Tag Archives: food transformation

Did we just see the tip of the iceberg designed in Davos?

Posted on by
Reply
Wealth from the tech sector led Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) to be central to venture capital investments in food and energy tech startups, including plant-based and cell-based fake-meat and fake-dairy. Beyond Meat is one high-profile example in SVB’s ‘Clean Tech’ portfolio amid the rampant climate/ESG-focused investment that has occurred throughout the financial sector when interest rates were low and the economy was being pumped full of capital. Now, after eight interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve in response to record inflation, the SVB collapse is the second largest bank failure in history. Did we see a ‘bubble’ or the tip of an iceberg designed in Davos.
  Istock photo collage by Sherry Bunting

Looking back and ahead, there’s more than meets the eye

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine March 31, 2023

The Federal Reserve policy shift to raise interest rates and restrict the money supply after more than a decade of ultra-low rates and two years of pumping money into the economy opening a Pandora’s box of unrealized losses and liquidity problems in areas of the banking system as consumers and businesses rifle through savings in the face of record inflation, and now rising interest rates.

Ongoing global banking stress, central bank interest rate hikes, tightening credit conditions, and continued inflation are affecting both the U.S. and Europe against the backdrop of two important geopolitical developments in late March.

First, the UN Secretary General accelerated ‘net-zero’ climate commitments for the U.S. and EU to 2040 instead of 2050, while China and India have until 2060 and 2070. Second, leaders of authoritarian regimes in China and Russia made a pact to “shape the new world era by cooperating on a range of economic and business areas.”

At the same time, the second largest bank failure in U.S. history — then backstopped by the federal government and run by federal regulators — re-opened as Silicon Valley Bridge Bank. Within days, it had regained its status as the darling of the tech-elite. Venture capital startups came back to it “in droves,” according to several business news reports. 

Looking back two years in my reporter’s notebook, I found harbingers of these current events from the World Economic Forum’s 2021 meeting in Davos, and the global transformation — the Great Reset — that underlies it.

Let’s review, and look ahead:

At the leading edge of the ‘banking crisis’ that emerged in March 2023 was the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse and subsequent Biden backstop for all of its deposits over and above FDIC-insured levels.

Known as the venture capital bank for the tech sector, SVB doubled its deposits from $115 billion to $225 billion from 2021 to 2022, according to a lengthy Feb. 2023 report in Forbes that eerily discussed the ramp up in ESG-investing in 2021 facing off with 20 states moving to restrict it in 2022.

In 2021, there were huge venture capital investments, and high-profile public offerings for climate-focused startups such as those in SVB’s ‘Clean Tech’ division for alternative energy, food, and biotech.

As interest rates rose in 2022, venture capital investment slowed, and these startups started eating into their deposits backed by long-term securities, leaving insufficient upfront liquidity. Many of the food tech startups banked by SVB are pre-market, others are plant-based imitations with lackluster sales and bottom line losses.

Food Dive reporters described the scene at a food tech expo when a tweet about SVB broke the news. Startup owners went into a bit of a panic, transferring, or attempting to transfer, funds from their phone apps. 

They say the Biden backstop makes these depositors whole, but not the investors. That is misleading. The deposits consist mostly of investor funds now being used for payroll and cost of business.

Why was SVB deemed ‘systemic’ enough to elicit a rapid and complete federal backstop? It’s the epitome of ESG / climate investment funding models.

In fact, one of the executive orders signed by President Biden in Jan. 2021 repealed the Trump rule that had previously restricted retirement fund managers from using ESG (Environmental, Social Governance) factors. Then, just this week on Monday (March 20), Biden vetoed legislation passed by Congress to undo his Jan. 2021 executive order, seeking to restore those restrictions.

It’s worth noting that the climate agenda focus on ESG-investing-on-steroids over the past two years may have distracted the financial sector from minding the books.

Is it a ‘bubble’? Is it the tip of the iceberg? Will there be fallout for agriculture? 

The good news, wrote American Farm Bureau chief economist Roger Cryan on March 17 is that regional banks are in a strong position, and farmers – mostly – have strong balance sheets coming out of 2022.

An article about the SVB and Signature Bank failures was shared with farmers during a Lancaster County, Pa. meeting Thursday (March 16), noting that, “As of now, these issues don’t appear to be systemic.” 

The author, Matthew Brennan, senior investment strategist and portfolio advisor for Fulton Bank, wrote: “These aren’t questions of solvency, these are questions of liquidity. While we expect the measures put in place by the government should go a long way towards providing stability to a sector that was beleaguered last week, volatility is expected to remain high.”

Meanwhile, the entire financial sector braced for the Federal Reserve meeting March 22, anticipating a 0.25% rise in interest rates as the consumer price index announced March 14 for February showed inflation was 6% higher than a year ago with core inflation on a month-to-month basis the highest of the past four months.

So, how did we get here, and is there more than meets the eye?

As mentioned, venture capital investment for climate-tech startups in energy, food and cellular ag ramped up in 2021 amid low interest rates, expansion of the monetary supply, and government incentives. 

Inflation, which followed, actually helps these alternative sectors by making their higher-cost products align better with the cost of conventional fossil energy and traditional ‘real’ foods in the meat and dairy sectors that experienced the highest inflationary surges.

As the Biden Administration and the Federal Reserve were both late to react to rising inflation, all of this money pumped into the economy created an ESG investment runway. But as startups now eat into those deposited investments, while consumers go through prior government funds and are now borrowing to keep up with inflation, reality hits home.

Analysis by experts across the financial spectrum vary from blaming ‘woke’ ESG-investing, to calling the bank failures ‘unique’ and not likely to spread, to describing these failures as ‘tips of an iceberg’, to suggesting a designed consolidation to globalized central banking.

A Stanford University report on March 20, pegs the banking sector’s ‘unrealized losses’ as high as a collective $2.2 trillion. Therefore, as Fed monetary policy has tightened, the ‘paper’ losses become real losses if depositors use or move even 10 to 20% of their funds.

Parallel to these financial unravelings, a United Nations report March 20 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shortened the climate ‘crisis’ timetable in dramatic style.

Calling the report “a guide for defusing the climate time-bomb,” the UN Secretary-General promptly announced for September’s Climate Summit an “acceleration agenda for first-movers”, specifically calling upon the U.S. and EU to shave 10 years off their commitments to reach net-zero by 2040 instead of 2050, while China and India meet their commitments by 2060 and 2070.

That’s a 20- to 30- year difference, and China is already positioned to be a prime supplier for digital transformation of energy and food for us all to become dependent upon. Recent agreements made by China and Iran and by China and Russia this week make these stark climate-commitment differences even more geopolitically important.

China already has significant investments in U.S. food and agriculture, including food and energy tech startups that were just bailed-out with U.S. funds in the collapsed SVB.

Beyond EV batteries, wind turbines and solar panels, largely made in China, China is investing heavily in lab-created protein alternatives and is already the world’s largest concentrator of soy, pea, oat, and other proteins that are the mainstay of plant-based imitation meat and dairy.

China and Russia have both invested in infrastructure, along with Singapore, to ramp up cellular protein via biotech, DNA-altered fermentation products as dairy analogs and gene-edited stem-cells with no growth endpoint as cell-cultured meat analogs.

To be clear, a recent Bloomberg business report confirmed alternative cellular protein to be based on ‘immortal cells’ in the same way as cancer cells have no growth endpoint, but somehow scientists reassure us — without proof — that this will not harm us when we are expected to dutifully consume climate-saving cancer-like blobs of immortal cells, made in China. (No, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I am a realist. It’s looking more and more like China is attempting to call the shots for the American consumer. I’m not the only one pointing out the need to return to ‘reality.’)

In a CNBC interview over the weekend, one business analyst said what is needed in the face of disruptor-tech-gone-wild is investment in real companies making real products for real people.” (Sound familiar?)

True to form, however, what sector of the stock market is rallying this week? The tech sector and artificial intelligence. Which sectors are seeing their values fall? The staples, the real essentials. This is counterintuitive unless we recall that it’s a page directly out of the World Economic Forum (WEF) playbook that has been written in Davos for decades.

Let’s go back to the WEF-Davos meeting two years ago and have a look…

It was January 2021 when the World Economic Forum (WEF) launched its annual meeting ‘virtually’ in Davos with a transformation agenda centered on the post-Covid ‘reset.’ During that week, two things caught my eye and ears. 

First, China’s president Xi Jinping was given the status of opening the Davos 2021 ‘reset,’ talking about four global governance ‘tasks’: digital, health, climate and economic. He spoke of China’s ‘superior’ role in global digital governance and global health governance. Then he stated: “China will get more engaged in global economic governance.”

Xi had the audacity to scold any nation or region that may try to reverse globalization or to decouple supply chains. He described such moves as “arrogant.”

Never mind the fact that Covid supply chain disruptions made the world keenly aware of the dangers in over-reliance on made-in-China medical essentials or centralized, globalized food systems.

Also in my notes are comments from business news analysts, admitting Environmental, Social, Governance benchmarks for investing (ESGs) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “not well-defined” and could be “a bubble”. Some even warned ESG venture-capital in tech startups (food and energy) “will fail.”

Nevertheless, more than 60 corporations covering tech, food, pharma, energy, finance, and accounting signed the ESG agreement in Jan. 2021 to outline what is measurable and pledging to “implement and enforce ESG and SDG at the supply chain and stakeholder level to drive consumers to a ‘net-zero’ consumption level.”

Think of this as the high-speed high-occupancy lane for pass-holders on the beltway — bypassing the methodical traffic of regular folk into and out of, well, Washington D.C., for example. Move all the climate-tech startups into that bypass lane, infuse them with trillions of dollars in capital — while the steady-eddy slow-going lanes are the shunned real asset essentials.

Also in my Jan. 2021 notes, are recorded comments by BlackRock and Bank of America CEOs who led the 60-plus global corporations in signing that ESG agreement in Davos. They talked about “following and auditing” the ESG and UN Net Zero SDG “decarbonization” investments.

A week later, President Biden took office and signed a stack of executive orders, followed by congressional spending packages that, together, created a cascade of ‘green new deals’ per the WEF ESG agreement signed in Davos.

Reading the next lines in my notes from the 2021 WEF-Davos, I had to catch my breath. In quotes are the words of Bank of America CEO Moynihan at the time. He said: “It will take $6 trillion per year investment for world consumption to be Net Zero by 2050. Governments and charities cannot do it without the corporate finance sector shepherding loans and investment funds in that direction with carbon performance measurement.”

Chilling to think that two years later, we could now be witnessing a cascade of government, corporate and monetary policies aimed at essentially achieving this investment infusion like a snowball rolling downhill. 

We could be seeing the first fallout, the first sign of the ESG ‘bubble’ bursting, but right on cue, these huge investments over the past two years are now being backstopped by policies to keep the infusion of capital flowing in that special bypass lane on the climate beltway.

The structure is being set for capital to flow to the now “accelerated climate agenda”, the carbon-control agenda, whether by hook or by crook, by corporation or by government — one way or the other the push to accelerate this agenda is already occurring.

Did we just see Act 1? Did we just witness a Trojan Horse carrying tech venture capital out of Silicon Valley Bank, et. al., while the government performs a backstop flow of capital to refill it? 

Will we see more federal spending packages, and additional tools unveiled to meet the combined global government-corporation-charity investments of $6 trillion that the BlackRock and Bank of America CEOs said will be necessary annually on a global scale to “bring consumption to ‘net zero’ by 2050?”

One of the now-infamous quotes to come out of that 2021 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting held virtually in Davos in January 2021 was Klaus Schwab predicting: “You will own nothing, and you be happy.” In 2022, the same crew talked of tracking what we eat, where we go, and how we get there.

What the Davos crowd may not have factored-into the equation is the skepticism of freedom-loving American consumers who are not keen to be globally digitized via artificial intelligence that could control the very essence of life – carbon — by consolidating the flow of capital and information to an accelerated decarbonization of essential food, health and energy.

The Davos crowd and cohort China may not realize freedom-loving Americans will resist this bitter pill. 

They certainly did not foresee American legislators and Governors standing up against out-of-control ESG-investing. 

And, they didn’t foresee the victory for Dutch farmers and their pro-farmer political party that shocked the world in last week’s elections. 

(By the way, Dutch dairy farmer Ad Baltus, whom I interviewed in the 2022 Farmshine series about the farmers’ plight and protests in The Netherlands is now among the six people helping to form Holland’s new national administration and working on the coalition parliament there. Look for a follow up interview with him in the future.)

-30-

Transformative words, policies, what will they mean for farms, families?

Posted on by
Reply

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, April 9, 2021 (expanded)

Resilience and Equity are the two words of the year when it comes to almost every legislative policy discussion and presidential executive order, and filtering down through the briefings given to members of organizations by those who represent them, walking the halls of Congress.

Great words. Great ideals. But a little thin on definition.

That’s par for the course on many of the terms used in the USDA press release announcing the newly-named programs under USDA from stimulus legislation — Pandemic Assistance for Producers (PAP) — as well as details on the held funds for 2020’s CFAP 2.

It is difficult to make sense of much of the language in the press release because of terms thrown about and not defined. “Cooperative agreements” are mentioned as the way to grant nonprofits (yes, DMI would qualify), funds to help “support producer participation” in the assistance being offered. Broadened assistance for ‘socially-disadvantaged’ producers is mentioned, but no definition is given.

What will be attached in this approach within the context of transforming agriculture and food under the auspices of climate action, given the administration’s 30 x 30 plan, widely referred to as a “land grab”?

The 30 x 30 plan is part of a climate action executive order signed by the President within hours of inauguration. It aims to protect 30% of U.S. lands and oceans by 2030.

Specifically, Section 216 of the executive order states:

Sec. 216.  Conserving Our Nation’s Lands and Waters.  (a)  The Secretary of the Interior, in consultation with the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Commerce, the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and the heads of other relevant agencies, shall submit a report to the Task Force within 90 days of the date of this order recommending steps that the United States should take, working with State, local, Tribal, and territorial governments, agricultural and forest landowners, fishermen, and other key stakeholders, to achieve the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.

The Lincoln Sentinel in Nebraska reports that meetings are taking place in April in the western U.S. to explain to landowners what 30 x 30 entails.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, currently the U.S. protects 12% of its land. “To reach the 30 x 30 goal, an additional area twice the size of Texas, more than 440 million acres, will need to be conserved within the next 10 years,” the Lincoln Sentinel reported this week.

A bill in the U.S. House would create new “wilderness” declarations, land that will not be managed or accessed — including a complete ban and removal of all agricultural use from these “conserved” land areas taken to meet the 30 x 30 goal.

A push is happening in Washington to incorporate 30×30 ‘land grab’ principles into the massive infrastructure bill and in the COVID-19 relief stimulus package that was passed.

The slippery slope toward larger and hotter wildfires and against private property and generations-old land use rights has begun. And the Nature Conservancy, already a large land owner / controller, is already looking ahead to the 2023 Farm Bill to include certain conservation provisions in the final product. They also look to the National Defense Authorization Act to include public land designations.

Tom Vilsack — whom President Joe Biden stated upon nomination to the post of Agriculture Secretary — helped develop the Biden rural plan for rural America and now has the job of implementing it, is on record pledging to use every opportunity within existing and new USDA programs to meet transformative sustainability goals.

This is all aligned and consistent with the Great Reset. Farmshine readers may recall several articles over the past year pointing out the ‘land grab’ goals of World Economic Forum’s Great Reset and with the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs) ahead of this summer’s UN Food System Transformation Summit. The UN documents use the same “resilience” and “equity” buzz words without much definition.

Remember the awkward moment at a Biden town hall meeting in Pennsylvania during the presidential campaign when a potato farmer and Farm Bureau member asked about his positions on environmental regulation, such as the Obama-era Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) implementation.

Then candidate Biden’s telling response described “the transition”:

“We should provide for your ability to make a lot more money, as farmers, by dealing with you being able to put land in land banks and you get paid to do that to provide for more open space, and to provide for the ability of you to be able to be in a position so that we are going to pay you for planting certain crops that in fact absorb carbon from the air,” he said, also referencing manure and setting up industries in communities to pelletize it.

“That’s how you can continue to farm without worrying about if you are polluting and be in a position to make money by what you do in the transition,” then candidate Biden said.

Though Biden stated at that time that his climate policy was not the Green New Deal, the overlaps in language were hard to deny. The Green New Deal included such references to “land banks”, described as government purchasing land from “retiring farmers” and making it available “affordably to new farmers and cooperatives that pledge certain sustainability practices.” (The short way of saying the answer he gave above).

The $2.2 trillion infrastructure plan includes land use and protection provisions as well as the STEP Act to help pay for it. That’s a proposal to raise estate and capital gains taxes to begin taxing asset transfers between generations during the estate-planning ‘gifting’ process and lowering the amount exempted on land and assets of estates transferred before and after death. This could have a big impact on how the next generation in the farm business pays the taxes to continue farming.

As one producer put it in a conversation, the plan is tantamount to selling one-fourth or more of a farm in order to pay the ‘transfer tax.’ (But, of course, the government then has the perfect setup to come in and pay the farmer to land-bank it, and then give it to another entity that contractually agrees to grow what the government wants, or to re-wild it.

Think about this, as we reported in October, most of us don’t even know what’s being planned for our futures. Big tech, big finance, big billionaires, big NGO’s, big food, all the biggest global players are planning the Great Reset (complete with land grab and animal product imitation investments) in which globalization is the key, and climate change and ‘sustainability’ — now cleverly linked to pandemic fears — will turn the lock.

The mandatory farmer-funded dairy and beef checkoffs — and their overseer USDA and sustainability partner World Wildlife Fund (WWF) — have been at this global food system transformation table since at least 2008 when DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy was formed and Tom Vilsack was starting his first eight years as Ag Secretary before spending four years as a top-paid dairy checkoff executive and is now again serving as Ag Secretary.

So much of the groundwork for this pattern is consistent with the work of DMI and its sustainability partner WWF toward the Net Zero Initiative, and key WEF Great Reset global companies have joined in with funds for NZI piloting.

Perhaps what brings it home for me is reading what National Milk Producers Federation’s lobbiest Paul Bleiberg includes and omits in his piece for Hoards online Monday, where he talks about how fast things are moving in Washington and how the Biden administration and the 117th Congress are advancing ambitious plans to stimulate the U.S. recovery that, “encompasses key dairy priorities, including agricultural labor reform, climate change, child nutrition, and trade.”

He notes that as Congress and the administration have begun to dive into climate and sustainability, NMPF has outilined a suite of climate policy recommendations. He writes that “primary among (NMPF’s) goals is for Congress to consider modernizing conservation programs and provide new incentives to dairy farmers to build on the significant sustainability work they are already doing.”

For those paying attention to the WEF Great Reset and WWF’s role in food transformation, it is obvious that the anti-fat Dietary Guidelines are a key cog in the food and agriculture transformation wheel.

Bleiberg mentions childhood nutrition as a key dairy priority, but puts all of his emphasis on “urging the Senate Ag Commitee to maintain the flexibility for schools to offer low-fat flavored milk.” No mention is made of expanding flexibility to include the simple choice of whole milk. This, despite citing the DGA Committee’s admission that school-aged children do not meet the recommended intake for dairy.

Giving schoolchildren the opportunity to choose satisfying whole milk would certainly help in this regard, but that choice would interfere with the long-planned food transformation goals of the global elite — the Great Reset.

We all need to be aware of the transformational elements within policy discussion, find out the definitions of terms and nuts and bolts of program changes, be aware of how our youth are being used as change-agents, and be prepared to speak up for farmers, families, and freedom.

-30-

Gates et. al. peddle fake food, climate propaganda; Guarding real food ID will be critical

Posted on by
3
Bill Gates is pictured here in a Jan. 27, 2021 screenshot talking about carbon markets during the World Economic Forum Davos Agenda 21 livestream. A massive land grab is underway at the same time as this push toward ‘synthetic animal protein’ and as the WEF and UN goals of 30 x 30 are implemented. Big tech billionaires, like Gates the single largest owner of  U.S. farmland, are heavily invested in ‘synthetic animal protein’ (otherwise known as ‘lab-garbage’). WEF screenshot by Sherry Bunting

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Feb. 26, 2021

EAST EARL, Pa. — Bill Gates gave hair-raising interviews last week with the Feb. 16th release of his new book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. In it, Gates lays out what he says it will take to eliminate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to ‘save the planet’.

Grabbing headlines is the Microsoft founder and software developer’s proclamation that ‘rich’ nations should move to 100% synthetic animal protein, while ‘poor’ nations, like Africa, can keep consuming animal-sourced proteins — if they reduce animal GHGs and environmental footprint by “merging-in” the meat and milk genetics and other technologies that have made U.S. cattle herds so productive.

Specifically, in a published interview with MIT Technology Review, Gates was asked: “Do you believe plant-based and lab-grown meats could be the full solution to the protein problem globally?”

Gates replied: “No, I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that ‘green premium’ is modest enough that you can sort of change the (behavior of) people or use regulation to totally shift demand.”

That’s a mouthful.

Gates laments the “politics” of animal-sourced foods being a challenge for his fake-food-based climate goals and investments. “There are all these bills that say it’s got to be called, basically, ‘lab garbage’ to be sold,” Gates said. “They don’t want us to use the beef label.”

He goes on in the interview to explain why poor countries will continue to animal-source protein.

“For Africa and other poor countries, we’ll have to use animal genetics to dramatically raise the amount of beef per emissions for them. Weirdly,” says Gates in the MIT interview, “the U.S. livestock, because they’re so productive, the emissions per pound of beef are dramatically less than emissions per pound in Africa. And as part of the (Bill and Melinda Gates) Foundation’s work, we’re taking the benefit of the African livestock, which means they can survive in heat, and crossing-in the monstrous productivity both on the meat side and the milk side of the elite U.S. lines.”

Here’s the thing. A month before his book release, Gates made headlines as “the man who is about to change the way America farms.” In January, the 2020 Land Report 100 featured Gates as “America’s leading farmland owner with 242,000 acres of productive farmland in more than a dozen states.”

According to the Land Report map, Gates’ swaths of farmland, amassed through front-company Cascade Investments, are located mainly near water and ports across 19 states.

Gates is also a founding member of an investor group (Leading Harvest), setting a sustainability standard for over 2 million farming acres in 22 states and another 2 million in 7 countries, according to the Land Report.

Furthermore, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (separate from Cascade Investments and Breakthrough Ventures) has a farmland initiative called Gates Ag One, based in St. Louis. According to the St. Louis Business Journal, its focus is research to help farms in low- and middle-income countries adapt to climate change by becoming “more productive, resilient and sustainable.”

The Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) investment fund recently changed its website, but the strategies for agriculture and food production are still clear when clicking through tabs. Here’s just the tip of the iceberg. BEV website screenshot by Sherry Bunting

Gates also chairs the investment fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), mentioned in various ‘fake-meat’ and ‘fake-dairy’ articles published in Farmshine over the past three years.

The BEV fund is mentioned throughout Gates’ new book as a ‘philanthropic’ fund with a climate strategy. Digging into the website, one sees the fund’s climate investments described as “patient, risk-tolerant capital” that will recoup return on investment years down the road once the global supply chains, government policies, and other strategies move consumers toward the various sector outcomes the BEV billionaires are investing in.

The BEV investor list includes significant interests based in China; Democratic party candidates and/or donors like George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg; big tech billionaires like Gates, along with Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.

The two-pronged approach to animal protein in Gates’ book reflects the two-pronged investments of Gates, BEV, Leading Harvest and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On the personal and fund investment side, Gates and friends have put billions of dollars into ‘replacement ag systems’ featuring fake-animal-protein for ‘rich’ countries, while on the foundation side, the focus is on research for efficient animal ag systems in poor countries.

In fact, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which has endeared itself to Big Ag by supporting biotech research for developing countries — was among 11 top-level sponsors in the $100,000-plus donation category for the American Farm Bureau Federation’s virtual convention in January.

During the 2021 convention, Farm Bureau president Skippy Duvall and Land O’Lakes CEO Beth Ford — together — provided a joint keynote discussion under the ‘stronger together’ 2021. Ford spoke of Land O’Lakes’ 2020 partnership with Microsoft to build an “artificial intelligence” ag-tech platform to automatically gather data from farms and trade carbon credits. The discussion ended with a focus on climate-smart technology and a more “inclusive” advocacy platform less cluttered by production identity labels.

For his part, Duvall stated that, “There’s room in the marketplace for everyone, every type of production — organic, conventional, plant-based meat, whatever it might be — there’s enough room in the market for all of us,” he said. “We have to stop throwing ourselves under the bus and work together as one united family.”

This sentiment dovetails with the global food transformation agenda of companies and investors wanting to mix-match-and-blend in a way that melts-away protein identities in favor of planetary diet standards, labels and symbols. Walmart’s director of sustainability talked about this during a World Economic Forum virtual event reported in Farmshine in January, and it is showing up in Walmarts today with big name frozen entrées in lookalike packaging, featuring BE’F, CHICK’N and DAI’Y. How clever.

On the fake-animal-protein investments, Gates and friends are working with global mainline agriculture companies like Cargill, Tyson, ConAgra and ADM, as well as global food supply chains like PepsiCo, Nestle, Unilever, and Coca Cola, along with ‘replacement’ plant-based and cell-cultured fake-meat and fake-dairy manufacturers like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Memphis Meats, BioPrint, and Perfect Day.

All of this ‘replacement’ or ‘alternative’ ag push is setting the stage for a massive land grab to meet the 30 by 30 executive order of President Biden that dovetails with United Nations goals to have 30% of U.S. and global lands in conservation protection by 2030. That would double the current 15%.

With billions in ‘patient capital’ invested, Gates and friends want to see U.S. consumers ‘herded’ toward the ‘herdless’ imposter-foods they’ve invested in.

The USDA-HHS Dietary Guidelines have the facilitating low-fat diets positioned and ready. The FDA Nutrition Innovation Strategy is a multi-year effort underway to modernize standards of identity and develop a universal ‘healthy’ symbol for ‘approved’ foods.

Meanwhile, Gates and friends are pushing for polices and pricing that shift diets more quickly from the ‘climate’ side. For example, wholesale boneless wing and tender prices, as well as beef, are rising rapidly (but not to producers). This effectively narrows the gap between real and fake to help with the transition. Even the dairy industry is moving to ‘dual purpose’ processing.

Digesting Gates’ book interviews, hearing him talk about carbon markets during a World Economic Forum Davos Agenda 21 livestream, and seeing the ‘who’s who’ board of the BEV investment fund – it is clear Gates and friends are politically well-positioned to push policies that can shift diets based on their investments.

They are also getting help from within the animal-sourced food industries to corral Gen Z as ‘agents of change’ that will embrace these China-sourced pea-protein concentrates and lab-created franken-foods as they scale up across household name brands. In its recent joint-venture announcement with Beyond Meat, PepsiCo admitted their alternative snack and beverage rollouts must be “effortless” so consumers don’t have to think about making the “right choices for the planet.”

Food transformation is unfolding rapidly as Big Ag, Big Food, Big Tech, Big Money players align with governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and globalized supply chains.

To affirm the identity of real, local, U.S.-produced animal-sourced foods from farms will require a direct appeal to consumers and accountability for industry leaders and policymakers.

Overblown climate propaganda about dairy and livestock fuel policies that gradually undermine food production identity. Gates is not a food fortune-teller, but rather he is fixing to be a food fortune-maker believing he and his billionaire big tech cronies can ‘software program’ food and behavior to enrich their own outcomes.

We need to follow the money and wake up the public to see the garbage the elites are selling for what it really is. Some of us are ready to pick this food identity hill to die on.

-30-


Net Zero Initiative will ‘shape future of dairy,’ say leaders

Posted on by
5

Editor’s Note: Part one provided some details on the “official” launch of the Net Zero Initiative, which according to DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, “signals bold climate action” as “an industry-wide effort that will help U.S. dairy farms of all sizes and geographies implement new technologies and adopt economically viable practices.”

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, October 27, 2021

CHICAGO, Ill. — The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy — formed in 2008-09 by the national dairy checkoff via Dairy Management Inc (DMI) — unveiled the Net Zero Initiative earlier this month along with Nestlé’s announcement pledging up to $10 million over five years as the first ‘legacy partner’ to fund research, pilot farms and provide expertise to scale technologies and practices to achieve carbon neutrality, optimized water usage and improved water quality by 2050.

Innovation Center chairman Mike Haddad noted in a DMI media call Oct. 14 that the Environmental Sustainability Committee “has been in place a very long time – many, many years.

‘Mature effort’

“Mike McCloskey has always chaired this committee. This is quite a mature effort for us,” Haddad explained, adding that the committee decided a couple years ago that dairy can become carbon neutral, and many dairies can sequester carbon.

“We felt like there was enough evidence already with existing technology and practices, that by scaling them, we can achieve this over time, and we have been working for years to build out this framework,” he said.

As chairman of Schreiber Foods, Haddad said suppliers, companies like Schreiber, “already see this requirement from our customers who want to have our sustainability efforts feed into their sustainability efforts. They want to know that we are taking care of the earth in making our dairy products, and we have to prove it to them with our measurements along the way.”

Environmental ‘mapping’

In 2007-08, just as the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy was being formed, the mapping of dairy’s environmental footprint began.

“We were the very first ag sector to establish life cycle measurement of greenhouse gas emissions, showing U.S. Dairy at 2%,” said Krysta Harden, DMI executive vice president of global environmental strategy and former USDA undersecretary of Tom Vilsack when he was ag secretary.

“Through modernization and innovation, the environmental impact of producing milk uses 30% less water, 21% less land and manure, and has a 19% smaller carbon footprint today than in 2007,” she said. “It’s amazing where we have come since 2007.”

Harden explained that Net Zero Initiative (NZI) was started as “a dairy organization that represents farmers, cooperatives, processors, and includes DMI and the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, NMPF, IDFA, U.S. Dairy Export Center and Newtrient.

“All of these groups came together to establish NZI,” she said. “This really is the pathway for how to get there, how to break down barriers and make it more accessible and affordable for dairy farms of all sizes and all places.”

‘Piloting’ underway

Pilot farms are already being identified throughout the country, and 2021 is set as the year to move them forward.

Next, the constant focus will be on “scaling up to accelerate progress over time to our 2050 goals,” Haddad said.

“Largely these technologies already exist but need operational improvement,” Harden added. “We can see how we can get there, but the barrier is the significant investment needed by farmers to get there. We want to knock this out by scaling, to lower the investment by farmers and generate new revenue streams for farmers. This will be critical to a self-sustaining future.”

Bottom line, said Harden: “Dairy is committed to being an environmental solution.” She said the key, at the heart of it, is the dairy farmers.

According to the Innovation Center’s official statement, the 27 dairy companies that make up its board, represent 70% of the nation’s milk production and have voluntarily adopted the U.S. Dairy Stewardship Commitment and contribute to the industry’s ability to track, aggregate and report on progress.

“We know dairy farmers are leaders, and they care about what they are producing and how they are producing it,” said Harden. “They are passionate first-adopters, embracing how the world is changing.”

Sustainable profit?

DMI vice president and California dairy producer Steve Maddox shared his thoughts from the producer perspective.

“When we first started talking about sustainability efforts by the Innovation Center, most dairy farmers viewed this with a jaded eye because it often means requiring more of them, and not of others,” said Maddox. “But this effort focuses on improving profitability and efficiency that is also environmentally sound.”

He said farmers know the importance of being as efficient as possible. Early-on, Maddox said the Innovation Center started down the road of environmental sustainability to fight claims by anti-animal-ag groups by doing the scientific measurements in 2008, to show how dairy has reduced its footprint since 1944.

“That is a significant date near the end of World War II when some of America’s greatest generation went to college, and extension — through our land grant universities — taught us to maximize production and take better care of the land,” said Maddox. “That led us to continue improving.”

As that generation retired, and with government budget cuts to research and extension, a dropoff in improvement was seen, according to Maddox. He said this signals the need for the industry to pick things up to “shape the continuous improvement of the industry at the farm level.”

During media questions, Harden stated that the $10 million from Nestlé is specifically geared toward on-farm improvement — not changes in processing or new dairy products.

However, the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy is also looking at the processing and transportation aspects of achieving the NZI goals.

In fact, the climate impact of transportation and refrigeration of milk and dairy products is already a big part of the entire shaping process through innovations such as ultrafiltration, microfiltration, and aseptic packaging for shelf stable beverages and products. These are other pieces that come from precompetitive Innovation Center collaborations.

As for the farm-level impacts of NZI, Maddox stressed how the 2007-08 life cycle analysis on milk and cheese showed that the industry reduced its use of feed, land and water through collaboration on animal care, improved genetics and the FARM program.

Shaping dairy

In other words, through FARM and NZI, companies will shape dairy’s “continuous improvement” instead of relying on extension education for those gains — mainly because, they say, the industry is at a point where these future gains will cost money. Since farms will need to invest in those gains, NZI is banking on industry and government to step up and help pay for it.

Something that often gets lost in discussions about climate change and sustainability, said Maddox is: “Cows, being ruminants, are miracles onto themselves. They convert byproduct to nature’s most perfect food.”

At his California dairy, over 50% of the cow feed on a dry matter basis is byproduct that would have gone into landfills.

“This, too, is a major part of it. We can feed all sorts of things, bakery waste, Doritos, sunflower meal… There are 400 different commercial crops grown in California, and all of them can be fed to cattle,” said Maddox.

He painted a picture of farmers learning from each other within the NZI framework.

Maddox observed that cow care and breeding to have more efficient cows is a big part of reducing dairy’s environmental impact to meet the ambitious new industrywide goals. 

“All of these sustainability practices will have a bottom-line impact,” he said.

-30-

Dairy checkoff GENYOUth ‘hero’ PepsiCo partners with Beyond Meat to market plant-based alternative protein snacks, drinks

Posted on by
2

Watch those FUTP60 breakfast carts! Packaged food, beverage giant and faux-meat maker join forces to market plant-based alternative protein snacks, drinks.

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, January 29, 2021

The business news stream was buzzing Tuesday (Jan. 26) as Beyond Meat stock value soared to 18-month highs after PepsiCo announced a joint venture with the fake meat maker to develop and sell plant-based protein snacks and beverages.

“Plant-based proteins are playing an increasingly vital role in modern diets — they’re nutrient-rich and far more sustainable than meat,” states the PepsiCo press release about the joint venture with Beyond Meat, being launched as “The PLANeT Partnership” and billed as being “better for the planet.”

The announcement was complete with ‘clever’ marketing hashtag — #ThePLANeTPartnership — but not much science, of course, nor substance.

“Climate action is core to our business as a global food and beverage leader,” said Chairman and CEO Ramon Laguarta said just one week earlier announcing Pepsico’s ‘bold’ new climate action plan.

Beyond Meat’s global chief commercial officer Ram Krishnan said the PepsiCo partnership “represents a new frontier in our efforts to build a more sustainable food system.”

During the World Economic Forum Davos Agenda 2021 livestream on Transformation of Food Systems and Land Use on the very next day (Wed., Jan. 27), PepsiCo’s Laguarta joined United Nations FAO director, deputy secretary general, special envoy for the food transition summit later this year, CEO of Rabobank and president of Costa Rica. The relationships between these types of partnerships are becoming clear.

Let’s review:

For 11 years, dairy farmers through the mandatory promotion checkoff founded and have predominantly funded GENYOUth, a ‘youth wellness’ non-profit with the dairy checkoff’s Fuel Up and NFL’s Play 60 combined as Fuel Up to Play 60. For nine of those 11 years, GENYOUth has partnered with PepsiCo, bringing this ‘fox’ into the FUTP60 schoolhouse — even awarding PepsiCo North America CEO Albert Carey the ‘hero’ Vanguard Award at the November 2018 GENYOUth Gala event in New York City. 

This, despite the fact that these two GENYOUth partners — the National Football League and its longtime beverage partner PepsiCo — contribute $1 million (or usually less) annually while dairy farmer-funded checkoff pays $4 million or more annually on the non-profit filing tax forms as Youth Improved Incorporated. DMI tax forms also show dairy checkoff payments to the NFL of $5 to $7 million annually as an independent contractor for ‘promotion services’. Amounts potentially paid in proprietary partnerships with PepsiCo are undisclosed.

GENYOUth was created while Tom Vilsack was Secretary of Agriculture during the Obama administration in 2008, with an MOU signed by USDA, NFL and National Dairy Council in 2009. (Mr. Vilsack is President Biden’s pick for Ag Secretary — again. In between his eight years as Ag Secretary under President Obama and the upcoming round-two as Ag Secretary, Vilsack was the top-paid executive hired by the dairy checkoff to head the U.S. Dairy Export Council and provide leadership for the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy)

When former President Bill Clinton was invited to speak about Vilsack at the 2017 GENYOUth Gala — the year that Vilsack was presented with the Vanguard Award — Clinton, a vegan, talked about every entity in the “diverse partnership” that he was celebrating except for America’s dairy farmers.

In the 2017 Gala speech about award winner Vilsack, Clinton talked about how children receive 40 to 60% of their calories from drinks in school. He talked about turning the obesity epidemic around by everyone taking responsibility in that area of beverages. He talked about how Vilsack’s leadership with Michelle Obama, made beverages and snacks abide by the fat-free rules, including school vending machines. Clinton stated that Vilsack was “instrumental under the radar… working for a ‘healthier’ generation of kids before coming to USDA and before the launch of GENYOUth.”

Former President Clinton thanked former Secretary Vilsack at the 2017 GENYOUth Gala for being “the guy” to tackle the beverage issue in school lunches. The year GENYOUth was formed is the year Vilsack’s USDA outright banned whole milk from school property from midnight before the start of the school day until 30 minutes after the end of the school day. The “Smart Snacks” rules went into effect under Vilsack, requiring a la carte and vending machine beverages to meet the Dietary Guidelines fat criteria and be under 60 calories per serving. (Mr. Vilsack and others in charge are still waiting for that elusive ‘preponderance of evidence’)

What happened next? A proliferation of PepsiCo snack and beverage products made their way into schools through PepsiCo’s own school foodservice company – complete with “USDA-Smart-Snacks-compliant” lists of snacks and drinks, including Mountain Dew Kickstart, Gatorade Zero, a host of snack bars, Doritos, and more.

The very next year at the November 2018 GENYOUth Gala, PepsiCo was the Vanguard Award ‘hero’. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell sang PepsiCo’s praises, of course, the NFL and PepsiCo have been partners for decades.

“I say to our farmers: They had a dream, and we have been blessed to be part of that dream. You gave us life. You believed in us. And can you believe we are standing here today on the cusp of the 10-year anniversary of FUTP60?” said GENYOUth CEO Alexis Glick just before extending “an extra special thank you to PepsiCo.”

Glick said of PepsiCo’s Carey: “The generosity of your vision, your resources, your team, time and talent have changed our organization.”

That’s a mouthful. 

PepsiCo’s Carey showed his appreciation by plugging the new Quaker “oat milk” they were launching that month. It fell flat in the market, but PepsiCo is at it again with this new joint venture with Beyond Meat to make fake meat snacks and fake milk beverages that are sure to find their way onto the USDA-controlled Smart Snacks menus and FUTP60 breakfast carts in schools — even as the nutritious, delicious whole milk children love is prohibited.

In accepting the GENYOUth Vanguard award in November 2018, PepsiCo’s Carey talked about their “long and wonderful partnership with the NFL” and the way their ads and retail programs boosted both of their brands. He talked about how Play 60 was the NFL program they “most admired and wanted to be part of.” He was careful to leave out the “Fuel Up” part when mentioning the program because that is supposed to belong to the dairy checkoff.

He went on to talk about how PepsiCo “wanted to be part of the Play 60 program because of the importance of kids being active. But we also believe at PepsiCo that we need to provide healthy products for our consumers,” said Carey. “Some of you may be familiar with our mission ‘performance with purpose.’”

He described the mission as “getting great business performance while also serving others… on the part of the environment… or many other ways, but this one particular way is about providing healthier foods for our consumers.”

GENYOUth Gala, New York City, November 27, 2018: Commissioner of the National Football League, Roger Goodell, presents the Vanguard Award to Al Carey, CEO, PepsiCo North America, accepting on behalf of PepsiCo. (GENYOUth Now photo)

Carey took his time at the GENYOUth Gala podium, ‘hero’ Vanguard Award in hand, to tout PepsiCo’s “healthy beverages, including zero sugar soda, Life Water, Bubbly Sparkling Water, Gatorade Zero, Quaker oat milk.” (Yes, the now off-market Quaker oat beverage never put ‘milk’ on the label, but Carey called it ‘oat milk’ in his speech during the GENYOUth Gala as dairy-farmer-checkoff-paid employees of GENYOUth, DMI, NDC, etc. smiled and clapped with partnership euphoria).

Carey went on to tell the November 2018 GENYOUth VIP Gala audience that, “Oat milk, Bare Snacks and probiotic drinks are part of PepsiCo converting its portfolio to healthier foods for the future.”

A December 2018 Farmshine article about the Gala event quoted from the PepsiCo website, where the company touted its purpose-driven mission “to further the World Health Organization goals of alternative products to reduce saturated fat consumption and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, thereby improving global environmental and nutritional sustainability.”

What did PepsiCo do to earn the Vanguard Award from GENYOUth in 2018? PepsiCo committed $1 million that year to fund translation of the Play 60 materials in Spanish and to purchase some additional mobile breakfast carts. While it’s true those school breakfast carts carry fat-free and low-fat 1% milk, non-fat yogurt and non-fat or low-fat cheese, they are also well-stocked with PepsiCo snack bars and beverages.

After this week’s headline-making announcement of the PepsiCo – Beyond Meat joint venture to make alternative plant-based protein snacks and beverages, we see what might be appearing on those breakfast carts and USDA-compliant lunches in the not-so-distant future.

Again, as oft-repeated in this nutrition and promotion saga, the USDA / HHS Dietary Guidelines are the framework that allows less healthful foods to appear more healthful simply because they are devoid of saturated fat and contain artificial sweeteners. 

The government-mandated dairy checkoff deduction from milk checks pays for government speech, which means promoting fat-free and low-fat dairy and funneling ‘change-agent’ ‘sustainability’ curriculum into FUTP60 offerings. The NFL gets logo-emblazoned flag football kits into schools to promote their brand through exercise. Corporate partners like PepsiCo develop entire meal, snack and beverage lists with their products touted as “USDA Smart Snack compliant”.

Meanwhile, dairy farmers foot the main bill for the vehicle and watch as fluid milk consumption declines took a steeper nosedive since 2008, and as a whole generation has been turned away from milk until the recent resurgence of grassroots whole milk promotion. Farmers foot the bill for the vehicle and watch as obesity and diabetes rates rise among children and teens, especially low-income communities most reliant on government feeding programs. They foot the bill and watch as schoolchildren discard large volumes of packaged skim milk only to buy those other beverages, many of them made by PepsiCo.

All because dairy promotion and school offerings are strapped to Dietary Guidelines developed by the federal government that even in this recent 2020-25 round ignore more than a decade of scientific research on dietary fats as well as ignoring the investigative reports that have uncovered the flaws in the original science at the very core of 40-years of failed dietary policy.

You can’t make this stuff up. 

However, it’s not all that surprising when we see what is going on in this week’s ‘virtual’ World Economic Forum ‘Great Rest’ Davos Agenda. More than 60 global food, technology, energy, pharmaceutical, and financial companies made headlines also on Tuesday. They signed an agreement to adopt Environmental Social and Corporate Governance (ESGs), including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) centering on Net Zero by 2050, including goals to “reserve” and control 50% of the earth’s land surface by 2050.

It is increasingly obvious that the Dietary Guidelines adopted by the U.S. and other countries around the world have little to do with human health but are a framework for using ‘nutrition’ to implement a ‘sustainability’ agenda seeking to dilute and replace animal agriculture while increasing global corporate control of food, and more. 

There’s a connection to China in these convergences of factors, which is also coming to light. Figuring prominently in the WEF Great Reset Davos Agenda this week is China, as evidenced by Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China being chosen to give the opening Davos address Monday (see related story).

According to the May 20, 2020 edition of Newsweek, Beyond Meat signed a significant deal with Shuangta Foods in China’s Shandong province to provide 85% of the concentrated pea protein for its fake meat products.

Over the past decade, China has built an empire of soy- and pea- protein manufacturing. According to the Good Food Institute — the trade organization representing plant-based and cell cultured meat and milk replacements — China is a “dominant supplier” of soy and pea protein to the world and keeps expanding pea protein concentrate and isolate processing capacity, having already been at 79% of global soy protein isolate production by 2016.

This is a familiar path in the way China dominated and took over the global apple juice market two decades ago, making apple concentrate powder that is reconstituted here to bottle most commercial brands of apple juice sold in the U.S. (a major shelf-stable beverage option already offered at schools and other foodservice settings).

PepsiCo has a 40-year history of building up its presence in China, spending billions in the past decade to build up its beverage processing infrastructure. In February 2020, PepsiCo purchased Be & Cheery, maker of nut, fruit and meat snacks in China. At the same time, PepsiCo announced plans to grow online snacks sales.

Thinking back to the 2007 melamine catastrophe in China involving the addition of melamine to boost protein levels ‘on paper’ for China-produced milk powder that was destined for infant formula production, as well as the periodic recalls of pet foods for melamine levels as many of the concentrated proteins in pet foods are also made in China… 

One has to wonder about the future of food. 


-30-

Announcing Vilsack as Ag Sec pick, Biden admits: ‘He helped develop my rural plan’

Posted on by
5
Tom Vilsack is pictured here testifying before the Senate Ag Committee in spring 2019 announcing ‘It’s time to get to net-zero.’ He was testifying then as a dairy checkoff executive for DMI serving as president and CEO of USDEC and defacto leader of DMI’s Innovation Center. This week he was officially announced by President-Elect Joe Biden to come back for another term as U.S. Agriculture Secretary, where ‘It’s time to get to net-zero’ is the Biden rural plan Vilsack helped develop while pulling a $1 million salary from mandatory dairy farmer checkoff. Photo by Sherry Bunting

By Sherry Bunting, republished from Farmshine, Friday, December 18, 2020

BROWNSTOWN, Pa. — President-elect Joe Biden this week officially nominated former Iowa Governor and former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a lawyer by trade, to return as Ag Secretary in his administration. This nomination will likely be a fast walk through Senate confirmation, given the supportive words this week from American Farm Bureau and prominent Ag Senators from both sides of the aisle. 

But some responses from a few organizations and grassroots efforts, as well as some Senators, are less than supportive or outright aiming to stop the confirmation. Some, because they see the choice as one that does not make diversity, equality, and feeding programs a priority. Some, because he talked about antitrust issues but did nothing when Secretary under Obama. Others, because they remember Vilsack’s role in removing whole milk (and 2% milk and 1% flavored milk) from school menus and prohibiting it from a la carte offerings. 

Still others, are being more methodical in thinking through how to deal with a third round of Secretary Vilsack.

Throughout the Biden-Harris campaign for the presidency, Biden made it clear that his slogan — Build Back Better — had as much to do with climate change and new farm and energy policy as anything else. In several stump speeches, Biden drew from the rural policy he admitted this week was in part developed by Vilsack, himself, to talk about paying farmers to put land in ‘land banks’, now being referred to as ‘conservation’ and to plant crops ‘we want you to grow,’ now being called ‘cover crops.’

The terms ‘conservation’ and ‘cover crops’ are familiar terms that put farmers at ease. They plant cover crops already to stabilize ground between main crops and to produce grazing or harvested forage for dairy cows and livestock. Farmers know what payments to idle land can mean for landlords retired from farming. But what does it mean for dairy farmers renting that land? I guess we will soon find out.

Here’s the deal. While introducing Vilsack as his Ag Secretary pick, Biden stated publicly that, “(Vilsack) helped develop my rural plan for rural America in the campaign, and he now has the dubious distinction of having to carry it out,” said Biden with a laugh. “It’s a good plan that includes making American agriculture the first in the world to achieve net zero emissions and create new sources of income for farmers in the process.”

Wait a minute, Tom Vilsack helped develop president-elect Biden’s rural plan for rural America while he was being paid a million dollar salary through mandatory dairy farmer checkoff? 

When farmers have asked him to say even one positive word about bringing whole milk back to schools during his private citizen tenure with producer-funded dairy checkoff, the response from DMI was: ‘Sorry, we can’t lobby on government policy.”

But did we just hear Biden properly? We did. He said the top-paid DMI executive Tom Vilsack “helped develop” government farm policy for a partisan presidential campaign candidate who is now president-elect Biden. This policy at the Biden campaign website states ‘the Green New Deal is the framework’. It is policy that aligns directly with what the global, multinational food corporations want. These companies  pay membership into the U.S. Dairy Export Council (USDEC) of which Vilsack was president and CEO since January 2017.

In fact, as Biden and Vilsack shared the podium Tuesday, when the Ag Secretary pick was announced officially, they described a USDA and rural plan that fits within the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset (which also uses the Build Back Better tagline).

At the core of the Great Reset are the same huge global food manufacturers and purveyors who are part of USDEC (adding their membership fees to the mandatory producer checkoff funds to have influence). The USDEC, which Vilsack oversaw the past four years is joined at the hip with DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, which was founded by checkoff in 2008 when then Sec Vilsack struck Memorandums of Understanding between USDA and DMI to chart a course for sustainability and to start the low-fat dietary indoctrination of children via GENYOUth.

This train of globalism has been rolling. It slowed down a bit the past four years when the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Climate Treaty and nixed the Trans Pacific Trade Partnership, called out China, and revamped NAFTA.

But the consolidating globalist food transformation train does keep rolling no matter which political party is in power.

“The one bipartisan thing getting done in Washington is this: their ability to work on and move forward the globalization of food and agriculture,” said Mike Eby, a Gordonville, Pa. farmer and executive director of Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM).

 He notes the concern of OCM and others that Vilsack has a track record of doing nothing on the antitrust and anti-competitive market issues in agriculture, that he could ignore checkoff referendum requests that will be brought to USDA with the appropriate number of signatures in the next year, just as he ignored the law while Secretary and did not forward the annual reports about the dairy checkoff to Congress for four years. Another concern is that Vilsack’s return to USDA brings an entrenched globalization end-game with no path forward for country of origin labeling.

“Under Republicans, we saw a push toward consolidation, but under this Democratic rural policy developed by Vilsack and now to be fulfilled by Vilsack, we see the choke point at the center of food production through qualifications of standardization determining who can participate and how,” says Eby, who also serves as chairman of the National Dairy Producers Organization (NDPO) and on the Grassroots PA Dairy Advisory Committee that is active in the Drink Whole Milk 97% Fat Free campaign.

“With a net zero or environmental choke point in place, and specific benchmarks, consumers may only have the ability to purchase from the middleman that says the milk or beef meets the ‘net zero’ standard,” Eby continues. “It is a linear goal, either way, that makes it difficult for competitive markets and independent producers to survive.”

Vilsack’s own words in accepting the President-elect’s nomination to return him to his former post as Ag Secretary paint a bit of a picture: “One of our first orders of business is to do all that is possible at Department to aid in the pandemic response, reviving rural communities and economies, addressing dire food shortages and getting workers and producers the relief they need to hang on and come back stronger,” he said.

But read what he said next: “When we emerge from this (pandemic) crisis, we will have an incredible opportunity before us — to position U.S. agriculture to lead our nation and the world in combating climate change. Reaping new good-paying jobs and farm income will come from that leadership.”

He touted Abraham Lincoln’s words when he first established the USDA. Lincoln called it “The People’s Department.”

But in essence, Tom Vilsack is part of an elite class that believes they know best for the people. Through pandemic and climate fear, they are counting on the masses to be scared into submission about food and jobs so systems for the food transformation can be redesigned the way the global organizations, billionaire tech sector investors and multinational companies are planning.

The agenda was crystallized and set in motion in the 2007 to 2009 time period. First, importers were given influence in dairy and beef checkoff messages by including them in the checkoff deduction. Next, the MOU’s between USDA and checkoff etched in stone a path of transformation that throws competitive markets and country of origin labeling to the side in favor of farmers conforming to certain standards. It all begins with things farmers already do and as they get comfortable, the vice their own money places them in starts to squeeze.

The agenda was perpetuated when Dietary Guidelines – the tip of the food transformation iceberg – were adopted in 2015 without full consideration of the science on fats. Again for 2020, the low fat and fat free vegetarian style eating patterns continue, even though current Secretary Sonny Perdue has not yet rubber-stamped them. Vilsack will, of course.

With the low-fat / fat-free emphasis of the DGAs, the new Bioengineered labeling rules, and the FDA Nutrition Innovation Strategy, the dilution of animal proteins with plant- and lab-based lookalikes has an easy road.

Without country of origin labeling, globalized food supply chains are created and sustained to give a few large multinational corporations control. 

With dairy and beef checkoff programs continually funded by farmers with importers paying something to be at the table to douse domestic marketing, these global companies are able to sit at a secret, or proprietary table where pre-competitive ‘innovations’ are hatched and the ‘choke points’ of farming practices and production standards in “producer programs” like FARM are decided.

Vilsack’s replacement to head the USDEC (as well as defacto head of the various global partnerships that make up the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy) is Krysta Harden. DMI announced this week that Harden will be promoted to Vilsack’s vacated post from her current role as DMI’s executive vice president of global environmental strategies.

Harden and Vilsack worked together on the Net Zero Initiative for two of the past four years, and they worked together before that at USDA. When Vilsack was previously Ag Secretary under President Obama, Harden was installed as Deputy Undersecretary for 2013 through 2016.

One thing Biden said Tuesday that really sinks in: “I asked (Tom Vilsack) to serve again in this role because he knows the USDA inside and out. He knows the government inside and out. We need that experience now.”

He might have easily added that Vilsack knows China inside and out as well. While USDA Secretary, Vilsack participated in the joint commission on commerce and trade between the U.S. and China, meeting in 2015 in Chicago. He flowed that right into USDEC with the dairy industry global supply chain companies and will flow them right back to the USDA as he goes back to being Secretary again.

Yes, dairy and agriculture relationships with China are important, but so too is the concept that free trade needs to also be fair trade. Global supply chains don’t care whether U.S. family farms make it. They have an agenda and are using climate-change ‘philanthropy’ to achieve it.

Biden and Vilsack talked about new possibilities, new revenue, new jobs, via a ‘new’ charter for USDA as a climate agency.

With a four-year interruption in the so-called climate agenda seeking farm, food, and energy transformation that was begun 12 years ago, we can expect things to move fast – very fast – on the globalization and transformation of food once Vilsack resumes his former USDA post, especially if the Democratic party gains control of the Senate in addition to already having control of the House and the incoming office of the President of the United States.

-30-