I’m not sure that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, is undertaking multigenerational effort to destroy this nations “red” heartland.
But if they were, I wonder what they would be doing differently?
Sometimes Paranoia Is Just Perfect Awareness
“Fine. I’ll just turn my lawn into a garden. Ha!”
You can’t buy seeds; Amazon won’t deliver.
“No worries. I’ll save seeds from the produce I buy!”
Monsanto will sue you, and put you out of your house
Blade:
If you buy heirloom seeds and stay diligent about collecting seeds for the next year, Monsanto can pound sand. You can obviously make your own fertilizer from grass clippings, vegetable scraps, cow or horse manure and trash fish like carp and bullheads. My friend has been doing this for years. He also makes his own weed killer and insecticide. I guess one could argue that if some or all of the components of those can’t be purchased, he may be out of luck, but as of right now, he’s doing well.
Monsanto and the Heirloom Seed
“Monsanto is a leading corporation in agribusiness has been gradually taking over smaller heirloom seeds suppliers in addition to trademarks acquisition of a number of heirloom seeds. This started several years ago and it’s continuing.”
https://www.permaculturenews.org/2016/02/03/monsanto-and-the-heirloom-seed/
Monsanto will pound the shit out of you if you save their seeds; they will fucking destroy you…and they own ALL the seeds. They also own own the pollen from plants that come from their seeds; if their pollen gets on your plants, they own your plants.
This is all panic pr0n. Sorry.
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is an economic must-read.
The price you will pay for self sufficiency is poverty.
You can go to a grocery store deli and by a fully cooked, hot chicken for nine bucks. The chicken was hatched, kept and fed to adulthood, slaughtered, plucked, delivered to your local deli, seasoned, cooked, and packaged for less than what an unskilled worker is paid for an hour’s labor, and everyone involved makes money.
That is what a modern economy does for you.
Soooo, if pollen from a Syngenta plant gets on a Monsanto plant, does that mean Monsanto lose ownership to Syngenta?
“Only plants that reproduce asexually (as through cuttings or grafting), are fully protected by patent law. while seed-bearing plants and those which might reproduce sexually were only eligible for a protection certificate under the more restrictive PVPA. This protection certificate was not a patent, and its protection extended only to the first sale of the plant or seed.”
PVPA certification did not expose farmers to infringement liability if seeds or pollen from a purchaser’s land drifted into their fields.
Organic Seed Growers & Trade Ass’n v. Monsanto
What Monsanto owns are the genetics that they paid to develop. It is only fair and just that they can reap the rewards for their investment and that others cannot steal their intellectual property.
Text from the link above:
“Monsanto sells seed under a license for a single generation of genetically modified seeds. Between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto brought 144 infringement suits for unauthorized use of its seed; about 700 other cases settled without litigation. A coalition of farmers, seed sellers, and agricultural organizations that grow, use, or sell conventional seed, concerned that their product could become contaminated by modified seed and that they could be accused of patent infringement, sought declaratory judgments that the patents were invalid, unenforceable, and not infringed. Monsanto referred to its website, which states: It has never been, nor will it be Monsanto policy to exercise its patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means. The district court dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. The Federal Circuit affirmed, stating that Monsanto has made binding assurances that it will not take action where crops inadvertently contain traces of Monsanto biotech genes; the plaintiffs did not allege circumstances placing them beyond the scope of those assurances. There is no justiciable case or controversy.”
How does a farmer double his income?
Put up a second mailbox! Ha! They take all the welfare, then gripe about paying taxes or the weather or input costs…..
Monsanto aside…..
Russia accounts for 23 percent of ammonia exports and 10 percent of processed phosphate exports. Russia is also the second-largest producer of nitrogenous fertilizers and potassium fertilizers and is the fifth-largest producer of phosphate fertilizers.
The big question is where does this stuff go?
If it goes to India and China, no sweat, but if US producers are exporting these essentials to back fill lack of Russian stocks, same with Russian and Ukrainian grains, that would be a problem.
Greg, I think I read somewhere that Europe is the primary recipient of Russian fertilizer (like natural gas).
Regarding fertilizer – just like energy, most European manufacturers shuttered their production because they could not compete with imports from Russia. Russia owns Eu in this regard much the same as they do on energy. Hardest hit will be shithole countries which relied on handouts from UN which was primarily sourcing grain in Ukraine.
And in the meantime, from the Dementia in Chief himself yesterday:
“As one…of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946…Since then, we’ve established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while. A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos. And now’s the time when things are shifting…there going to be a new world order out there and we’ve got to lead it. And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”
It strikes me, back to the original topic, that the reason diesel and fertilizer prices are such a big deal is that we’ve been promoting intensive grain farming for the past century to “feed the world”, blithely ignoring the fact that “the world” is not lining up to buy our products at reasonable prices, and that fertilizer runoff is turning too many of our rivers and lakes a sickening shade of green from algal bloom.
bike, that’s what subsidies will get you – market distortion. And you forgot to add GMO. No GMO, have to use more fertilizer to increase production.
You are probably right – but I find “world price” a bit frustrating. It assumes that practical barriers do not exist. So if fertilizer prices skyrocket in Germany, how exactly, practically, affect a farmer in North Dakota.
Well, it is a great excuse to for suppliers to gouge their customers.
The logical result of all of this would be for suppliers and customers to sign multi-year contracts.
bike:
A lot of corn is being diverted to ethanol production, too. There was a big plant in Brookings, SD (Verasun?) and at certain times of the week, I counted as many as 30 trucks lined up to drop off their loads. I believe that company went belly up in 2017, but, according to some farmers that I know, corn is still going to other plants. Ethanol is just another cog in the gloBULL warming scam.
You are probably right – but I find “world price” a bit frustrating
That’s why I wrote that this is “panic pr0n”. The price of diesel and fertilizer has tripled. OK, since when? And if 20% of farmers are going bankrupt and their land is going to be bought people with money, well, then what? They’re not going to farm it? Or they want to starve people (like holodomor). People who are armed? And if everything going back to a society that is worse than the Great Depression, who’s gonna enforce all these edicts, much less property rights, much less heirloom seeds rights. F’r’cryin’out’loud…
… this all reminds me of the End Times predictions for Y2k (eye roll).
Every fall, I work in my brother-in-law’s scale house.
As each truck of corn or beans comes in, I weigh and record the load for the fields we are working that day. The fields all have names like O’Leary, Kittleson, Johnson and so forth. Each represents a family who once worked the land but no longer do.
My city friends don’t really understand how farmers work. Most fail to realize that our fields are spread all over the area and moving the equipment is something we do several times a week during harvest.
About half our land is owned (much of it by the bank) and the other half is rented.
As farms consolidate and the equipment gets larger, more efficient and more expensive, these trends will continue.
I also heard that the average age of a farmer was somewhere around 60.
“ And if 20% of farmers are going bankrupt and their land is going to be bought people with money, well, then what? They’re not going to farm it?”
Some significant part of it; no.
Over the past 20 years, more than 31 million acres of fertile farmland have been turned into houses, townhouses and apartments. That’s more farmland than the whole state of Iowa.
The city of Woodbury was erected on farm land.
We like to say “most if the country is empty. We have room for everything!”
Well, that’s not completely true.
With lot prep, you can build a house almost anywhere. But you can’t grow wheat in Arizona, or Nevada, or New Mexico or Washington or Oregon, or Texas. And once you put a house on property, as long as America stands, it will never again grow food.
We have more immediate problems, it’s true. And those problems may well make these more distant crisis moot.
But there’s no harm in being aware of what’s going on.
And once you put a house on property, as long as America stands, it will never again grow food.
Not true. The (my family) homestead going back to 1850 or so had a big farm house w/ cistern, barn, various out-buildings, some in stone. When it was sold to another farmer, a corporate farm out of Chaska, they came in with some big ass earth-moving equipment, made a gi-huge-ic hole, and pushed all the buildings into it. So as to get the 240 acres up to 250 and farm it.
Maybe a development signals the end of farm land, but a house doesn’t.
Caught yourself.
I’d love someone to show me where a “Pheasant Run” or “Mill creek” development got pushed into a big hole.
Never happened; never will.
A corporate farmer will always gravitate to the crop that gives highest rate of return, especially if it is susbsidized by the goobernement. Hence corn for ethanol, soybeans for biodiesel, and soon pot farms from sea to shiny sea.
For reference, contra Swiftee, wheat is grown quite well in all the states he mentions. And as jdm notes, when the price of commodities justifies it, yes, they do take out old houses to grow crops. Profits, or for that matter the prospect of starvation, can be a good motivator.
Really, per what Greg notes, farmers have been changing crops, tree cover, fencerows, buildings, and more ever since they got started. Sometimes it seems to me that it’s a never-ending chase after a bit of cash that puts them into debt slavery with all the capital they need.
For reference, I just checked. The few farms in New Mexico growing wheat average 21 bushels per acre. And they have to leave their fields fallow every other year. The total state yield is novelty numbers. Its about the same in Nevada and Arizona.
Kansas yields just short of 60 bu/acre year over year. And more than 1/2 the state is planted every year.
Some guys just gotta be right, even when they’re not, eh, Emery Jr?
Just for reference, Swiftee, you said you couldn’t grow wheat there. Your statement was BS. Deal with it.
I would love to see how they came up with those numbers. I would also love to see who came up with those numbers. My guess, a coalition of urban high density living hawking environmentalist groups.
Aside from that, a few points.
1) May I suggest that the 31 million acres represents suburban growth, not fertile farmland lost. Exactly how many of those acres were tillable?
2) Exactly how many of those tillable acres should have been tilled in the first place? My father-in-law sold the infamous “forbidden forty” down here near the Iowa border to a Twin Cities developer who wanted to build on a metro wetland but needed farmland to be turned back into a swamp so he could offset filling his land. He cut the tile, Voila, wetland. It is a common thing down here.
3) How much acreage has gone into federal 99 year set aside programs in the same time? How about 15 year programs?
4) How many acres have been lost to “rod of sod” stream protection programs in the same time? A rod is 16.5 feet. Our mentally ill ex-governor wanted to take away 50 feet. At 50 feet how many acres is that to a mile? Do the math.
5) On average, corn yields have improved by 2 bushels per acre per year since the 1950’s. With precision farming and new hybrids, those numbers are increasing at faster rate within the last few decades.
So no, a loss of 31 million acres of mixed use land to metro growth is not going to adversely impact crop production.
[snarf]
We are wintering down here in Phoenix, and lo and behold, they are growing alfalfa up and down the valley. Freak’n, Alfalfa! You go down to Yuma or the Imperial Valley, one of the driest places on the continent and it’s all green intensive agriculture. Hell, if you lose an acre to a house, all you do is shove over a few feet into the desert and you’re in business.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, water is always an issue and the expansion of urbanism to the southwest sucks up water that was once rationed for agriculture, but the fretting over it is nothing more than the panic normally attributed to the 22 year old Brooklyn hipsters who live off their parents and subsidize their bar-hopping by cranking out 20 articles a day for the web.
This, OH MY, WE’RE LOSING LAND TO THE SUBURBS, is just plain urban-hippie ignorance.