Free Republic

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal. Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois. Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation,...

Several injuries have been reported in an explosion at a plant operated by Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur, Illinois, NBC affiliate WAND-TV reported. In a statement, the company said an explosion occurred at approximately 7:11 p.m. on Sunday inside the East Plant within ADM's Decatur processing complex. Several employees were injured and transported to the hospital for treatment, the statement added. Headquartered in downtown Chicago, ADM is an agricultural origination and processing company, and on its website describes itself as a "leader in both human and animal nutrition." As of late Sunday, the company had yet to determine a cause...

The European Commission has decided to restrict the provision of flexibility on nitrates rules affecting more than 3,000 Irish dairy and beef farmers from the first of January. Many farmers may have to reduce stocking rates as a result. The farmers have been availing of a nitrates derogation that allowed them higher stocking rates on their farms. But that arrangement was dependent on Ireland delivering on a commitment to improve water quality. The Government has failed to do this. The commission’s response means that, from next year, the farmers affected will have three ways to meet the new, reduced limits...

Crushing federal and state regulations are forcing California's farmers to move operations to Mexico. What could go wrong? Anybody notice who might be getting their hands on the U.S. food supply? I found it buried in an Epoch Times story about Congress's upcoming Farm Bill spendathon, set to go to a vote in December. It's supposedly aid to U.S. farmers, including California's, the U.S.'s top agricultural state, which produces much of the U.S. food supply. But it's hardly a solution. Turns out the regulatory burden is so nasty out there it's driving farmers in California to move operations to Mexico...

A rural community in Michigan has hailed a 'huge victory' after a Chinese-owned industrial firm backed out of buying local farmland. Residents of the idyllic Green Charter Township, around 50 miles east of Lake Michigan, say they were 'bullied' into accepting the takeover, but refused to do so. Gotion, a company that 'pledges allegiance' to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), did, however, complete the purchase of 260 acres of derelict industrial land in the township and 10 acres of disused farmland last week. It comes as data shows Chinese firms now own more than $2billion worth of US farmland, up...

Can you spare a few thousand square feet of land for a windmill? Well, maybe not you, but surely a farmer can, right? Or a rancher? Or a developer. What’s a few thousand square feet to a land baron? Some people with lots of land can spare that much, especially if the government will pay them a few grand for it. Maybe not you or me, but… the other guy. Let HIM do it. America is a big country. Huge. It doesn’t really sound like a few thousand square feet of land for a windmill would have a big impact...

Special presidential envoy for climate John ("Effing") Kerry recently took time out from flying around the globe in his private jet to warn the world that climate change cannot be conquered without first dramatically reducing the agriculture sector's emissions. Kerry asserted that agriculture production alone creates roughly 33% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions and argued that reducing those emissions must be "front and center" in the quest to defeat global warming.Giving the keynote address at the Department of Agriculture's "AIM for Climate Summit" on August 2, Lurch the former secretary of state said:A lot of people have no...

@wideawake_media Greenpeace co-founder, Dr. Patrick Moore, on the genocidal consequences of Net Zero: “Now they’re going into agriculture and threatening to cut off the supply of food, because food is causing global warming… Only the billionaires will be able to afford to buy food, and now all the other people will die because there’s not enough food. That’s what we’re heading for if we continue to listen to these people.” “They will cause a ruination the likes of which the Earth has never seen, because there are over eight billion of us, and four billion of us depend on nitrogen...

SUMMARY: Globalists will use prions to make people allergic to beef first, then pork. They will blame ticks as cover story. Only globalists will be allowed to grow and consume meat. Continuation of their war on farming/food supply. CDC will declare emergency.

An article published Friday detailed how some Hispanic ranchers are abandoning their previous allegiance to the Democratic Party under the Biden administration. Ranchers in New Mexico’s Tierra Amarilla are part of a broader trend of Biden losing support among Hispanic populations in rural parts of the country, Axios reported. Their growing disdain for our current president comes from Biden’s progressive policies on so-called “environmental protection” that are actually just destroying the generational wealth of Hispanic landowners. Ranchers in the region were predominantly Democrat voters, but the tides are turning red as the Biden administration continues to haemorrhage support. Apparently many...

In a joint statement, representatives from nations involved in the anti-farming pact celebrated the agreement. “Food systems are responsible for 60% of methane emissions,” said Marcelo Mena, CEO of Global Methane Hub. “We congratulate countries willing to take the lead in food systems methane mitigation and confirm our commitment to support this type of initiative with programs that explore promising methane mitigation technologies and the underpinning research of methane mitigation mechanisms to create new technologies.” “Mitigating methane is the fastest way to reduce warming in the short term,” said U.S. “Climate Czar” John Kerry. The news comes as unelected bureaucratic...

Reps. Dan Newhouse (R-WA), Mike Simpson (R-ID), David Valadao (R-CA), and John Duarte (R-CA) have joined Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Jim Costa (D-CA), Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), Salud Carbajal (D-CA), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), and Jerry Nadler (D-NY) to reintroduce the Farm Workforce Modernization Act — a bill passed in 2019 and 2021 that ultimately failed to gain traction in the Senate despite being backed by many Republicans and Democrats. Aside from providing amnesty to about 2.1 million illegal aliens working on U.S. farms — allowing them to apply for green cards and eventually secure naturalized American citizenship — the bill keeps...

For months now, the proposals for the Nature Restoration Law have provoked heated debate and exchanges between farming organizations and environmental and other NGOs. Today’s narrow majority vote for the watered-down version of the Law in the European Parliament was greeted with mixed reactions on all sides. The text passed today has removed all mention of re-wetting, and other measures targeted at the agri(culture) sector. Nevertheless, farming organizations remain wary of the law and what it will mean for them. IFA President Tim Cullinan was in Brussels for today’s vote. “There is real and genuine concern that there will be...

In November 2022, four eminent scientists issued a theoretical physics paper, “Nitrous Oxide and Climate.” It proves that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s “war on nitrous oxide” to achieve Net Zero Emissions (NZE) by 2050 threatens to cause a significant collapse in the world’s food supply.The article’s four authors are eminent men in their field, so their analysis and opinion deserve to be taken very seriously: (1) C.A. de Lange, a physicist at Vrije Universiteit, in Amsterdam; (2) J.D. Ferguson, an M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, with a specialty in developing computer models of the effect...

This week I saw a depressing article entitled "U.N. issues famine warning," which warned, "Up to 80 million people will be plunged into hunger if climate targets are not met." The situation, we are told, is dire. According to the article: "The world is advancing toward a catastrophic future where tens of millions of people will be at risk of famine unless climate change is adequately addressed, the United Nations' human rights chief warned at a debate on Monday. Speaking to officials at the U.N. Human Rights Council event in Geneva, Switzerland, Volker Turk said extreme weather events were having...

The globalist coalition government in The Netherlands collapsed on Friday evening, with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte tendering his resignation to King Willem-Alexander on Saturday, paving the way for elections to be held by November and the possibility of the populist pro-farmer BBB party to come into power.The fourth government of Mark Rutte, 56, the Netherlands’ longest-serving prime minister, collapsed on Friday evening as coalition partners were seemingly incapable of coming to a compromise on the issue of migration and asylum policy. This marks the third time since coming to power in 2010 that a Rutte government failed to complete...

... As Earth this week set and then repeatedly broke unofficial records for average global heat, it served as a reminder of a danger that climate change is making steadily worse for farmworkers and others who labor outside. Farm workers are 35 times more likely to die of heat exposure than workers in other industries, according to the National Institutes of Health, but there is no federal heat standard that ensures their health and safety. Climate change makes extreme heat more likely and more intense. Farm work is particularly dangerous because workers raise their internal body temperature by moving, lifting...

Long before the invention of agriculture, humans already knew how to process cereals and other wild plants into a flour suitable for food—and now there's new evidence they did so long before scientists was previously thought.Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, an Italian-led study of five ancient grindstones from around 39,000 to 43,000 years ago shows that milling for food dates back to the transitional period between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens...The Neanderthal-to-Homo sapiens period was characterized by the coexistence of the Late Mousterian (Neanderthal), Uluzzian and Protoaurignacian (H. sapiens) techno-complexes in the northwest and southwest of present-day Italy.The grindstones come from...

China’s problems are many and varied, but now we can add a possible famine to them.Like Mao during the Cultural Revolution, Xi is pushing a new program of “agricultural management.” In practice, this means hundreds of thousands of party bureaucrats or simply average job seekers turned into state-sanctioned “agriculture managers” (effectively rural “enforcers” for the CCP) descending on villages and small towns – a nightmare scenario for farmers.These enforcers have already sowed resentment and chaos in rural communities. In one instance from earlier this year that went viral on Chinese social media, agricultural managers threatened to uproot backyard fruit and...

Why did so many Americans receive strange packages they didn’t think they’d ordered?Sid miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner, sat atop his stallion Smokey and faced the camera. It was Saturday, August 1, 2020. Miller had a message to share. “Good morning, patriots,” Miller began, raising the coiled lasso in his right hand by way of greeting. “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of all these surprises coming out of China. First it was the Chinese virus, then we had the murder hornets, then we had to close the embassy in Houston because of espionage … Now we’ve...