Government Imposed Extermination!

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 15 March 2024…

Hey Y’all!

Good morning and happy Fast-Jet Friday from Air2Ground Farms! The fast jets today are the Mighty-Mighty F-15E Strike Eagle flying low in Wales. Notice the FAT sheep in the background of the bottom pic? It looks like they grow sheep big in Wales! The middle pic is the sky yesterday just after the gust front passed and before the storm hit. We were under a tornado and severe hail warning but thankfully, all we got was a heavy rain with some wind. The picture doesn’t show the colors exactly, the sky was that weird yellowish color that it gets sometimes before strong storms. The top pic is our new A2/A2 Jersey heifer. She is doing very well and has adjusted to life here on our farm without issue. We selected her name and made a video of the process…check out the video tomorrow (goes live at 6:00 AM CDT) to find out her name! We spent the morning adjusting the hog area so that we could put the trailer down there. We got everything situated and the trailer in place, to include buckets of feed in the trailer. When we left, they weren’t interested in checking it out, but half of their breakfast is in there, which should entice them to explore. This afternoon, we will put their entire meal in the trailer. We much prefer self-loading hogs than fighting with them to get them on the trailer. The sheep continue to break out of their pasture, about 3-4 times per week. Normally, after we run them back in, they don’t get out again that same day. We’ve got about 2 more weeks and then they will be locked in with electric wire and netting, which should stop their wandering. The beef herd is doing well. The hay we fed this winter has treated them very well and no one lost condition over the winter, which makes us feel good. Happy is getting close to having her calf. Her udder is tight and she is getting “sloppy” in the hind-end, both signs that calving is imminent.

I last wrote about government mandates for electronic IDs for cattle. If you watched the podcast, you know the potential impacts it will have on small farmers. Today, I want to bring another small-farmer issue to your attention. According to the USDA, the number of farms in America plummeted by 140,000 in the last 5 years, or about 2,500 farms going away EVERY month. Most of them are small farms which earn less than $50,000 per year—which decreased by almost 10%. Contrast that to large farms which earn over $1M per year which increased by 36% over the same time period. Why? Rising costs, falling revenue, and green mandates. The USDA expects farm income to continue to decline this year by 25%. Government mandates, like the EID tags, are crushing the small farmers. In fact, since 1950, the number of farms in America dropped by almost 4 million. The food-production industry continues to consolidate into the huge corporations I’ve consistently written about. Often these HUGE companies are foreign, like Smithfield (our nation’s largest pork producer) which is owned by a Chinese company, and JBS (our nation’s largest beef producer) which is owned by a Brazilian company. Where is the food security when the number of producers continue to decline and the big companies continue to gain an increased percentage of the market…and they’re owned by foreign companies? Why did we start a farm? I can tell you it’s not in an effort to get rich! I just hope we can continue to avoid the Government Imposed Extermination of the small farm.

Check out Thursday’s Podcast where we discuss the USDA vs the small farmer and the EID mandates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk8_calYriI

Cheers!

Psycho & Shelley