So what can we do about it?

The good news is that there are many things we can do. Some of these solutions may sound extreme or inconvenient. But I am guessing many of you chose wildly inconvenient and deeply courageous paths to protect yourselves, your families, and your patients during the Covid psyop, and to avoid being injected with mRNA shots. The substances you take in through your digestive tract can be just as harmful as those that come through a needle.

Do not give in. Do not comply. Do not take the convenient route. It leads to serfdom.

1. Get involved. Start speaking up about this issue to the people around you.

2. Stop eating processed foods. They are an addictive poison and only becoming more poisonous.

3. Join the movement to defund and disband the USDA, the FDA, and your state’s Department of Agriculture. Support bills that limit their power.

4. Abandon the grocery store. At a minimum, aim to spend at least 50% of your food budget on food direct from local farms.

5. Find local farms whose husbandry practices meet your requirements. Tour the farm and ask questions – what pesticides do you use? Do you vaccinate your animals? Are your cows 100% grass-fed? Where do you source your feed grains? Do you put any additives in your raw milk, and do you process your own meat? What chemicals are used in your meat processing? When you find a compatible farm, aim to purchase as much of your food as possible from them. You can find local farms at localharvest.org or through a local chapter of the Weston A Price Foundation. If you can’t find compatible farms locally, you can find farms that will deliver to your area at FarmMatch.com.

6. Support raw milk farmers in your state, and defend their right to produce it, even if you don’t personally drink raw milk. The government bureaucrats view raw milk as the tip of the food freedom spear and believe that if they lose the battle against raw milk, they could lose the food freedom battle entirely. Let’s prove them right. If you want to find a local source of raw milk, visit getrawmilk.com.

7. Build a local parallel society of like-minded people committed to supporting local food producers and looking out for each other in the challenging times ahead. This is crucial! When the truly hard times hit, it is too late to begin building community. Develop and strengthen your social bonds now, particularly in your local area.

8. Vote with your wallet while you still have that option. Use cash when you can to prevent your purchases from being tracked and used against you. If your local farmer will take payment in non-fiat currency, even better.

9. When a retail central bank digital currency launches and cash is phased out, or when states begin to crack down on food purchases that violate the planetary health paradigm, we’re going to need to be ready to transact in alternate currencies. It’s time to start brainstorming and testing payments in cryptocurrencies, pre-1965 silver quarters and dimes (known as junk silver), or by barter. Be creative and get started now.

10. Plant your own garden. Study permaculture. It’s a lot easier to ramp up an existing garden with the knowledge you have gained from years of trial and error than it is to start from scratch when you really need it.

11. Create your own seed vault of heirloom, non-GMO seeds. You can buy them or save seeds from your garden every year. Buy heirloom seeds from trustworthy sources like True Leaf Market.

12. Get your own backyard chickens and find a local trustworthy feed source. Ask your local pastured chicken farmer where he gets his feed, or if he’s willing to sell some to you.

13. Buy a large freezer if you can and stock up on frozen fruits and vegetables from farmers you can trust during the growing season.

14. If you can’t afford a freezer, you can probably afford a couple of grow lights, seed-starting trays, organic potting soil, and seeds. Grow your own microgreens all winter for a small daily salad. They’re nutritious, taste good, and can be harvested in as little as a week. If you can’t afford that, get seeds and a sprout jar, and grow sprouts.

15. Don’t blindly trust USDA-inspected meat and eggs. It’s a deep rabbit hole you’re welcome to go down, but eggs are washed with chemicals that leave them porous – absorbing those chemicals like chlorine, ammonia, and peracetic acid – and then the eggs are coated with soybean oil, canola oil, or other toxic seed oils which also absorb into the egg white. Don’t see it on the label? Anything that’s an “industry standard” doesn’t need to be listed on the packaging. For meat, that means your beef, pork, goat, chicken, and turkey are soaked with peracetic acid, GMO citric acid, chlorine, lauric acid, or other chemicals. Many of these substances are banned for food use in Europe yet required here. Amish farmer Amos Miller’s battle with the USDA has largely been about his refusal to spray so-called citric acid on his meat, which the USDA mandates for chicken processed in their slaughterhouses unless you want to use bleach or peracetic acid. You’d be excused for thinking commercial citric acid comes from citrus fruit. Instead, it is made from black mold and GMO corn. It is manufactured in China and then sprayed on almost all meat sold in grocery stores in the United States. Black mold is a known allergen and likely causes autoimmune disease. If feasible, only get your meat from dissident farmers committed to pasture-raised, GMO-free, vaccine-free meat and poultry who process meat without chemical additives.

16. If you feel you can’t afford food like this, consider where your money is going, and if you can rearrange your priorities. It is possible you can barter labor for food with your local farmer. Be prepared to work hard. Also, recognize that the money you spend on truly nutritious food is money you won’t be spending later on medical bills.

17. Constitutional sheriffs have played a key role in protecting farmers in several states when bureaucrats attempted to shut them down for selling raw milk and processing their own meat. If you live in a state that still recognizes the constitutional role of sheriffs, get to know your county’s sheriff and find out if he is willing to support the rights of local farms against state and federal agencies. If he is not, find someone to run against him who will.

18. Call your congressman and senators to ask them to co-sponsor the PRIME Act. This bill would not fix everything, but it would remove many of the federal obstacles to pushing for agricultural reforms on a state and local level.

19. Spread the word to everyone you know about what is happening to our food supply. If we all refuse to comply, the scheme is guaranteed to fail.

We are at a crossroads: if we fight now, we can build a future where local farm-to-table networks feed us, and where we choose for ourselves what we want to put in our bodies. If we ignore the plan set out by the global elites for control of our bodies through diet, injections, and injunctions, we do so at great peril. Your health and your family’s health are at stake. Please join the movement to protect both medical freedom and food freedom, as we fight to hold fast to these fundamental rights for future generations.

About the Author

Tracy Thurman is an advocate for regenerative farming, food sovereignty, decentralized food systems, and medical freedom. She works with the Barnes Law Firm’s public interest division to safeguard the right to purchase food directly from farmers without government interference.

Of course, the sociopaths who want nothing more than to rule over us, make us sick, and sell us the cure are sure to point out that this is all the fault of “climate change”. At the Aspen Ideas Climate, Bezos Earth Fund vice chair Lauren Sánchez announced an initial $60 million commitment to establish Bezos Centres for Sustainable Protein as part of the Bezos Earth Fund’s $1 billion commitment to food transformation.

What exactly is “sustainable protein?” It is “plant-based lab-grown meats.” So to is not food, but a creation made to mimic food that will probably give humans autoimmune or other chronic inflammatory conditions that they’ll “need” to treat with pharmaceutical drugs.

According to a report by The Daily Exposé, the Aspen Ideas Climate conference was held in Miami, Florida over the course of three days from March 11-13, 2024. It had five themes:

• Big Bets on Tech: Charting the course for sustainable technologies of the future which included climate technology, biotechnology, lab-cultured “food,” artificial intelligence, geoengineering, and new ideas for creating and storing energy.
• Building things: Such as urban landscapes, infrastructure, and “reimagined” economies that lead to a “sustainable and inclusive future.”
• Financing the Future: A seismic shift in financial strategies, from billions to trillions globally, is required to address the “climate crisis,” so they claim.
• Healthy Planet, Healthy Community.
• Narratives of Change: “From the resonance of music to the subtleties of architecture, from stirring art to imaginative fiction, profound calls to action are often hidden in the unexpected. Experience the captivating stories that inspire change from some of the most unanticipated sources.” Which has undertones of using psychological techniques to bring about the desired change.

Setting the scene using the usual marketing tactic of fear porn, in this case, global famine. Sánchez asked: “How do we feed 10 billion people with healthy, sustainable protein throughout this century? This will need a ton of innovation,” she said following it with a statement that should make everyone shudder. “We’re investing heavily in [the] livestock sector and inventions that will give consumers meat options that are better for the Earth.”

Except lab-created meat isn’t meat, and we cannot expect it to act the same in the human body. But Sanchez is asking the slave class to “trust” her.

“I’m thrilled to announce, and I’m very excited about this one, tonight 60 million dollars to establish Bezos Centres for Sustainable Protein that will help grow these ideas. Their inventions will make plant-based lab-grown meats cheaper, healthier, and tastier. And these sustainable proteins really are getting better, trust me.”

You can watch Sánchez’s full speech at the Aspen Ideas Climate below.

• A State of Martial Law: America Is a Military Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy

Democracy worldwide is, even if run perfectly, nothing more than mob rule and nothing less than slavery. All freedom is an illusion as long as governments exist, people will be deluded into being their slaves.

The organizers of Thursday’s protest are the Farmers Defence Force. They said the state of emergency was a way to squash their democratic rights and freedom of assembly.  Of course, their government, like all governments, sees them only as slaves meant to obey, so they don’t care about rights or freedom. The rulers think they own their slaves. It would be like believing your cow has a right to vote to keep it from being eaten. The notion of government gets more absurd by the day and yet, slaves still hold the system that’s oppressing them up.

Subtitled!!
This is Jolanda Nooijers a Dutch Farmer.
She tells what is happening today and what they have planned in back rooms and pushed laws through against any consent

They are planning on doing this all over the world , so this is a heads up to those abroad to stay… pic.twitter.com/oQCqBHqgWg

— The Keystone Channel (@TKCrecovered) June 26, 2023

The Dutch farmers have decided to disobey and make their way to The Hague to protest regardless of the state of emergency. Although, if they intend to disobey the state of emergency, why not just disobey the unjust law they are protesting? Begging the master for longer chains never works, and if it does, it’s only temporary. The way to end it is to remove the system that’s putting chains on people.

Netherlands Anti Nitrogen Cuts, Anti Govt Lies Here they come again.. The Farmers En Route to The Hague in solidarity against proposed restrictions that threaten their industry….𝘿𝙤 𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝘾𝙖𝙣 𝙏𝙤 𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙧𝙪𝙥𝙩 𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙞𝙧 𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙨…. pic.twitter.com/Kl2jNWTwCT

— 𝙍𝙄𝙎𝙀𝙈𝙀𝙇𝘽𝙊𝙐𝙍𝙉𝙀 (@Risemelbourne) June 30, 2023

The Netherlands is the world’s 2nd biggest exporter of farm produce, yet the Dutch government are sabotaging their own farmers. Dutch government proposals for tackling nitrogen emissions mean an estimated 11,000 farms will close.#NoFarmsNoFood

pic.twitter.com/0gHBklZhoC

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) June 30, 2023

“The Netherlands has for years missed its climate goals. Now it’s time for a great leap forward,” Jetten said, calling the package “ambitious.” He presented 120 different measures which he said would make sure CO₂ emissions in the Netherlands will be 55 percent lower than in 1990 by 2030.

The Dutch government can reportedly spend 28 billion euros to reduce the temperature on Earth by 0.000036 degrees. This would mean that each resident would have to contribute about 1,647 euros and a family of four about 6,588 euros., News Facts reported. -The Daily Exposé

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore explained how globalist rulers, including Klaus Schwab and the United Nations, are using the climate scam as an excuse to cut off fossil fuels and nitrogen fertilizer, to deliberately depopulate the planet.

In a broad-ranging discussion including whether the earth is headed for another ice age, the maximum number of people the globe can handle, what would happen if the population were to double in size, whether our masters care about the future or just their time lording power over others and the importance of sustainable energy, Dr. Moore said:

“Carbon dioxide [and] temperature [ ] are actually slightly negatively correlated in the long historical record. In other words, it is not a cause-effect relationship … There is no historical relationship between the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere and the temperature of the earth … The climate has changed long before humans could have been any factor in it.  It’s been changing all through the history of the earth.”

Article cross-posted from SHTF Plan.

Once known as the “breadbasket” of Europe, Ukraine’s farming industry has been severely disrupted following the Russian invasion. Staple crops like maize (corn), oats, rapeseed (canola), and rye are not expected to fully recover to pre-invasion production levels until at least 2050.

Barley, sunflower, wheat, and other sectors could recover sooner, the report states, but not until at least 2040.

“This means that it may take as long as 20 years for Ukraine to regain its strength in agriculture after the devastation brought by the Russian military assault,” researchers say.

Destruction of Kakhovka dam, which appears to have been an inside job, spells loss of one of Ukraine’s most farming-rich regions

By April of this year, more than 26 percent of Ukraine’s physical assets had been destroyed by the war. This includes upwards of $9 billion worth of the country’s agricultural sector, which Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere rely on for sustenance.

Naval blockades imposed by Russia on the Black Sea are of course taking the blame for all this rather than Ukraine’s collusion with the Pentagon in harboring dozens of bioweapons-producing laboratories, which is what provoked Russia to invade in the first place.

Instead of being sent to their intended destinations, crops instead sat on ships or at port where they rotted. Prior to the invasion, Ukraine had about 33 million hectares (about 82 million acres) dedicated to the cultivation of grains and oilseeds. Last year following the invasion, that figure dropped to 25 million hectares (about 62 million acres).

The latter figure is expected to continue dropping for as long as the conflict is ongoing. Assuming the war ends before the sowing of winter crops this year, the amount of Ukrainian land used for agriculture could be partially restored by 2030 and reach 37 million hectares (about 91.5 million acres) by 2050.

Prior to the war, Ukraine produced about 10 percent of global wheat exports; 15 percent of barley and corn exports; and 50 percent of sunflower oil exports. These figures have since dropped precipitously.

Keep in mind that the report came out prior to the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in Southern Ukraine near Kherson, an event that further destroyed Ukrainian agriculture in one of the most farming-intensive regions of the country. The loss of all that water will effectively turn the land into deserts.

“The destruction of the [Kakhovka dam] will lead to the fact that the fields in the south of Ukraine may turn into deserts as early as next year,” said Ukraine’s agricultural ministry earlier this month, warning that the dam’s destruction could cost Ukraine hundreds of millions of dollars.

Since the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, upwards of 600,000 hectares (about 1.5 million acres) of formerly arable land no longer has access to irrigation.

In 2021 before the war, Ukraine harvested about 106 million tons of grain and oilseed. According to the agriculture ministry, this year’s harvest could be as low as 65 million tons.

The effects of this are already being seen across the globe as about 345 million people have now been forced into a state of “food insecurity,” which is a nice way of saying that they could starve to death.

The latest news about the war in Ukraine can be found at WWIII.news.

Sources for this article include:

• Breitbart.com
• KSE.ua
• Newstarget.com
• NATURAL NEWS

These are the very institutions responsible for the social, ecological and environmental degradation associated with the current food system. The same bodies responsible for spiralling rates of illness due to the toxic food they produce or promote.

In this narrative, there is no space for any mention of the type of power relations that have shaped the prevailing food system and many of the current problems.

Tony Weis from the University of Western Ontario provides useful insight:

World agriculture is marked by extreme imbalances that are among the most durable economic legacies of European imperialism. Many of the world’s poorest countries in the tropics are net food importers despite having large shares of their labor force engaged in agriculture and large amounts of their best arable land devoted to agro-export commodities.”

He adds that this commodity dependence has deep roots in waves of dispossession, the establishment of plantations and the subjugation of peasantries to increasing competitive pressures at the same time as they were progressively marginalised.

In the 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.

By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their productive means) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).

In more recent times, neoliberalism has further reinforced the power relations that underpin the system, cementing the control of agricultural production by global corporations and facilitated by the policies of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

CORPORATE FOOD TRANSITION

The food transition is couched in the language of climate emergency and sustainability. It envisages a particular future for farming. It is not organic and relatively few farmers have a place in it.

Post-1945, corporate agribusiness, largely backed by the US state, the Rockefeller Foundation and financial institutions, has been promoting and instituting a chemical-dependent system of industrial agriculture. Rural communities, ecological systems, the environment, human health and indigenous systems of food cultivation have been devastated in the process.

Now, the likes of Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta are working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate farmerless farms driven by cloud and AI technology. A cartel of data owners and proprietary input suppliers are reinforcing their grip on the global food system while expanding their industrial model of crop cultivation.

One way they are doing this is by driving the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, a contested commentary that has been carefully promoted (see the work of investigative journalist Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology and tying this to carbon offsetting and carbon credits.

Many companies from various sectors are securing large areas of land in the Global South to establish tree plantations and claim carbon credits that they can sell on international carbon markets. In the meantime, by supposedly ‘offsetting’ their emissions, they can carry on polluting.

In countries where industrial agriculture dominates, ‘carbon farming’ involves modifying existing practices to claim that carbon is being sequestered in the soil and to then sell carbon credits.

This is explained in a recent presentation by Devlin Kuyek of the non-profit GRAIN who sets out the corporate agenda behind carbon farming.

One of the first major digital agriculture platforms is called Climate FieldView, an app owned by Bayer. It collects data from satellites and sensors in fields and on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices: when and what to plant, how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to apply, etc. FieldView is already being used on farms in the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Europe.

To be part of Bayer’s Carbon Program, farmers have to be enrolled in Bayer’s FieldView digital agriculture platform. Bayer then uses the FieldView app to instruct farmers on the implementation of just two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: reduced tillage or no-till farming and the planting of cover crops.

Through the app, the company monitors these two practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the participating farmers have sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations, and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and sell these in carbon markets.

In August 2022, Bayer launched a new programme in the US called ForGround. Upstream companies can use the platform to advertise and offer discounts for tilling equipment, forage seeds and other inputs. But Bayer’s big target is the downstream food companies which can use the platform to claim emissions reductions in their supply chains.

Places like India are also laying the groundwork for these types of platforms. In April 2021, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers.

Microsoft will ‘help’ farmers with post-harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices. In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ agriculture, including post-harvest management and distribution.

CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details –

1. Profile of land held – cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions.
2. Production details – crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession.
3. Financial details – input costs, average return, credit history.

The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution.

However, this initiative also involves providing data on land holding deeds with the intention of implementing a land market so that investors can buy up land and amalgamate it – global equity funds regard agricultural land as a valuable asset, and global agritech/agribusiness companies prefer industrial-scale farms for rolling out highly mechanised ‘precision’ agriculture.

‘Data-driven agriculture’ mines data to be exploited by the agribusiness/big tech giants who will know more about farmers than farmers know about themselves. The likes of Bayer and Microsoft will gain increasing control over farmers, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use.

And as GRAIN notes, getting more farmers to use reduced tillage or no-till is of huge benefit to Bayer.  The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with its RoundUp (toxic glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically engineered (GE) Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize.

Bayer also intends to profit from the promotion of cover crops. It has taken majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene-edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be sold to farmers who are enrolled in ForGround and the crop will be sold as a biofuel.

GE has always been a solution in need of a problem. Along with its associated money-spinning toxic chemicals, it has failed to deliver on its promises (see GMO Myths and Truths, published by Open Earth Source) and has sometimes been disastrous when rolled out, not least for poor farmers in India.

Whereas traditional breeding and on-farm practices have little or no need for GE technologies, under the guise of ‘climate emergency’, the data and agritech giants are commodifying knowledge and making farmers dependent on their platforms and inputs. The commodification of knowledge and compelling farmers to rely on proprietary inputs overseen by algorithms will define what farming is and how it is to be carried out.

The introduction of technology into the sector can benefit farmers. But understanding who owns the technology and how it is being used is crucial for understanding underlying motivations, power dynamics and the quality of food we end up eating.

NET-ZERO PONZI SCHEME

In its article From land grab to soil grab: the new business of carbon farming, GRAIN says control rather than sequestering carbon is at the heart of the matter. More than half of the soil organic matter in the world’s agricultural soils has already been lost. Yet, the main culprits behind this soil catastrophe are now recasting themselves as soil saviours.

Under the guise of Green Revolution practices (application of chemicals, synthetic fertilisers, high water usage, hybrid seeds, intensive mono-cropping, increased mechanisation, etc), what we have seen is an exploitative form of agriculture which has depleted soil of its nutrients. It has also resulted in placing farmers on corporate seed and chemical treadmills.

Similarly, carbon farming draws farmers into the digital platforms that agribusiness corporations and big tech companies are jointly developing to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices (big tech companies, like Microsoft and IBM, are major buyers of carbon credits). The companies intend to make their digital platforms one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the data harvested from the participating farms.

Those best placed to benefit from these programmes are the equity funds and the wealthy who have been buying up large farmland areas. Financial managers can now use digital platforms to buy farms in Brazil, sign them up for carbon credits, and run their operations all from their offices on Wall Street.

As for the carbon credit and carbon trading market, this appears to be another profitable Ponzi scheme from which traders will make a financial killing.

Journalist Patrick Greenfield states that research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

The analysis raises questions over the credits bought by a number of internationally renowned companies – some of them have labelled their products ‘carbon neutral’ or have told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the ‘climate crisis’ worse.

Washington-based Verra operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its verified carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than a billion carbon credits. It approves three-quarters of all voluntary offsets. Its rainforest protection programme makes up 40% of the credits it approves.

Although Verra disputes the findings, only a handful of Verra’s rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reductions – 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.

The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study.

Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, has been researching carbon credits for 20 years, hoping to find a way to make the system function.

She says that companies are using credits to make claims of reducing emissions when most of these credits don’t represent emissions reductions at all:

“Rainforest protection credits are the most common type on the market at the moment. But these problems are not just limited to this credit type. These problems exist with nearly every kind of credit.”

GENUINE FOOD TRANSITION

The ‘food transition involves’ locking farmers further into an exploitative corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market needs of global corporations, carbon trading Ponzi schemes and private equity funds. Farmers will be reduced to corporate labourers or profit-extracting agents who bear all of the risks.

The predatory commercialisation of the countryside is symptomatic of a modern-day colonialist mindset that cynically undermines indigenous farming practices and uses flawed premises and fear mongering to legitimise the roll-out of technologies and chemicals to supposedly deliver us all from climate breakdown and Malthusian catastrophe.

A genuine food transition would involve transitioning away from the reductionist yield-output industrial paradigm to a more integrated low-input systems approach to food and agriculture that prioritises local food security, diverse cropping patterns and nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience, good soil structure and the ability to cope with evolving pests and disease pressures.

It would involve localised, democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture (there are numerous concrete examples of regenerative agriculture, many of which are described on the website of Food Tank).

This would also involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense and free from toxic chemicals and ensuring local (communal) ownership and stewardship of common resources, including land, water, soil and seeds.

This is the basis of genuine food security and genuine environmentalism – based on short-line supply chains that keeps wealth within local communities rather than it being siphoned off by profit-seeking entities half a world away.

Article cross-posted from Off-Guardian.

Okay, so this article isn’t about the 80s movie with the unnecessary remake that I didn’t watch, but I get the same deadly vibe the more I learn about RoboCrops. That’s not the official name, of course. Instead, they’re calling it “robot-assisted farming,” but the implication is the same for doomsday watchers.

The robots in question are driven by Artificial Intelligence. They have lasers. Yes, lasers. And they’re rapidly becoming the go-to “labor” force for farms across the globe. Why? Because they never need a lunch break, rarely call in sick, and are as precise as their AI brains allow them to be.

It reminds me of an important line from the original Terminator. “It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Movie references aside, the rise of AI-powered farming equipment is concerning because of where it will lead. As they demonstrate how effective the equipment is, there will eventually be the desire to take the human factor out of the equation altogether. It makes sense to those who don’t fear AI because if the machines are not only doing the work but controlling how the work is done, crop yields will be increased dramatically.

At least, they will until they aren’t and by that time it will be too late. But now is not the time to give a bad idea to the wrong people. I’ll leave the risks of such developments up to the imagination. For now, let’s just look at the news wire report and you can decide for yourself whether this is a good idea or not.

Agriculture Adapts to Labor Shortage with AI-Powered Farming Robots

Over the past 70 years, agriculture has witnessed a decline in its workforce as successive generations turned away from family farming businesses. However, the need for increased food production, projected by the United Nations to grow by 60 percent to feed the global population by 2050, has pushed the industry to explore innovative solutions. With major producers like the US struggling to find agricultural labor, farming practices must evolve to meet the growing demand.

Walt Duflock, Vice President of Innovation at Western Growers, a crop growers’ association in the western US, highlights the significant gap between the labor required in agriculture and the labor currently available. He believes that automation is the only solution to bridge this gap.

Farmers are now embracing modern AI-powered farming robots, replacing traditional machinery, to handle tasks that previously relied on human labor. One such example is the Naïo Oz Farming Assistant, a robot designed for hoeing, weeding, furrow-making, seeding, and transportation. These robotic farmhands are already in use across 48 countries, with nearly 150 units deployed.

In addition to a growing number of AgTech startups, established manufacturers like Naïo and Burro have sold hundreds of robots. Stout Industrial Technology, which introduced its Smart Cultivator in 2020, is also moving in the same direction. Their cultivator, attached to a tractor, uses computer vision and AI to precisely control mechanical blades, effectively turning over soil, eliminating weeds, and sparing crops. Stout’s approach focuses on building multipurpose farming machines that become more valuable as AI technology advances.

Dr. George Kantor, a field robotics expert from Carnegie Mellon University, supports this approach, emphasizing the need for machines that can be used across tasks and crops, rather than creating specialized machines for each application. While autonomous tractors have been in use for years, new models like the Monarch Electric Tractor are designed to operate unmanned, with a driver being optional. These battery-powered tractors incorporate 360° cameras accessible via software, allowing farm workers to manage fleets remotely.

One of the most advanced innovations in the field is the Laserweeder developed by Carbon Robotics. This robot uses high-resolution cameras and computer vision software to differentiate between weeds and crops, precisely targeting and eliminating weeds with lasers. Though priced at $1.4 million, it can eliminate 200,000 weeds per hour, making it a popular choice among growers facing labor shortages.

Agricultural technology companies are also developing solutions for tasks such as weeding and thinning out crops. While harvesting remains a more complex challenge, these technologies are expected to be refined within the next decade. Implementing these advanced farming technologies may come with higher upfront costs for farms, but they can reduce reliance on temporary workers, which often incurs additional expenses for housing and transportation under government visa schemes.

Despite initial concerns about job displacement, the adoption of robotic systems in agriculture may lead to a transformation of the workforce. Rather than replacing jobs, these technologies have the potential to create fewer but more skilled and better-paid positions. Walt Duflock anticipates that immigrant farm labor will continue to play a significant role on farms in the next decade, alongside robots that enhance workers’ capabilities and enable them to focus on valuable tasks.

Jorge Heraud, vice president of automation and autonomy for John Deere, noted that he sees the company’s future as being a leader in the manufacturing of robotics and artificial intelligence-infused equipment alongside the tech giants of Silicon Valley. (Related: Warehouses turning to robots to fill labor gaps as e-commerce booms.)

John Deere showcased a glimpse of its future line of automated farming machinery last January when it unveiled its fully autonomous 8R farm tractor, driven by an AI rather than a farmer behind the wheel.

According to Heraud, the 8R is the culmination of Deere’s investments in automation, data analytics, GPS guidance, internet-of-things connectivity and software engineering. All of this research and development is a mix of homegrown research as well as the result of acquisitions and partnerships with agri-tech startups.

“This comes from our realization that technology is going to drive value creation and increase productivity, profitability and sustainability for farmers,” said Heraud. “The AI we use involves computer vision and machine learning.”

The science behind this technology was developed by Silicon Valley startup Blue River Technology, which John Deere acquired in 2017 for $305 million. The company’s “see and spray” robotics platform utilizes dozens of sophisticated cameras and processors to distinguish between crop plants and weeds when applying herbicides.

To help the 8R distinguish between weeds and crops are six pairs of stereo cameras that can “see” obstacles in the field like rocks, logs or people. These cameras can also determine the size of the obstacle and how far away it is from the tractor. The cameras then pass the images along through a deep neural network that analyzes the pictures and decides whether the tractor should stop or keep moving.

“We’ve curated hundreds of thousands of images from different farm locations and under various weather and lighting conditions,” said Heraud. “With machine learning, the tractor can understand what it’s seeing and react accordingly. This capability also allows the farmer, instead of being in the tractor, to operate it remotely while doing something else.”

John Deere purchasing startups that can bolster its agri-tech R&D

Stephen Volkmann equity research analyst at Jefferies, noted that while John Deere is making a big splash in automation, it is “very, very, very early in this process.”

He noted that the total global fleet of autonomous tractors the company has now “is less than 50.” The company’s plan is to have a fully autonomous farming system for row crops by 2030. “In Wall Street time, that’s an eternity,” said Volkmann.

For the time being, Volkmann noted that John Deere is creating value and profits for its well-established automated systems that can be installed onto its existing, manually-driven tractors, such as GPS-based self-steering and precision seeding.

While this is happening, John Deere is engaging in an aggressive expansion campaign by purchasing startups that could help further the company’s agri-tech research and development.

8R’s autonomous driving capabilities were initially developed by Bear Flag Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup launched in 2017. It was then purchased by John Deere for $250 million.

Bear Flag Robotics’ autonomous navigation system was used for 8R and can be retrofitted onto existing tractors to help farmers navigate.

In April, John Deere formed a joint venture with GUSS Automation, a tech company that devises semi-autonomous orchard and vineyard sprayers. The company’s tech can detect trees and their sizes and determine how much to spray.

A month later, John Deere acquired numerous patents and other intellectual property from AI startup Light. The company has a depth-perception platform that can improve upon existing stereo-vision systems with the help of additional cameras. John Deere plans to integrate Light’s platform into future versions of its autonomous farm vehicles.

To keep a close eye on other developments in the field of agri-tech John Deere has also established a “Startup Collaborator” program to test innovative technologies.

“The hope is that they find the diamonds before they become obvious to John Deere’s competitors and keep them in the fold,” said Volkmann.

Learn more about automation and artificial intelligence at Robotics.news.

Watch this video from Stefan Molyneux asking if automation leads to economic collapse.

This video is from the Stefan Molyneux channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

• Robots replacing shelf stockers in Japanese convenience store chain.
• RULED BY SILICON: Airports turn to ROBOTS to enforce COVID protocols as air travel normalizes.
• Italian vineyards turning to robots and automation to fulfill harvest needs as labor shortage worsens.
• Restaurants look to ROBOTS to fill openings amid labor shortage.
• McDonald’s to test run AI-powered drive-thru windows that don’t need employees to take orders.

Sources include:

• WesternJournal.com
• CNBC.com
• Brighteon.com
• NATURAL NEWS

Food now arrives pre-packaged (often precooked), preserved with chemicals and contains harmful pesticides, micro-plastics, hormones and/or various other contaminants. We are also being served a narrower menu of high-calorie food with lower nutrient content.

It is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with how modern food is produced.

Although, there are various stages between farm and fork, not least modern food processing practices, which is a story in itself, a key part of the problem lies with agriculture.

Today, many farmers are trapped on chemical and biotech treadmills. They have been encouraged and coerced into using a range of costly off-farm inputs, from synthetic fertilisers and corporate-manufactured seeds to a wide array of weedicides and pesticides.

With the industrialisation of agriculture, many poor, smallholder farmers have been deskilled and placed into vulnerable positions. Traditional knowledge has been undermined, overwhelmed or has survived only in fragments.

Writing in the Journal of South Asian Studies in 2017, Marika Vicziany and Jagjit Plahein state that farmers have for millennia taken measures to manage drought, grow cereals with long stalks that can be used as fodder, engage in cropping practices that promote biodiversity, ethno-engineer soil and water conservation and make use of collective sharing systems.

Farmers knew their micro-environment, so they could plant crops that mature at different times, thereby facilitating more rapid crop rotation without exhausting the soil.

Experimentation and innovation were key. Two terms modern agritech/agribusiness corporations lay claim to, but something farmers have been doing for generations.

Many farmers also used ‘insect equilibrium’ and their knowledge of which insects kill crop-predator pests. Food and policy analyst Devinder Sharma says he has met women in India who can identify 110 non-vegetarian and 60 vegetarian insects.

Complex, highly beneficial traditional knowledge systems and on-farm ecological practices are being eroded as farmers lose control over their productive means and become dependent on proprietary products, including commodified corporate knowledge.

Farmers in places like the Netherlands are now being blamed for harming the environment due to carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions. Although Dutch farmers are taking flak, what we are also seeing is an attack on large feed and meat producers. There are not many small farms left in the Netherlands and most animal farms are concentrated feeding operations.

The Netherlands’ farming sector is highly livestock intensive and there seems to be a policy to reduce the size of the meat industry in that country. Farmers have been told to get out of farming or shift to growing crops.

Instead of the authorities facilitating a gradual shift towards organic, agroecological agriculture and attract a new generation to the sector, farmers are in danger of being displaced.

But Dutch farmers are not the only ones in the firing line. Farmers in other European nations are also protesting because various policies make it increasingly difficult for them to make a living.

There seems to be a concerted effort to make farming financially non-viable for many farmers and remove them from their land. The farmer protests in Europe follow in the wake of massive resistance by Indian farmers against corporate-backed legislation that would have seen an accelerated drive to push many already financially distressed farmers out of farming.

Farmer Bill

The biggest owner of private farmland in the US – Bill Gates – has a vision for farming: a chemical-dependent, corporate-dependent, one-world agriculture (Ag One initiative) to facilitate the global supply chains of conglomerates. This initiative is side-lining indigenous knowledge and practices in favour of corporate knowledge and a further colonisation of global agriculture.

Gates’s corporatisation of smallholder agriculture is packaged in philanthropic terms – ‘helping’ farmers in places like Africa and India. It has not worked out well so far if we turn to the Gates-backed Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), established in 2006.

The first major evaluation of AGRA’s efforts to expand high-input agriculture in Africa found that – after 15 years – it had failed. With concerns being voiced over the use of hazardous pesticides, less than impressive yields, the privatisation of seeds, corporate dependency and farmer indebtedness, among other things, we can expect more of the same under the Ag One initiative.

But the ultimate high-tech vision for farming is farmerless farms largely overseen by driverless vehicles and AI-driven sensors and drones linked to cloud-based infrastructure. The likes of Microsoft will harvest field data on seeds, soil quality, historical crop yields, water management, weather patterns, land ownership, agronomic practices and the like.

Tech giants will control multi-billion-dollar data management markets that facilitate the needs of institutional land investors, agribusiness and monopolistic e-commerce platforms. Under the guise of ‘data-driven agriculture’, private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends.

With lab-based synthetic meat being promoted and attracting huge interest from investors, Gates and the agritech sector also envisage a largely ‘climate-friendly’ animal-free agriculture, which they claim will result in freeing up vast tracts of farmland (we can only speculate for what).

It remains to be seen just how energy-efficient, environment-friendly and health-friendly synthetic meat labs are once scaled up to industrial levels.

At the same time, industrial agriculture will use new technologies – minus farmers – and will still rely on and boost the use of fossil-fuel-dependent agrochemicals (with all the associated health and environmental problems) and remain focused on long-line supply chains, unnecessarily shipping food around the world.

A high-energy system reliant on the oil and gas that has fuelled the colonisation of the food system (‘globalisation’) by agribusiness conglomerates. Moreover, the new human-less on-farm technologies will be energy-intensive to run and will rely on environment-destroying extraction for finite resources like lithium, cobalt and other rare-earth elements to produce.

Low-energy agroecological approaches based on the principles and practices of localisation, local markets, authentic regenerative agriculture and proper soil management (which ensures effective and ecologically sound nitrogen and carbon storage) are key to ensuring genuine long-term sustainability in food production.

Many who belong to the agribusiness lobby have been drawing attention to Sri Lanka in an attempt to show organic farming can only lead to disaster. A transition to organics has to be gradual, not least because regenerating soil cannot occur overnight.

Regardless, the article ‘Sri Lanka Faces Food Crisis – No, It’s Not Due to Organic Farming’ that recently appeared on The Quint website reveals why that country really headed into crisis.

Great Refusal

The neoliberal programme that took root in the 1980s has now reached a debt-bloated, inflationary impasse. In response, capitalism has embarked on a ‘great reset’ with transformative technology very much to the fore in the guise of a ‘4^th Industrial Revolution’, promising a brave new tomorrow for all.

However, there are deep-seated concerns about how this technology could be used to monitor and control entire populations, especially as we are witnessing a brutal economic restructuring and increasing clampdowns on personal liberties. If neoliberalism promoted individualism, the ‘new normal’ demands strict compliance – individual freedom is said to pose a threat to ‘national security’, ‘public health’ or ‘safety’.

There is also concern about economic collapse, war and the exposure of a food system to energy price shocks, supply chain breakdowns and commodity market speculation.

In Mali in 2015, Nyeleni – the international movement for food sovereignty – released The Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology.

The Declaration Stated:

Essential natural resources have been commodified, and rising production costs are driving us off the land. Farmers’ seeds are being stolen and sold back to us at exorbitant prices, bred as varieties that depend on costly, contaminating agrochemicals.”

It added:

Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society. We need to put the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of the peoples who feed the world.”

The Declaration made it clear that the prevailing capitalist food system had to be challenged and overcome.

In analysing the potential for challenging the capitalist order, Herbert Marcuse stated the following in his famous 1964 book One-Dimensional Man:

“A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”

Today, we might say – an uncomfortable, unsmooth, unreasonable, undemocratic unfreedom prevails, a token of an emerging techno-dystopia.

Marcuse felt post-war mass culture had made people repressed and uncritical. They were a reflection of a one-dimensional system based on the consumption of commodities and the effects of modern culture and technology that served to dampen dissent.

The controlling nature of technology pervades all aspects of life today. But whether it involves farmers protests in Europe and India, the advancement of a political agroecology, truckers taking to the streets in Canada or ordinary people protesting against a rapidly advancing authoritarianism in Western societies, many people across the world know something is seriously amiss.

To borrow from Marcuse, we are seeing a ‘great refusal’ – people saying ‘no’ to multiple forms of repression and domination – tentacles of an economic system in crisis.

About the Author

Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his “mini e-book”, Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Cultivating Resistance, here.

Article cross-posted from Off-Guardian.