase as a farmer plants more crops.Thus, large farms and agribusinesses–which not only have the most land, but also are the nation’s most profitable farms because of their economies of scale–receive the largest subsidies. Meanwhile, family farmers with few acres receive little or nothing in subsidies. Farm subsidies have evolved from a safety net for poor farmers to America’s largest corporate welfare program.With agricultural programs designed to target large and profitable farms rather than family farmers, it should come as no surprise that farm subsidies in 2002 were distributed overwhelmingly to large growers and agribusinesses–including a number of Fortune 500 companies. Chart 2 shows that the top 10 percent of recipients received 65 percent of all farm subsidies in 2002.6 At the other end, the bottom 80 percent of recipients (including most family farmers) received just 19 percent of all farm subsidies.
I am very grateful to the Heritage Foundation for providing this documentation, but they miss the punchline, and that’s this – Agribusiness farms would go under without massive subsidies. Ten calories of oil to one calorie of food is a tremendously awful business model, comparable with failed Soviet experiments in collectivization.
Of course massive subsidies prevent Agribusiness from failing, exactly as bank bailouts prevent the “too big to fail” banks from failing.Backyard gardeners and mini-farmers can produce food with a positive EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). The opportunity to destroy Agribusiness and restore family farms and local economies is looking us in the face. We just need to implement. It would be nice to implement before we get skyrocketing food prices, but we may not adapt on a mass scale until we are forced to do so.
Acres USA is an organization dedicated to “biological farming.” It provides commercial farming techniques to backyard gardeners and mini-farmers. One of them is a biodegradable organic paper mulch available from weedguardplus.com You put down the paper, cut holes in it where you you plant the tomatoes/peppers/eggplant. It’s not for root crops like carrots, but fine for transplants like eggplant/pepper/tomato, and also direct seeded watermelon/cucumbers/squash.”
Here is a picture of a row of tomato plants, with container eggplants or peppers in between. The container crops hold down the mulch paper, and double the production of that row. You can grow mountains of peppers and eggplants in large nursery pots. Just because I’m a dirt farmer, doesn’t mean I scoff at container gardening. I do both. I constantly experiment with more efficient methods of high EROEI, mostly hand tool farming.
Small scale, high EROEI farming is the path to freedom. Everybody living has to eat, and the food the ordinary person can produce is of far higher quality to the consumer than Industrial farmed food. It’s the opposite of widget making. Ordinary people can’t build a Porsche, but a specialized factory in Stuttgart can. The specialized “food factories” actually produce much lower quality food, less efficiently than the hobbyists, amateurs, and small scale biological commercial farmers.
The only reason food factories are in business is that they are “too big to fail” welfare queens.
Here’s a new method for hilling potatoes.
Step 1: Put a dryer drum around the potato plant, with the plant centered. 
Step 2: Carefully pull the potato plant together, and fit a large,capped stove pipe over it. Then fill the space between the stovepipe and drum with soil, compost, etc. 
Step 3: Fill to a level not quite as high as the potato plant.
Step 4: Pull off the stove pipe and push the dirt around the potato plant, and make sure there’s a few potato leaves poking out of the top of the hill. Pull off the dryer drum and DONE.
Using ACRES USA type products such as weedguard, and inventing your own methods of solving problems and sharing these tips and tricks with one another, is how we can use Production as a Weapon against the Bad Guys.
When we have at least a few hundred mini-farmers in an area, we can form trading guilds and springboard ourselves to be food traders as well as producers, and begin to undo the Earl Butz “fencerow to fencerow” welfare queen monocropping system, and restore our Local Economies. Restored local economies based on local production will lead to a healthier culture, and a healthier culture will overthrow the totalitarian globalist oligarchs.
Problem solved.Now if we will just do it.
The Anti-Defamation League has expressed concern that the financial crises lead to anti-Jewish feeling, given the prominence of Jewish executives in corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and others.http://www.adl.org/main_internet/Anti-Semitism_Financial_Crisis.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_2
Updated: October 24, 2008Starting in mid-September 2008 and continuing through October 2008, numerous posts have scapegoated the Jews for causing the economic crisis in the United States and have claimed that Jews purposely cause crises in order to benefit themselves. These posts, as well as videos on YouTube, depict Jews as evil plotters whose only goal is to do harm by lying, cheating, and manipulating others.
We at European-Americans United believe that these “too big to fail” banks are largely responsible for creating these “boom and bust” cycles, but we do NOT blame ordinary Jewish people for them. We believe that economic relocalization will take power away from these big banks and smooth out theboom and bust cycles, reducing the power of firms such as Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan over the US economy.
This is the only workable solution, both for the economy and for anti-Jewish animus. But Abraham Foxman, chairman ofthe ADL, will never say so, because his job depends on anti-Jewish animus, as you will clearly see in this movie by an Israeli film-maker:http://www.archive.org/details/HashmatsaLet’s work towards putting Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs) and Abe Foxman out of business!