#agricultural products distribution

[vishalmishra]

Scope and Importance of Agricultural Distribution Business

Today, the agriculture market has amazing opportunities. We are Appoint Distributors, a distribution channel that mainly works on distributorship opportunities in India. We are a guide to the agricultural products distribution business and its scope. Check out our article. 

[dealerswanted]

Are you looking to connect with reliable Agriculture Products Manufacturers and Dealers in India? Look no further than GetDistributors.com. It is a trusted online platform that serves as a bridge between Agricultural Products Distribution Businesses & Suppliers, providing agricultural equipment distributorship and weeder machine distributor opportunities.

[farmerstrend]

How Kenya’s Investment in Macadamia Nuts is Driving Regional Export Growth

Discover how Kenya’s investment in macadamia farming and digital innovation has propelled the country to become a leading exporter, overcoming regulatory challenges and boosting agricultural growth. Explore the role of MSMEs and digital platforms in transforming Kenya’s macadamia sector, driving productivity, and enhancing market access for sustainable economic growth. Learn how Kenya’s macadamia…

[myzacoza]

Government welcomes positive GDP growth

Government has welcomed the country’s positive economic growth, as reflected in the latest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures.  According to data released by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA), the GDP increased by 0.4% in the second quarter of 2024, following a 0.0% growth in the first quarter.  On expenditure, real GDP rose by 0.5% in the second quarter, an improvement from the 0.1% decrease…

[vamptastic]

ough ooough i need to learn more about agriculture

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #14

April 12-19 2024

The Department of Commerce announced a deal with Samsung to help bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing and research and development to Texas. The deal will bring 45 billion dollars of investment to Texas to help build a research center in Taylor Texas and expand Samsung's Austin, Texas, semiconductor facility. The Biden Administration estimates this will create 21,000 new jobs. Since 1990 America has fallen from making nearly 40% of the world's semiconductor to just over 10% in 2020.

The Department of Energy announced it granted New York State $158 million to help support people making their homes more energy efficient. This is the first payment out of a $8.8 billion dollar program with 11 other states having already applied. The program will rebate Americans for improvements on their homes to lower energy usage. Americans could get as much as $8,000 off for installing a heat pump, as well as for improvements in insulation, wiring, and electrical panel. The program is expected to help save Americans $1 billion in electoral costs, and help create 50,000 new jobs.

The Department of Education began the formal process to make President Biden's new Student Loan Debt relief plan a reality. The Department published the first set of draft rules for the program. The rules will face 30 days of public comment before a second draft can be released. The Administration hopes the process can be finished by the Fall to bring debt relief to 30 million Americans, and totally eliminate the debt of 4 million former students. The Administration has already wiped out the debt of 4.3 million borrowers so far.

The Department of Agriculture announced a $1 billion dollar collaboration with USAID to buy American grown foods combat global hunger. Most of the money will go to traditional shelf stable goods distributed by USAID, like wheat, rice, sorghum, lentils, chickpeas, dry peas, vegetable oil, cornmeal, navy beans, pinto beans and kidney beans, while $50 million will go to a pilot program to see if USAID can expand what it normally gives to new products. The food aid will help feed people in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Yemen.

The Department of the Interior announced it's expanding four national wildlife refuges to protect 1.13 million wildlife habitat. The refuges are in New Mexico, North Carolina, and two in Texas. The Department also signed an order protecting parts of the Placitas area. The land is considered sacred by the Pueblos peoples of the area who have long lobbied for his protection. Security Deb Haaland the first Native American to serve as Interior Secretary and a Pueblo herself signed the order in her native New Mexico.

The Department of Labor announced new work place safety regulations about the safe amount of silica dust mine workers can be exposed to. The dust is known to cause scaring in the lungs often called black lung. It's estimated that the new regulations will save over 1,000 lives a year. The United Mine Workers have long fought for these changes and applauded the Biden Administration's actions.

The Biden Administration announced its progress in closing the racial wealth gap in America. Under President Biden the level of Black Unemployment is the lowest its ever been since it started being tracked in the 1970s, and the gap between white and black unemployment is the smallest its ever been as well. Black wealth is up 60% over where it was in 2019. The share of black owned businesses doubled between 2019 and 2022. New black businesses are being created at the fastest rate in 30 years. The Administration in 2021 Interagency Task Force to combat unfair house appraisals. Black homeowners regularly have their homes undervalued compared to whites who own comparable property. Since the Taskforce started the likelihood of such a gap has dropped by 40% and even disappeared in some states. 2023 represented a record breaking $76.2 billion in federal contracts going to small business owned by members of minority communities. This was 12% of federal contracts and the President aims to make it 15% for 2025.

The EPA announced (just now as I write this) that it plans to add PFAS, known as forever chemicals, to the Superfund law. This would require manufacturers to pay to clean up two PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid. This move to force manufacturers to cover the costs of PFAS clean up comes after last week's new rule on drinking water which will remove PFAS from the nation's drinking water.

Bonus:

President Biden met a Senior named Bob in Pennsylvania who is personally benefiting from The President's capping the price of insulin for Seniors at $35, and Biden let Bob know about a cap on prosecution drug payments for seniors that will cut Bob's drug bills by more than half.

[apas-95]

On Authority

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether — given the conditions of present-day society — we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear.

On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of individuals. Modern industry, with its big factories and mills, where hundreds of workers supervise complicated machines driven by steam, has superseded the small workshops of the separate producers; the carriages and wagons of the highways have become substituted by railway trains, just as the small schooners and sailing feluccas have been by steam-boats. Even agriculture falls increasingly under the dominion of the machine and of steam, which slowly but relentlessly put in the place of the small proprietors big capitalists, who with the aid of hired workers cultivate vast stretches of land.

Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to have organisation without authority?

Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? Let us see.

Let us take by way of example a cotton spinning mill. The cotton must pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in different rooms. Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed, must be observed by all, without any exception. Thereafter particular questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled in an authoritarian way. The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]

If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

Let us take another example — the railway. Here too the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.

We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority. Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

- Engels, 1872

[probablyasocialecologist]

Since the turn of the millennium, the prices of crude oil and food have evolved almost in sync. This can be put down to the high energy input required for the production of agricultural commodities such as synthetic fertilisers and chemical pesticides. In addition, a huge amount of fossil fuel energy is needed to manufacture and operate farm machinery and to process, package, distribute and prepare food. Food systems consume 15% of the fossil fuel energy used globally, according to estimates. The production of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers is particularly energy-intensive, requiring around 4% of global gas consumption.

Public Food Stocks for Price Stabilisation and their Contribution to the Transformation of Food Systems

[mindblowingscience]

What if there was plastic-like material that could absorb excess nutrients from water and be used as a fertilizer when it decomposes? That product—a "bioplastic" material—has been created by University of Saskatchewan (USask) chemistry professor Dr. Lee Wilson and his research team, as detailed in a paper recently published in RSC Sustainability. The research team includes Ph.D. candidate Bernd G. K. Steiger, BSc student Nam Bui and postdoctoral fellow trainee Bolanle M. Babalola. "We've made a bioplastic material that functions as an absorbent and it takes phosphate out of water, where elevated levels of phosphate in surface water is a huge global water security issue," he said. "You can harvest those pellets and distribute them as an agricultural fertilizer."

Continue Reading.

[tanadrin]

Reverse unpopular opinion: radical feminism

Radical feminism starts from what I think are solid philosophical fundamentals. One: that the relationship between the sexes is based on material conditions, and that absent a way to eliminate or alter those conditions, there are dynamics that you cannot wish away just by tinkering with culture and legal systems around the edges. The class of people who engage in the work of gestation and (for 99% of human history) nursing children really are going to occupy a fundamentally different position in society than the class of people who do not do that. And because of the importance of reproduction to keeping society going, sex-based oppression is not only a really common pattern in human cultures, it's also a really hard one to escape. Much like the lord extracting surplus from the rural peasantry, there are different cultural and historical particulars you might find in any single place, but the general pattern of patriarchy, like the general pattern of controlling the means of agricultural production, is going to have common features throughout the world and throughout history.

This is not purely a quaint historical phenomenon, either, though; given that this differential relationship to reproduction has been around since long before agriculture, it is a pattern even more deeply ingrained in human societies than unequal distributions of land and capital; and given that the first generation of feminism dates from around the early 20th century, and some of the most important political gains from feminism postdate the birth of many people reading this post, the idea that feminism is over, or has reached some culmination point, or has passed its peak usefulness, or has even come close to uprooting deeply entrenched patterns of patriarchal oppression (nevermind that the fundamental biological dynamic that helped create those patterns is still largely in place!) is laughable, even in progressive-by-global-standards societies like those in Europe and North America.

On top of this there are a lot of contingent cultural patterns that radical feminists observed in the 70s and 80s which I think were broadly accurate; second-wave feminism correctly noticed there was a more fundamental shift in perspective that society needed besides just giving women the right to vote, and this shift in perspective was what "women's liberation" more broadly was aimed at covering.

I also think that the ultimate goal of radical feminism, as at least some radical feminists have expressed it, is laudable: that of the "elimination... of the sex distinction itself," so that "genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally." It's utopian as hell, and it is also in tension with the idea that the role of the reproductive class of humans is special, but utopian ideas often call on us to radically reimagine the future (and radically interrogate the present), and I think that, in general, that is an excellent thing.

[vishalmishra]

Agricultural Products Distribution Services in India

We are one of the best business opportunity providers in India. We offer agriculture products distribution for the growth of distributors who work in this segment and want to build their strong market with brand product distribution.

[goodstuffhappenedtoday]

Millions of U.S. apples were almost left to rot. Now, they'll go to hungry families

NOVEMBER 27, 2023 By Alan Jinich

It's getting late in the harvest season in Berkeley County, West Virginia and Carla Kitchen's team is in the process of hand-picking nearly half a million pounds of apples. In a normal year, Kitchen would sell to processors like Andros that make applesauce, concentrate, and other products. But this year they turned her away. ... Across the country, growers were left without a market. Due to an oversupply carried over from last year's harvest, growers were faced with a game-time economic decision: Should they pay the labor to harvest, crossing their fingers for a buyer to come along, or simply leave the apples to rot?

Bumper crops, export declines and the weather have contributed to the apple crisis

... While many growers in neighboring states like Maryland and Virginia left their apples to drop. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was able to convince the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to pay for the apples produced by growers in his state, which only makes up 1% of the national market.

A relief program in West Virginia donated its surplus apples to hunger-fighting charities

This apple relief program, covered under Section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935, purchased $10 million worth of apples from a dozen West Virginia growers. Those apples were then donated to hunger-fighting charities across the country from South Carolina and Michigan all the way out to The Navajo Nation.

Mike Meyer, head of advocacy at The Farmlink Project, says it's the largest food rescue they've ever done and they hope it can serve as a model for their future missions. "There's over 100 billion pounds of produce waste in this country every year; we only need seven billion to drive food insecurity to zero," Meyer says. "We're very happy to have this opportunity. We get to support farmers, we get to fight hunger with an apple. It's one of the most nutritional items we can get into the hands of the food insecure."

At Timber Ridge Fruit Farm in Virginia, owners Cordell and Kim Watt watch a truck from The Farmlink Project load up on their apples before driving out to a food pantry in Bethesda, Md. Despite being headquartered in Virginia, Timber Ridge was able to participate in the apple rescue since they own orchards in West Virginia as well. Cordell is a third-generation grower here and he says they've never had to deal with a surplus this large.

At the So What Else food pantry in Bethesda, Md., apple pallets from Timber Ridge fill the warehouse up to the ceiling. Emanuel Ibanez and other volunteers are picking through the crates, bagging fresh apples into family-sized loads. "I'm just bewildered," Ibanez says. "We have a warehouse full of apples and I can barely walk through it." "People in need got nutritious food out of this program. And that's the most important thing" Executive director Megan Joe says this is the largest shipment of produce they've ever distributed – 10 truckloads over the span of three weeks. The food pantry typically serves 6,000 families, but this shipment has reached a much wider circle. "My coworkers are like, 'Megan, do we really need this many?' And I'm like, yes!" Joe says. "The growing prices in the grocery stores are really tough for a lot of families. And it's honestly gotten worse since COVID."

"It's the first time we've done this type of program, but we believe it can set the stage for the region," Kent Leonhardt, West Virginia's commissioner of agriculture says. "People in need got nutritious food out of this program. And that's the most important thing." Following West Virginia's rescue program, the USDA announced an additional $100 million purchase to relieve the apple surplus in other states around the country. This is the largest government buy of apples and apple products to date. But with the harvest window coming to an end, many growers have already left their apples to drop and rot.

[farmerstrend]

Harnessing the Power of Fruit Sizing for Kenya's Fruit Farmers: A Key to Maximizing Orchard Performance

Fruit sizing is a crucial aspect of orchard management, especially in the dynamic world of fruit farming. For Kenya’s fruit farmers, understanding and optimizing the factors that influence fruit size is essential for achieving consistent, high-quality yields. Operating in diverse environments with varying regional climates, soil types, and microclimates, the importance of fruit size monitoring…

[zvaigzdelasas]

"The first session of the 118th Congress was one of the least productive in the body’s history. Only 22 bills were signed into law this year by the president — by far the lowest total since at least 1993, the first year for which the National Archives have data. (For comparison, the next least productive year during this timespan was in 2013, when 72 bills became law.) Despite the slow year, members nonetheless found time to introduce an abundance of bills relating to the threat of China, which was the focus of hearings in committees ranging from Financial Services to the Judiciary committee, and of legislation concerning everything from fentanyl distribution to TikTok. In 2023, members introduced 616 pieces of legislation that contain a variation of the word “China” — more than 3.5 for every day that Congress was in session on average. That’s already more than any two-year congressional session, except for the 117th Congress (2021-2022; 860 bills) and the 116th (2019-2020; 620 bills), according to a search of the congressional record. One of the few “accomplishments” in Congress this year was the formation of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party — which was almost instantly dubbed the “tough on China committee” — in January."[...]

Members of Congress introduced at least nine bills aimed at restricting foreign ownership of agricultural land in the United States. As RS has explained, these efforts are not always logical, even if there are some legitimate national security concerns over China or other nations buying up farmland.[...]

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) and five co-sponsors introduced the “Defund China’s Allies Act” to “prohibit the availability of foreign assistance to certain countries that do not recognize the sovereignty of Taiwan,” aimed at 21 countries in Central America and the Caribbean. The bill argues that the “United States efforts to condemn these countries’ willing diplomatic shift toward a genocidal government is undermined by an incomprehensible adherence to the so-called ‘One China’ policy, on terms dictated by the Chinese Communist Party,” implicitly calling for an end to the policy that has maintained peace in the Taiwan Strait for decades.[...]

bills introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Reps. John Curtis (R-Utah), and Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) [...] would have renamed the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in Washington, D.C. to the Taiwan Representative Office, because it “better reflects its status as Taiwan’s de facto diplomatic mission to the United States.” That was only one of many bills that were purely symbolic and antagonizing, including one that demanded that Beijing “must be held financially liable for $16,000,000,000,000,” because of its responsibility in the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and a resolution that declared China to be the biggest threat to freedom in the world. “Whereas it is the opinion of Congress that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest threat to freedom and to the free world,” reads the text, introduced by Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.). “Be it Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That Congress agrees that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest threat to freedom and to the free world.” That’s the entire resolution.

27 Dec 23

[turtlesandfrogs]

One of the things I think about a lot is productivity comparisons between conventional and unconventional agriculture. Mostly because that's the first question you get asked when you talk about anything that's outside the norm*, but, on what metric are we measuring? Per acre? Per hour worked? Per cost of input? Are we measuring yields of product or dollars earned?

This question also, to me, rings of fear. Fear of food shortages, which are really a problem of greed & distribution, not the world's capacity to grow food. If we were really worried about calories though, I think we'd at least switch to pastured animals instead of sending so much corn and soy to livestock (for any non-farmers out there, you do not get nearly the calories out of a chicken or pig that you put in- you get much less**). Or we would put more effort into making cities great places to live so we stopped turning farmland into suburbia. Or we would be much more concerned with how to prevent erosion & loss of arable land. But we don't, and we're not.

I also think of the complexity of non- conventional farming, and how instead of it being a return to the past, it actually relies on new information and methods***.

Take the plot of land that I'm working to make into a market garden. It's soil is, from a farmer's perspective, crap. It's gravely, sandy, very little organic matter. If I were to farm it conventionally, I'd basically have till to open the soil and kill weeds, and then provide all of the plant nutrients through fertilizers, which would cause the plants to kick out their symbiotic fungi, leaving them vulnerable to pathogenic fungi, and more dependant on me for water. There would also be bare soil everywhere, increasing evaporation & providing plenty of opportunities for new weeds. My costs would be very high, paying for fertilizers, pesticides, & herbicides, and I would have to water, a lot. It probably wouldn't be at all economically feasible to grow food on this plot using conventional methods.

Now, I look at it and say, I'm going to do no-till. I look at the hard, weedy, depleted soil and there's no way a seed is going to be able to come up through that. But, I'm not just doing no-till, because I'm not looking at it from a conventional mindset and just trading out one practice. I'm doing basically everything different from above.

Instead of tilling, I'm laying down a thick layer of mulch, to shade out the weeds, increase soil organic matter (increasing the amount of water and nutrients the soil can absorb & good on to), and feed the soil ecosystem. By the time spring rolls around, the soil underneath will be much better, but I'll still add more compost in most cases.

Instead of fertilizers I've had to pay for, I'm using mulches that I got for free from my gardening work & composts made for free from restaurant kitchen wastes****. I'm going to use over crops, plants that fix nitrogen and also serve as perennial hosts to beneficial soil fungi, which will also form symbiosis with most of my crops, increasing their resistance to pathogenic fungi while also providing them with increased access to water and soil minerals.

Instead of bare soil, there will be mulches and cover crops every where. Instead of monocrops & pesticides, I'll be intercropping which will help by hosting beneficial native insects that will chow down on aphids and other crop pests.

From this framework, there's an upfront investment of effort and planning, but farming this land now seems feasible.

And the thing is, each of those choices is backed up by research. We know so much more now about soil and nutrient cycling and how it actually works than when conventional ag really got started. We know so much more, and so many practices are new, so growing non-conventionally isn't a step back into the past of how things were grown.

But at the same time, it's not exactly completely information either- other cultures have different ways of growing food crops, and if you broaden your concept of what cultivating plants looks like, there's examples everywhere. We're just studying it now and providing it scientifically.

*and I honestly think that it's a result of the extractive mindframe that comes from being the decendants of colonizers. Just look at the different perspectives between many western foragers ideas and Indigenous peoples' relationship with the land.

** chickens are one of the most efficient, with a feed conversion ratio of 1.6, which means for every 1.6 pounds of food you give them, you can expect the chicken to gain 1 pound (cows are over 4 pounds of feed to pound of live weight, and pigs are 3 to 4ish). That's the whole bird though, counting all the parts we don't eat- guts, feathers, bones, etc. Even so, a pound of chicken food has over 1300 calories, and is about 20% protein for starter/grower, where as a pound of chicken has about 500 calories and about 30% protein (for dark meat, you get fewer calories from white meat). I'm not saying everyone should give up meat, but I am saying that the amount of meat in mainstream diets has increased dramatically, much of it comes from cafos where animals are fed on grains & legumes, and if we're measuring productivity and yield per acre because we're worried about feeding the world, this is a huge factor. Look up how much of the corn & soy crop goes to actually directly feeding people.

*** from a western, colonizing prospective

**** is this a particular boon from my particular circumstances? Yes. But everyone has their own challenges and resources, there is no cookie-cutter solution to all agriculture, everywhere. You have to find the solutions that work for you.

[transmutationisms]

thoughts on veganism? i find it pretty complicated considering how many leftists view the ethical + environmental complications while knowing i will never be vegan bc Eating Disorder.

i mean i don't think those two positions are actually in tension though. like, anybody with serious communist political commitments understands that individual consumption patterns are not the same as a political movement for systemic change—there is value in trying to collectively reduce meat consumption, & for some people a vegan consumption pattern is just the only ethical response to the issues of interspecies justice that animal product consumption raises. but people who are serious about both communism and veganism are not asking you to endanger yourself by following dietary rules that are unsafe for you, nor do they think that the entire animal agriculture industry would collapse if only you as an individual would agree to do so. if food justice is something you care about i think there are much broader conversations and political movements to get involved with here, which ultimately aim to provide all people with sufficient food that is produced in ways that don't cause massive ecological damage or needless animal suffering. a just and sustainable food system will probably never be able to provide people with the amount of meat / dairy that, eg, usamericans are accustomed to eating, and plant foods definitely do need to become more reliably available, affordable, sustainably produced, &c. but like, i'm talking here about massive fundamental changes to the entire system of growing, processing, and distributing food; these are questions of political import that you can absolutely care about & be involved in even if, in present circumstances, eschewing all animal products is not practicable for you.