Industrial agriculture and forestry

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

We are dealing with Nature as if she were a factory floor and we even call agriculture and forestry nowadays industries.

Nature is not a factory floor, however, but a living intricate organism that cannot be (just) exploited, whether it is in the way that we farm today or the way that we deal with our woods and forests.

We are trying to get more and more out of our farmland and our woods and forests without considering that it just does not work that way. Oh, if the soil is depleted of nutrients we can just chuck some chemicals at it to feed the plants while at the same time further eroding the soil and the organism that live within it and that are needed for proper soil structure and soil health.

We use machinery that compacts the soil and destroys the organism that live there and that make the soil the life-sustaining stuff that it is. In forestry the huge harvesters, which are claimed to be so much more efficient than using loggers and tractors or better still horses to move the logs, with their weight and wheels destroy everything in their wake but then it is the fact that branches have not been left laying on the floor “for the wildlife”. So, lets create “habitat piles”, that will solve the problem, while we continue with bad practice.

But, we are told, it must be done this way so as to be expedient and profitable. Profit, in the world today, comes before anything and everything and that we are degrading and destroying the biosphere – let's get away from the term environment, for environment just, in actual fact means surroundings – to such an extent that it has difficulties supporting life.

Ever bigger and heavier machines are needed, we are told, for farming and forestry to be efficient and productive, which at the same time destroy the very soil that the entire operation depends upon. Then it is a call of chemical industry to the rescue in the form of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, etc., in the hope that that might mitigate some of the infertility of the soil and so on. Fighting fire with fire might work with a forest fire to some extent but not in this case.

If we don't nurture Nature Nature will not nurture us. Simple as that. Time to understand that Nature is a living breathing organism and not some factory floor with production lines. But that is how we have come to behave in the last century or so and it is just not a way that we can go on. In fact, we should never, ever, have started down that road and we must make a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn about and we must do that now, immediately, before it is too late.

We are reaching the point where the Earth, where Nature, will have to end the burden that we have placed upon Her, if we do not lift the burden ourselves. It is those practices of ours of treating Nature like a factory floor that have placed an enormous burden upon Her and unless we lift this burden She will change things Herself, no doubt. Nature has Her ways of keeping a balance and that way might very well go against us.

We need Nature but Nature does not need us. This is something that we did well to remember and began now, this very moment, to make and demand the changes that are required. Nature is not a factory nor is it a store of resources to be plundered for profit.

© 2017

EU food control coming?

Crop diversity under threat

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The European Union minions in Brussels/Strasbourg are working on controlling what foods we can eat. No, I am not jesting.

They are aiming to ban, as in outlaw, all heirloom and non-hybrid seeds, even for personal garden use, as well as the growing of such plants, the retention of their seeds (and seeds also from hybrid seeds for future use) and the taking and passing on of cuttings.

This way they will regulate what kinds of vegetables we can buy and even grow ourselves, and those will all have to be approved hybrid varieties and thus all only and rare vegetables will no longer have a chance.

As the collection and keeping of seeds and passing on from one gardener to another will also be punishable by law it means that we will have to – annually – go to authorized seeds merchants and buy our seeds for our garden.

Agribusiness, especially the big plant breeders, such as Monsanto, have been lobbying the EU commissioners for the last five plus years to create law that will do this and thus make it impossible for the people to avoid buying seeds from that company and others.

They have been working out, one can but guess, that people were voting with their feet and decided to grow their own food and especially here gardeners were aiming to use non-hybrid seeds and also to keep seeds from the harvests back for future use and also to share with other gardeners.

Therefore the EU commissioners have been lobbied hard to outlaw this practice and if the revised proposed seed regulation becomes EU law then we will all be forced to, if we wish to grow our own food, to grow only what they permit and keeping seeds back from the harvest for use next year will be punishable by this law.

How they are going to enforce this is, obviously, a question but if heirloom varieties are no longer available and organic seeds – for it would appear that they also will fall foul of this proposed legislation – then policing will be hardly necessary anyway.

This proposed legislation from Brussels proves yet again that the European Union is far from being a good thing for the people of Europe; the opposite rather, and the sooner it is put to death the better.

While this issue is all over the news in Germany and some other continental EU countries not a single word is mentioned of this issue in the media in the UK or Eire.

Time for a serious change to our system is needed...

© 2013