Tag Archives: globalization

Food system transformation: DMI at globalization table where big players plan Great Re-set ‘land grab’ targets

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By Sherry Bunting (Updated as published in Farmshine, Oct. 1, 2020)

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 Re-set (complete with land grab and animal product imitation game) 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 put together the Sustainability Alliance for U.S. Dairy.

DMI says there is a difference between WWF-US and WWF-EU, but it’s really one big thing connected to these same global corporations that are driving the emerging government policies of the Great Re-set — like the Green Deal in Europe and the Green New Deal in the U.S.

DMI leaders say WWF is ‘helping’ farmers by providing a seat at the table to be sure sustainability will be profitable.

It will be profitable, for sure, but for whom?

The answer to that question came into focus after listening to more than a half dozen livestreamed sessions of the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Summit Sept. 21-24 as part of the Great Re-set.

More light was shed on the ‘we will pay you’ carrot-before-club concept of ‘land banks’ in the U.S., when listening to former Vice President Joe Biden answer a farmer’s question about environmental regulations during CNN’s Town Hall in Moosic, Pennsylvania Sept. 18.

More illuminating yet is the flurry of global food company press announcements in recent days as they position themselves ahead of the Sept. 30 United Nations Biodiversity Summit in New York City. That’s where global leaders and the global business community will adopt targets to “restore” (re-wild) 30% of the earth’s land as Protected Areas by 2030 and 50% by 2050.

That’s half the world’s land by mid-Century, and leading this charge is WWF, along with companies like Walmart, Amazon, Nestle, Danone, Unilever and others involved in checkoff-funded pre-competitive collaboration through DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

According to Survival International, an organization defending indigenous people and smallholder farms, these 2030 and 2050 sustainability targets of the Great Re-set “will be the biggest land grab in world history and will reduce hundreds of millions of people to landless poverty.”

The new narrative is that this massive target of land transfer is needed not just to “restore a trillion trees” as carbon sinks to cool the earth, but to end the Covid-19 pandemic and prevent future pandemics by creating more separation between humans and animals to avoid zoonotic disease transfer. These land targets call for a “critical overhaul of the food production system,” according to the summit agenda.

Even as California wildfires burn out of control — collectively emitting more GHG than tens of millions of cars annually and largely influenced by environmental policies that have led to neglect of the forests in terms of land management — re-wilding of more land is big on the Great Re-set agenda.

Meanwhile, as consumers prioritize health and economics over the ‘planetary diets’ hatched by the Silicon Valley billionaires funding fake meat and fake dairy, the ‘biodiversity’ angle on these land targets is the new hook linking pandemic fears to climate action and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through diet.

Some of the themes are familiar in dairy industry discussions about DMI’s Sustainability Framework and Net Zero Initiative — both rooted in the Great Re-set they have been participating in planning for over a decade through alliances with WWF and its World Resources Institute doing the benchmarking for the global corporations driving it.

(Remember Starbucks’ announcement earlier this year? They are a DMI partner, and so is WWF, but after their WRI benchmarking, they announced ‘moving consumers away from dairy and toward plant-based options’ in their coffee beverages as the biggest of four areas of action! They even borrowed the ‘flat white’ name reserved for their lattes made with whole milk instead of default reduced fat milk to launch a new signature almond-‘milk’ latte. Talk about confusing the customer into making a choice desired by the diet-and-sustainability-elite-ruling-class.)

During a recent DMI ‘open mic’ call, CEO Tom Gallagher stated that these are the rules today and globalization is the world we live in. On the same call, president Barb O’Brien revealed dairy checkoff’s 13-year alliance with Walmart, a two-year partnership with Amazon, and on the Net Zero Initiative, she frequently mentioned Nestle, Unilever, Danone and Starbucks.

What do they all have in common?

They are the key global brands ramping up into plant-based and cell-based dairy and meat alternatives, and they are among the top global corporations that have set goals to ‘move consumers to planetary diets’ and to change the way food is produced.

During the WEF livestream Tuesday Sept. 21 on 2030 land targets, Walmart’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kathleen McLaughlin described it this way:

“What we are talking about is massive transformation of societal systems — financial services, retail consumer goods, the things we bring into our home to eat or to wear or to decorate our homes with. Changing the way all of that gets produced is a massive systemic undertaking that will take business action. It will take philanthropy. It will take government action,” she said.

McLaughlin cited Danone, Nestle and Unilever as the suppliers “in the lead” on this.

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“This is total ecosystem transformation,” said McLaughlin. “Our suppliers have stakeholders wanting this, and if there isn’t alignment among their stakeholders (for instance dairy), they are glad to be able to say: ‘Hey, Walmart wants us to do this so we have to do it.’ We help them figure out what to do and how to go faster on some of these things.”

She referenced Walmart’s Sept. 18 announcement that it will be net-zero by 2040 and will become a “regenerative” company “restoring” land to meet 2030 and 2050 targets.

“We will work at the landscape level with suppliers and philanthropy to restore 50 million acres of land — to change the way it gets managed, to decarbonize the supply chains, and change the way consumer products work in retail, as an industry, with traceability and transparency tools,” said McLaughlin.

She talked about Walmart having projects already for all three scopes of the Environmental, Social and Governance reporting (ESGs) that are being mainstreamed into financial markets in 2021. This is how the flow of capital will go to companies progressing toward these global targets.

McLaughlin talked about working with WWF to implement more standards and more certifications for suppliers and to move away from “segregated commodities” to “blended approaches” that use global traceability and transparency systems and document ESG reporting and progress on the SDGs each step of the way.

“It is clear we are exceeding boundaries of the planet, and as a company that sells food and apparel made of cotton, the business case is clear for the SDGs, said McLaughlin.

Asked what is Walmart’s ‘why’? McLaughlin revealed: “The benefits are clear: cost reductions, supply security, risk management, so that’s why we’re doing it.”

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Speaker after speaker and company after company throughout the WEF Forum talked about how all business sectors will be collaborating on these global ESGs (capital) and SDGs (land).

Kristina Kloberdanz, Chief Sustainability Officer for MasterCard even talked about using their platform of over 3 billion customers interacting with retailers and merchants to “inform, inspire and enable consumers to take action, themselves, against their own carbon footprint.”

What is clear is that consumers will be led to where global companies want them to go. These global business leaders stated that “moving consumers” (not just suppliers) toward these goals is what they are working on.

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Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan (top, center), who is also chair of the International Business Council, sat with heads of the four big accounting firms in one of the WEF livestream sessions about the launch of Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics, which they affectionately refer to as “accountant as activist” or “warrior accountants.”

Moynihan said that financial accounting for the investment sector — even lending — will be predicated on progress toward carbon-neutral and carbon-negative goals.

A glimpse of how land targets would be set in the U.S. was seen in former Vice President Biden’s response to a farmer’s question at the CNN Town Hall in Pennsylvania about environmental regulation, referencing the Obama-era WOTUS rules and the Green New Deal.

“We will have land banks,” said Biden. “You will be paid to put your land in land banks to create open space and be in a position where you will be paid to grow certain crops we want you to grow to sequester carbon from the air.”

He talked about his home state of Delaware with a $4 billion poultry industry and stated that, “manure is a consequence of chickens and it is polluting the bay. But we recently found out we can pelletize the manure and remove the methane,” said Biden.

Though Biden states that his climate policy is not the Green New Deal, the overlaps are there. The Green New Deal includes such references to “land banks”, where government will purchase land from “retiring farmers” and make it available “affordably to new farmers and cooperatives that pledge certain sustainability practices.”

Analyses of the Green New Deal’s land policies suggest rented ground — which comprises up to 40% of agricultural land — would be targeted first because environmentalists assume the active farmers renting this ground don’t care as much about its stewardship because they don’t own it.

Landlords who rent ground to active farmers and ranchers for cropping and grazing are easy targets for such a plan.

However, on the production side, rented ground is incredibly important to active farmers in many dairy states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, and it is how new and beginning farmers get a start.

The Great Re-set driven by climate goals and sustainability linked to pandemic fears and the Covid-19 impact on the global economy holds significant impacts for food and agriculture production. The “solutions” we see discussed are things former Secretary of Agriculture and current DMI executive Tom Vilsack has worked on for at least 13 years, maybe longer.

DMI leaders tell farmers that they are the reason farmers have a voice at the table to keep regulations from coming in that are unprofitable. But more apparently, DMI leaders are at the table helping to shape the dairy re-set that mirrors the global Great Re-set as pursued by WWF and global corporations like Walmart, Amazon, Nestle, Unilever, Danone. They are driving food system transformation in the Great Re-set — a one-world-order clothed in climate goals.

DMI has longstanding alliances with these partners, including WWF. But whose interests are counted at the table where the food system transformation game is being played? The global companies that partner with checkoff through DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy and its Sustainability Alliance? Or the farmers mandatorily funding DMI’s existence?

Are farmers and ranchers really at the table? Their powerful integrator (checkoff) and buyers (global processors) most certainly are.

Who will stand for farmers and consumers at the grassroots level? What happens when food production is fully integrated and digitized under globalized control by fewer entities? The role of USDA’s Dietary Guidelines is just the tip of the iceberg, facilitating dietary control of the masses through institutional feeding — working to move us all to the pre-ordained ‘planetary diets.’

The public at large has no idea what’s coming and how their food choices are being manipulated.

Given DMI’s alliances with the big players in food system transformation, the answers should be clear.

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‘Unify or die’ concept doesn’t cut it

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Time for transparency on where dairy checkoff’s partnerships are leading

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, August 28, 2020

Partnerships and proprietary information stop many conversations from moving forward when it comes to the direction of dairy checkoff leadership under Dairy Management Inc. (DMI).

Meanwhile, contrary to DMI CEO Tom Gallagher’s assertions in the Aug. 5 ‘open mic’ call, consumers DON’T know the nutritional benefits of milk. That’s why grassroots efforts to promote milk (like the Drink Whole Milk 97% Fat Free effort) get so much action. People really know very little about milk and dairy after decades of dairy farmers spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually in promotion and education.

But that’s okay, according to Gallagher, DMI is a supply chain expander.

We keep hearing this theme that consumers will deal with fewer players, shop at fewer stores, become less brand-loyal, learn to accept pre-planned food categories and assortments, realize ‘generics’ are just as good as brands, and will focus more on how diets affect the planet, while spending more for new innovative products… We have to stop a minute and wonder:

What does all of THAT mean?

First off, the math is not adding up.

More than one report or webinar has hit on the indicators showing consumers are focused on food purchases that address their concerns about health and economic value, and they are finding comfort in traditional choices – like real milk and dairy products.

Furthermore, the food disruptions of the pandemic have created more interest among consumers in where their food comes from – is it local, regional, produced in the U.S.? They are more in touch with the importance of local and regional food systems, and less keen on global supply chains nor globalization — not just of food, but also medicine and other necessities.

While rank-and-file consumers and farmers find opportunity and security in building localized or regional food systems, that is the last thing the big players want to see happen. So what do they do? They mine consumer data, something DMI will help with, to twist consumers’ health- and value-focused concerns to fit a ‘planetary’ values system that steers consumers straight into the jaws of the global suppliers that have checked all their pre-planned criteria boxes.

They want consumers to prioritize planetary diets so supply chains can be centralized and globalized — pure and simple — and our own industry checkoff organizations are participating at best, helping them accomplish it, at worst.

In fact, the “good for the planet” mantra — as defined by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and its World Resources Institute (WRI) is what global corporations and Silicon Valley tech food investors are all about. They are creating the boxes, checking them off, and then trying to convince consumers that this is what is important to them when making decisions about their food.

Data clouds, omnichannel marketing, digitized food, personalized experiences, purpose-driven marketing, planetary diets – these are but a few of the buzz terms and technologies driving future of food transformation.

Through GENYOUth, the dairy checkoff is actually facilitating transformation, grooming schoolchildren to make choices that will eventually pad the wallets of billionaire tech-sector food investors and give them control under the guise of planetary diets and climate change. The future-of-food players need a global ‘value-driver’. It was climate change. 

Then came Covid, and people were forced home and began to turn inward to the health and economic needs of themselves and their families. They began to see the importance of communities and began to recognize that farmers are connected to their communities.

To bring them back “on-task”, WWF recently launched a campaign to link Covid-19 to the already set goals. In fact, according to its website, WWF explains that, “A big possible casualty of COVID-19 are the world’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In a July 22 report on the pandemic and planetary health, WWF scientist Robin Naidoo states that, “In 2015, the United Nations adopted (Sustainable Development) goals to improve people’s lives and the natural world by 2030.The success of these SDGs depends on two big assumptions: sustained economic growth and globalization.

“COVID-19 has now torn both assumptions to shreds,” the WWF report states. “This has fundamental implications for how we conceive of and prioritize sustainability in a post-pandemic world.”

The report then goes on to twist the narrative on these UN SDGs (that are also part of DMI’s Net Zero Initiative) to say 30 of the targets “would help to lessen the likelihood of another global pandemic.”

Like a chameleon, the big players adapt the plan by changing the picture to shift consumer focus back onto the planetary diets and by honing in on post-Covid concerns about health and economics from a different angle. Easier to do this when people do not know much about milk and dairy.

Yes, there is a tug of war emerging from the pandemic in which consumers seek and grassroots farmers can deliver real, whole, healthful foods in regional, national and international food systems that are in direct competition with centralized global supply chains that want to streamline, limit options and control diets.

While DMI leaders are busy convincing dairy farmers to get with the program of unified marketing in order to compete – as one — in a big marketplace, what is DMI actually doing with their empowerment?

— DMI has a close working relationship with WWF to write the rules of the ‘sustainability’ and ‘net-zero GHG’ playbook – the driver.

— DMI’s marketing and public relations contractor Edelman has close ties to WWF, the EAT Lancet forums, and is developing new terms for brands in the plant-based alternative milk sectors.

— DMI partners with DFA to help launch a 50% milk 50% oat or almond juice beverage with pretty packaging and marketing that make it appear superior to the milk produced and bottled from dairy farms.

— DMI’s GENYOUth program facilitates access to schoolchildren so global corporations and other partners can groom schoolchildren into future decision-making consumers focused on “planetary diets” – their global value system.

— DMI recently hired a digital food and cellular ag proponent as its vice president of Dairy Scale for Good. Caleb Harper’s hiring has brought many questions but is merely one more cog in the supply chain wheel being built with dairy farmer checkoff money. His focus will be large dairies. His background is controlled environment horticulture through computerized plant boxes that several science publications, and even public radio, pointed out were “smoke and mirrors.” His father has ties to the early rendition of fairlife through Mike McCloskey, and both Harper and McCloskey are part of WWF’s thought leadership group

Innovation is normally something to be enthusiastic about. Technology is progressive and something farmers embrace. Competition is healthy and provides entrepreneurial opportunities.

But when it comes to mandatory promotion dollars, gone are the days of managing content that everyone can see, as it all goes digitally underground to meet proprietary consumer targets of partners. Gone are the days of education to promote the benefits of dairy to meet the needs and questions of consumers.

When farmers are forced to fund an entity with the power to set parameters on how they do business, an entity that is overseen by USDA and yet is partnered with activist groups, large multinational companies and global supply chain consolidators, and an entity that can pay for research that then becomes proprietary and could involve diluted dairy products such as butter that is mostly water, and an entity that begins to see its role as the expander of the supply chain… yes, transparency and vigilance are most definitely needed.

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Dairy mis-leaders call for unity, bring on misery

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By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine Op-Ed, July 19, 2019

Dairy producers find joy in the big and little things in life on the farm, working with family, raising children on the farm, building or continuing a family business, seeing the sun rise and set as they work, producing wholesome milk they take pride in, helping a cow have her calf, watching that calf grow and develop, planting tiny seeds, watching a crop grow.

We know personal stress on farms is at an all-time high, amid price and weather pressures. There is some optimism returning as last month’s milk checks were a bit better, and the futures markets fueled some optimism before hitting the see-saw again. Also, the first round of dairy margin coverage (DMC) checks have been received or are in the mail. (Signups for 2019 DMC end Sept. 20).

But despite the return of some optimism, stress continues to build on our dairy farms because the hole that has been dug is so deep, the ground to make up so vast, and the future sustainability of family farm businesses more challenged by the industry’s control of how they operate.

My thoughts here are based on personal meetings, phone conferences, emails and other communications with young farm families operating small herds and multi-family operations with very large herds. 

In my various work and volunteer efforts as a freelancer — I visit a lot of dairy farms. 

Even though milk prices are gradually rising, net mailbox prices are flat and costs are going up, eating into the price gains. Forages are tight, weather is an added burden, farmers are utilizing new strategies, adopting progressive practices, improving their business management – and yet, their farms and families are fraying over the question of whether to stay the course or sell the cows and leave it behind. 

Many are taking on other work and adding to their already long days with efforts to bring in income to support the farm.

Communities are feeling the long fingers, and farmers and related agribusinesses are supporting each other as best they are able. The levels of farm community unity have probably never been higher in this regard: People are coming together to promote milk through voluntary efforts, to support their neighbors, and to reach out to each other as friends and colleagues.

The industry leaders say the dairy industry must be unified. They say it is wrong to challenge the path of the industry because doing so is “depressing and divisive” and “brings more stress onto the farmers.”

Don’t challenge the system, they say, because this creates negativity and stress when farmers need to stay positive and united. This, I’ve been told by leaders.

Questions and challenges are not meant to divide or stress our farmers. The stress is already there. It may not always be spoken, but it is there, and it is visible. 

This stress cannot be painted over with pretty colors.

Stress on dairy farms today is rooted in the way this industry and various milk pricing and nutrition policies have economically failed our farmers (and our consumers), especially since 2008.

To talk about the industry’s path — to discuss and debate marketing decisions made with producer dollars — does not mean one is being divisive. This is America where ideas and challenges can still be discussed and debated, and where leaders can be questioned and held accountable.

How much more divided can an industry become than to see marriages, families, businesses, dreams fractured from the undue stress of not only a tough deal on the milk pricing but perhaps even more concerning, the increased levels of control that this same system puts upon our farmers, and how they manage their farms, as a condition to keep their milk contracts?

This loss of independence and loss of their ability to control the ‘controllables’ is of utmost concern. If we ignore these trends — in an attempt to be passively non-divisive — does that make the issue or problem go away? Certainly not.

Rapid streamlining of the dairy industry is underway, at least in part because this is the path charted in 2008 by the DMI Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy and the U.S. Dairy Export Council working via memorandums of understanding with USDA Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack who is today a DMI leader as USDEC president and CEO and instrumental in the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy. 

Both USDEC and the Innovation Center are primarily supported by the mandatory checkoff paid by dairy farmers; but they also partner with food supply chain companies that work on proprietary products, ideas and concepts for the expressed purpose of growing the dairy sector globally.

The industry leaders tasked with spending the farmer’s 15 cents per hundredweight say raising exports to 20% (last year was 16%) is the key for a growing dairy industry.

Most notably, Vilsack reported in May that, “2018 was a record year for U.S. dairy exporters with export volume up 10% from the prior year. Simply put, exports support the growth aspirations of the U.S. dairy sector.”

Nowhere in his statement, or the entire blog post at USDEC, did Vilsack mention the dairy farmers who pay his salary. He mentions the dairy exporters and the dairy sector, but not the dairy producers.

Are exporters and sectors paying his salary of $750,000? No, not really. A small portion of USDEC is funded by ‘industry’ memberships, and importers pay a smaller checkoff, but the bulk of the agency and its CEO Tom Vilsack are funded directly from government-mandated dairy producer checkoff funds.

Where are the statements about a promotion agenda that seeks to return a fair price and livable income to those producers paying the agenda-makers salaries?

At various meetings last year where milk markets were discussed, dairy traders stated that exports do not raise farm-level milk prices. Interestingly, 2018 exports were higher than 2017 while 2018 prices paid to dairy farmers were much lower than 2017.

The direction of the dairy checkoff is toward growth of the dairy sector globally, at all costs, and yet the U.S. dairy farmers are paying the bill for this, with USDA having very close control of it.

This goal has been positioned to farmers as an all-out race to gain global market share before other countries do it, without a methodical approach or review on the impact to domestic markets and producers along the way.

This global agenda is also steering the sustainability frameworks and alliances DMI’s Innovation Center is forming that will control more aspects of management at the farm level in the future.

In recent proof of conversations between farmers and checkoff staff and board members, questions about Innovation Center projects, alliances and partnerships were passed off as though the board receives its information on these projects on a “need to know” basis. A board member stated in these exchanges that they are not concerned with seeing every detail of a proprietary project because DMI’s attorneys and USDA’s attorneys know the details, and the board trusts the staff.

(I have served on boards elected by citizens. Trust in staff is critical, but so is transparency of projects paid for by a checkoff — the same as a school tax.)

For some, a call for unity means don’t ask questions. For others, it means get informed and start mobilizing a grassroots unifying effort.

In a copy of non-executive February DMI board minutes received by Farmshine, a strategy is detailed by the Farmer Relations and Consumer Confidence Committee. According to the minutes, a key discussion at the February 19-21 board meeting was stated as “farmer engagement around checkoff value is more important than ever before.”

A key bullet point was for national and local checkoff board members to “focus on the movable middle.”

Another bullet point of the discussion in the minutes is that DMI is “learning from the checkoff Facebook page and regional media coverage (Farmshine) reinforcing that you do NOT continue to engage with those detractors that cannot/will not be moved.”

While Farmshine was still seeking answers to questions and had not yet published the DMI chair’s letter of response (published Feb. 21), DMI had already taken a position in its Feb. 20 board discussion to “not engage” with detractors, mentioning Farmshine parenthetically by name in this category.

According to the minutes, the rest of the DMI board discussion on this topic centered on the need to “reach out to those farmers who see/hear from the unmovable detractors” (that would mean Farmshine readers as per the above). According to the minutes, “ways to reach the movable middle” were discussed.

So, while organizations chart a course for unity and reaching out to a movable middle, dairy farm families are focused on finding ways to move forward on their farms and to unify and inform their communities.

Even though our legislators are taking notice of the growing crisis — and some sincerely care and are trying to do something — these stopgaps and investments are a drop in a very large bucket. Those drops are appreciated, but there are big things to tackle that require courage when it comes to the needed changes in nutrition rules, checkoff rules, promotion rules, labeling rules (and also lack of standard of identity enforcement), complex milk pricing rules (while processors and co-ops are readying a proposal for their make allowance increases as soon as prices improve a bit), not to mention rules that impact the cost of doing business every day on the farm.

As dairy farm families keep moving forward, finding ways to do more with less, working longer hours with less help, taking on off-farm employment and finding other revenue streams to pay their bills — They are consequently burning the candle at both ends and incurring more stress.

The stress on farms of all sizes can be overwhelming and is felt by even the best operators.

We do need unity, yes, but the question farmers are asking themselves is: Who will be part of dairy’s unified and globalized future? They deserve to know the direction the organizations they fund are taking their product, their market, and the industry they have supplied with wholesome milk for generations.

We can do better than this in America where agriculture truly is our backbone. Without strong farm families, all else fails eventually, including our liberty and security as a nation. 

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Leaving boots in the mud to seek new ground on Tuesday

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Editorial Comments by Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Friday, Nov. 4, 2016

flag19Agriculture is at a crossroads, and so is America. But the choice of paths that lie before us are neither clear nor direct.

When we go to the polls on Tuesday, it will be with mixed thoughts and emotions.

As the mainstream media analyze and over analyze every breaking news story, every “narrative,” every campaign “spin,” every poll, every issue that they deem important, there is much that gets left on the cutting room floor — important issues that no one really talks about, and yet they are harbingers of our future.

What they don’t talk about – of course – is agriculture. What they don’t talk about is the backbone of our economy, the original resource from which all other facets of the economy are made possible.

Take, for example, Hillary Clinton’s speech to financial institutions, where she said she dreams of one world, one economy, without borders. When pressed on that issue, her response was to say that, ‘Oh, that speech! I was talking about the energy economy, a worldwide energy grid. I want the U.S. to be the renewable energy super-power of the world.’

A convenient response to a concept that should give us all pause — in and outside of agriculture.

In talking with farm folk who volunteer for missions or projects in third-world countries where helping to establish indigenous agriculture practices and infrastructure is deemed so important, it hit me: We will be that third-world country — maybe not in my lifetime – but nevertheless that is one path on this crossroads if we do not take care to protect our farms and our farmers. Not only is their stewardship of the land vital to regional food security, but they are the place-holders for the essence of our liberty as a nation. Private property rights and ownership are the keys to our freedom as a nation, as a people.

Globalization is happening at a rapid pace. Running parallel to globalization is market concentration as mergers and acquisitions put more and more power into the hands of the few when it comes to food and agriculture. And then those ‘too big to fail’ entities are being sold off to foreign nations, like China, who already owns, according to the Department of the Treasury, $1.24 trillion in bills, notes and bonds (about 30%) of the over $4 trillion in Treasury bills, notes and bonds held by foreign countries.

That, my friends, is the auctioneer’s gavel on our national debt. True to form as a businessman, Donald Trump is talking about the national debt. Hillary Clinton is not.

Exports are said to be necessary for all agriculture commodity markets, especially dairy, and while I believe exports are important, they are not the end-all, be-all – except to the multi-national companies that view us as though they are on a satellite in space counting their dots on the globe: production units or consumption units, bars on a graph, slices on a pie-chart, numbers on a sales report, quarterly statements to shareholders.

In these third world countries I referenced earlier — where the good folk of the USA help farmers establish themselves — one of the first realizations is that when we throw cheap food at them, through exports, they have difficulty getting their own agriculture established to have the food security we Americans enjoy and truly take for granted.

Think about that for a moment. Are we not in danger, ourselves, of going down a path that could leave us food insecure?

The trade agreements that give our farmers market access to foreign markets also give our domestic market away to foreign imports. The give and the take are contrived and uneven. Winners and losers are made, created.

There is nothing fair or free about world trade because nations are losing the ability to care for and protect their own – particularly the U.S. – and we don’t even realize it. We are focused on the tantalizing allure of what we can sell … so that we are blinded to being sold-out.

The magician’s trick. Watch the elaborate thing I am doing with my left hand while I fool you with my right.

Many of these trade agreements are not free and fair trade, but rather a march forward to globalization, where the World Trade Organization and the United Nations become a higher power than our own Congress, our own President.

We saw just a tiny inkling of this, firsthand, when Congress quickly repealed the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) last March, and when the administration lifted the ban on Brazilian beef in August, and when the first boatload of beef hit Philadelphia, via JBS, just three weeks ago, followed by a rapid downturn in cattle prices here at home.

We’ve already seen foreign interests, namely China, purchase Smithfield and Syngenta, to name a few. This week, the Dallas News reported that a team of Chinese bankers and a Chinese dairy are considering a possible takeover bid for Dean Foods, our nation’s largest milk bottler that handles 35% of the raw farm milk produced in this country.

What does this have to do with Tuesday’s presidential and congressional election? Plenty.

You won’t hear Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump talk about agriculture, specifically, but listening to their differing outlooks, overall, a few things are clear and have helped me make my choice for next Tuesday.

For me, voting for a third party candidate or writing in a name like John McCain (as previous candidate and Ohio governor John Kasich did) is not an option. Neither is it an option to write in Mickey Mouse or to leave that part of the ballot blank.

Folks, this is serious. This presidential election – for all of its circus acts – is no circus. This is our future. This is the future we are handing to our children and grandchildren. I, for one, cannot trust it to a candidate who has spent the past 30 years in the political realm as a profitable public servant, and has wasted so much of that time on her own agenda with such disregard for the rules others live by as to again be under investigation.

I will vote between the two major party candidates based on what I know about their outlook on the future along with what my gut tells me about the investigations into their pasts and what it says about what they could or would do with the power of the Presidency in the future.

Neither candidate lives like we do out here in middle and rural America. But, at least one of the two candidates lives outside of the political realm.

We are governed by career politicians embroiled in endless self-perpetuation. The more paralyzed they are in their elected offices, the more power is diverted to the longstanding and quite powerful bureaucracy whom are elected by no one.

Everyone complains about the gridlock inside the beltway, like nothing ever gets done.

Wrong.

Plenty of work is getting done in Washington D.C., it is just mainly the work of career bureaucrats that exercise more control and make us weaker, tearing at our moral fabric, eating away at the base of our economy, ripping through our roots, and chipping away at our freedoms.

There is a power- and land-grab underway in this country. Most all agriculture commodities are at prolonged below-breakeven prices while the political elite is poised to push yet another trade agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership, into the mix.

Meanwhile, we have a hammer of political correctness keeping us in our place, not daring to be free thinkers. Many voices are silenced as the economic and moral decay are inextricably linked.

Take, for example, the way we accept how the government imposes ridiculous rules on what our children can eat for lunch at school. All things are connected so that local communities cannot even feed their children the way they see fit. Those rules, incidentally, create winners and losers. And in so doing, the voices of the affected are silenced.

We have a runaway EPA with the implementation and flawed interpretation of the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) legislation that threatens to create a second wave of land-grab after the market pushes a first wave of farmers off the land.

And then there is the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) and their silver-tongued Wayne Pacelle. He is campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Her animal rights agenda dovetails with the candidate and Democratic Party’s obsession with climate change — right down to the livestock and dairy cattle on our farms.

There is so much more I could say, but to summarize, consider this: Who better to tackle over-regulation, unfair trade agreements, national food security, a vital agriculture, family farms and small businesses besieged by a labyrinth of complexities foisted upon them by a government run by self-perpetuating career politicians and ever-present, accountable-to-no-one bureacrats than a business man — a man that for all of his faults, at least does not live and has not spent 30-plus years operating in the self-perpetuation of the D.C. beltway.

We need to break free of the career politician mentality and breathe fresh air and common sense into the mix as well as to toss a bit of our sensitivity and political correctness to the side to break the cycle we are in and alter the path down which we are being led.

For all of his faults, Donald Trump is the only one of the two less than optimal choices we have in this election that fits that description.

Even on immigration reform, he is the one to have the best chance of getting it done. Only after our border is secured will our divided nation have a chance to come together with compassion for the illegal workers who are here today, working hard, making a contribution and raising their families that were born here. I have listened to Trump on this issue, and I get it. He is leaving room for that conversation after the border is secured and the estimated two million illegal immigrants that have committed crimes are properly dealt with. He will consult the American people on the next move after that first important move.

Election after election, candidates promise to shake things up, bring about change, bring people together, work for the people, protect our country.

Meanwhile, the beltway fills with sludge and slow-motion sets in to the point where boots are stuck.

Instead of standing fast, I’m leaving the boots in the mud, these bare feet are seeking new ground next Tuesday.