The most recent attacks on farming by the Biden administration unveiled recently are cloaked in wildlife protection regulations. At the end of September, a broad coalition of “farmers, cattle ranchers, hunters, landowners and energy companies,” according to Fox Digital, pushed back on the US Fish and Wildlife Service, claiming the rules are capricious, overly broad, and inflexible. Detailed analysis and balancing of economic impacts are being swept aside in order to extend protections to “threatened” as well as “endangered” species and remove consideration of economic impacts. This imbalance will greatly burden many farmers already struggling to produce healthful food.
Patented Food
Agricultural consolidation in recent decades has quietly eviscerated most of the mid-sized American farms that historically produced the bulk of Americans’ food. As with most federal food and agriculture regulations, large farming operations are more able to comply with complex regulations than smaller businesses. The expanded wildlife regulations will similarly hurt smaller farms, though even larger producers are crying foul.
There is a pattern to the destruction of independent farms and food production. Federal and state rules coupled with subsidies that favor large enterprises farming monocultures such as corn, wheat, and soybeans have steadily worn down small-scale farms. The advent of GMO technologies also favored large-scale production, dependent on chemicals and patented seeds. Inexorably, food has become patented in every facet.
Liberty Livestock
(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Not yet patented are animals, particularly cows. It is noteworthy that they are being targeted for their flatulence, while the noxious and exponentially more toxic effluent from swine and chicken farms goes uncondemned. However, the megacorporations that now dominate most American food production already control those industries indirectly, as they are dependent on grains that are patented and oligopilized. Cows, sheep, and goats can be raised solely on grass and bred without corporate consent.
Now, the globalist players have circled their cow-condemning wagons in concert. The United Nations, World Economic Forum, and World Resources Council (to the glee of PETA) have raised a cowcophany of derision against bovines that is anything but scientific: It is a colossal scam. Humanity is told it must eradicate 80-90% of meat from its diet to stave off that nebulous bogeyman, “climate change.” Cows on grass avoid chemical- and fossil-fuel-dependent grains entirely while rebuilding and fertilizing soils, sequestering more carbon dioxide than forests or anaerobic digestors. They also provide healthful meat. Bovines have become scapegoats, while the anthropomorphic warming generated by the Ukraine war is simply ignored.
In the midst of this war against cows, POTUS has announced expansions of rules protecting wildlife that threaten an already endangered food supply. The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) strongly opposes this regulatory creep:
“Federal regulations have a direct impact on farmers and ranchers, and over the years, the breadth and extent of that regulatory landscape have increased. AFBF has taken a stand against regulatory overreach and is working to reform the federal regulatory process and preserve farmers’ and ranchers’ land-use and water rights.”
The American Soybean Association observed in public comments that these new wildlife rules “impose stricter than necessary limitations for U.S. farmers and other stakeholders” and will “result in significant reductions to land values and impede the economic use of property for landowners … whose properties overlap with a listed species’ range.” The rules often provide weak guidance for farmers and ignore economic balancing of the impacts on wildlife and on farmers or food supplies.
There is a long history of politics either purposely or inadvertently creating carnage through interference with farming. Whether that’s Joseph Stalin killing tens of millions in the dekulakization of his newfound empire, including some six million Ukrainians, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward which took over farms and killed some 50 million Chinese in famine. The greatest resistance to such food tyranny is self-reliance and secure local food supplies, in fact, the polar opposite of the push towards synthetic meats and insect burgers, in the name of protecting endangered species and the world.
