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Mr. Rawles,

Yesterday, you posted Chad L.’s submission concerning buying “organic” and/or locally produced food. In it, Chad made a few statements that are simply wrong. This is an example: “…factory farming requires the use of fertilizer made from oil, largely derived from the Middle East. ” This is a wholly ignorant statement, ignorant because if the author had bothered to check, he would have found that the USA produces nearly all of it’s nitrogen fertilizer from natural gas. Even if we did use oil as the source for ammonium nitrate, OPEC only accounts for about half of the oil we import, if you only count Iraq it accounts for 10 percent of that (or about 5 percent of all imports). We import more oil from Canada and Mexico than from any country we are current at war with. This sort of soft-thinking is impossible to support, but sounds nice to many who take such statements as fact without taking the time to check them. We don’t produce nitrogen fertilizer from oil, and if we did, the USA produces far more than it imports, so the “largely derived from the Middle East” is patently false. Heck, OPEC isn’t comprised only of countries from the Middle East. Venezuela as well as several independent African nations are lumped in too. Take them out of the equation and the total oil imported to the USA from the Middle East only about a third of the total OPEC imports we receive.

He also doesn’t point out that the majority of the world is fed by corporate farming, he even makes “corporate” sound like a dirty word. Any farmer I know who is making a profit, is incorporated. It costs approximately 1/3 to produce (by weight) a “corporate” tomato as it does an “organic” tomato – and the only purported guarantee you get is that no pesticides were used to produce it. If the world went “organic” the world would starve. Sure it’s a good idea to grow your own food, but to do so because you hate “corporations” or that non-organic food is somehow less safe (anybody remember the folks who died/got sick when they drank the “organic” Odwalla juices a few years back?) or more safe is living in a fantasy world.

Let’s not forget the offhand insult delivered to that ignorant guy wearing the NRA hat. Was it meant to say that the guy, being a gun-owner, should know something about a place he’d never been? Or, more to the point, was it simply an ad-hominem attack on some marginalized citizen (aren’t all ignorant rednecks, NRA hat-wearin’ types?) who had the misfortune to cross this man’s path?

Since he touts “organic” local farming as using, in his words, “very little oil-based fertilizer” where, exactly does he think they get their ammonium nitrate? Any farmer can make the claim to use “very little oil-based fertilizer” since nearly all fertilizer is made from natural gas (that we produce in the USA).

His arguments simply do not support the truth and facts about farming. He also knocks, “South American factory farms” and makes an incoherent statement about millions of low-income immigrants (the same incoherent statements made about the Irish, Italian and WWII waves of immigrants) who flee here because of economic conditions on South American farms. The last time I checked, immigration from Chile (the major source of our winter fruits and vegetables – remember, the seasons are reversed below the equator – not so with Mexico) was so small, they did not fulfill their maximum quota with the US department of state. In fact, with a 96 percent literacy rate, they are better educated than we are in the USA. And in fact, with a population of only about 16 million (most descended from european immigrants) they would depopulate very quickly if they did support his “millions” number. Corporate farming in Chile works well, they help feed the rest of the world. Argentina is a close second. Many of the farm workers in Chile, for instance, are multi-generational employees of the same evil “corporations” as their fathers and mothers. How do I know this? I visit there, and have several connections in their agribusiness community. He picked a poor example of “insuring national security”, most of the illegal workers in the USA do not work in agriculture-related industries, although this may not be readily apparent to a Californian (the breadbasket of the USA). This also casts unfair aspersions on the character of the human swarm he would have us fear as a “national security risk”, do you really think an illegal immigrant would countenance someone coming to the country he needs to work in to support his family as his side in a border crossing, if that person were to attack the USA? He would have you fear the “great brown horde” the same way people in the northeast were taught to slur those “swarthy grape stompers” from Italy.

His facts are either skewed, or wrong. His thinly veiled disdain for gun owners and their intellect is insulting. And he is ignorant about where ammonium nitrate comes from. – L.D.M.

JWR Replies: To bolster your position, I should mention that SurvivalBlog reader “3CanKeep” kindly did some research and found that only 3.1% of the U.S. natural gas supply comes from foreign sources.

Jim,
I really enjoyed Chad L.’s article from an organic farmer reaching out to the preparedness community. It was very well written with many bits of humor and many very relevant thoughts, such as, “if I’m lucky I just might get to be a farm hand if things go bad.” and”That requires knowing how to grow it, something that is well beyond even moderately accomplished hobby gardeners”,and “a book can be a great source of information, but it will likely never replace hands on learning from someone that knows what they’re doing. If you want to be able to grow enough food to live on you should know a farmer.”and, finally, “Much lore and utility can be learned from those that actually know how to do things and no thing is more important than being able to produce food.”
For some unknown reason, I’ve been really fired up during the last few weeks to learn as much about gardening and growing food, more than I have ever been during my last 50+ years. If this is Providential direction, I had better get my rear in gear!

Chad’s article is truly reaching out to those of us who, “have never really been to a farmer’s market because he thought it was full of overpriced vegetables and dope-smoking hippies”, and I commend him for his efforts and have a better idea as to how those prices may be not as high as I thought.

I just want to second what Chad is saying. Having been around production (factory), small scale and organic farming for about 40 years, it is clear most of the production farms and farmers will not survive times when oil and it’s associated fertilizers and pesticides disappear or are in very short supply, the same is true if credit is tight. The knowledge curve to change from production to organic farming is a multi-year process.

For the preppers having seeds in a can sounds good and may make some folks feel good but it is unlikely their first crop will provide sufficient food to make it till the next harvest. That also assumes they have knowledge to preserve the crops and an a appropriate place for storage. There are only two groups that might grow us enough food to survive, the small homesteading folks that are currently supplying food for their family and the small growers that are selling into the farmers markets and/or have Community Supported Agriculutre (CSA) organizations. Of these two only the small growers have the knowledge to rapidly scale up output.

Having been a conservative most of my life and having watched George W. take away many of our freedoms with the Patriot Act and Paramilitarization of the police force though the war on drugs, I now mostly try to ignore the far right, ‘christian’ right, far left, and other fringe groups and just focus on the individual people. There are many folks planning and preparing for tough times, it will be difficult enough to survive without using the knowledge of all of us.

Thanks for the blog. I just ordered your new edition of “Patriots“. – Riverrat