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est taste of its contents although i hope it is sufficiently representative and enticing enough to stimulate your desire to read it in toto rob wallace an evolutionary biologist is currently an advisor for the institute for agriculture trade policy iatp and a visiting lecturer at the university of minnesota s institute for global studies he blogs at farming pathogens for the past three decades the international monetary fund and the world bank have made loans to poorer countries conditioned on removing supports for domestic food markets small farmers cannot compete with cheaper corporate imports subsidized by the global north many farmers either give up for a life on peri urban margins or are forced to contract out their services their land their labor to livestock multinationals now free to move in the world trade organization s trade related investment measures permit foreign companies aiming to reduce production costs to purchase and consolidate small producers in poorer countries clearly agribusiness structural adjustment global finance environmental destruction climate change and the emergence of pathogenic influenzas are more tightly integrated than previously thought the nest of dependencies requires fuller investigation while the argument has been made that corporate food supplies the cheap protein many of the poorest need the millions of small farmers who fed themselves and many millions more would never have needed such a supply if they had not been pushed off their lands in the first place a reversal need not involve ending global trade or an anachronistic turn to the small family farm but might include domestically protected farming at multiple scales farm ownership infrastructure working conditions and animal health are inextricably linked once workers have a stake in both input and output the latter by outright ownership profit sharing or the food itself production can be structured in such a way that respects human welfare and as a consequence animal health with locale specific farming genetic monocultures of domesticated animals which promote the evolution of virulence can be diversified back into heirloom varieties that can serve as immunological firebreaks the economic losses influenza imposes upon global livestock can be tempered fewer interruptions eradication campaigns price jolts emergency vaccinations and wholesale repopulations rather than jury rigged with each outbreak the capacity for restricting livestock movement is built naturally into the regional farm model rather than to the expectations of an abstract neoclassical model of production the scale and practice of agriculture can be flexibly tailored to each region s physical social and epidemiological landscapes on the ground at the same time it needs to be acknowledged that under such arrangements not all parcels will be routinely profitable as richard levins points out whatever reductions in income farms accrue in protecting the rest of the region must be offset by regular redistributive mechanisms from the article the political virology of offshore farming first published in antipode november 2009 big farms 50 84 posted by patrick s o donnell at 10 08 am 0 comments wednesday march 28 2018 documentary on dolores huerta dolores some readers as viewers may be interested assuming you ve yet to see it in the recent documentary on the remarkable and inspiring life of dolores huerta on pbs independent lens dolores and should you have missed its earlier posting here is my bibliography for césar chávez the united farm workers and the struggle of farm workers in the u s image yreina d cervántez 1989 mural la ofrenda painted under a bridge in downtown los angeles in it cervántez an artist and chicana activist pays homage to dolores huerta co founder with césar chávez of the united farm workers of america posted by patrick s o donnell at 6 38 pm 0 comments saturday march 24 2018 famine history causes and consequences a select bibliography my latest bibliography on the history causes and consequences of famine is here compilations with significant family resemblance beyond inequality toward the globalization of welfare well being and human flourishing beyond capitalist agribusiness toward agroecology food justice ecological environmental politics philosophies and worldviews global distributive justice health law ethics social justice marxism posted by patrick s o donnell at 7 15 pm 0 comments down on the farm nostalgic ideological hegemony in the service of agribusiness big data and ai or capitalist agriculture and country music agriculture wars by nick murray march 12 2018 for viewpoint magazine the town of maricopa may be surrounded by arizona desert but a small plot of land near its northern border may qualify as the most closely studied piece of farmland our planet has ever produced here stands the lemnatec scanalyzer weighing some 50 000 pounds the device sits on a steel gantry that moves back and forth along tracks that line the field it monitors the growth of every plant below it and by the end of the day it generates five to eight terabytes of data what it records could help scientists develop the next generation of genetically modified seeds the university of arizona the company lemnatec and the u s government which funded the project through the department of energy all agree this could be the future of agriculture culture in all its early uses was a noun of process raymond williams says in keywords it described the tending of something basically crops or animals eventually by way of metaphor the word was extended to a process of human development but the roots run deeper still for much of human history culture in the sense of ceremony and arts has been tied closely with cycles of agriculture from work songs in fields to celebrations of harvest in america this tradition sees some of its most potent representation in country music the genre has produced countless songs about life on the farm but few are as straightforward as alabama s american farmer from 2015 they re out there every morning planting those seeds in the ground riding those big wheels until the sun goes down sings the group s frontman randy owen owen tells a familiar story paying tribute to the wholesome grit of the farm tradition yet with the nature of farming accelerating rapidly into the future the labor he describes could soon be obsolete not many farmers will ever have access to a 50 000 pound robotic field scanner but if the corporations that dominate the agriculture industry get their way farmers will see their work transformed by smaller devices like drones automated tractors and mini robots that crawl the ground at the front of this shift is the german company bayer ag we usually associate the name bayer with aspirin or heroin which it trademarked in the late 1800s but the pharmaceutical giant has steadily grown into one of biggest names in agriculture in 2014 its market capitalization the value of its outstanding shares stood around 112 billion this should soon rise bayer is now in the process of acquiring the american seed and pesticide firm monsanto itself worth around 66 billion now on bayer s crop science website the company promotes technological upgrades geared to the future one article mentions another scanalyzer that allows an automated measuring of crop growth but planting those crops can be automated too and to this end bayer promotes a robot called prospero an agricrab that scuttles across fields drills holes and deposits seeds prospero s inventor david dorhout imagines a small army of these on every farm a swarm of autonomous robots doing all the things alabama s american farmer used to do so what happens to the farmer dorhout has already considered this the farmer acts like a shepherd giving his swarm instructions he says then his robots carry out these orders by communicating with each other through infrared signals in bigger picture robots like prospero will change the role of a farmer from being a driver to an instructor which robots will pick up dorhut continues they will alleviate the physical work of farmers which gives them more time to focus on the economic part of their business if country music gave voice to many american farmers during the 20th century what does it have to say about the fundamental shift in farm labor that is coming to define the 21st if farmers become robot herders spending more time in quicken than in the field what will that mean for the culture that grew out of it will representations of farm work like those in country music keep pace with its realities the ongoing process of automation affects jobs in just about every sector of the economy yet for farming the shift toward robots creates a unique ideological problem that s because in american culture the farmer usually represents self sufficiency both personal and national the ability to live with two hands connected to the land without the need for modern devices like robots and computers in country music no song makes such a claim quite as forcefully as hank williams jr s a country boy can survive a number two hit in 1984 country boy beings by foretelling an apocalypse the preacher man says it s the end of time and the mississippi river she s a goin dry the resulting environment of scarcity and conflict divides urban from rural businessman from farmer you can guess which side adapts quickest though as hank tells it the rural country folk barely need to adapt at all they already know how to plow a field harvest heirloom tomatoes and ferment wine i got a shotgun a rifle and a 4 wheel drive he sings what more does one need williams s country folk are drawn from myth as much as fact subsistence farming was once common in regions like appalachia but by 1984 the practice was nearly extinct in the coal mines that the singer mentions subsistence farmers were violently incorporated into the markets of capitalism those still in business tend to grow one crop like wheat or corn as nodes in a supply chain that extends around the globe if country boy is an indignant song some its fire seems to come from this fact the singer has missed the first era of american household agriculture so he eagerly anticipates the divine providence that will bring about a second thus country boy is at once nostalgic and millenarian it claims to speak for the working class yet it rejects solidarity with the urban poor over 30 years later it remains one of country music s major points of reference we hear its title spoken at the end of tracks like montgomery gentry s daddy won t sell the farm and looped throughout blake shelton s boys round here search its title alongside the name of just about any male country star and there s a good chance you ll find shaky cell phone footage of a live cover so what happens when even farmers lose the skills that hank williams jr is counting on we can begin to trace this shift even in the multiple versions of a country boy can survive on songs like the anti gay anti disco dinosaur hank williams jr proudly proclaims his obstinacy his refusal to change with the times but when it comes to country boy even he has twice amended his own tune in 1999 williams collaborated with george jones and chad brock on a y2k version of country boy can survive the update emphasized the country boy s distance from wall street a new line proclaimed that if the bank machines crash we ll be just fine yet two years later after the september 11th attack on the world trade center williams returned to the studio to record a new version called america will survive the original had seemed to imagine a world after america and took its own shots at downtown manhattan hardly acceptable in late 2001 but this latest iteration attempted to reconcile the earlier contradictions urban and rural farm and finance in defense of a nation that will now triumph together as hank sings our flag is up since our people went down and we re together from the country to town we live back in the woods you see big city problems never bothered me but now the world has changed and so have i a changed world needs changed country stars enter luke bryan and now the article s conclusion harlan howard famously described country music as three chords and the truth this connection turned cliché is one reason why companies like bayer work so hard to become associated with country music there s reason to doubt the political efficacy of benefit concerts and one may certainly hesitate to call for more but in the 1980s and 90s farm aid somewhat successfully used music especially rock and country to link farming with liberal politics suspicious of big business these politics may be milquetoast but for corporations like those described above that link can pose an existential threat a bigger threat even than the money that farm aid raises for charity the organization s nominal purpose the here s to the farmer campaign should be understood in part as an intervention responding to this particular problem its purpose is not just to build brand awareness in the united states but to break this chain to encourage country listeners to identify less with a political position than with the brands themselves this state of affairs is troubling but there is no reason to assume it should be final a corresponding intervention might not just attempt to undo the advances of companies like bayer but rather to raise the stakes further beyond even the bourgeois politics of organizations like farm aid such a move only seems far fetched if we fix country to descriptors like conservative and traditional while ignoring the antagonisms that take shape in the music itself one such antagonism lies between the desire for autonomy or self sufficiency and growth of capitalism which requires people to submit to the market country music may be used to reinforce this submission but intervention in country music might also attempt to change the way this desire is articulated within the genre linking its fulfillment to a new anti capitalist politics something like this can only happen through engagement with country music and the spaces in which it takes place if it doesn t happen we might expect to hear more songs like upchurch s revanchist rap lacking anti capitalist politics this same desire for self sufficiency can produce not socialism but nativism and fascism meanwhile many of the farmers that country music claims to be speaking for continue to engage in their own forms of cultural resistance in raymond williams s pre industrial sense after the ratification of nafta in 1994 indigenous farmers in mexico often aligned with the zapatista movement rejected hybrid corn seeds arguing that they displaced native plants and destabilized local economies in 2010 a group of haitian peasants promised to burn hybrid seeds that monsanto shipped into the country in the guise of earthquake relief now back in the united states two new varieties of open pollinated corn seed have...