Monsanto forked over nearly a billion in cash for a company that can tell farmers... well you read it..
Once "we can know," that is Monsanto can tell you, how much seed to grow where, and how much water to use, it is only a matter of time where their advice becomes public policy. We already have the USSupreme Court making rulings specific only to Monsanto, with the science behind them, Monsanto becomes irresistable. Especially when no one else can crunch the numbers like they do. The danger is too few people making decision affecting too many people.
I wonder where Monsanto got a billion to blow on a weather service? Anyway, before we go much farther, we should think about the preferences and subsidies in our policies....
Now note the Federal Policy is not "We want everyone to get big" (bad enough), but "get big or get out." That means if you are small or medium, you are not wanted. That has been the policy for the last 40 years. What has been the result of that policy? Monsanto is one result. Time to rethink this?
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
Monsanto said it was paying $930 million in cash for the company, whichlooks at data like historic rainfall and soil quality to help farmers predict crop yields. Monsanto hopes to apply the Climate Corporation’s data analysis insight across the company, to create what a Monsanto executive called “the next level of agriculture.”
“A farmer should be able to grow on farmland square meter by square meter, for lots more yield, planting seeds at different rates for each meter,” said Kerry Preete, Monsanto’s executive vice president of strategy. “We’re a data company at heart, breeding seeds and helping farmers optimize yields and manage risk.”
Last year Monsanto paid $250 million for Precision Planting , a company that enables farmers to plant seeds in various depths and spaces, almost by the square meter, so different parts of a farm can get different treatment. Mr. Preete said Monsanto saw this as a first step in developing two-way farm machinery systems that took up and receive data, giving farmers better sense of what to plant and how much water and fertilizer to use.
Once "we can know," that is Monsanto can tell you, how much seed to grow where, and how much water to use, it is only a matter of time where their advice becomes public policy. We already have the USSupreme Court making rulings specific only to Monsanto, with the science behind them, Monsanto becomes irresistable. Especially when no one else can crunch the numbers like they do. The danger is too few people making decision affecting too many people.
I wonder where Monsanto got a billion to blow on a weather service? Anyway, before we go much farther, we should think about the preferences and subsidies in our policies....
Earl Butz18th United States Secretary of AgricultureIn officeDecember 2, 1971 – October 4, 1976
For example, he abolished a program that paid corn farmers to not plant all their land. (See Henry Wallace's "Ever-Normal Granary".) This program had attempted to prevent a national oversupply of corn and low corn prices. His mantra to farmers was "get big or get out," and he urged farmers to plant commodity crops like corn "from fencerow to fencerow." These policy shifts coincided with the rise of major agribusiness corporations, and the declining financial stability of the small family farm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz
“Food is a weapon...”
“To think of food as a weapon, or of a weapon as food, may give an illusory security and wealth to a few, but it strikes directly at the life of all.
The concept of food-as-weapon is not surprisingly the doctrine of a Department of Agriculture that is being used as an instrument of foreign political and economic speculation. This militarizing of food is the greatest threat so far raised against the farmland and the farm communities of this country. If present attitudes continue, we may expect government policies that will encourage the destruction, by overuse, of farmland. This, of course, has already begun. To answer the official call for more production -- evidently to be used to bait or bribe foreign countries -- farmers are plowing their waterways and permanent pastures; lands that ought to remain in grass are being planted in row crops. Contour plowing, crop rotation, and other conservation measures seem to have gone out of favor or fashion in official circles and are practices less and less on the farm. This exclusive emphasis on production will accelerate the mechanization and chemicalization of farming, increase the price of land, increase overhead and operating costs, and thereby further diminish the farm population. Thus the tendency, if not the intention, of Mr. Butz confusion of farming and war, is to complete the deliverance of American agriculture into the hands of corporations.”
? Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
Now note the Federal Policy is not "We want everyone to get big" (bad enough), but "get big or get out." That means if you are small or medium, you are not wanted. That has been the policy for the last 40 years. What has been the result of that policy? Monsanto is one result. Time to rethink this?
Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.
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