A Shift In Emphasis

In the USA, the agricultural policy was announced in the early 1970s: get big or get or get out.  Not merely "we'll emphasize big business" which is certainly part of that mantra, but part and parcel is the destruction of small agriculture.  When the stated policy is the destruction of small agriculture, and the means used destroys small agriculture, and the results 40 years later are the destruction of small agriculture, at what point do people say, "I wonder if they are trying to harm small agriculture?"

The question is not arising yet, but we may get there some day.

I was listening to a lad share he was entering college with a view to agricultural sciences.  He was of Irish descent.  I asked him if he knew about USA agricultural policy, and he was well versed, and so I asked him if he thought it was a good thing?  He replied, "We have to feed all of those people around the world."  I then asked him if he ever heard of the Corn Laws?

"No."

Shame on his ancestors.

The rationale for get big or get out in modern USA was no idle preference of a one power-mad bureaucrat, but part of a specific policy:  Food as a Weapon.  It is no secret to people worldwide it is the game plan of the USA to destabilize countries by exporting subsidized GMO corn (and other grains) into a country to destabilize that country, and then send in the US military to defeat independent local actors and prop up American puppets.

And why not?  We vote for the exact same thing here:

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced as a farmer?Anyone familiar with me would have to smile at this question, knowing that my answer would be and continues to be the food police. The on-farm hurdles we’ve faced, from drought to predators to flood to cash flow, are nothing compared to the emotional, economic and energy drain caused by government bureaucrats. Even in the early 1970s when, as a young teen, I operated a farm stand at the curb market, precursor of today’s farmers markets, the government said I couldn’t sell milk. The first business plan I came up with to become a full-time farmer centered around milking 10 cows and selling the milk to neighbors at regular retail supermarket prices. It would have been a nice living. But it’s illegal. In fact, in 2007 I finally wrote Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, documenting my run-ins with government officials.

So what is the most earth-shaking, radical act an American can do to shake up the system?  Start a business.

For my part, I will continue doing my business, but make something of a shift in emphasis.    I have been the only voice teaching business in the last 30 years that actually emphasizes customers, "the most important thing in business is the customer, the hardest thing is getting the product (or service right."

Of course, every other source mentions "the customer"  but I have been the only source to actually organize a program around customers.

We have lost at least two generations of entrepreneurs, so there is that to make up, but perhaps more devastating is the loss of two generations of salespeople.  On the one had we have the order takers assigned to welfare queen corporations, and the desolate landscape of missing small businesses and the salespeople who would have thrived with them now in prison or dead for "drug related charges."

When your housing is Section 8, you furniture Ikea, your clothes Macy's, your food Safeway and Mickey D, and all religion, entertainment, healthcare and so on reduced to a smartphone, who needs anything more?  Wars are unkind to such people.

We vote against wars, we get wars.  We vote against bailouts, we get bailouts  We vote against stadiums, we get stadiums.  And the regulators are always captured by the regulated.  There is no connection between participation and results.

I am optimistic this system will fail spectacularly.  In fact it already has, and what we have now is the pure anarchy of people creating order in spite of the chaos brought to us by failed democracies, a classic, working example of anarchy.  The question is, will we have enough people who know how to create and produce, who survive the degringolade, to build something good and just.

Who knows?  But the problem of ignoring customers has only gotten worse as people live in fantasy worlds of online sales and video games.   Acute is the lack of salespeople who serve customers, act as the conduit of feedback from retailers and end-users to wholesalers and growers.  The brand ambassador at Costco will not make or save a company.

(Great MBA thesis topic:  how many companies which give away samples at Costco are still in biz within 12 months?).

From the same article:

We don’t need programs; we need freedom. If we really had freedom, farmers like me would run circles around the corporate-welfare, food adulterated, land-abusing industrial farms.

Exactly.  There are so many more ways to distribute good food, but the rules BigAg implemented to kill off small agriculture makes it impossible.  The state commonly brings in armed swat teams, with crazed Iraqi vets now in police uniforms and fingers on the trigger to enforce violently the "get big or get out" policies.

Imagine an auction in the early morning of produce and meat open to all sold in whatever lots with restaurateurs bidding on what's available and making up menus on the fly based on what is fresh.  Competing on design would bring top prices in agriculture.  Once common, now a criminal act.

We can all be optimistic the entire system will fail.  Whether it is occasioned by a disease of the monocurrency or a disease of the monocrops, it will happen, it has happened.  The question is will there be enough people who can take up the slack.

My contribution (within this avocation of teaching) for a while will be in aiding and abetting the development of salesmanship, start-up and domestic and international market expansion.

Look for changes.

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