Ag Bank Mergers Exacerbate the New Farm Crisis

Not only is Big Ag a very sick system of growing food for the planet, it is very bad for farmers as well.  While access to operating loans keeps them in business doing the same old bad practises and thus it is hard to sympathize, it nonetheless keeps them out of bankruptcy.  If there are no farmer -- only slave labor -- there will be no farms or farmers or rural culture to convert to best practice. They need loans despite our differences and then they need access to organic and soil building technology to transition to sustainable farming. This article from Food & Power

Last year, the Nebraska Rural Response Hotline, which connects farmers and ranchers with legal, financial, and mental health services, set four monthly records for the number of new callers in financial distress. This spike reflects the broader hardship facing rural Americans in the midst of what some are calling the new farm crisis. 

The crisis has many causes, including falling commodity prices and the rising cost of farm inputs like seed and fertilizer. But another contributing factor that is already making the consequences of these deteriorating fundamentals far more severe is the massive consolidation of ag lenders that has occurred since the last farm crisis in the 1980s. 

Grain and dairy farmers, in particular, depend on annual operating loans, which can be more than $1 million dollars, to pay for their upfront costs. But according to Joe Schroeder, an advocate with Farm Aid who takes calls from farmers in crisis, “it’s getting tighter and tighter across the board for people depending on operating loans,” to the point where accessing credit “becomes an annual nightmare.” 

Farmers are finding it harder to get new loans due to their declining income and mounting debt. But another cause is the displacement of local agriculture banks by large distant lenders with which farmers have no personal relationships. 

“So many banks have consolidated that the local bank is not locally owned, it’s just a branch of another bank,” says Vern Jantzen, Vice President of the Nebraska Farmers Union. “In the old days there was a relationship there, the banker knew how this family was operating and he could figure out if this is a good risk or not, but all of that is gone.”  Posted by Claire Kelloway in Commodities, Grains, Mergers & Acquisitions, Newsletter

http://www.foodandpower.net/2018/08/16/ag-bank-mergers-exacerbate-the-new-farm-crisis/

Morality of Eating Meat

I am glad somebody raised this issue.  I have long held that factory farms are the problem and that keeping animals on a family or village farm that are integrated members of the farm that give and recieve care and value are morally justified especially it they are eaten in moderation, (not greedy, selfish and childish.)  This article challenges even this position.

    “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? … The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes … ” Jeremy Bentham, father of the theory of utilitarianism

     Making factory farming more humane misses the point of immorality and injustice of the use of animals as resources. Indeed, there are those philosophers who believed that animals do not have moral status equal to humans. Human exceptionalism
     Human exceptionalism is based on the premise that humans have superior abilities compared to other animals. For example, humans can have social relationships, in particular family relationships; they also have the ability to use language; they can reason and feel pain.           French philosopher Rene Descartes

     More astute observations and scientific studies, however, have shown that animals do experience pain analogous to humans and have feelings. For example, elephants have complex emotional lives, including grieving for loved ones, and complex social and family relationships.
     Animals can reason, communicate with one another, possibly use language in some cases and behave morally.
     Thus, excluding animals from moral consideration and eating animals cannot be justified because they lack these characteristics.

https://www.alternet.org/heres-what-philosophers-have-say-about-eating-meat?src=newsletter1095151

Oasis' place in a world in crisis

If Oasis can be a sanctuary that speaks to connecting visitors to the earth it would be of value beyond ourselves in a world alienated from the very dirt beneath our feet and sky above our heads and the imperative to change our relationship to it.. If we agree that part of our purpose here is to restore a sense of natural wonder  by "looking and seeing" and hearing what the land would say if it could speak and then helping it grow to its best sense of place, then we have found one part of our common cause in our relationship to this very land and our community.  Our activism can flow from this center.

PanGaia creations come out of the necessity and urgency for the protection of the Earth.  We share out of a fierce need, and out of an ‘inner call’ to give voice to what the Earth would say if it could speak in human language.

We have been listening and creating a unique sound in New Age music —primal, multilingual, multi-sensory— a sound that can help people connect to their original Nature blueprint and integrate some of their shadow parts such as grief... or awe. 

Our live performance ceremony blends world music, ancient instruments, poetry and collective ritual. PanGaia believes in bringing their medicine to the places and people where it is most needed, where a re-connection between humans and the land needs to be established, such as we did in “Offerings to the Russian River”.

click to listen

https://www.pangaiamusic.com/