This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land
Our agriculture and theirs...(part 1)
I absolutely love using the title of Woody Guthrie’s iconic American folk song as the inspiration for this series of essays promoting neoagrarianism for America, but if we were to sing the song honestly today, it would go something like this: “This land is Bill Gates’ land, this land is the Communist Party of China’s land.” Bill Gates is reputed to be the largest holder of farmland in America today, and except in those states wise enough to prohibit the sale of agricultural land to foreign interests (amongst which, sadly, I cannot count my beloved Lone Star State of Texas), interests connected with the CCP are also avidly hoovering up available farmland at a record rate. De gustibus non disputandum est, but to my mind this constitutes one of the worst obscenities in American history.
... today nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities.1
Last July, a Politico report, citing Agriculture Department statistics for 2020, said Chinese companies controlled about $1.9 billion worth of agricultural land. It amounted to about 192,000 of the nearly 900 million acres of total American farmland.2
According to The Land Report, Gates owns 242,000 acres of farmland, in addition to 25,750 acres of transitional land and 1,234 acres of recreational land, for a grand total of 268,984 acres.3
There are many Americans who still march politically under the slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) (and President Joe Biden has gone so far as to declare a war against them!). But to those who are seriously inspired by this watchword, I would argue that a wise man once wrote that in order to be great you must first be good, and I hold this truth to be self-evident. America was never greater than when she was constituted by a panoply of yeoman family farms, each in its own way going about the business of producing the nutritional abundance on which America throve during her halcyon decades. The farmers, who were most of America, were doing good, so America was doing great. I suggest, dear readers, that the recipe for America’s success has not changed. If we are to recover our “greatness,” we must first recover our goodness; renationalizing and redistributing our agricultural land in a new “homesteading” approach is the way back and the way forward. Let me be the first to coin this revised slogan: “Make America good again!” Of course, that goodness is also lodged in our religious character, and the Recovenanting of America will ultimately be grounded in this, but for the nonce let’s focus on agricultural issues per se.
Divine serendipity brought to my inbox this recent report on Thai agricultural technology by Brian Berletic (whose current YouTube channel is called The New Atlas, and who formerly published under the pen name Tony Cartalucci). I was struck by the suitability of the Thai approach to agriculture and its suitability for adaption by an American nation small-scale American farmers, if we can politically arrange for such to be our destiny again (more on a “Jubilee” land reform in future essays). It is notable that the impetus for these developments, including the sharing of larger agricultural equipment between farms and the use of modern drone technology for aerial spraying of crops (including organic farming, where the applications must be more frequent), comes from the Thai royal family, which shows that even monarchy can occasionally serve as a beneficial political influence, though I would argue this is the exception that proves the rule that monarchy as an institution tends in the opposite direction. This ten-minute report is excellent, and deserves the attention of all who are inspired to an agrarian future for the United States of America, and much of the rest of the world, we might add:
The goal of this essay is to inspire a vision of a re-agriculituralized America, and to contrast it with the present, the destructive meanderings of “Big Agra” or “Agribusiness.” The watchwords of our movement are “downsize” and “decentralize,” as opposed to the current agricultural model of “adding field to field” and centralizing decision-making and ownership in fewer and fewer hands, with the end result of genetically modified and pesticide-laden crops that are literally killing its consumers. Analogously, just as we desire the end of “Big Pharma” and “Big Medicine,” as its become clear that these giants in the healthcare industry are providing the very opposite of health care, and have become the third leading cause of death in the United States, in favor of returning health care to autonomous family practitioners who are free to employ any medical approach they see fit, and no longer accountable to Big Insurance to determine medical diagnoses and treatment options, so we wish to see our current agro-industrial giants go the way of the dinosaurs that they so resemble, and make way for the return to the small-scale farmer who will take seriously tour new national mission of producing wholesome, quality, natural food for family and local consumer alike, and the reclamation of our depleted soils from the ravages of Big Agra so that, in the long run, America can boast of having the world’s most fertile soil, and again become the world’s breadbasket.
It may seem to critics that there is no glory in such a project, glory like that which attends American imperialism as it gallivants from one engineered military flashpoint to the next, leaving failed and looted states in its wake, but this sad Neocon-driven imperium is rapidly making America not only feared but hated by the rest of the world. A neo-agrarian direction . On the other hand, would make America a net contributor to the good of the world, as opposed to its current status as “global rip-off artist extraordinaire.” It would imbue America with a quiet nobility, humble in nature but beneficent in its output. An agrarian republic, the Jeffersonian dream, will have no need of a military-industrial complex, and who knows – America could crown its good with brotherhood and be the first of the “superpowers” to unilaterally disarm, which could reverse the current race to the bottom of militarism to a race to the top of peaceful coexistence throughout the world. This would be an America we could conscientiously leave to posterity, unlike the present one which is a greater threat to posterity than most of us ever thought imaginable!
1https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/723501793/american-soil-is-increasingly-foreign-owned
2https://www.newsweek.com/us-china-farmland-ownership-national-security-1725939
3 https://marketrealist.com/p/how-much-farmland-bill-gates-owns/