I just got home from my state fair, where I helped my kids and students with their 4-H and FFA projects. As I reflect on the week's events, I am reminded of an old exhibition poultry book The Art of Faking Exhibition Poultry.
Fake hair, Fake coloring, Fake animals. The livestock exhibition world has truly become an artificial adulteration of what started out as livestock feeding people and training kids to do so.
After 25 years of attending such events, exhibiting, observing, visiting with other agriculturalists, and preparing for competition to be competitive, I have one takeaway. We are in a food bubble in all aspects of production. Our food systems are in the fiat bubble as we have never been before.
Three symptoms of the bubble are,
1) The majority of the animals we are exhibiting and propagating for ribbons and accolades cannot live or produce in a real ecosystem.
2) Industrial agriculture systems are using technologies that require greater and greater economies of scale models that wreck ecology.
3) The division between historically normal "homestead" type agriculture techniques and today's modern industrial agriculture producers is a valley so wide in gap that the two by contrast are foreigners to each other.
This is the day of CHAT GPT, artificial insemination, artificial fertilization, artificial breasts, artificial eyelashes, artificial nails, artificial music, artificial lab-grown meat, artificial currency, and artificial personalities.
It's all for show but is anyone really winning?
What will we see when all the FAKE is stripped off?
Are we prepared to face the music when we wake up next to the real deal the morning after the ball?
Let's start with the first assumption.
The majority of the animals we are exhibiting for ribbons and accolades cannot live in a non-artificial ecosystem.
Environmental control, nutrition control, and breeding control for the ribbon is at an all-time high. The Boer goat that has been winning most wether shows has been propagated and perverted since its importation into Texas in the 90s. It has not had time to adapt to more humid regions. In Arkansas, they will die at warp speed without massive amounts of anthlametic and other pharmaceutical inputs due to their non existent resistance to internal parasites. The Dorper sheep will do the same and the Hampshire cross sheep that are winning the market lamb shows will follow suit. Wool is now a liability with a lack of labor for shearing. In the chase of a fiat dollar, we have created fiat breeds that have so many crutches underneath them that when reduced to natural environments, they fail to survive, let alone thrive.
Show hogs live their lives on soft pine shavings to keep them from breaking down skeletally and they couldn't forage an acorn to save their life. These are the creatures that flood the show ring.
All of the breeds we raise came from regional adaption in a slow-moving world. Review the names of Tunis, Sussex, Alpine, Simmental, Aberdeen-Angus, Gurnsey, Nubian, and Charlaois, and
remember that these are locations on the planet.
We have yet in the United States to establish bioregional breeds that are adapted to the peculiarities of the area and those that we did are at risk of loss due to the industrial and green revolutions that "goosed" the energy supporting them.
Our land grant systems have almost left the plant and animal breeding arena for the people and have been dominated by multinational conglomerates that own the genetics. The fiat chemical dependency, energy dependency, reproductive dependency, and mineral dependency when made to function in real solar time cannot. And the bubble pops.
Second, industrial agriculture systems are using technologies that require greater and greater economies of scale models that wreck ecology.
I spoke with an old college roommate while watching the market hog show this week. He spoke of a new technique they are using to prepare for spring planting. I sat down for a second because it floored me. A water-activated antigermination, soil sterilant for seeds in the field. Isn't that every farmer's dream? Soil that won't allow seeds to sprout when they are wet. How does soil come back from that one?
SOIL! A living, breathing, farting, warming functional biological system on our planet that we all depend on is being forced to yield what life it harbors, turning into innate molecular substrate, to create a commodity to sell to someone we don't know with fiat dollars, with fiat fertility, in fiat economies in fiat markets to support a system feeding fiat animals to feed real people.
Wow. Oh, and he just purchased the newest John Deere combine. It is the newest and biggest harvesting machine on the market. He has yet to purchase a food processing machine. Remember the "get big or get out" phrase from Kissenger and the farm crisis that followed to change our country?
The division between historically normal "homestead" type agriculture techniques and today's modern industrial agriculture producers and even more so, "show" breeders, is a valley so wide they are foreigners to each other.
If you live in rural America, with the exceptions of Amish and Mennonite communities and a few homesteading regions, much of our agriculture production hubs are food deserts. It is no different than the food deserts of inner cities. It seems that much of the consumable food that can nourish us, is found at the edge.
The marketplaces of Kroger, Walmart, Dollar General, Costco, Publix, and others have found their place at the edge of communities and placed themselves there. They are in many places the only outlet for nourishment and you pay for it one barcode at a time. My production agriculture friends have no clue how to garden, cut, and process their own animals, hatch eggs, or which type of fruit and berry plants can suit them. They only know GMO varieties, chemistry, pharmaceuticals to give, and what to call to move their product.
They like machines that go VROOOMMMM and only seem to find bigger ones or use more and more layers of technology. It seems we have forgotten what our grandparents have taught us in our current life of modernity.
Fiat soon becomes the real to some in psychology. Fiat is fake but many times cannot be recognized due to psychological contrast bias.
We cannot forget what our grandparents taught us about how to harvest the sun, wind, water, and nurture the soil. That with our labor, God will tend to us.
I will leave with a story of exhibition cattle told to me by my animal science professor in college. He told of a popular bull which a large firm had purchased and collected semen on with the intention of selling a pile of it and making a wad of cash profits.
While in Denver at the National Western show, they noticed a lump on his testicle. In close proximity to Colorado State University, they hauled him in to get checked out. The bull had testicular cancer.
The firm had already bought in deep, so they removed the testicle, replaced it with a fake, and continued to promote the bull nationwide in order to win shows and sell their inventory.
Fiat testicles and fiat dollars.
Will we be ok with fiat nutrition in the long term? I won't place chips on that bet. We must have the real goods in the woods at the end of it all. Remember Cinderella and her chariot and team of horses at midnight?
Comments