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

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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.)

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Our farmers are the thin green line between us and a ‘Holodomor’ – Let’s not forget it!

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Bale art in Holland has a message. Displays like this are a ‘public-friendly’ way to protest the nitrogen (emissions) policy, and the red handkerchief has become the sign of support for farmer resistance.

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, July 22, 2022

The pain is necessary. The transition is unavoidable. The climate pledges are urgent. Race to zero. Net Zero Economy. Sustainable Nitrogen Management. Climate Champions, and on and on. 

These are just some of the pages and phrases at the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) website where resolutions are adopted, targets are pledged, sustainable development goals (SDGs) are constructed and updated, and Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) scoring is discussed for countries, cities, corporations, lenders, investors, institutions, states, provinces, networks, alliances, even individuals.

Dairy farmers are being asked to provide more and more of their business operations data, field agronomy, feed and energy purchases, inputs, output, upstream, downstream — a virtual farm blueprint.

While it is important that farmers have a baseline to know where they are and gauge where they are going, it is also critical that such details do not provide a centralizing entity the ability to map them into zones where requirements are passed down by milk buyers, government agencies, industry programs, or lenders deciding farmers in Zone A will be held to one standard while farmers in Zone B are held to another. 

Meanwhile, even the most aggressive standard is so trivial in the big picture that it is offset virtually overnight by unrestrained pollution in countries like China where no one is minding the store.

Sound familiar? Look at The Netherlands.

Activist NGOs have struck deals with everyone from the billionaire globalists, activist politicians, industry organizations, corporations and investors to create the world they envision and have invested in for a future return.

They use marketing platforms, global PR firms, thought-leadership networks, pre-competitive alliances, pseudo-foundations and even align with government agencies to flesh out the details and drive the bus.

As producers and consumers, it feels like we are along for the ride.

For example, Changing Markets Foundation, an offshoot of World Wildlife Fund, partners with NGOs to “leverage market forces to drive rapid and self-reinforcing change towards a more sustainable economy.”

It was formed to accelerate this transition.

Just this week Changing Markets published a study taking aim at dairy – warning investors to take a more active role in improving the dairy and meat sector’s “climate impact” by asking these companies, the processors, to disclose their emissions and investments and cut methane and other pollutants.

In other words, the NGOs, through a ‘marketing’ foundation, prods investors to push your milk buyers, lenders and vendors to obtain and track for them your information.

These NGOs and foundations are driving this bus a little too fast, and it needs to slow down. They take countries (like Holland) to court to hold up infrastructure projects, using their own pledged targets against them and forcing a faster timetable to gain the offsets needed for the stalled projects.

They publish self-fulfilling studies, surveys and warnings prodding investors to reach back into the dairy and meat sector and take a more active role in getting more reporting of downstream methane emissions (your farm).

They warn dairy and meat processors that if they don’t get this information and cough it up, investor confidence will be harmed and their assets could be stranded, resulting in large economic losses.

They salivate with anticipation, waiting for land purchase packages that they, as NGOs, can poorly manage as contractors alongside the purchasing government entities.

Let this sink in. The investor class is being deemed the farmer’s new customer – not the consumers whom our farmers are proud to feed and proud to show the truly valuable practices they use in caring for the land, practices that are often not very well monetized – like cover crops, for example.

If a country like the Netherlands with a progressive agriculture industry finds itself in the position that it can’t build or do infrastructure projects without first decreasing nitrogen emissions on the backs of farmers, where do we go from here with the fuzzy math being done on all greenhouse gases in the sidebars of highly-capitalized alternative meat and dairy lookalikes that are lining up — ready to burst on the scene to grab a foothold for investor returns?

The Changing Markets report, in fact, makes the claim that 37% of global GHG comes from food production and attributes most of this to meat and dairy — certainly embellishing the issue in this disingenuous phrasing and fuzzy math.

If farmers can’t be paid for the simplest of constructive practices that produce food for people — while at the same time being restorative to the land, why should billionaires and governments be able to come in and buy their land, plant trees, re-wild to scrub brush or half-hearted grassland status and get an offset?

None of what is happening makes sense unless we step back and recall what we know about the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, Food Transformation, Net Zero Economy and the realities of so-called ESGs. This has been a process and most of us have only had glimpses of it to connect the dots.

I recall conversations over the years of my journalism career with a most respected ag economics professor, the late Lou Moore at Penn State. He worked with farmers and his peers in former Soviet countries after the breakup of the Soviet Union. He would tell the stories from Ukraine, described to him as handed down through generations of the period of terror and famine known as the Holodomor when the Soviets collectivized the farms of the Ukraine under communism – resulting in the starvation and death of 10 million or more in a transition.

Bottomline: Agenda 2030 has been under construction for some time now, and ‘climate urgency’ is being used today to target farming and food production, not just energy and fuel.

Our industry organizations keep telling us the public, consumers, are driving where this is going, that it is science based, and yet key questions at the farm level still can’t be answered.

At the regional levels, we see authentic models of conservation groups partnering with dairy farms and cooperatives to access grants for meaningful improvements that make financial and environmental sense but may not show up just so on a global NGO’s master sheet. 

There are ideas being generated to give companies of all sizes a way to be ‘climate champions’ by investing in Farm Bill conservation programs that really work. Congressman G.T. Thompson mentioned this recently at a farm meeting.

Let’s do the work that accomplishes what’s real and equitable for our farmers and hold off just yet providing too much detailed information.

We know NGOs and governments have set targets to protect 30% of the earth’s surface as non-working lands by 2030 and 50% by 2050. This boils down in the targets at the U.S. level as well.

Let’s be sure we don’t give away the farm.

The strength and diversity of our farmers is so important. You, our farmers worldwide, are the thin green line between us and a Holodomor.

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On Life, Liberty, Land and Pursuit of Happiness

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EDITORIAL: Deals with the devil at Davos come down to money invested to control carbon, essential to life

By Sherry Bunting, published in Farmshine Newspaper, June 17, 2022

‘Deals with the Devil at Davos’ published in Farmshine June 10, 2022 may have left some readers’ heads spinning. So, let me boil it down to what I see happening: The ramping up of a pervasive global transformation of life itself being leveraged on the masses by the biggest actors in food, energy, capital and policy.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is the place where plans are hatched to transform food and energy in the name of sustainable climate and environment. (Great Reset)

This includes goals of setting aside 30% of the earth’s land surface by 2030 for re-wilding and biodiversity – 50% by 2050. 

This includes top-tier elite billionaire investor plans to transform food through plant-based and lab-created meat and dairy lookalikes and blends, with the purpose of replacing livestock, especially cattle.

This includes “sustainability” measures being enacted by the world’s largest global food and agriculture companies as the leverage point to position producers and consumers into the headlocks of their vision, their capital, their control.

The bottom line is that the dairy and beef checkoff programs have joined in by creating alliances and initiatives as partners with these WEF actors, including individuals, corporations and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). This gives the appearance of a bottom-up approach, when in reality it is top-down, and has been gradually bringing more farm-level decisions and practices in line with what the Davos crowd is cooking up.

The vehicle? Measuring, tracking and controlling carbon. 

In other words, controlling energy, food, and land, and with it life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, with a strategy to condition the next generation to accept an alternate reality.

The specifics mentioned in the analysis last week include the involvement of the checkoff programs, through memorandums of understanding with USDA, WWF and others, to position schoolchildren as “agents of change.”

In short, checkoff funds are used at the national level for many things, one key element being dairy transformation to fall in line with the transformation goals of the globalist elites. We can see the business and policy changes that translate to the farm level just beginning amid a void of understanding for the essential role cattle play in true environmental sustainability and the carbon cycle of life itself.

Of all farm and food animals, the life cycle of cattle is tied to the largest land base. Think about that in the context of the land set-aside goals for 2030 and 2050.

Meanwhile, the consumers that the farmers think they are reaching with their checkoff dollars are having their voices stolen by the supply chain actors. On the other end of the spectrum, farmers are also having their voice stolen as their mandatory dollars target the ways they are and may be expected to conform in order to access this narrowing and consolidating supply chain leverage point and the capital to run their farms.

When farmers and consumers talk directly to one another, they find out that they care about the same things and can reach mutual respect and understanding – as long as the WEF’s Klaus Schwab and friends don’t use their position in the supply chain leverage point, the middle, to set the rules of the game.

How are they herding farmers and consumers into headlocks? By transforming the future through their definitions of measuring, tracking and controlling carbon – the essence of life.

These things are happening without voice or vote, and in part, mandatory checkoff funds have been instrumental over the past 12 to 14 years in shaping this transformation through alliances.

Life on earth would not be possible without carbon. It is one of the most important chemical elements because it is the main element in all living things and because it can make so many different compounds and can exist in different forms.

Bottomline: The measuring, tracking, trading and control of carbon means the measuring, tracking, trading and control of life. 

Who will have a voice in life when there is a global consortium laying out the control, access and transformation for the essential element of life – never mind liberty, land (property), and the pursuit of happiness.

Most farmers think they are promoting and educating consumers with checkoff funds. Yes, they are to some degree. However, a significant portion of those funds and/or the direction of funding is tied up in sustainability alliances that ultimately redirect the Davos-hatched transformation agenda right back onto the farm.

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Deals with the devil at Davos; it all comes down to money… and land

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WEF panel at Davos on redirecting capital in agriculture. (screen capture)

NEWS / ANALYSIS

By Sherry Bunting, published in Farmshine Newspaper, June 10, 2022

DAVOS — Let’s follow your checkoff money all the way to Davos, where Klaus Schwab and friends, known as the World Economic Forum (WEF), gather annually in Switzerland. This is where globalist elites have been plotting and planning the net zero economy, complete with food transformation maps.

On May 26, your message was delivered and your future was signed up, with your money through your checkoff programs — a plan 14 years in the making under the DMI umbrella of multiple so-called non-profit foundations and alliances.

Some of the same global actors in the WEF food transformation movement are also represented in the various non-profit alliances that were created by your checkoff in the 2008 through 2012 time-period.

At Davos, the May 26 panel on “redirecting capital in agriculture” is where “farmers voices were heard for the first time,” they said.

Don’t worry, the purpose was to get you the money from Davos billionaires to do all the things they will be requiring you to do to be part of the new net zero economy they are creating with the net zero goal DMI has set for you — despite the fact you didn’t vote on it or sign up for it, and experts can’t even agree on what it means or how it will be measured.

But that’s okay, your checkoff created surveys, sustainability platforms and strategic alliance non-profits to bring the largest processors together “pre-competitively” to set the timelines, plan the parameters, and craft your messages.

DMI “thought leaders” often talk about getting ahead of “societal issues” such as animal care and the environment via the Innovation Center — to avoid regulation. That is the basis of the FARM program, for example.

But the reality is the regulatory side has at least some accountability — a process via our democratic republic if we still have one. 

What democratic process was used to determine the rules your farm will live by — as decreed by the corporations buying what you produce, and now also the access to capital you will need to continue?

Consumers have not asked for this, and neither have you. But your checkoff has done it for you and will help you navigate.

DMI issued a press release just a few days before Davos about how the Sustainability Summit they held state-side to help you, the farmer, navigate this new future they have been creating with your checkoff money.

“Never has the opportunity been greater for us to come together and demonstrate our collective impact,” said DMI CEO Barb O’Brien in opening the pre-Davos Summit. “And frankly, never has it been more urgent as we work to meet the growing demands and expectations of both customers and consumers around personal wellness, environmental sustainability and food security.”

These are pretty words.

The press release cites the U.S. Dairy Stewardship Commitment as having 35 companies representing 75% of the milk market signed on. The four pieces DMI is working on were listed in a vague way: 1) utilizing new ‘digital frontiers’ for point-of-purchase ‘strategies’, 2) promoting a new definition of ‘health and wellness’, 3) fulfilling an ‘impact imperative’ they say exists among consumers positioning U.S. Dairy as the leader in addressing societal challenges such as climate change, and 4) targeting ‘inclusive relevance,’ which O’Brien said Gen Z is the driver as the most diverse generation to-date with societal expectations for companies and brands.

Two weeks later, the thought leader representing you in Davos told the gathered elite, the billionaires, the power-centers, that your soil has “perpetual societal value” and should be invested-in and traded as an “asset class,” that farmers are the “eco workforce to be deployed,” and that investors and lenders should “redirect capital” to “de-risk” the investments farmers must make as “climate warriors that are planting the future.”

We missed that memo. Lots of buzz terms here, so let them sink in.

Here’s the reality: Farmers’ voices were NOT heard in Davos. Instead, what was heard was the voices of the WEF billionaires, the WWF supply-chain leveraging model, the string-pullers (thought leaders), and the plan-developers. 

The World Wildlife Fund 2012 “Better Production for a Living Planet” identifies the strategy depicted in this graphic on biodiversity (30×30), water and climate. Instead of trying to change the habits of 7 billion consumers or working directly with 1.5 billion producers worldwide, WWF stated that their research identified a “practical solution” to leverage about 300 to 500 companies that control 70% of food choices. By partnering with dairy and beef checkoff national boards in this “pre-competitive” strategy, WWF has essentially used farmer funds to implement their priorities in lockstep with the World Economic Forum. Image from 2012 WWF Report

We don’t even know all the tentacles behind the pretty words used to describe what you have already been signed up for. Rest assured, DMI will roll them out gradually through the Innovation Center and FARM, and investors, lenders and others will put them in the fine print of farmer access to capital and markets.

It’s more truthful to say the farmers’ voice is being stolen in this process.

Your autonomy, independence and decision-making is being overridden. Your permission is being granted for the WEF Davos billionaires to step right up, help themselves, and determine your options, your future through their investments in a soils asset class — because, climate.

During the WEF panel, it was Erin Fitzgerald who carried “the farmers’ voice” to Davos.

Erin Fitzgerald (USFRA photo)

Fitzgerald is CEO of U.S. Farmers and Ranchers in Action (name changed in 2020 from the previous U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance). She became the USFRA CEO in 2018 after spending the previous 11 years working for DMI as Vice President of Sustainability and several other roles and titles while the FARM program and net zero framework was being developed. She spoke “for farmers and ranchers” in four sessions at the WEF annual meeting in Davos, including one panel about redirecting capital in agriculture, where she talked about soil as an “asset class” and farmers as the “eco workforce.”

During her comments on the Davos panel about “redirecting capital,” she made it clear that your consumer is “no longer the person at the checkout” in the grocery store. She said it’s the pension fund investors looking for low-risk investments. 

Even that is not entirely accurate. The truth is that DMI — in the creation of its many precompetitive alliances — has its sights set on bigger fish: the billionaires at Davos, the venture capitalists, the global corporations investing in climate. 

In fact, this is being driven behind the scenes by Edelman, the global PR firm that receives $16 to $18 million in checkoff funds annually as the contractor for DMI over the past decade of plotting and planning. Edelman is a key player at Davos. GENYOUth was the Edelman brainchild, and outgoing CEO Alexis Glick was originally tapped by Richard Edelman, himself, to lead GENYOUth as a former financial analyst who made Davos a high point of her itinerary.

Back to the WEF panel on May 26 — the messages that have been crafted were touted, along with a narrative about what you will do in the next 30 harvests as the “eco workforce” of the “new global net zero economy.”

Listening to some of the livestreamed sessions, other panels highlighted the future of food, energy and financing to all be rooted in carbon impact.

Some panels noted the fast pace of the WEF global transformation is creating inflation pain, but the globalist elites are not concerned, even saying “that’s a good thing.”

Other panels delved into individual carbon tracking, to measure, record and score what each one of us eats, where we go, how we get there.

Truth be told, consumers are also being signed up for the net zero economy, although most don’t even know it yet. In a free America, I’m not sure we voted on this global-control-fast-track either.

Fitzgerald, whose role is described as “building sustainable food systems of the future,” laid it out for the crowd of investors, corporations, regulators, and government officials.

On the Davos stage, she said she brought the farmers’ message and referred specifically to the DMI board chair as “my chair Marilyn, a farmer from Pennsylvania.” (Marilyn Hershey also sits on the USFRA board.) 

In the ‘redirecting capital’ discussion, another layer of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) model of leveraging the few players in the middle of the food supply chain to move consumers and producers at both ends was very much in play.

This is not surprising. The DMI alliance with WWF also spanned a 12-year period from 2008 to 2020 when all of these non-profit alliances were formed under the DMI umbrella to bring global processors together as a platform for “pre-competitively” determining how all farms will operate in the future.

Your innovation and hard work were mentioned, but no credit was given to where you are, what you already accomplish, as farmers. It is all forward-looking to annually “make progress” over “the next 30 harvests.”

The stage was set for farmers to see capital “redirected” to de-risk certain types of operations and to make the soil you farm an “asset class.”

“We officially have our first solution,” declared the Davos panel moderator, turning to the panelist sitting beside Fitzgerald, saying “that’s your area, let’s do it.” Who was this panelist? None other than David MacLennan, the board chair and CEO of Cargill, and a former member of the Chicago Board of Trade and Board of Options Exchange.

Think about this for a moment. Soil as an asset class dovetails nicely with the 30 x 30 land grab, another WEF / WWF / Great Reset / Build Back Better invention.

Lured by money or financing, the soil you farm — if it becomes a tradable asset class with financing channeled to certain practices begs this question: Whose land does it become and what will be your accountability through the Security and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for disclosures? Farm Bureau is already sounding the alarm on proposed rules about supply chain producers being an open book to the SEC for claims made by companies buying their raw commodities.

More importantly, who will make the decisions on your farm? Fitzgerald asked the audience to “put aside the term ‘farmer’ and think about ‘these people’ as the “eco workforce.’”

Your voice, through your checkoff, just went into the den of thieves to offer your land, your future, your autonomy — as a farmer, rancher, landowner, generational steward of God-given resources in your community — and put it on a silver platter for the Davos global elites under the feel-good message of farmer as climate warrior, an eco workforce planting the future in the net zero economy.

They said your voice was heard, your story was told, and they’ll get you the investment funds for projects. In  “thinking about soils as a perpetual asset to society,” Fitzgerald said investors can do what was done for the renewable energy sector in 2008 to “prop it up and get it moving.”

“This eco workforce has boots on the ground,” she said. “They have every bit of capability, but they’re going to be battling the real effects of disrupted markets and climate change, and they also have unbelievable talent. Our farmers are doing amazing work as climate eco warriors. Are we as business agents of change here at Davos really creating the finance models to de-risk their investment to let them plant the future and be the eco warriors they can be in the fight on climate change?” 

More pretty words that might sound inspiring to some, until we pull back the layers and realize deals are being made with the devil.

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

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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. 


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