Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "GOP seeks farm bill support amid immigration debate" video.

  1. Food choices are largely under the control of consumers. I'd like to see a massive shift towards locally grown and permaculture. I'd trust the guy I can go visit a lot more than some farmer from another country. But I don't want it sent down from on high as a mandate from Congress. That's the thing about a free market. It's what we make of it, with our individual choices, that decides the day. Something I WOULD support from government is Cities and Towns, for max sustainability and min carbon footprint, to encourage import replacement. LOCAL tax breaks for LOCAL growers. And public awareness. MOST people making a decent living would probably choose to pay double or triple for their produce - the cheapest aisle in the supermarket! - to have it done in planet-and-people-friendly fashion. Special deals on produce that's close to expiration date, for poorer people, for pennies on the dollar... There are a lot of things we can do, locally, to make the feds irrelevant, but we always look to them to fix everything and then bitch because of the way things turned out. I think smart people like you could recruit a LOT of people to doing things, differently, of their own free will, and the marketplace would respond in more nuanced ways than any bunch of technocrats trying to define the physics of a frisbee, when any fool just uses their eyes, hands and legs to go get the damn thing.
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  2. Greenhouses in the outlying vicinity of cities and towns. You can WAY out-produce conventional agriculture, per acre, with smart, climate-controlled installations. We are very grains-based, though, but that's a holdover - some might say throwback - to our first experiments in civilization thru agriculture. We ARE very addicted to our breads and tortillas, though, aren't we? And for growing out West, in more arid country, maybe ancient Persia could give us some guidance on sustainability. But the first thing I'D do - and piss of Rino Grassley - is end all subsidies on corn. Corn is a stupid crop to use for fuel. And it's a robber crop, requiring fertilization. Maybe the feds get off their asses and allow hemp, which, as I understand it, is a nitrogen-fixing crop, beneficial to soils. We really do need to break free of the petroleum-to-fertilizer paradigm, imo. Another dumb thing. Farmers should take a lesson from the Amish or Pennsylvania Deutsch, and return to soil-BUILDING farming. We rob the soil and then inject nutrients, artificially. And rather than let the land lie fallow, we're dead set on using every square inch ... ... or, better yet, we like to COUNT every square inch and - hilarious - receive a government check for NOT farming it! What a scam for landowners! But ya gotta be big enough to really cash in.
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