I am not a farmer. I didn't even pay much attention to farming issues until last year when I found out about Monsanto using Bollywood actors to trick illiterate Indian farmers into buying extremely expensive genetically engineered seeds. Big yields promised. No word that the heavy loans for the seeds would need to be followed by more heavy loans for Monsanto fertilizer and Monsanto pesticides. No word that the seeds needed irrigation. The package said so but the farmers couldn't read. And besides, the small print was in English. The farmers were Marathi.
Crops failed.
The catastrophe of that is hard for us who are not rural to appreciate. Crops failed. The immense debt was there. Debt larger than most had ever experienced. No one could collect seeds off the few plants that did grow because the seeds "belonged" - by means of a demonic twisting of law and of all morality and of everything that had existed in human agriculture for thousands of years - to Monsanto. The farmers bought the seeds but they owned no future seeds from them. The great cycle of life, from seeds to plants to more seeds, from hard work to a chance to save for the future, was broken into by a corporation, inserting itself between farmer and his work, farmer and his plants, farmer and his reliance on the bounty of nature.
Monsanto had patented "bounty of nature" itself.
So, the Indian farmers had to take out more loans. More crops failed. Many farmers began killing themselves. Drinking Monsanto pesticide was a common means.
166,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since the late 1990s when the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, pushed India to open its doors to Monsanto and our Big Ag corporations. Eight million have left the land.
I never tire of telling this story, perhaps because the immensity of the tragedy never seems to be fully expressed no matter how often I repeat it. Those deaths may be the largest mass suicide in recorded human history. And they are increasing. One farmer in India commits suicide on the average of every 32 minutes.
Corporate agriculture and genetic engineering are the greatest changes since human agriculture began thousands of years ago and they have occurred in only the last few decades. I see their immense success written in dead farmers and the disappearance of one third of the bee colonies in the world.
I see their success in the holocaust of industrialized animals crammed like trash into feed lots and cages, stuffed with drugs like bovine growth hormone to make them produce until they burn out, stuffed with steroids to make them blow up and weigh more til their organ fall out and have to pushed back in and they stitched shut, stuffed with antibiotics to fend off the diseases from the filth of it all.
It is a great success. The fabulous modern science of it all bringing animals and plants and farmers and us all such good things, such improvements, such "help for the starving masses" - the touching PR argument for genetic engineering - while we don't notice the poor don't want it, the poor farmers are dying from it, the biodiversity the poor depended on and helped to create over thousands of years of hand selection stolen out from under them and destroyed during it, the enslavement of the poor farmers to the triply expensive patented trap of it all.
On the Ride for Farmers, one word keeps coming to mind: fear.
In Pennsylvania, farmers are afraid. It's palpable. They are afraid of going out of business. They are afraid of inspectors shutting them down. They are afraid of selling an innocent product, a clean product, a healthy product - raw milk - and being arrested. One farmer was, and while away, the feds went onto his land and stole all his equipment - thousands of dollars worth - and he still faces the possibility of prison. A Mennonite shopkeeper was afraid to say where to get raw milk in the area. He can't sell it anymore, though there is nothing wrong with it. He said he can't sell raw cider anymore either.
Ask the question about raw milk and people flinch. Grown men.
Farmers and cattleman are afraid of NAIS. See my previous diaries as well.
Farmers are afraid of the next regulation, the next "food scare" that will again be used to wipe out their animal stocks, or to push more regulations on them, regulations that never touch the grotesque, disease-ridden conditions of the corporate industrial side of farming where the diseases originate. "Food scares" have "progressively" wiped out the small farmer who is just making do. He hasn't got the money for a cement floor for his dairy or required bathroom for the USDA inspector so can't be certified organic though his animal feed is, his land is, and the animals are injected with nothing. No, the regulations which are set by the corporate side drop like a cement block on top of the organic or small farmer.
Cement floors. The urban, bureaucratic scientists' "fix" for the farm and all that ... dirt. Never mind that cows can't bear to stand for long on cement and yet must do so all their lives inside industrial milk factories. Meanwhile the cow of the small farmer grazes outside on soft land and comes inside to a dirt floored dairy where it can stand more easily.
The standards for organic farming, the standards for MANY things that family farmers must do, are set to industrial standards, to standards that are created by people who know nothing about cows. "Scientific." "Sterile." Reminds me of the scientific "expertise" of the 50s that had doctors telling mothers not to breast feed because it was more hygienic and safer for the baby to give it bottles. How many billions of dollars of formula got sold that way? Science telling mothers that millennia of nursing was not clean. Missing, of course, the antibodies and the connection and all the other benefits not available through formula.
Real things seem to escape the notice of experts. Things people have done for centuries and longer, they consider dirty or inadequate, but those things keep popping up again as richer than, safer than, more healing than, all the things the scientists were charging for.
Plain ole dirt floors and plain ole cows and plain ole raw milk filled with probiotics are now suddenly bad. And raw milk is getting to be illegal.
Cement floors and cows on genetically engineered hormones and rBGH now associated with a 7-fold increased risk of breast cancer and using massive amounts of antibiotics are good. And legal, legal, legal.
I found out that cows on rBGH are only good for one lactation cycle. They are used up after that. They get killed.
The plain ole cow with the dirt floor and no hormone, usually goes through about 7 lactation cycles, sometimes more.
I saw cows with udders immense from the hormone. Absurdly large. Cows who'll be dead soon, having lived a painful life, having put out at some maximally unnatural rate. Innocent, gentle animals.
The industrial agricultural madmen are burning through cows so fast, they can't find enough heifers to replace them. These are the men of "science" who look down on farmers with the cows living quietly and productively and normally for years. These are the USDA folks who declare raw milk a threat. These are the people who use (invented?) food scares to help them put crushing new regulations in place against family farmers, making sure the public is sufficiently alarmed so the USDA or state Department of Ag, will appear to be acting in the public's best interest.
On this ride I have learned to hear "big government" with new ears, not the ears of a leftist interpreting that as racist or as not caring about others, but now seeing people being ruined intentionally, for corporate advantage. I hear "no more taxes" or "no more regulations" in the same way, as sheer desperation. I have learned to understand that the corporate USDA and FDA are out to destroy those farmers as surely as Big Ag in India is knocking farmers off the land as fast as possible.
I see farmers standing along against NAIS, something that will weaken their property rights to their own land, something that sets them up to be controlled on their own property by a government agency in bed with corporations that are destroying land, plants and animals, and yet the public continues to hear "food scare" and jumps to accept the next draconian regulations landing on farmers.
A cattleman I know sent me some wonderful pictures of new calves in the back of a pickup truck, heading down a dirt road. Someone else I showed the pictures to was freaked at that, that it was illegal to "transport" animals like that. I said the calves were being moved from one field to another but were so young, they lay down on the dirt road. The men gave them a lift a few hundred yards to spare them the walk. The person was certain the cattleman would get into serious trouble for breaking the regulations.
Is it when we learned about germs that farmers seem got caught in some nightmare where "science" began to trump nature and disease was to be eliminated by sterile methods and drugs were to fix anything wrong? And is it that the urban world is now so far from the land that they believe all of life can be sterile and packaged and neat, and drugs will make things work and drugs will cure things? Have urban people lost all sense that nature itself works on its own? Works better in most cases?
The great Japanese farmer Fukuoka said: "When a decision is made to cope with the symptoms of a problem, it is generally assumed that the corrective measures will solve the problem itself. They seldom do. Engineers cannot seem to get this through their heads. These countermeasures are all based on too narrow a definition of what is wrong. Human measures and countermeasures proceed from limited scientific truth and judgment. A true solution can never come about in this way."
"Trained as a microbiologist in his native Japan, he began his career as a soil scientist specializing in plant pathology. At age 25, he began to doubt the wisdom of modern agricultural science. He eventually quit his job as a research scientist, and returned to his family's farm on the island of Shikoku in Southern Japan to grow organic mikans. From that point on he devoted his life to developing a unique small scale organic farming system that does not require weeding, pesticide or fertilizer applications, or tilling."
Perhaps the USDA has some regulations that would straighten him out?