So I read a story in Time magazine titled “Their trying to wipe us off the land…” today, the link to original article is here. In it they go to a farm in my home state of Wisconsin and talk about the incredible difficulty dairy farms are having in my state. But the small family farm model is threatened all over the U.S. And when US Ag secretary Purdue in essence told the people of my state tough titties, go large or go home…as in go cafo or go home…nothing like evil on top of evil to let you know where things really stand in this country.
I’ve been mulling over these things and I cannot notice a distinct parallel to the Irish Potato famine. One of the things I wondered is why didnt they grow something else. And the answer I finally got was that the English withheld seed (Ireland and Scotland were under British rule). And the reason why, was with the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, they needed bodies in factories and by withholding seed, the English forced the Irish into the workhouses as they were the only place with food. See, the Irish and the Scottish were notoriously hard to take…the Romans even said screw this and built Hadrians wall. Your typical Irishman would live on his holding with his potatoes and livestock and be largely self-sufficient. There is no way your going to convince that guy to work in a factory for 12 hours a day on a machine that might possibly and do quite regularly rip off limbs. Unless he were starving and had no choice.
Now get ready with your conspiracy theorist epithets cause I’m going for the gold here…i look at this farming crisis and see the eat same thing again. See farmers & ranchers are a hell of a voting block. The only recent memory of anyome going up against the government and making the government back down was Bundy and the BLM. Wisconsin hunters technically are the largest standing army in the world, and as I sit in my wooded hamlet at the tail end of the 2019 Wisconsin deer gun season I can attest to that…more gunshots than an inner city neighborhood folks. We, Wisconsin farmers, ranchers and hunters are quite a formidable voting block. If we no longer exist, and our counterparts in other states go the same way, then all food is controlled by centralized industrial farms, centralized industrial farms that are being picked up legally by countries like China(Smithfield). Not only is it a threat to democracy from within, as its really easy to control a populace through their food as the Irish taught us, but if a foriegn power we are somewhat hostile with decides to try to mess with us, well they have control of our food.
The Ravings of a Complete Lunatic 