#AGRICULTURE

[alexseanchai]

[image 1: same tweet as image 3, which has alt text. image 2: reply by disast3rtransp0rt: "May I add: Sweeney Toddler"]

[opendirectories]

[mindblowingscience]

A research team has successfully sequenced and assembled the genomes of all four Macadamia species, marking a significant advance in crop improvement efforts for this commercially valuable nut. The findings reveal key genetic traits that could enhance disease resistance, climate adaptability, and crop yield, addressing the challenges of genetic diversity in macadamia breeding. Macadamia, a genus native to eastern Australia, includes four species: Macadamia integrifolia, M. tetraphylla, M. ternifolia, and M. jansenii. Only the first two species and their hybrids are widely cultivated for commercial production.

Continue Reading.

[brawley1492]

I love the "sunshine" of your smile

Sunflowers are born that way ... William

[gaystation4]

thats right bb come suck on my seed

[nando161mando]

[thepromiscuousfinger]

[honkytonkdyke]

I NEED TO KNOW I HAVE TO PROVE SOMETHING

i'm using seen as you have been in the general vicinity of a cow outside of a vehicle (driving down a highway thing). cows are a very big part of my life but i live in the usamerican south so i want to know. HAVE YOU SEEN/INTERACTED WITH COWS

[howlfromthecore]

I don't actually think there's going to be mass deportations. What I do think is that there will be some big deportations, for show, which will make it much easier for Ag bosses to exploit and control immigrant workers.

This will allow the trump administration to have some public "successes" to point to while not losing the support of big Ag. Plus they can avoid that whole "rising cost of food" and "crops rotting in the field" issue. Nasty. More human trafficking and similar unethical bullshit perpetrated on immigrants.

And this will all happen out of public view. Most of the people who live in in agricultural areas drive down the same handful of roads to conduct their daily business. But if you take the roads that don't go to the highway or the next town or big processing plant, though. Take a few turns down the pitted roads deep between the orchards and fields and pastures. Go way down the roads that you'd have no reason to drive down unless you live or work there.

There you'll find the little villages, half camp, half trailer park, far away from public eyes, building inspectors, and the reach of social services.

And the trump administration will give the bosses that much more leverage, that much more to threaten them with. This will push them that crucial bit further away from schools, from social workers, from access to medical care, from drug prevention programs for their kids, from all the little things that help people live better lives and have hope for their children's future.

it's unbelievably fucked up how the most popular criticism of mass deportations is that it'll cause a labor shortage in the agriculture industry and raise food prices. not because it's incorrect (it isn't), but because how the fuck do we even have to take this argument any further than "mass deportations are bad because they're fucking mass deportations, start treating immigrants like fucking human beings." every article I've read about it doesn't even bother talking about the inhumane and horrific labor conditions that undocumented immigrants face in the agriculture industry, without even any legal recourse to turn to, because instead these thinkpieces just fixate on the economic impact on U.S. citizens.

there is a need to expose the hypocrisy of the agricultural businesses and farmers' bureaus that complain about labor shortages yet endorsed pro-deportation politicians, but any conversation about labor shortages is inherently deceptive if it does not address the workers' conditions in the first place — and when it comes to agriculture, the motivation for not addressing those conditions is clearly racist and nationalist to its core. a huge swath of even the anti-deportation wing only cares about immigrants because they see the status quo of immigrant abuse as benefitting them.

[headspace-hotel]

I will write this thought about Veganism and Classism in the USA in another post so as to not derail the other thread:

There are comments in the notes that say meat is only cheaper than plant based foods because of subsidies artificially lowering the price of meat in the United States. This is...part of the story but not all of it.

For my animal agriculture lab we went to a butcher shop and watched the butcher cut up a pig into various cuts of meat. I have had to study quite a bit about the meat industry in that class. This has been the first time I fully realized how strongly the meat on a single animal is divided up by socioeconomic class.

Like yes, meat cumulatively takes more natural resources to create and thus should be more expensive, but once that animal is cut apart, it is divided up between rich and poor based on how good to eat the parts are. I was really shocked at watching this process and seeing just how clean and crisp an indicator of class this is.

Specifically, the types of meat I'm most familiar with are traditionally "waste" parts left over once the desirable parts are gone. For example, beef brisket is the dangly, floppy bit on the front of a cow's neck. Pork spareribs are the part of the ribcage that's barely got anything on it.

And that stuff is a tier above the "meat" that is most of what poor people eat: sausage, hot dogs, bologna, other heavily processed meat products that are essentially made up of all the scraps from the carcass that can't go into the "cuts" of meat. Where my mom comes from in North Carolina, you can buy "livermush" which is a processed meat product made up of a mixture of liver and a bunch of random body parts ground up and congealed together. There's also "head cheese" (made of parts of the pig's head) and pickled pigs' feet and chitlin's (that's made of intestines iirc) and cracklin's (basically crispy fried pig skin) and probably a bunch of stuff i'm forgetting. A lot of traditional Southern cooking uses basically scraps of animal ingredients to stretch across multiple meals, like putting pork fat in beans or saving bacon grease for gravy or the like.

So another dysfunctional thing about our food system, is that instead of people of each socioeconomic class eating a certain number of animals, every individual animal is basically divided up along class lines, with the poorest people eating the scraps no one else will eat (oftentimes heavily processed in a way that makes it incredibly unhealthy).

Even the 70% lean ground beef is made by injecting extra leftover fat back into the ground-up meat because the extra fat is undesirable on the "better" cuts. (Gross!)

I've made, or eaten, many a recipe where the only thing that makes it non-vegan is the chicken broth. Chicken broth, just leftover chicken bones and cartilage rendered and boiled down in water? How much is that "driving demand" for meat, when it's basically a byproduct?

That class really made me twist my brain around about the idea of abstaining from animal products as a way to deprive the industry of profits. Nobody eats "X number of cows, pigs, chickens in a lifetime" because depending on the socioeconomic class, they're eating different parts of the animal, splitting it with someone richer or poorer than they are. If a bunch of people who only ate processed meats anyway abstained, that wouldn't equal "saving" X number of animals, it would just mean the scraps and byproducts from a bunch of people's steaks or pork chops would have something different happen to them.

The other major relevant conclusion I got from that class, was that animal agriculture is so dominant because of monoculture. People think it's animal agriculture vs. plant agriculture (or plants used for human consumption vs. using them to feed livestock), but from capitalism's point of view, feeding animals corn is just another way to use corn to generate profits.

People think we could feed the world by using the grain fed to animals to feed humans, but...the grain fed to animals, is not actually a viable diet for the human population, because it's literally just corn and soybean. Like animal agriculture is used to give some semblance of variety to the consumer's diet in a system that is almost totally dominated by like 3 monocrops.

Do y'all have any idea how much of the American diet is just corn?!?! Corn starch, corn syrup, corn this, corn that, processed into the appearance of variety. And chickens and pigs are just another way to process corn. That's basically why we have them, because they can eat our corn. It's a total disaster.

And it's even worse because almost all the USA's plant foods that aren't the giant industrial monocrops maintained by pesticides and machines, are harvested and cared for by undocumented migrant workers that get abused and mistreated and can't say anything because their boss will tattle on them to ICE.

[ketyoulater]

[japhugmafia]

[webdiggerxxx]

palestine, 2012

[ancientsstudies]

Demeter

The roof of the cabin constructed of growing grass and has tomato vines growing on the walls.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The global food economy is massively inefficient. The need for standardized products means tons of edible food are destroyed or left to rot. This is one reason more than one-third of the global food supply is wasted or lost; for the U.S., the figure is closer to one-half. The logic of global trade results in massive quantities of identical products being simultaneously imported and exported—a needless waste of fossil fuels and an enormous addition to greenhouse gas emissions. In a typical year, for example, the U.S. imports more than 400,000 tons of potatoes and 1 million tons of beef while exporting almost the same tonnage. The same is true of many other food commodities and countries. The same logic leads to shipping foods worldwide simply to reduce labor costs for processing. Shrimp harvested off the coast of Scotland, for example, are shipped 6,000 miles to Thailand to be peeled, then shipped 6,000 miles back to the UK to be sold to consumers. The supposed efficiency of monocultural production is based on output per unit of labor, which is maximized by replacing jobs with chemical- and energy-intensive technology. Measured by output per acre, however—a far more relevant metric—smaller-scale farms are typically 8 to 20 times more productive.

5 November 2024