The hay and the chickens are very flammable....
Its easy to destroy food. All crops are plant matter, flammable. Same with animals. Wouldn't even need FEDs to do something this easy. Ol Billy Gates could run around setting fire himself....
No one thought food needed protecting.... so we are vulnerable
squashkin@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
every time I hear about these stories it just digs in to me more and more
I knew of farmers growing up and it seemed like they and their kids thought the "smart" thing was to get out of farming and do something else, there was some hate on farmers as being "backward"
but without farms there is no food. and if our food is entirely grown by some other country they could just stop trading with us and we would be in trouble. so the neglect of farming to me is pretty sad and shortsighted.
I have no illusions about how much hard work farming can be. but also a lot of people don't feel desk jobs are all that great. either way, big respect to the farmers. we need more regional farms, and it's worth paying more for as it's not just the economics of food but represents food security.
masterofballs@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
In China to be a farmer is to be of extremely low status. Even the word farmer is a slur. Sort of like "hill billy" or "hick". As a result, no one wants to farm anything in China. Poor people still farm, but not much industrial farming goes on. It's a lot of low tech stuff, and borrowing the neighbors truck. China cannot feed it's people. It relies heavily on food imports. (Where do you think all our chicken feet go?) I would like the states to remain food producers. We don't produce much else so it's a good thing to atleast know we won't starve when a war breaks out.
squashkin@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
you may be familiar with Joel Salatin (organic farmer / writer), I really liked his attitude about the topic
I think he encountered the same dilemma of people talking poorly of farming and being encouraged to do something else, but he's argued we need more smart people who farm and has a polyface farm thing: https://www.polyfacefarms.com/
So he farms a little, but I imagine advocacy is probably more of what makes him money
so like even high tech farming I'm still fine with: aquaponic or aeroponic designs that are more automated and use lots of tech, or working on autonomous robots to farm.
I think ancient rome had a distaste for manual labor in general and tried to have slaves do the manual labor, and this kind of attitude has persisted really throughout history up until now about attitudes towards manual labor
the industrial revolution also changed things dramatically, up until last century (or maybe the one before) I think most people worked on or lived on farms, whereas now it's like the opposite, so we're still kind of adapting to this shift culturally
but anyway it's still very strange to me to see people look down on farming, because if your slaves or workers die or won't work or your food supply somehow gets cut off if you're dependent on others, you're in trouble. Maybe it's just arrogance and ignorance of trying to not be aware of or care about this basic survival issue, which was sold to the public and now is ripe for being exploited with these " " " mysterious " " " fires (arsons?) going on.