And Willie Nelson supports INDUSTRIAL HEMP to get America the FUCK off of dependence on foreign oil ! Ralph Nader has learned from Willie Nelson. Has Mccain or Obama? Yeah right !

Sioux Rose

What struck me here is the parallel between so few industrial giants determining how food is produced and what ends up on our supermarket shelves, with a similar consolidation of our media. Both trends are related in that they shore up power to a few who then wield phenomenal influence on all aspects of our lives. The media through the "magic" hypnotic spell cast by top-tier advertising experts determines what we WILL want and then big agri seeks to deliver it. Noting in advance what trends will be supported, they simply fill these "foods" with enough chemicals to keep them shelf lifed into perpetuity, while the Wall St hucksters betting on commodities futures to drive up costs, these numbers later used in the global tally that is gamed like any big sport, with inane rules of (tariffs) engagement. A few giants in the ring, the rest of us, lucky to get some crumbs... democracy, what a concept!

The University of Michigan study of organic farming pushed the concept of cover crops for out of season soil building. Sadly, that is difficult in short-season cropping areas like Minnesota where I farm. In order to use this system, I would have to plant earlier maturing plant varieties thereby losing significant yield potential. Planting late means harvesting later even with lower yielding short-season varieties. Chances then increase for an early frost to cause devastation and/or having to expend more energy to dry grain for storage.

I think the current congress has already learned from Willie but not in a good way. Willie Nelson lost a golf course and a bunch of other real estate because he couldn't pay his financial obligations.

I was living in Minnesota during the years that so many faming families lost their farms. We had moved from Minneapolis to a rural farming area--it was the "Back to the Earth" years and we wanted a few acres to garden, keep a few chickens, and such. We were surrounded by small farms and large fields of peas and sweet corn which was under contract to Green Giant. We were a young family and money was of course tight, but we did what many rural folks used to do back then, attend farm auctions to find used equipment. You'd get to see all your neighbors, eat hotdogs in the open air, and all-in-all have a really fun-filled day.

But then it turned ugly. It was just absolutely heart breaking, and to this day I almost break into tears when I remember those years. Hundreds of farmers were selling their farms, not because they wanted to sell or could even imagine anything other than farm life, but because after owning the farm that their parents and perhaps even grandparents had carefully tended, they could no longer finance their operation. They would hold an auction, but there were so many auctions during those years, and with no new small farmers just starting out, who wanted their old stuff? The only things that sold well were the big rigs that got them into trouble in the first place--the big rigs that they had bought on credit because they had been told that they needed to expand and modernize their operations if they wanted to save their farms.

Years later I was working with a woman one night and we got to talking about our past and she said that she and her husband had been ranchers in South Dakota, but that they had lost their ranch and had to "move into town". She explained that so many small ranchers were losing their ranches that there was a term for it--you wouldn't say, for instance, "Did you hear that so-and-so lost their ranch?", you'd say, "Did you hear that so-and-so had to move into town". And she said there was a shame connected to the loss, as though you had made poor choices and were only getting your just reward. Well I was surprised, but why should I have been? It was my Minnesota story all over again, but this time it was small ranchers in South Dakota. But the big eye-opener for me was how she had said that the ranchers were ashamed when they had to move into town. Remembering back to my Minnesota years, I realized that the farmers had also taken the blame for their loss and were ashamed that they had lost their farms.

Now compare this to the corporate farmers, their lobbyists in Washington, and their crookster politicians who pass bill after bill that favors corporate farms over the small family farm. Do they feel any shame? Why not at all! You'd think that God and Mother Nature herself prefers to see our earth divided into huge tracts that are spread with artificial fertilizers, sprayed with herbicides, planted with a single crop that is sprayed with pesticides, harvested with huge machinery or using under-paid farm workers, packaged so expensively that packaging accounts for 1/3 of the energy costs of producing food, shipped thousands of miles to the final market, and then, thanks to subsidies not available to small local farms, sold at a price that is so cheap that much of it ends up in landfills.

Best wishes at Farm Aid, Francis. Thanks to you and all those who are speaking out for a return of family farms.

Merry ( mainelyorganic@yahoo.com ), a woman in my permaculture gardening group, is writing a book which she hopes to soon have published: "Homegrown Community: The Maine Example". I asked her if she might have anything from her book that she would like to share with the people at the Farm Aid gathering. She sent me an email with these excerpts from her book:

"Opening our minds, our wallets, and our policies to support local agriculture is no longer a luxury for the informed, well-heeled, and activist few. The availability of safe local food depends upon us. American health is undermined by foods that are nutritionally deficient, harvested half-ripe, and over-processed. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides poison our soil, water, air, and bodies. Global warming, water emergencies, and increasing food contamination threaten the global food supply. Falling oil supplies combine with rising oil costs to fuel the fires of scarcity. It is in our own self-interest to learn about and befriend local farmers. I’m grateful that local agriculture provides such a pleasant, tasty, wholesome alternative, not a stringent sacrifice...

Many of us want to convert our fears about peak fuel, global warming, and American overuse of global resources which threaten our future into motivation to create an alternative, sustainable future. We know we must make changes in lifestyle but don’t know how to move outside the role of “consumer” into which corporate America has boxed us. We are hungry for the inspiration to replace fear with hope. We can find that inspiration among our neighboring farmers and gardeners...the synergy of local farms, gardens, markets, and forms of governance create a viable, vibrant community...

Together, we can celebrate family farmers. They grow healthy families, local economy, and resilient communities alongside their crops and livestock. With local agriculture, true homeland security takes root. We become self-sustaining, dependent only on local resources that we can husband and harvest sustainably. Thus, we become less vulnerable to global shortages, contamination, wars, or terrorism. When a community grows organically, it sets roots in fertile soil. It becomes resilient, able to weather the storms that are certain to come. The soil and the environment flourish rather than wither under the husbandry of corporate farms. Family farms contribute to global healing, not global warming...

We can discover and perhaps join a new tribe: “Locavores.” These are the people who seek out local foods. They enjoy growing some of their own food at home and sourcing the rest from local farms. They complete the community circle. In cooperation with their local farmers and Mother Nature they create a cycle that is self-sustaining and resilient. Eventually, they will contribute to reduced dependence on oil for the packaging and transport of food. Locavores use the power of their purse-strings to help reestablish global equity and peace. They cooperate with nature to reestablish the health of our planet...These members of the local food community—farmers, gardeners, and consumers acting in concert—are the true heroes of the 21st century...

As farmers and consumers share in the cultivation of our heritage, our fields, and our gardens, we are discovering that, together, we are also cultivating community. We are feeding and enriching each other, thereby nurturing social justice. We are forming consumer and farmer cooperatives, strengthening the ties that bind us to one another. Farms are turning to Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs) left and right. Over backyard fences, we are sharing food and garden lore with our immediate neighbors. At the farmstands and farmers’ markets we are meeting our slightly more distant neighbors. As we learn more about our interdependence, we are creating numerous organizations and events supportive of local farmers. Community is springing up everywhere around food. A MOFGA (Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association) bumper sticker reads “Local Farms, Healthy Communities.” Our state recognizes this connection with a new “Support Local Agriculture” license plate.

My car, like many others in Maine, sports a bumper sticker that asks, “Who’s Your Farmer?” MOFGA prints these stickers, because it believes it is as important for us to know our farmer as to know our doctor or lawyer. Welcome to a whole new paradigm:

"Your farmer is an important professional in your life."

Sioux Rose

GANDY DANCER: Thank you for sharing that moving story, and its parallel to ranchers. One could say the same thing about Ma & Pa small retail stores and even restaurants. Wallmart is the big fish eating all the little ones, and perhaps fast food has in many places taken away the "need" for other more down-to-earth restaurants. It's a cancer, this growing so big you cannot fall/fail, as is being proven as erroneous as the strategy to enable wealth to mostly aggregate at the TOP of the pyramid, thus creating an unstable structure, which could in the long run be the good news... its toppling onto US, where symbolically we become the slaves carrying those heavy slates upwards (taking on the debt burden) is the short term (I hope) tough part.

Sioux Rose

PS: I just realized the same "School of thought, or business operational instructions" applies to media: where big conglomerates have eaten up all the little broadcast stations, local newspapers, etc... soon the US will be "ONE NATION under OIL, INC."

The "Shill":
In the "old days", small towns as well as the busy big cities had "card masters" who would set up a "three card Monte" or "shell game" table on any street corner. The 'master' would gain people's confidence with the "legitimacy of his game" by using a "shill". Usually a child, sweet and innocent looking, or a "girl" (very virgin looking), or "old man/woman", who would "play the game and win". This would build the confidence of the "onlookers" who, when they saw the "shill" win would be encouraged to take their own chances---and they always lost. Later ----"off stage"-- the "game master" and the "shills" would split the take---because the shill was working with the master.
Willie Nelson has never been anything but the shill for the "masters"-----playing concerts for the "family farmers" and "raising aid money" for the most heavily government subsidized industry in the system, that by nature are the largest polluters of the environment as well. The "Family Farmer" has never been anything but a player on the commodities market, and feeding the family or the others was and still is secondary. I grew up on a ranch and we always had a "truck garden" where we sold/traded locally what we did not eat ourselves---including meat, if we ate beef it was when one of our animals broke a leg" cause yo don't eat your cash crop"---it's that simple.
"Organic produce" is higher priced at the local Super Market, and the standards for verification are almost non existent. If you find toxic chemicals in/on your broccoli that you purchased at the super market chain in your neighborhood you have little or no recourse for redress, and you most likely will not get your purchase price returned---as a result of false advertising.
The only answer is locally produced (usually your own yard) and very closely supervised "produce production"---including your meat/fish.
None of these measures are effective unless the population controls it's numbers, and this is not occurring on a very large scale anywhere on earth.
The problems that this country are facing are reflected in the rest of the world, and this country "being a world leader and all"----is leading in the wrong direction. They do not control their numbers and so they are always scrambling for a way to feed all those little children that "Jesus loves so much"----but does not feed cause he's so busy elsewhere---you know---saving all those souls.
Hunger is just another tool used by a few to control the many, and the USA is a world leader there as well.
Several years ago a friend of mine made an excellent suggestion to her local Ag. Extension Agent. SHE pointed out that the most agriculturally productive nation on the planet had (at the time ) 12 million hungry children each day, and almost as many elderly. Her idea was a sound one. Since the Ag. Dept PAID (and still does) farmers to let their land "lay fallow" that is not grow certain crops, they would be paid "compensation". Her idea was to raise food crops on these "fallow lands" and distribute the food to hungry Americans. She was told that the "Feds" would never allow it since the food that already goes to feed the hungry is bought on the open market with the money people donate for the hungry. In other words, it would compete with the commodities market and they could not allow this. So the people who donate their money to feed the hungry in the USA, do so paying full commodities prices----no wholesale when we feed those hungry Americans, or the world either.
Try not to forget also that Willie was a huge proponent of Marijuana use for many years. Until the made public his debt to the IRS for 16M in back taxes, after a "weed bust". Then he almost immediately appeared on TV Commercials as a proponent for the Reagan's (Nancy and Ron) just say NO " program failure"----saying that "The Marijuana sold today is ten times stronger than the Marijuana sold in the years past"--so just say no--a huge pile of "feces" that people ate up with spoons---cause Willie the Outlaw said it........on TV---- and "ya know its against the law to say stuff on TV that ain't true". Willie has been busted several more times since then for "Weed"----I'm sure it's that "old fashion weed"---the weaker stuff, ya know?
America seems to be doomed to failure at its own hands----as a result of its own absolute stupidity, and the deep need for "HEROS".
The "Organic Farmer" coming to the rescue is just another one of many.
Putting the production of food into the hands of a few is just as foolish as putting the control of $700 Billion in "bad debt" into the hands of a few ---in fact the very ones who created the problem---just a few---in the first place.
Then you know ---those Americans are not famous for learning from their mistakes are they?