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TechnoratiFood Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us
Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our financial system. If we continue to allow corporations to determine what we eat, as well as how food is harvested and distributed, then we will become captive to rising prices and shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap, mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat. Food, along with energy, will be the most pressing issue of our age. And if we do not build alternative food networks soon, the social and political ramifications of shortages and hunger will be devastating.
The effects of climate change, especially with widespread droughts in Australia, Africa, California and the Midwest, coupled with the rising cost of fossil fuels, have already blighted the environments of millions. The poor can often no longer afford a balanced diet. Global food prices increased an average of 43 percent since 2007, according to the International Monetary Fund. These increases have been horrific for the approximately 1 billion people-one-sixth of the world's population-who subsist on less than $1 per day. And 162 million of these people survive on less than 50 cents per day. The global poor spend as much as 60 percent of their income on food, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
There have been food riots in many parts of the world, including Austria, Hungary, Mexico, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Russia and Pakistan have introduced food rationing. Pakistani troops guard imported wheat. India has banned the export of rice, except for high-end basmati. And the shortages and price increases are being felt in the industrialized world as we continue to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and food prices climb. There are 33.2 million Americans, or one in nine, who depend on food stamps. And in 20 states as many as one in eight are on the food stamp program, according to the Food Research Center. The average monthly benefit was $113.87 per person, leaving many, even with government assistance, without adequate food. The USDA says 36.2 million Americans, or 11 percent of households, struggle to get enough food, and one-third of them have to sometimes skip or cut back on meals. Congress allocated some $54 billion for food stamps this fiscal year, up from $39 billion last year. In the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, costs will be $60 billion, according to estimates.
Food shortages have been tinder for social upheaval throughout history. But this time around, because we have lost the skills to feed and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for most of us to become self-sustaining. The large agro-businesses have largely wiped out small farmers. They have poisoned our soil with pesticides and contaminated animals in filthy and overcrowded stockyards with high doses of antibiotics and steroids. They have pumped nutrients and phosphorus into water systems, causing algae bloom and fish die-off in our rivers and streams. Crop yields, under the onslaught of changing weather patterns and chemical pollution, are declining in the Northeast, where a blight has nearly wiped out the tomato crop. The draconian Food Modernization Safety Act, another gift from our governing elite to corporations, means small farms will only continue to dwindle in number. Sites such as La Via Campesina do a good job of tracking these disturbing global trends.
"The entire economy built around food is unsafe and unethical," activist Henry Harris of the Food Security Roundtable told me. The group builds distribution systems between independent farmers and city residents.
"Food is the greatest place for communities to start taking back power," he said. "The national food system is collapsing by degrees. More than 50 percent of what we eat comes from the Central Valley of California. What happens when gasoline becomes $5 a gallon or drought sweeps across the cropland? The monolithic system of food production is highly unstable. It has to be replaced very soon with small, diverse sources that provide greater food security."
Cornell University recently did a study to determine whether New York state could feed itself. The research is described in two articles published in 2006 and 2008 by the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. If all agricultural land were in use, and food distribution were optimized to minimize the total distance that food travels, New York state could, the researchers found, have 34 percent of its food needs met from within its boundaries. This is not encouraging news to those who live in New York City. New York once relied on New Jersey, still known as the Garden State, instead of having food shipped from across the country. But New Jersey farms have largely given way to soulless housing developments. Farming communities upstate, their downtowns boarded up and desolate, have been gutted by industrial farming.
The ties most Americans had to rural communities during the Great Depression kept many alive. A barter economy replaced the formal economy. Families could grow food or had relatives to feed them. But in a world where we do not know where our food comes from, or how to produce it, we have become vulnerable. And many will be forced, as food prices continue to rise, to shift to a diet of cheap, fatty, mass-produced foods, already a staple of the nation's poor. Junk food, a major factor in obesity, diabetes and heart disease, is often the only food those in the inner city can buy because supermarkets and nutritious food are geographically and financially beyond reach. As the economy continues to deteriorate, the middle class will soon join them.
"It is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land," Wendell Berry observed in "The Unsettling of America." "Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our ‘marginal land' because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work."
Berry, who lives on a farm in Kentucky where his family has farmed for generations, argues that local farming is fundamental to sustaining communities. Industrial farming, he says, has estranged us from the land. It has rendered us powerless to provide for ourselves. It has left us complicit in the corporate destruction of the ecosystem. Its moral cost, Berry argues, has been as devastating as its physical cost.
"The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat," writes Berry. "They will be detached and remote from the sources of their life, joined to them only by corporate tolerance. They will have become consumers purely-consumptive machines-which is to say, the slaves of producers. What ... model farms very powerfully suggest, then, is that the concept of total control may be impossible to confine within the boundaries of the specialist enterprise-that it is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people."
The nascent effort by communities to reclaim local food production is the first step toward reclaiming lives severed and fragmented by corporate culture. It is more than a return to local food production. It is a return to community. It brings us back to the values that sustain community. It is a return to the recognition of the fragility, interconnectedness and sacredness of all living systems and our dependence on each other. It turns back to an ethic that can save us.
"[The commercial] revolution ... , " writes Berry, "did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesmen of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
"The inevitable result of such an economy," Berry adds, "is that no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home, no home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty, nothing is ultimately worth doing, and no place or task or person is worth a lifetime's devotion. ‘Waste,' in such an economy, must eventually include several categories of humans-the unborn, the old, ‘disinvested' farmers, the unemployed, the ‘unemployable.' Indeed, once our homeland, our source, is regarded as a resource, we are all sliding downward toward the ash heap or the dump."
59 Comments so far
Show AllGood article. I have trouble getting some friends who are prosperous, urban, and science-challenged to understand the magnitude of the food crisis. "What's the problem? If you don't like the food, find an organic store." This article does a good job of describing how vulnerable our food situation is, even in this rich country. I will use this article.
Chris Hedges says: "It is a return to the recognition of the fragility, interconnectedness and sacredness of all living systems and our dependence on each other. It turns back to an ethic that can save us." The ethic will be food that is locally grown using organic methods. If animals are involved, using their products sparingly and giving them some quality of life will make us better people.
I think we can begin by replacing some food that is currently supplied by agribusiness. Word of mouth is an effective advertising strategy for food issues to counter the expensive marketing campaigns by purveyors of tainted food. We should build support for local farms, farmers' markets, zoning changes to allow vegetable patches or yard fowl in lawns. Those of us who can should pay the little extra for local organix food. City plots can be set aside. Street plantings could include some fruiting trees and vines. Highway right-of-ways and rooftops could be farmed. Schools can have food cultivation programs to supplement the lunches and teach the children about growing. All are possible through changes in local laws and through local activism. I have seen this work in the Montpellier region of France, which will host a conference on food in spring 2010.
It is so difficult to get tougher ecological controls during this period of corporate domination of politics. But we can start by chipping away around the edges whereever possible. Then if there is a disaster we have something like an auxilliary generator to keep us going for a while.
Joe
I am afraid that we are past the point of no return on corporate control of the food chain. I come to this conclusion based on what I have seen happen to the small, rural farming community I know in south-central Kansas. Once a thriving community that had its own elementary school, bank, post office, and hardware store it now has no operating businesses but the grain elevator where the local wheat farmers come to have their grain shipped off to god knows where. The elementary school is a hulking ruin. Most of the farm houses that dotted the landscape have been abandoned. The only people that still live in the town are in their seventies or eighties. Increasingly, the farm land is concentrated in the hands of a single family that farms the land with enormous machinery. No one raises chickens, cows, or pigs. Hardly anyone even has a kitchen garden. The community is, in effect, dead. This is what we have allowed to happen. We have allowed thriving rural communities to become ghost towns while we hunker down in unsustainable coastal megalopolises completely cut off from the farming communities that sustain them. Happy talk about farmers' markets will not change this.
hey Cyon,
ever heard of this one??
http://www.newswithviews.com/NWVexclusive/exclusive15.htm
Rumsfeld and aspertame? he was the CEO of Searle Pharma..
big bucks making artificial sweeteners..
right to your kids, and ..well, check out that article, and also hunt for
connections "rumsfeld and aspartame".
I dont like the artificial man-made stuff..
.chemicals can be poisonous.
This is really the truth that is happening in our economy. We are now experiencing shortages in food. I wish there would be a way to solve this problem. - Transfer Point Beta Glucan
If millions of us planted pot could they arrest us all? That would be a revolution.
They probably wouldn't arrest us. They would just shoot us.
Not if you gave them some from time to time!
Joe
duplicate deleted. (OK you got me Siouxrose, Mercury is retrograde)
Joe
America: The Grim Truth
Americans, I have some bad news for you:
You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.
If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.
I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.
I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.
Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance.
This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.
With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.
If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:
Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12
The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed.
All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.
And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.
But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.
If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.
So what should you do?
You should leave the United States of America.
If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can.
In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?
Full article in comments on thread here: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/23685
Thanks Lance. I have been thinking about it for a long time. But I feel that leaving my otherwise beautiful country to the scum that is killing it is somehow treasonous.
Poet, I garden a little differently. For almost 40 years I have been using the no till (permaculture) method, and it has worked very well for me. I don't "work" the soil at all and I do very little composting. I keep my entire garden covered with a very thick mulch, and that's about it. For mulch I use just about anything I can get my hands on: leaves, hay, cardboard and newspaper, sea weed, grass clippings, wood chips... A thick mulch eliminates most weeding and the soil is so rich that crops can be planted very closely and there is no need to let the soil rest.
One of the posts here stated concern about using human wastes in the garden. Urine is fine for your garden--dilute it one to ten parts water. Composted human manure is fine as well.
My advice to anyone just getting started is to join an organic/permaculture gardening group. Google your state and see what you can find.
Chris mentioned that the North East lost their entire tomato crop this year. I live in Maine and everybody here lost all of theirs, many lost all their potatoes as well. The culprit was "late blight", and it was due to the unusually cool, wet weather we had this summer. Late blight is the same plant disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine. Though, as some of you may know, it was the English that killed the Irish peasants, not the famine. You can read about the famine at Wikipedia.
For those of you all ready to go gardening please note that it is more than just plugging plants or seeds into the ground.
Soil is a living organism which must be worked--fertilizer, compost and mulch yes, but also weeding, crop rotation, and resting the land periodically so it can recover.
Your food harvest will get out of the soil only as much as you put into it naturally. By respecting your soil you are respecting yourself and the source of all life.
Poet
Is Chris Hedges doing a trial balloon here?
Because given his writing and research skills he could have put together this article in about half an hour just by linking together a few Wendell Berry quotes and some guvment data.
Meanwhile, in many of the above responses I get a serious sense of apocalypse (or its opposite!). I spend a lot of time driving around rural SE Indiana where it is all corn and beans and mostly older people still clinging to their no longer family farms because the young people are mostly fleeing. Many of the farms have become junkyards of broken machinery, and the barns are falling in. The "waste places" are now hugely yellow: it's ragweed time.
I don't know about you, but I can't pull over and eat the Monsanto GM atrazined "pig corn," and although I have pulled over and eaten soy beans before they've started going brown, I wouldn't recommend it as a steady diet, because for all I know, the genes they are putting in those beans may have me glowing in the dark like a firefly!
Actually, Hedges makes a really good point when he writes that "Food shortages have been tinder for social upheaval throughout history. But this time around, because we have lost the skills to feed and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for most of us to become self-sustaining. The large agro-businesses have largely wiped out small farmers."
But it would have been nice if he had tied this observation specifically to the last Great Depression, when perhaps the majority of Americans did not yet live in cities. Meanwhile, the remaining "small farmers" are mostly growing corn and beans for the industrial ag system, so that even they are no longer relevant to the FOOD supply chain.
Yeah, I know I'm rambling, because I am trying to avoid agreement with drosera, who writes above:
"Population growth happens first, then a socioeconomic system evolves to feed and maintain the billions that occupy the planet. The world's capitalistic food economy is like the body's immune response to infection. It is a way of adapting to the increase in human beings on the planet.
We will never go back to small farms, not as long as our population exceeds the carrying capacity of the Earth. You can play around the edges all you want with organic farming, buying locally, farm markets, and canning your own peaches, but the present food system evolved for a reason: it is the only way to feed seven billion people."
I believe this is an accurate statement regardless whether you think it is "fair" or not. What is needed is a new way of thinking about what constitutes anything called a "standard of living." For example, the Catholic Church is opposed to China's One Child policy, but can you imagine where we would be today without it? We really need a GLOBAL One Child Policy or we will have a No Child Left Policy, by default.
Meanwhile, I no longer grow veggies in the back yard because local teenagers either steal them or trample them. In a small town of large lots where almost everybody is a grandchild of a farmer, I am one of the few remaining gardeners, yet reduced to container gardening in my driveway. No generational memory. If the wire popped off the spark plug of their lawn mower they'd be lost. What the hell, most of them hire others to mow---and trim---their lawns.
Wendell Berry is right. We are dying from high-fructose corn syrup poisoning! A nation of diabetics; slaven, ignorant, obese, and useless. Too toxic even to be ground into Soylent Green. Then there are the lies of "Nutrition Facts" food labeling, but that is another story, eh?
You are what you eat. Eh?
-30-
drosera's claim that overpopulation drives industrial agriculture is incorrect. Rather, industrial agriculture is another vicious cycle of "disaster capitalism". Elites build enterprises that create destruction that opens new doors of profit opportunity. The elites' campaign to commercialize all aspects of human civilization creates scarcity across a planet of abundance. The fabricated scarcity drives enslavement and instability, in turn driving overpopulation.
The most efficient food/fuel/materials production occurs in places like Kerala, India, where an acre of production feeds six people. Everyone knows that Keralans enjoy top education and health standards, better than the average USan, and on a small fraction of inputs. Kerala home gardens are a sustainable agriculture practice, relying on almost no petro-chemicals.
There are 3.8 billion acres of arable land on the planet. So we can feed 23 billion people, Kerala style, just on this land, which doesn't even include the wildland abundance or the seafood. Or we can provide food/fuel/materials for 7.8 billion people on this land - sustainably - something the elites cannot claim for their profit rackets.
These figures provide guidelines for the people's policy. We really want to reduce this amount of land under cultivation and rely more on wild food. And we can sustainably fish the seas too. So we limit the human population to the current 7 billion, reduce the cultivated land by 30% to provide food/fuel/materials for 70% of the population, and let the wildlands and the seas cover the other 30%. Notice that this also cuts out most of the elites' highly destructive logging, mining, and fossil operations and the associated gargantuan waste streams and contamination. Not to mention the imperial skulduggery.
The population is stabilized with global cooperation in dismantling rule by elites and replacing it with land/water/food/fuel/material production rights for all. Economies and populations worldwide will stabilize. Are we ready to ostracize the psychopaths (elites) from the society?
Thank you Chris for articulating this so well.... Food is so basic. Such a part of our lives: social, beautiful, delicious, consciously respectful, health/life-sustaining, humbling and connecting. CAN be, anyway... OR it can be a commodified means to control, isolating, addictive, wasteful, poisonous, separating us from its natural source, sickening us internally and externally and rendering us mechanically to its same heartless Caesar....the iron-fisted Molloch mammon god that insists we have no other.
I have lived most of my life in urban areas, but have been lucky enough to have experienced for significant periods since childhood the communitarian feel of the agrarian life. I have been heartbroken to see the frequent morphing of land-based living to techno-monetary-based, but do have hope for the human race despite current insanities making it seem a lost cause.... I cannot fall into despair because in rural areas I've seen people returning to farming thanks to the 'seeds' planted by their parents/grandparents and in urban areas I've seen new home gardens and CSAs taking off like rockets with the disillusionment of the public after such clearly venal aims of our food 'providers' have been exposed... We are not all blind, and we see and share more each day... We need to take back the term, 'Green Revolution' and apply it in our backyards, windowsills, rooftops, community centers, schoolyards and vacant lots... We need to plant veggies around our capitol buildings, incorporate local food plants into landscaping for hospitals, restaurants, grocery stores. Whatever justifiable criticisms of the political mess of the world, or the US in particular, the possibility that Michelle Obama's garden may have sparked a fire inside some future farmers is just one of a thousand signs that there may be HOPE for actual human beings and not just corporate behemoths yet.
This revolution will not be televised, marketed, packaged, processed, frozen, shipped or shot full of hormones or antibiotics... It is comprised of love for life, not control over life. This revolution will open minds and hearts, not 'win' them. Not to say it will be easy.
ezeflyer is right.
Cannabis hemp is the element missing from the food equation. I am always disappointed to read analyses such as this one, that omit Cannabis from the conversation, as if it isn't a key factor.
No discussion of agriculture is complete without consideration of the world's most ancient, nutritious, potentially abundant, globally distributed, useful, environmentally beneficial agricultural resource:
FACT: Hemp seed is the only common seed with three essential fatty acids.
FACT: Hemp is the best available source of organic vegetable protein on Earth.
FACT: Hemp is the only crop that produces biofuels, building materials, paper, cloth, oil, herbal therapeutics and completely nutritious food, in abundance, from the same harvest.
FACT: Cannabis isn't illegal, it's essential.
I challenge anyone to find a flaw in the strategy for sustainability that reintroduces Cannabis agriculture into organic crop rotations.
Search for projectpeace on You Tube and BlogTalkRadio to find out more about why Cannabis is essential to our species achieving sustainability on this planet. Contact me to help make it happen sooner.
Home gardening is on the rise. Seed sales were up dramatically this year, which means lots of newbie gardeners. If we see any noticable price inflation this fall/winter, you can bet that this trend will only increase next season. People can smell the instability in the air, as the giant gears of federal government shift us into a course of spending and corporate power that is unprecedented.
One of the main reasons that residents of the Soviet Union survived its collapse was that they were already used to ineffective government food distribution, and relied heavily on kitchen gardens to supplement their food needs.
While kitchen gardens certainly won't provide all your food needs, they can do a lot to prevent you from starving, especially if you plant more than a summer salad garden and plant:
-calorie dense crops such as potatoes and corn
-vitamin rich winter storage vegetables such as carrots, beets, and winter squash
-a variety of nutritious greens (spinach for spring and fall, chard and amaranth for the summer).
Even urban gardeners with limited space can utilize the vertical climbing habits of pole beans, peas, squash, and cucumbers. With careful planning, effective use of available space, intensive farming methods, and expansion of arable land with earthtainers, urban gardeners can produce a lot of food in very little space.
.
Don't be put off by the gloom and doomers who say that gardening cannot save you. Kitchen gardens aren't about long term self-sufficiency. They are about short-term survival and can supplement food obtained through foraging/barter/spotty market availability. It is unlikely we will see a complete absence of food, but rather shortages, food lines, purchasing restrictions, etc. In most cases, large kitchen gardens will ensure that a family can make it through the winter until the next planting season, in which they can expand the size of their garden accordingly.
I left the US almost 20 years agoone of the reasons being that I was sick of being made sick by the food. No matter how much I grew myself, or bought that was supposedly organic and natural, the toxic elements managed to sneak their way in and lay me low with stomcha issues, rashes or migraines.
My first trip to Mexico was a real revelation: The only time I got sick was in a a gringo-style ice cream place.
Here in Mexico, despite some unfortunate habits--like DDT, and human waste used as fertilizer--it is still possible to eat pretty cleanly from local stuff--especially if you grow some of your own.
Whenever I visit the States, no matter how careful I am when I eat--I still have to spend 3 weeks letting my body recover from toxic chemicals passing through it.
That is so true. I'm absolutely dreading ever going back to the land of processed crap. Nothing is safe ever since the government quit respecting the rule of law. If you let one Frankenfood nose under the edge of the tent, pretty soon, you're going to have the whole monster crashing into you bed.
And that's the case now. Core ingredients like Fructose and Soy gene-spliced to leech pesticide and herbicide into your gut long after it's been harvested. That's exactly what happens: it ties up my colon for three weeks. Then getting the hell out of that funny-farm and back to a little island that has no Frankenfood because the people are so poor: why, it's like being reborn or something. Dirt cheap succulent produce that's way sweeter (and smaller and not as shiny) as "Buthole Foods" Phony Produce.
I feel ten years younger eating stuff that just came outta the ground or off the tree not ten miles from where it is sold.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
the only thing i would add is to mention the rockefeller family of social psychotics engaged in the use of food to wipe out the populations of the world
"But before such a merger can be consummated, and the United States becomes just another province in a New World Order, there must at least be the semblance of parity among the senior partners in the deal – How does one make the nations of the world more nearly equal? The Insiders determined that a two-prong approach was needed, use American money and know-how to build up your competitors, while at the same time use every devious strategy you can devise to weaken and impoverish this country. The goal is not to bankrupt the United States, we must emphasize. Rather, it is to reduce our productive might, and therefore our standard of living, to the meager subsistence level of the socialized nations of the world.
Only a fascist-socialist dictatorship would have the power to accomplish such a – redistribution.- Notice that the plan is notto bring the standard of living in less developed countries up to our level, but to bring ours down to meet theirs coming up.
You may be assured, however, that the Rockefellers and their allies are not talking about reducing their own quality of life. It is your standard of living which must be sacrificed on the altar of the New World Order.
The Rockefeller game plan is to use population, energy, food, and financial controls as a method of people control which will lead, steadily and deliberately, into the Great Merger. Much of the spade work for setting up this ploy is being done by Henry Kissinger, who was a personal employee of Nelson Rockefeller for a decade before Rocky placed him in the Nixon Administration. On numerous occasions Herr Kissinger has declared that his goal is to create a “New World Order.” Syndicated Washington columnist Paul Scott reveals:
It is Kissinger’s belief, according to his aides, that by controlling food, one can control people, and by controlling energy, especially oil, one can control nations and their -financial systems. By placing food and oil under international control along with the world’s monetary system, Kissinger is convinced a loosely knit world government operating, under the frame-work of the United Nations can become a reality"
they are sick psychopaths and we need to deal with them, remove them form civil society
we need a eugenics plan for the nwo
this book - Seeds of Destruction - The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
by F. William Engdahl
http://www.globalresearch.ca/books/SoD.html
is a must read - not that the lazy left will - but everyone should read it
Some believe that bees are dying-off because of genetically-modified plant seeds that are altering their genetic make-up.
One way or another, they will try to deplete the number of people living on this over-populated planet. If not with food or the cost of food - then with vaccines or another potentially dangerous invention of elitist "profits over people"; and you can be certain they will profit as the population dwindles.
With legal cannabis, there would be no food problem.
attaboy...
important to remember that, when we think of food, we typically think only of what we traditionally have encountered, depending on our culture, as food...there are edible plants, insects and animals all over America that are not currently on the average American's brain-menu, but could be...
I disagree. I envision hoards of lunatics chanting, "food, food..." as they devour neighbors gardens. Private property and common decency will mean nothing to this plague of munchie z*mbies! Of course I could be wrong. edit: I had to replace the o with an * in order to post, weird.
You are wrong.
Look up the nutritional profile of hemp. It is one of the best sources, contains the highest amounts, of Alpha Linolenic Acid, an essential fatty acid. The only other plant based sources that compare are flax and chia. It also contains relatively high amounts of protein, not common among plant based foods, and fiber.
Deepa
In 1970 Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, said: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control people.”
The nexus between the US government, agri business corporations such as Monsanto and NGOs such as World Vision is evident throughout the world. Read:
"Monsanto and Its Philanthropy"
http://dissidentvoice.org/
2009/05/monsanto-and-its-philanthropy/
In order to understand the nexus between the US government, Corporations and NGOs one may read about US Global Leadership Campaign (USGLC). USGLC is an influential network of over 400 organizations and thousands of individuals. Corporations and NGOs such as Monsanto, Lockheed Martin, Mercy Corps, CARE, World Vision, Caterpiller, AIPAC, Motorola “joined together in a coalition with a common message and a common mission.”
http://www.usglc.org/
In order to know what US government and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland doing in India, read:
"Monsanto, a Contemporary East India Company, and Corporate Knowledge in India"
http://dissidentvoice.org/
2009/07/monsanto-a-contemporary-
east-india-company-and-corporate-
knowledge-in-india/
I recently moved from 16 acres to 1/16 of an acre in the center of a small CT town. Its amazing how much produce you can harvest by planning carefully and composting organically. Raised beds and container planting gave me great results even in this difficult summer weather we just experienced. Its amazing how much tastier the veggies are, and how much better I feel after having given up supermarket produce.And of corse theres the local farmers market a few blocks away.
Hedges is masterful at hyperbole. The same demon pops up over and over again in his writing: the evil of corporate culture. But our unethical, topdown system of economics and politics may spring from something more fundamental: the unrestrained population growth of Homo sapiens.
Population growth happens first, then a socioeconomic system evolves to feed and maintain the billions that occupy the planet. The world's capitalistic food economy is like the body's immune response to infection. It is a way of adapting to the increase in human beings on the planet.
We will never go back to small farms, not as long as our population exceeds the carrying capacity of the Earth. You can play around the edges all you want with organic farming, buying locally, farm markets, and canning your own peaches, but the present food system evolved for a reason: it is the only way to feed seven billion people.
Nothing will change in our food economy until the population decreases enough to make small farms viable again. That won't happen for quite a few years, though our present unsustainable system might break down suddenly, causing a die-off of billions. Unpleasant thought, isn't it?--Good government and sustainable agricultural practices depend upon the perishing of Earth's multitudes?
"the present food system evolved for a reason: it is the only way to feed seven billion people."
Perhaps for one generation or thereabouts. The present food system is not sustainable: it is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels and abundant water supplies, both of which are depleting, along with the soil fertility across continents as the oceans become anaerobic. Monocultures are also greatly susceptible to failure.
We already resolved this question. We're going after the elites and their godzilla machines. Then the population will naturally get itself under control. You have to realize that insecurity in this world, which causes overpopulation, is designed and implemented by elites with cold calculation. The elites fabricate insecurity and scarcity in a world of abundance to enslave the people.
The elites are thrilled for you to help divide the resistance with the overpopulation strawman. But we on the far left are not taking the bait. The problem is the elites. Nothing else. Consider shifting your exchange/association/investments away from the elites and their godzilla machinery, and toward your local community. This is the way to solve overpopulation, and all the rest of the symptoms of that dreadful plague, elitism.
You appear to be the only one who has the right idea, even hedges is worried about saving 1,000,000,000 people which will make him and others feel good that we can keep the 'unfettered' growth of the human population while keeping everybody comfortable as if there is enough room and resources for that 'growing' human population which in theory there is enough space in texas to accommandate the whole human population right now(just another cute disney type of trivia to make people happy or something).
Such rubbish is quite discomforting, much like moving into a city and living in an apartment with one window to enjoy the great outdoors from.
You are partly correct in that we have a situation where the majority of the world's population has crowded itself into cities, and in the third world, hellish
shanty towns. Now many of these folks were previously living on the land and doing quite well, thank you. Until, you guessed it, Monsanto and co. moved in and forced the people into indentured servitude and took over the once diverse farm lands and turned them into huge sterile expanses of GMO corn for export to feed lots in, you guessed it again, the U.S.....Feeding the masses nutritionaly deficient and downright toxic food-like substances only benefits OilyAgraPharma-cons.
Drosera, I believe you have it backwards. Corporations have no interest in sustaining human life. The Health Insurance Corporations leave out fifty million in their system of health rationing in the United States.
People now understand that modern economic systems are not inclusive and dedicated to the interests of people as opposed only to corporations and their investors. So, people realizing that YOYO (Your On Your Own) is real and applies to their lives directly. People now are shifting their views from Corporate to Communitarian. People understand the need for cooperation and mutual interdependence if they are to survive.
Millions of people are now planting organic gardens and saving their seeds. Additionally they are supporting local agriculture, primarily sustainable agriculture. People are respectfully reconnecting with nature and the soil. They are protecting the soil from pesticides and herbicides and increasingly choosing to buy and grow organic foods. People now understand that buying from large national or international corporations is in their worst interest. Locavores are growing in number and sustainable living is their goal. People are moving on and leaving the bankrupt corporate world behind. The old Corporate economy is being gradually replaced by a more sustainable economy and local living enhanced once again by people caring for other people. This movement is peaceful, enduring, and will ultimately replace the old system of Corporate Capitalism and governance.
Corporate agriculture is a prescription for starvation, especially targeted starvation for political ends. No thanks!
Stone,
While it is admirable that you and many others are moving away from corporate agriculture, it is unlikely that small, organic farms can feed seven billion people. Urbanization makes it necessary to transport food thousands of miles from where it was produced. Thirty-seven percent of the food New Yorkers eat COULD be produced in the state of New York. Only 37. And that is the story around the globe. Rail and air transport, big farms, petroleum-fueled farm equipment--that is how you feed an overpopulated planet. And that is one of the reasons our population grew--increasing agricultural output as well as public health measures which lower the death rate.
I look at the world to see where the corporate system of production and distribution is most obvious and what countries stand out? China, India, the United States, Japan, England, France. All overpopulated, all too outsized to put a human scale on any activity, political or economic. Small countries like Denmark, Sweden, Bhutan, Costa Rico do not have to run complicated systems to get food to their people. Small farms and farm markets work in such places. They work because of the smaller scale.
I didn't mean to imply corporate agriculture cares about people. It doesn't--witness its willingness to grow corn for biofuel. I just meant to say that our agricultural system was arrived at through a Darwinian scheme in which small-scale farms could not supply the needs of burgeoning cities and huge operations dependent on fossil-fuel inputs could. If we can reduce our population to the level maintained through of most of our history, maybe we can support people in the way you are practicing and advocating.
It's a vicious cycle, not a linear cause and effect. The corporations certainly did contribute mightily to population growth in the fact that they came in at the very top of the curves in population cycles and sustained them for further growth. (Population cycles are the rule throughout nature.) This has been one of the prime effects of global capitalism in the empire phase from the 19th century on. It's truly painting the world's population problem into a corner and creating an almost insoluble dilemma.
A comment about the 34% of food needs of New Yorkers. Hedges specifically referred to "agricultural land" in this figure. Much more land could be agricultural as intensive agriculture works in yards, plots, ex-driveways and streets, ex-parking lots, ex-box stores, fields, etc. Furthermore, the figure is probably derived from conventional agriculture.
It is amazing how little land is required to feed a family. The 34% doesn't sound terribly bad to me, if I am correct.
Still, we're talking about a major societal readjustment that may too traumatic to happen. Population reduction through time would still be necessary and would probably happen under these circumstances.
Arry,
What I am saying is different from most others on this site. Corporations are not evil. They do not intentionally screw up the world. They did not cause the population to explode. They don't care one way or the other what happens to the planet or to human beings. They only care about profits. That makes them neither good nor evil.
It's like religion. You can be religious, you can be anti-religious, and you can be areligious. Areligious--that is the way corporations are. They did not cause the population to grow, they did not plan to throw peasants off their land, they did not carry out a scheme to convert the prairies into cornfields, they did not hatch out a plan to make us dependent on fossil fuels. They only did whatever they could do to make money. That is not the same as committing evil deeds a la Hitler. There is no intent.
So, the population grows--due to our own cleverness, mainly. Institutions develop to deal with problems on a large scale--like food production and distribution. One of those institutions is our present capitalistic system with its banks, profit-motive, rewards to the greedy and so on. But capitalism is a reaction to the biological phenomenon of growth.
The end of capitalism will come when the population declines. It won't happen until then. Small countries without a population problem will be able to avoid the worst excesses of this twisted system, but the big countries (like the USA) will be stuck with it. Make you wanna move? How about Costa Rico?
drosera--unfortunately, corporations do intentionally do things that screw up the world. You can read about how food companies got together in the 1940's to convince women that cooking fresh meals for their families was old fashioned. That way they could sell all sorts of packaged process foods for profit at the expense of our health. And yes, they did conspire to get farmers off the land and the gov't was their partner.
There is also research that demonstrates that organic/sustainable systems can feed the world.
drosera -- I think I understand what you are saying. I agree corporations are akin to cancer (taking advantage of the situation at hand) and it would be kind of silly to call cancer "evil".
But you are wrong on one of your points. Corporations (rather the corporate/government complex) did have a hand in making the population explode in the manner I described. It was, as you say, primarily to make a profit and the more people in a developing condition buying into the corporate life, the more profit and growth for the corporations. (It's still how they think.) And real people were making the decisions based on an extremely limited set of conditions dictated by capitalism. In fact, many of them thought they were doing almost saintly work in feeding the masses and bringing the wonders of corporate culture to the world. But the fact is, what they did (the business/corporate/government complex) was a factor in rapid population growth, regardless of any discussion of good and evil.
Read some of the '40's and '50's books and articles on the subject and you will see this was a very hot topic and mostly benighted by the corporate/government paradigm which narrows the vision absurdly, precluding any kind of rational conclusions. Some people saw through it, of course.
Amen! I am one of these people you speak of, and I am seeing and hearing of many other people doing the things you speak of. The local co-op organic garden is doing VERY well in my neighborhood... great tasting, healthy produce and cheaper than the toxic-ridden crap you get from grocery stores.
the rockefellers and the nwo are working on both the mass murder of the planet and absolute fascist control of the planet using food among other techniques as weapons
they are sick bastards
the plan is called eugenics - look into it
Part of the puzzle is CODEX ALIMENTARIUS
Eugenics goes way back. FDR was a believer at one point. It was common to find the master race undercurrent flowing under the surface of the elite. CODEX world trade specifications are designed, from what I can read from a dissenting doctor on Youtube, to deliver malnutritious Frankenfood complete with chemicals known to cause sterilization to the masses. Ten years ago there was a Newsweek article on the shocking decline of births in the US. I suspect they may be connected.
The problem is, that it's been used more to monopolize food sources and ag land than control population. It's seen as a way to make money. And as all good Capitalists know, limiting your growth of your market is not in the interest of your bottom line. So it seems doomed to fail because food producers don't want to limit the population. It's just making us all sick with GM and Pesticide soaked crap that looks like food. It's pretty, as our resident MonInsaneto farmer cheerfully bubbled about his poison crop of CorpProduce, but it's not organic food. And the organic label, now means nothing either, since FDA won't penalize violators and allows over 240 sythetic chemicals in so-called "orgainic" food.
It's another, in-your-face, too-little-too-late Conservative fiasco. Clearly they're working on it, since Silly Gates and RockaMonster built the seed vault in the arctic to rebuild the world after....? What exactly?
They're not going to tell us their big "Joker/Batcave" plan, until it's way too late for your immune system to cope with it.
Don't buy anything from a big company, (fertilizers, seeds, etc) and you will be planting the good stuff. Share cuttings. Trade seeds among yourselves and don't involve money.
It is the only way.
All of the above are all just my opinions only.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
It is vitally important that we do not think of gardening and farming merely in terms of providing food. In all the decades I have been gardening, I have come to the realization that I must share and provide habitat and food for other creatures who, inevitably, for better and occasionally worse, will teach me unexpected truths. It is a balancing act which varies with the seasons.
Even if all you can do is to plant a few "Lady in Red" salvia among some carrots, when a migrating hummingbird decides to challenge your presence in what is obviously her garden, you will know that you are honored to have your self importance challenged.
My neighbors sometimes chuckle in the fall because as they are trying to be rid of the enormous number of leaves which cover their sterile lawns, I am collecting leaves because, to me, their decay is the major basis of my economy and diversity.
Birdbrain you are correct. I have used my grounds and garden in ways that both invites and welcomes other critters. I share my gardens with them and always plant more than I need so that all can live well here. I often see many different animals at the gardens at the same time enjoying their bounty. The woodchucks like the cucumber plants, the turtles the low hanging tomatos, the deer the sunflowers and the corn, I have a birdfeeder near the garden that I supply with seed year round and the sparrows in particular attack the insects that visit my corn plants. It is not a perfect balance but a very good balance because we all manage to eat well and live well here. I often see birds on the endangered list growing in numbers here such as the red headed woodpecker among others. All life is valued here and a natural balance seems to be working well for all. I also like plants populating parts of the grounds that appeal to them instead of planting grasses everywhere. Natural areas are welcomed. I also have a patch of rivercane growing in an appropriate place that gets a lot of moisture. Warblers are returning to live in the rivercane. Wildflower gardens with indigenous plants only help to support the local wild honeybee population and that supports my vege gardens and fruit trees. The peaches and melons are wonderful this year and the crabapples are larger than I have ever seen them. The deer love the crabapples and it brings them very close to my favorite sitting area. The Cardinal's also feast on crabapples. The blackberries were in good supply this year and the wild grapes and walnuts are doing very well both with heavy yields. Hawks and falcons keep the small animal and large insect populations in check. What I do here is mostly sustainable and little energy other than human energy is used to work the place. My place has become an environmental oasis that supports wildlife on adjoining lands. Every year holds special surprises. This spring a large group of Cedar Waxsings flew in to feed on the holly and pine for the first time. Each year is a little different and the surprises are many.
I like to 'talk' to our cardinals. Our deer enjoy ripping at the crabapple branches, which irritates me, unfortunately. The wild turkeys like the crabapples in the winter. I like the butterflies and make sure I have milkweed around for the monarchs. The hummingbirds like our place a lot and make themselves at home. I had a woodpecker eating seeds off my mullein this summer.
Gotta, Gotta, Gotta, watch the documentary "FOOD INC."
Gotta, Gotta, Gotta, watch this haunting film.
You can find it on line.
I own a CSA. (Community Supported Agriculture.)
(This is where people buy a share of my garden, which i pick and deliver every week.)
I went to our local theater.
It showed "FOOD INC" 5 nights in a row.
I gave fliers about my CSA to all that entered.
I told them, "You're going to need this when you get out!"
I picked up a lot of share holders.
More than I can serve.
I am haunted.
Even though I knew many of the facts before going in.
I am still haunted.
I flash on the movie every day and night.
"FOOD INC"
Your eyes can see the process first hand.
The shit beef! THe mutant chickens!
Your ears can hear the laws Monsanto tries to get passed.
Like.... making it against the law to publish a picture of food processing plants.
Like... making it illegal to "slander" the companies by talking down on how they do things.
BUy local organic, AND get anyone and everyone to watch this movie.
Plus, for anyone who hasn't discovered it already, FIND AND STUDY PERMACULTURE.
Contact me to find out more.
Kaika sez:
"Contact me to find out more"
*****************
How are we suppossed to do that Kaika?
Poet
People of Earth, it is time to reconnect with your inner gardener. You can do it. Your parents and grandparents
Probably farmed or gardened as naturally as getting up in the morning. The internet has put a wealth of information and resources at our fingertips. Gardeners I have met tend to be gentle people, eager to share what they know, and what they have grown. The famine and disease which are on our horizon, though effected by systems too large and complex and powerful for us to be able to do much about, can be mitigated through small, locally managed cooperatives.
And perhaps as important, is the direct effect on our physical, mental, and spiritual well being, of getting our hands in
The soil and nurturing a living system which will nourish us in return. Paramahansa Yoganada advised us to spend at
Least an hour a day gardening. The Buddhist precept of “A day without working is a day without eating” is a clear
Reminder of what a truly moral existence would look like. Big Ag represents the epitome of human chauvinism and arrogance. Whereas hunger is the universal humbling force: we must eat everyday. We have become habituated to false values of glamour, easy-living and convenience. Farmers are scoffed at, derided and abused, portrayed as ignorant straw-chewing hicks, while sports stars and movie stars and music stars get WAY more attention than they
Deserve. I submit that if you are hungry and someone gives you wholesome food to eat and gives you the skills to produce your own food, that person will become your personal hero. “Entertainment” will be in the basic, simple form
Of savoring with gratitude the life-giving deliciousness of every bite of food we are fortunate enough to partake in.
The delight and personal satisfaction that comes from participation in this fundamental human activity runs deep and profound. We can rediscover what balanced and sustainable living means . The earth will reward our efforts and our grandchildren will thank us.
Sat Chit Ananda
Everything Chris says is true. I also believe that Americans, in general, understand this at some visceral level, despite the chips and Ding-Dongs in the shopping cart.
The real concern for me is that the corporate control freaks see this, and they are running scared. As we all know, fear makes animals and people more dangerous.
Where is that corporate personhood amendment? Every time I think about it, I think about the Supreme Court throwing out Nebraska's law that corporations can't own farm land in that state.
Sioux Rose
One has to feel in awe of Chris Hedge's mind for the distances it travels. He presents compelling arguments on any number of subjects. The one thing I would add to this otherwise important analysis is that it would appear that a component of "Disaster Capitalism" is factored into the modern food mix. What I mean is, given that "industrial food" provides mostly filler without nutrition, and given that sugar and fat are its chief components, the sickening of a society appears to be "on the menu." The "Disaster Capitalism" side of a morally bankrupt equation kicks in with respect to health care. That the same forces (Monsanto! Big Agri, Big Pharma) are poisoning us, then demanding--like the owners of toll roads--that we pay enormous fees to receive antidotes to the very things they have introduced to our systems (which knowingly compromise them), seems a form of thievery that's essentially new under the sun. The "merchants of more" have invented a whole new category of evil.
GREG R: You are very lucky, and/or smart, to do what you do. I have some land now and hope to learn to plant. So far my fruit trees are barely producing, but they are young.
The young man I've been dating locally just got back from NY, whereas I just returned from Puerto Rico. We both return with a renewed appreciation for this remote sanctuary, and are glad for solitude, peace, quiet, and a profound closeness to nature. It's the ideal place to learn to farm! Some nights when we go biking, we see deer lined up like a Christmas card. The bird song is amazing. Many think this type of lifestyle is uncool; but I believe that places that have not been "developed," or fallen under the overseers' knives, machines, poisons, or direct controls ARE the most precious places left on this one green earth. Now if I can summon a green thumb, I'll be in "business." This part of Florida has too many cattle ranches. It has aimed at the marketplace and produced only specific items year after year like corn and watermelon. South Florida may soon rely on it for their bread basket.
Sioux Rose, good points about the development of an integrated predation strategy. I might call it "full-spectrum predation."
Your statement "The 'merchants of more' have invented a whole new category of evil" led me to wonder what it will take for the not-so-swift of the Christian variety to put two and two together and recognize that the corporation is the closest thing to their mythic Satan on the planet, i.e., when will they begin to consider categorizing corporations as Satanic (at least those Christians not completely under the spell of the corpofascist propaganda)?
Sioux Rose
KIVALS: I had that "Satan" metaphor playing in my head, too. Now as the right wing spends inordinate bucks using its echo chamber to demonize Obama for a mere continuation of the policies of their Savior (Bush, "man of god" in the White house), working overtime to FABRICATE the illusion of opposing political factions when there is none, we see that deception has become a HIGH art. I came up with a motto for Obama today, "Rooting for the Looting Side." That's what he's done in EVERY policy decision, yet hate radio and its well-paid enablers, are doing a fine job of muddying the perceptual waters so much that the sheep follow the labels without the faintest understanding of their bankrupt (unchanged by either party!) policies!
How is the dreamer (or rendered somnambulant) to be drawn into an awakened state? The answer is the definitive doorway from this late date Piscean Age into that of the truth-honoring Aquarian phase, 2200 years and the count has nearly begun.
Great posts Sioux Rose.
"hate radio" (LOL).
Your prose has the most soothing effect on me....
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
"How is the dreamer (or rendered somnambulant) to be drawn into an awakened state?"
I don't know, but I saw "The Matrix" on TV last night for the first time and saw it as allegorical.
Remember Professor,
"Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged yet....."
"they are still part of the system...." (Faux News viewers?) ;-)
A salute to all you CDer's who are living in the real internet world for your news.
TJ
Kombucha - food - also can be used as foliar fertilizer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/07/13/elixkombu.DTL&hw=Kombucha+Tea&sn=001&sc=10...
Actively Aerated Compost Tea (AACT)
http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/articles/brewing-compost-tea.aspx
Effective Microorganisms
http://emrojapan.com/
http://www.emamerica.com/
Terra Preta do Indio - Bio-char
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/research/terra%20preta/terrapretamain.html
http://www.gerson.org/
Search Terran at
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/
S, do a bit of study and find out what does well locally. As your knowledge grows, try some trickier stuff. Plant extra for the deer and other such intruders. Sometimes I'd swear some deer are mean and nasty the way they rip and tear at stuff. For others who must live in or near the city, I believe it is still possible to create your own sanctuary, whether simple or complex.
While there's a lot of good stuff in this article, the last paragraph is grossly overstated. My smallish farm is my home and I love it. I know I'm incredibly fortunate. I'm not organic, but I try to do things in a sane manner. Yesterday we put up a mess of applesauce from Beacon apples, which not only makes tasty sauce, but has beautiful natural coloring. Today we freeze more sweet corn and dig another mess of potatoes, as we wait for the field corn and soybeans to mature. Our late summer plantings of lettuce and edible pea pods look great. For most everyone who wants better health, eat more fruits and vegetables. It's just that simple. Look around for things you like and find quality suppliers.
No it's not.
But congratulations and best wishes on a bountiful harvest.