#Agricultural Subsidy

[sweetfirebird]

A farm and raw milk explainer, with a bit about the main guy pushing raw milk on America (who likes to present himself as a small farmer).

[jbfly46]

Believing glyphosate is necessary to keep food prices low enough for everyone to afford food is an uninformed opinion that often is derived from emotional reasoning. Most of the food crops grown in the U.S. are corn and soybeans grown where they don't naturally grow, and corn and soybeans are massively subsidized by the government, thanks to lobbying by companies like Monsanto, and the United State relying on corn and soybeans grown here being exported for GDP and Trade Deficit reasons. A lot of these crops aren't even going onto the tables of Americans, and the majority of them go towards feed for cows, chickens, and pigs; animals that don't naturally eat corn or soybeans. The rest are processed into junk food.

[dr-archeville]

Corn: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]

"John Oliver discusses the financial and environmental impact of corn in the U.S., and whether or not he really knows what Pearl Harbor is." [24 min 53 sec]

[queen-boudicca]

Me when doing my environmental science homework, at every available opportunity:

[iyemarathichiyenagari1971]

खरचं की…ही तर ओसाड गावची पाटीलकी !

कृषिमंत्री माणिकराव कोकाटे यांनी कृषी खाते म्हणजे ‘ओसाड गावची पाटीलकी’ असल्याच्या वक्तव्यावर विरोधकांनी आक्रमकपणे टीका केली होती. पण मी त्यांच्या या मतांशी 100 टक्के सहमत आहे. मी का सहमत आहे हे सांगणारा हा लेख… सतीश देशमुख, पुणेअध्यक्ष, फोरम ऑफ इंटलेकच्युअल्स9881495518 हातमाग कुटिरोद्योगाची स्थिती शेतकऱ्यांच्या संबंधित कुठलाही प्रश्न घेतला की तो इतर खात्याच्या मंत्र्यांच्या अखत्यारीत येतो.…

[aralintheobsessive]

And why does America grow so much fucking corn? Well, several reasons, but dominant among them: Subsidised revenue insurance programs! "In 1949, government payments made up 1.4% of total net farm income — a measure of profit — while in 2000 government payments made up 45.8% of such profits. In 2019, farms received $22.6 billion in government payments, representing 20.4% of $111.1 billion in profits."

Bad year? Bad market? Get paid anyway. Grow corn! Why go to all the risk and expense of diversifying your operation to try and grow crops there's an actual market demand for when you could instead go all-in on corn and soybeans? Now so many farmers have gone down this route that if the government reduces those subsidies, it would devastate entire regions. In today's agricultural industry of broadacre cropping, most farming is done by massive, expensive, highly specialized machinery. You can't just pivot, because you're in debt on giant machines that really only work on corn. So the government isn't going to cut the subsidies. So more farmers are going to go all-in on the safe bet that is corn. It's a horrible self-perpetuating cycle.

(Source for quote and image: https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-data-says/)

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.

[luffymonkey1227]

Why Are Food Prices So High, Especially in Grocery Stores?

In recent years, the cost of groceries has skyrocketed, leaving many Americans struggling to stretch their food budgets. Whether it’s the price of meat, produce, or everyday staples like eggs and bread, it seems like the cost of living continues to climb, especially when it comes to food. As we grapple with inflation, supply chain disruptions, and climate change, the question remains: why are…

[journosatyam]

vertical-farming-cost-benefit-comparison-indian-cities

शहरों में छतों और बिल्डिंग पर सब्जी की खेती, कितनी कारगर, कितनी महंगी?

भारत तेजी से शहरीकरण के दौर से गुजर रहा है। अनुमान है कि 2030 तक भारत की शहरी आबादी कुल जनसंख्या का 40% से अधिक हो जाएगी। इस बढ़ती शहरी आबादी की भोजन संबंधी जरूरतों को पूरा करना एक गंभीर चुनौती बनता जा रहा है, खासकर जब ताज़ी, सुरक्षित और कीटनाशक-मुक्त सब्जियों की मांग दिन प्रति दिन बढ़ रही है। पारंपरिक कृषि मॉडल शहरों में इस मांग को पूरा नहीं कर सकते, क्योंकि भूमि की उपलब्धता और प्रदूषण जैसे मुद्दे इसके आड़े आते हैं। ऐसे में 'वर्टिकल फार्मिंग' एक वैकल्पिक समाधान के रूप में उभर रही है। इस तकनीक के जरिए खेती क्षैतिज (Horizontal) ज़मीन के बजाय ऊर्ध्वाधर (Vertical) दिशा में इमारतों, कंटेनरों या टावरों के भीतर किया जाता है, जिससे कम स्थान में अधिक उत्पादन संभव हो पाता है।

वर्टिकल फार्मिंग एक नियंत्रित वातावरण (Controlled Atmosphere) वाली कृषि तकनीक है जिसमें मिट्टी के बजाय हाइड्रोपोनिक्स (nutrient-rich पानी) या एयरोपोनिक्स (हवा में न्यूट्रिएंट रिच फुहार) का प्रयोग किया जाता है। यहां पौधों को LED लाइट्स की मदद से सूरज की रोशनी के बिना उगाया जाता है। पूरी प्रणाली सेंसर, तापमान नियंत्रण, नमी, CO₂ मॉनिटरिंग और ऑटोमेटेड सिंचाई पर आधारित होती है। यह प्रणाली 90% तक कम पानी का उपयोग करती है और लगभग शून्य कीटनाशकों के साथ काम करती है। शहरी उपभोक्ताओं को इससे ताजे, हेल्दी और रसायन-मुक्त उत्पाद मिलते हैं।

पूरा आर्टिकल यहां पढ़ें:

शहरों में छतों और बिल्डिंग पर सब्जी की खेती, कितनी कारगर, कितनी महंगी?

[balu88r-blog]

PM Dhan Dhanya Krishi Yojana : ಅನ್ನದಾತನ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಸಬಲೀಕರಣ, ಪಿಎಂ ಧನ್-ಧಾನ್ಯ ಕೃಷಿ ಯೋಜನೆ ಸಂಪೂರ್ಣ ಮಾಹಿತಿ...!

PM Dhan Dhanya Krishi Yojana – ಕೇಂದ್ರ ಸರ್ಕಾರದ ಮಹತ್ವದ ಪಿಎಂ ಧನ್-ಧಾನ್ಯ ಕೃಷಿ ಯೋಜನೆ ಈಗ ಎಲ್ಲೆಡೆ ಸದ್ದು ಮಾಡುತ್ತಿದೆ. ನಮ್ಮ ದೇಶದ ಬೆನ್ನೆಲುಬಾದ ರೈತರ ಬದುಕಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಇದೊಂದು ಕ್ರಾಂತಿಕಾರಿ ಬದಲಾವಣೆ ತರುವ ನಿರೀಕ್ಷೆಯಲ್ಲಿದೆ. ಇತ್ತೀಚೆಗೆ ಕೇಂದ್ರ ಸಂಪುಟ ಈ ಯೋಜನೆಗೆ ಬೃಹತ್ ಮೊತ್ತದ ಹಣ ಬಿಡುಗಡೆಗೆ ಅನುಮೋದನೆ ನೀಡಿದ್ದು, ಇದು ಕೋಟ್ಯಂತರ ರೈತರ ಭವಿಷ್ಯಕ್ಕೆ ಹೊಸ ಭರವಸೆ ಮೂಡಿಸಿದೆ. ಏನಿದು PMDDKY? ಇದರ ಲಾಭಗಳೇನು? ಬನ್ನಿ, ವಿವರವಾಗಿ ತಿಳಿಯೋಣ. PM Dhan Dhanya Krishi…

[rightnewshp]

कृषि यंत्र सब्सिडी: हिमाचल में 18 जुलाई से शुरू होगा एग्री मशीनरी पोर्टल, जानें कैसे करें आवेदन #News #agriculture #subsidy #farm #machinery

[rightnewshindi]

कृषि यंत्र सब्सिडी: हिमाचल में 18 जुलाई से शुरू होगा एग्री मशीनरी पोर्टल, जानें कैसे करें आवेदन #News #agriculture #subsidy #farm #machinery