Wheat, Bread, Noodles and Global Competition

By Alan Caruba

My late Mother used to bake her own breads, along with cookies, cakes, and pies. I miss the taste of freshly baked bread and I miss the aroma that floated from the kitchen to the rest of the house. The author of several cookbooks, she knew a lot about the history of foods. Much of history was shaped by the development of agriculture, the growing of grains.

In the Middle East, it wasn’t called the Fertile Crescent for nothing. In Rome there were public ovens. The bakers of ancient Greece had a worldwide reputation. Much later when French peasants could not get bread, it sparked a revolution. “Let them eat cake” cost Marie Antoinette her head!

Great famines have marked history as well. There is a reason why bread is called the staff of life and there is a reason to keep an eye on today’s worldwide market for wheat. It reflects the competition between nations for the sale of this vital commodity.

Casting an eye over the world, one learns that Syria, in the midst of the riots to overthrow the Assad dictatorship, the more mundane business of the country goes on including the announcement that it plans to sell 50,000 tons of durum in extra stock bought from farmers last year.

Wheat Life, a publication of the Washington Growers of Wheat Association, monitors the global wheat market for its readers. Suffice to say that wheat is a major export for the U.S., generating billions in revenue every year. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. wheat exports will reach 31.3 million metric tons (mmt) in 2011 and 2012.

Farmers, as always, are dependent on the weather and other factors over which they have no control. In the U.S. the environmental movement has often been responsible for shutting off their access to water to “save” some reptile or other species. The EPA is trying to define “dust”, a by-product of farming, as a “pollutant.” This kind of regulation has a serious impact on the availability of all manner of foods at your local supermarket, in restaurants, and bakeries.

Since the growth of all vegetation, including wheat, is dependent on an abundance of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, the demand by global warming hucksters that emissions of this vital gas be reduced is idiotic, either domestically or worldwide.

But I digress. The fact that the world is now home to seven billion hungry humans will put a lot of pressure on farmers to produce more wheat, rice and other grains.

In 2007 India banned the export of wheat, but “large crops and inefficient storage centers means large quantities of India’s crop is spoiled every year.” India’s politicians are under a lot of pressure to ensure that the price of wheat remains within reach of its millions of poor people. Recently, however, India announced that it would allow private companies to export two million metric tons from its 86 mmt annual yield. That would make India the world’s second largest wheat producer after China.

China, however, is paying a price for the expansion of its wheat production. The Chinese Academy of Sciences says that the overuse of chemical fertilizers for the past thirty years is causing the deterioration of arable soil. When you have more than a billion people to feed, it poses a problem that could translate into political unrest, so the Chinese leadership pays a lot of attention to such things.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Russia’s export of wheat is expected to quadruple from last year to 16 mmt. In 2010, a hot summer that resulted in poor production led to a ban on wheat exports. The demand for Russian wheat has “outstripped the ability of the ports to handle it.” Former Soviet satellite nations such as Bulgaria and the Ukraine have had a banner year for wheat production.

This in turn has knocked Pakistan’s wheat producers out of the competitive marketplace despite the fact that it is the Middle East’s third largest wheat producer. Its expected exports of 3 mmt have been reduced to 1.8 mmt. Along with all its other problems, the excess wheat is likely to be dumped on the domestic market, driving prices downward.

From nation to nation, wheat, whether in abundance or the lack thereof, affects their internal affairs in ways that only rarely make headlines, but it remains as valuable as oil and other commodities that shape policies.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Spending Insanely While the Economy Collapses

By Alan Caruba

America is a sovereign nation, a constitutional Republic that will celebrate the 235th anniversary of its declaration of independence in 1776 and the 223rd anniversary of its Constitution which became effective when the State of New Hampshire became the ninth State to ratify it in 1788.

By most indications it is a nation in its death throes. Its original values and virtues are being jettisoned and that is always a sign of internal rot. The passage of a law legalizing gay, same-sex marriage in New York State is just one example. It becomes the sixth State to do so.

Families are regarded as the keystone to a healthy society. When they begin to disintegrate or are redefined as same-sex, most observers conclude that a range of social problems will ensue.

The Census Bureau recently announced that married couples no longer head a majority of families in the United States. They now represent only 48% of households, based on data from the 2010 census. It is the first time this has ever occurred.

The 2008-2009 financial crisis was a wake-up call. The nation has been through such crises in the past including the Great Depression from 1929 until the start of World War Two in 1941. The present administration, Congress, and Federal Reserve has responded in much the same way it did in the past and, not surprisingly, the economy has not responded to a flood of “quantitative easing”, governmental make-work programs, and similar efforts.

As Ronald Reagan told us, government is not the answer, government is the problem.

Let me share just a few examples of what is so terribly wrong.

The U.S. Department of Transportation cancelled a $1.2 million federal highway program that would have sent employees on a 17-day globe-trotting journey “to photograph different billboards” after ABC News told the Department it planned to air a report on it. The program has been around for a decade, allegedly to study how other countries handle their major highway networks, motorcycle safety, managing pavement, and “adapting to climate change.”

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced the awarding of $26.7 million in “sweat equity” grants to produce at least 1,500 affordable homes for low-income individuals and families. Grants were made at a time when there is an abundance of homes in the marketplace that have been emptied by foreclosure or the decision to walk away from them because the mortgage costs more than the decreased value of the home. A total of four cities received these grants. This same department handed out more than $31 million in grants to public housing authorities, resident associations, and non-profit organizations. It appears to be a lame effort to keep people on payrolls at a time of growing unemployment.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is giving $60 million in the form of $20 million each to three public universities in Florida, Iowa, and Idaho (the first two States have political importance in the forthcoming election) as a “major scientific investment in studying the effects of climate change on agriculture and forest production.”

Climate change is the new way of describing “global warming.” At a time when an estimated 14 million Americans are out of work, the USDA is enriching professors of tree physiology and claiming that climate change will increase levels of food contamination “from chemicals” such as the ones used to actually grow crops and protect them against weeds and insect depredation.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, through its Forest Service Awards, has also given away nearly $3 million for “renewable energy projects” at the same time the administration has tapped the Strategic Oil Reserve—intended for use only for emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina—in a lame effort to lower prices at the gas pump. Secretary Tom Vilsack claimed that “Biomass is a vital part of America’s clean energy future” while Congress was voting to discontinue subsidies to ethanol producers that were costing Americans billions.

These are just three government departments that are giving away millions for useless, politically-motivated, grants and programs that drain the public treasury. The news, however, gets worse.

Wayne Crews, a vice president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, is an expert on the impact of federal government regulation of business and industry. He recently noted that the federal government “is on track to spend more than $3.5 trillion this year. What most people don’t know is that government costs about fifty percent more than what it spends. That’s because complying with federal regulations costs an addition $1.75 trillion—nearly an eighth of GDP. And almost none of that cost appears on the budget.”

“At the end of 2009, the Code of Federal Regulations was 157,974 pages long. In 2010, 3,752 new rules hit the books—equivalent to a new regulation coming into effect every 2 hours and 20 minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

While Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke was telling reporters he had no idea why the economy was stalled, growing at an appalling rate of just over 1 percent annually, the government was continuing to throw money away in the name of climate change, a green economy, and countless other giveaway programs labeled “discretionary spending.”

The author, Ayn Rand, warned that, “When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obsessed with Food

By Alan Caruba

“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My late Mother, Rebecca, taught the art of gourmet cooking in New Jersey adult schools for over thirty years. When the troops came back from the war in Europe, they had been introduced to its cuisine and they encouraged their wives to prepare it.

Mother studied cookbooks like scholars study ancient manuscripts. She would author two cookbooks and the title of one perfectly captured her outlook, ‘Cooking with Wine and High Spirits.’ “There are people who just eat to live,” she would say, “and those who live to eat”, meaning people who loved good food, lovingly prepared.

Neither I, nor my Father or Mother ever got fat. We ate well and enjoyed wine with our meals, but we were never over-weight in any fashion although, as we got passed our fifties, both my Dad and I did acquire the paunch typical of older men.

In the best book ever written on the subject, “Fat: It’s Not What You Think”, by Connie Leas (Prometheus Books, 2008), she noted that ”It’s the male sex hormone, testosterone, that’s responsible for this selected buildup of fat in (men’s) abdominal region.” And, listen up girls, “An adult woman has about twice as much body fat as the average man” and this is likely due to natural selection over the millennia.

“The fat you carry around has useful functions,” wrote Leas. “It stores energy for future use, produces important chemicals, builds cell membranes and neural structures, provides padding, insulates against cold, supplies fuel, and supports your immune system. Fat can be your friend!”

I’m not talking about obesity here. I am talking about carrying a comfortable amount of weight that is not dictated by self-appointed arbiters. Your body size is determined by your DNA, your genes, your inheritance from prior generations. After that, it’s up to you to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Something is very wrong when the government, local, country, state or federal, passes laws regarding what you can and cannot eat, whether dining out or at home.

Perhaps, because we live in a society that provides an abundance of foods and an abundance of choices among foods, that accounts for why our society is so obsessed with eating and obsessed with weight.

Just count how many food-related or diet-related commercials you watch on television every day. Consider, too, the many channels and programs devoted to the topics of food and dieting. Then add in all the magazines, food columns, and blogs devoted to cooking.

Lynne Finnerty, the editor of the American Farm Bureau Federation newspaper, recently took note of “Health officials (that) are sounding alarms about our obesity epidemic. Maybe the issue isn’t the food itself,” said Finnerty, “but our preoccupation with it. Maybe it’s just up to us, as it’s always been, to decide how much is enough.” I agree!

It should come as no surprise that the same scoundrels who propagated the global warming hoax in order to get rich selling “carbon credits” and mandating that utilities use wind and solar energy, are also involved in trying to determine everyone’s dietary choices.

Tom DeWeese, founder of the American Policy Center, recently connected the dots of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 “sustainable development” hogwash with its endless efforts to control every aspect of the Earth’s population. Noting its emphasis on vegetarianism, DeWeese cited research by Dr. William Campbell Douglas who writes a blog called the Daily Dose.

Douglas wrote, “When researchers studied 300 vegetarian patients at Hiranandani Hospital (India) for a year, they were stunned to find that 70% of them were either suffering from heart disease or were at high risk of heart attacks.” Nearly all were badly deficient in vitamin B12, an essential nutrient found in meat.

DeWeese warned against Wal-Mart’s aggressive goals for allegedly improving ways that food is grown and transported across the globe. “In other words, Wal-Mart is now going to enforce sustainable farm policy on all of the suppliers and customers, just as Whole Foods. This is not free markets, it is huge global corporations playing footsy with radical environmental groups and pretending it’s for the common good.”

A history professor of mine used to say, “No government is more than two weeks away from being brought down if it cannot feed its citizens.” In the last century, however, both the Russian and the Chinese communists were responsible for the deaths of millions from famines, some deliberate, some avoidable.

On January 5, Bloomberg News, citing the United Nations reported that “World food prices rose to a record in December on higher sugar, grain and oilseed costs… exceeding levels reached in 2008 that sparked deadly riots from Haiti to Egypt.” Some of those riots were the direct result of redirecting massive amounts of corn from livestock feed and in food production to the mandated production of ethanol to be mixed with gas.

The global cycle of colder weather that began in the late 1990s will account for fewer crops just as it did during the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. It had profound affects on history over the course of five hundred years, bringing down monarchies and ending serfdom in Europe.

Modern farming technologies, genetically modified crops, and other advances such as fertilization and the proper application of pesticides and herbicides ensures that a mere two percent of the U.S. population feeds the rest of us and still has plenty for export. Food exports in 2011 are expected to generate $113 billion.

The Greens and their counterparts who pretend to represent consumers spread endless lies about agricultural methods, chemicals used to safeguard and preserve the shelf-life of foods, as well as the foods we choose to eat. They destroy production by getting water shut off to farming areas by claiming some specie is endangered. They threaten the freedom we savor along with a delicious meal.

Everywhere petty politicians seek to pass laws regarding where one can dine, what can be on the menu, and how it must be prepared. Those who dine at home find packaging loaded with food warnings. It is deliberate and it is baseless.

These busybodies, nags and harridans should be driven from the marketplace with torches and pitchforks.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Organic Food Scam

By Alan Caruba

Once, years ago, I was in a Midwestern State talking with a farmer. I raised the question of how much pesticide he used on his crop to ward off or kill insect predators or, in the case of weeds, how much herbicide.

“Look, my family and I eat a part of what I grow,” he said. “Do you think I am going to put anything on the crop that would endanger them?” Good answer.

I thought about that encounter while reading a really extraordinary book by an organic crop inspector that just blows the whole scam about organic foods wide open. “Is It Organic?” is a 599-page book by Mischa Popoff that comes with a wonderful history of farming while revealing why the public is being conned into believing that organic foods are safer and better for them when all they are is more expensive.

The book is available from http://www.isitorganic.ca/. If you’re a consumer interested in environmentalism, the history and politics of organic foods, or you are involved in agriculture the price is worth it. If you like plain talk and honest outrage, every fact-filled page will prove far more educational than most of the literature about environmentalism, energy, socialism, and agriculture than you will find anywhere.

“I believed in the principle of producing top-quality food and letting the market decide if it was worth more. Still do in fact,” writes Popoff. “But I learned the organic industry abandoned living up to that principle long ago.”

The secret this multi-billion dollar industry doesn’t want anyone to know is that “there is no field testing on certified organic farms to ensure synthetic fertilizers and toxic chemicals are not being used and to ensure harmful pathogens from animal waste are safely eliminated. The excuse I was given is that field testing is too expensive; something I later learned is patently false.”

“Testing in the field goes straight to the heart of what organic farming always meant throughout its vibrant history, until it was ruined by political activists. You’ll hear talk of end-product testing, but it’s a BIG waste of time. Synthetic chemicals dissipate if you wait long enough.”

“Honest organic farmers want field testing and so do consumers; so why is it rejected in this multi-billion dollar industry at the same time as it’s talked about as if it was the routine?”

Popoff explains that, “Organic food sold from one end of this continent to the other, whether grown locally or overseas, becomes ‘certified’ based on paperwork refereed by activist private-sector bureaucrats who make money hand over fist by giving their stamp of approval.”

Like global warming, organic food is a scam and it is run by an “unscientific, undemocratic, radical socialist movement” that eclipses the organic farmer “and bilks consumers in order to underwrite a political revolution that is about to impact your ability to feed your family.”

Food Pornography

Popoff calls it “food pornography”, an industry that calls itself organic, “but which is really just pure marketing from start to finish, promising everything and delivering nothing.”

“The genius of claiming that private companies test organic food,” says Popoff, “before they accept it as truly organic and put their corporate brand on it lies in the fact that there’s no possible way to know if it’s true.”

This is a very refreshing book to read on many levels and it’s worth knowing the author did not grow up in some suburban enclave and lived a privileged life. He was a farm boy “My family didn’t have a phone ‘til I was seven and I got my first horse before we got a television. I learned to drive a tractor and the bail truck when I was ten, and I got my first car, a three-speed standard, at the age of twelve.”

Far from the usual story of some PhD holding forth based solely on academic study and research, Popoff worked his way through college “grinding hamburger on the graveyard shift at a local grocery store.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1991 with honors in history and a minor in philosophy.

I doubt that “Is it Organic?” will leap onto the bestseller lists, but it deserves to be widely noted and widely read. It’s the literary equivalent of a lighted dynamite stick, exciting to read and thrillingly honest, a dangerous book in the best possible way.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Saving the Earth by Hating Humanity

By Alan Caruba

As the greatest hoax of the modern era, “global warming”, bites the dust around the world, it behooves us all to contemplate why environmentalists—Greens—would attempt to hoodwink the world’s population into believing they could do anything to “control” the planet’s climate.

One singular fact stands out in all Green propaganda and permeates all the legislation and other programs they sponsor. It is a contempt and disdain for the Earth’s human population. The leaders of the movement hate humanity. Obsessed with population growth, anything that can reduce it—disease, poverty, famine, or lack of energy is pursued as part of the Green agenda.

The Green movement grew out of an earlier, more salutary one, conservation. We can surely thank Americans such as John Muir and others who sought to preserve tracts of wilderness such as Yellowstone and the nation’s forested areas from the rampant depredations of the 1800s and early 1900s. The nation owes a debt of gratitude to President Theodore Roosevelt for the initial creation of national parks and forests.

As the nation industrialized, rivers suffered pollution and the air was polluted by factories that befouled both. In 1970 President Richard M. Nixon signed into being the Environmental Protection Agency which, empowered by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, can be credited to early success.

However, like all government agencies, the EPA has steadily sought to expand its powers and, aided by other environmentally related agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Corps of Engineers, it has relentless pursued ever larger control over all the land and waters of the nation, and by extension over everyone’s life.

They pose a threat to the constitutionally protected right to private property, vital to the nation’s economy and a keystone of capitalism.

The growth of literally hundreds of “environmental” organizations has led to an endless barrage of scare campaigns, often without any basis in science, and used to undermine the industrial, agricultural, and transportation sectors of the nation’s economy.

On a global scale, the United Nations Environmental Program and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have pursued an agenda devoid of scientific merit or justification.

Greens lie and they lie all the time

The lies about Alar came close to wrecking apple growers. The lies about the spotted owl species laid waste to the northwest’s timber industry. New claims about alleged dangers from plastic bottles are based on lies.

The lie that carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, has anything to do with “warming” has driven the totally deceitful “global warming” hoax and is used to create a market for worthless “carbon credits” that ultimately increase the cost of energy and everything else.

The introduction of the Endangered Species Act is one long history of near constant failure in pursuit of a foolish goal, advocating for obscure species while thwarting all manner of projects useful to the human species. It has been used to impoverish farmers in Oregon and California.

The truth is that the Earth is actually cooling, not warming. Carbon Dioxide is not a “pollutant.” The North and South Poles are not melting. Sea levels worldwide are not rising any more than they have for millennia. Polar bears are thriving. Solar and wind energy is a bust, providing barely 1% of all electricity used daily nationwide.

The truth is that pesticides protect people against insect and rodent-borne diseases and property damage. Saving “endangered species” ignores the fact that 95% of all the species that previously existed are now extinct.

The truth is that nothing humans do has any affect on the climate that is dependent on solar and ocean cycles.

The Greens are now famous for their campaigns against products from toilet paper to plastic bags, bottles, and everything else made from plastic, a petroleum derivative. Anyone who buys “environmentally” approved products is being charged a premium for their own gullibility. Every supermarket and store in America has comparable, safe products at far lower costs.

Americans are constantly harangued to adopt Green lifestyles. Generations of young Americans have suffered the child abuse of being told that the Earth is doomed despite its 4.5 billion year existence.

Corporations that advertise and promote their “Green” credentials pander to environmental hoaxes in order to avoid criticism and generate an “environmentally friendly” public image.

The real environmental message speaks to a hatred of humanity and the many technological, medical, agricultural, and other achievements that have enhanced, improved, and saved the lives of millions.

If you hate energy, join an environmental organization.

If you hate science, join an environmental organization.

If you hate jobs in America, join an environmental organization.

If you hate industrial and agricultural development and progress, join an environmental organization.

And if you hate humanity, join an environmental organization.

Wheat, Yes, Wheat!

By Alan Caruba

Today, we shall talk of wheat. Yes, wheat!

Since 98% of Americans have no connection to farming beyond a visit to the supermarket, most give no thought to how food products get to the shelves.

However, if you do a quick inventory of the foods you eat on a daily basis, you will discover that a significant number have some connection to wheat. Pizza crust is a wheat product. Some cereals (Wheaties!) and all pastas begin as wheat.

All breads. All cookies. All cakes and pies. All pancakes. Donuts, too. Hhhhhmmmm, donuts!

Born and raised in the suburbs, I never gave any thought to farming until my work as a writer and photojournalist took me to the fields of farmers around the nation to document aspects of their work. It was a revelation.

Indeed, as revelations go, if you are at all familiar with the Old Testament, you should swiftly begin to add up the many references to this king of all grains. From “give us our daily bread” to “cast your bread upon the waters” wheat has played an essential role in the development of civilizations dependent upon it or which thrived based on its export.

Little wonder that the lyrics of “America the Beautiful” begin, “O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain!”

Wheat still plays an important, though largely unreported role among nations today. China recently completed a three-month inventory and, with a population of more than a billion, it is little wonder that Chinese officials say that “grain has always been the first and foremost issue to maintain peace and stability.”

I had a college professor who suggested that no government is ever more than two weeks of being overthrown and replaced if it cannot feed its people.

Saudi Arabia just purchased 440,000 tons of hard wheat from the U.S. A desert nation, it needs about 2.3 million tons of wheat per year. The disruption to life in Pakistan, thanks to al Qaeda and the Taliban, has affected its wheat production and the U.S. is providing $26 million to go toward the purchase of wheat and other food. The world’s largest importer of grains is Japan and it is looking to use overseas investments in nations like Brazil, Argentina, Romania and Hungary to ensure a stable supply of food as global demand increases.

So maybe now wheat isn’t as boring a topic as you might have thought, eh?

While most people think of Kansas when you say wheat, the State of Washington is a major producer and Dr. David Bragg, Ph.D., an extension entomologist, recently enumerated the insect pests that can be depended upon to attack wheat.

They include the Russian Wheat Aphid, the Ladybird Beetle, the English Grain Aphid and Rosy Grass Aphid. Then there’s the Haanchen Barley Mealybug and Wireworm Beetle Larvae, as well as the False Wireworm, the Cereal Leaf Beetle, Cutworms and Armyworms. By no means should we leave out the Wheat Stem Maggot, the Wheat Stem Saw Fly, and the Wheat Joint Worm.

I want you to think about this army of insect predators the next time some environmental group is demanding that all pesticides be banned and that all grains and vegetables be grown “organically.” They feel the same about the herbicides that counter the affect of an astonishing range of weeds that also want to take up residence in Farmer Jones’ fields.

America is blessed to be the “bread basket” to much of the world that imports our wheat. Agricultural exports account for a major part of our national wealth and, other than the producers of the energy we use, our farmers and ranchers are among the most essential citizens we have in this great nation of ours.

And that, dear reader is today’s tribute to wheat!

Killing Pesticides, Not Pests

By Alan Caruba

We are going to go from cotton fields to bedrooms in order to connect the dots on the many ways the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups have conspired to deprive Americans of beneficial chemicals that protect crops and humans from insect pests.

Only a scant two percent of the U.S. population engages in the farming that feeds all the rest of us and provides a bounty for export. Farm kids will tell you how they were on a tractor by the age of eight or nine, working the fields from early morning until dusk. When they get older, a lot of them decide to take up another way of making a living because farming is very hard work.

Since the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, not to mention the Department of Agriculture, a life spent farming has become increasingly more difficult thanks to the endless regulations regarding land and water use, what products they can use to fend off the pests and weeds that attack crops, and the manner in which they can be applied.

Why should this matter to you? Ask yourself that question while you are prowling the aisles in your favorite supermarket. Here’s the equation to keep in mind: No farmers. No food. And that includes livestock that depend on feed like hay and grains. If you like a nice cotton shirt or dress, remember that it started in a farmer’s field.

On August 3, the Western Environmental Law Center sent out a news release to brag about that way the 6th Circuit had issued an order denying the pesticide industry’s petition for rehearing in National Cotton Council v. EPA No. 06-4630. The order upheld the Court’s earlier finding that pesticide residuals and biological pesticides constitute pollutants under the Clean Water Act.

Just about everything is a “pollutant” as far as the EPA is concerned, but they really hate pesticides. Now farmers seeking to protect their crops will be required to get a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit. If their neighbors or just about anyone objects, they won’t get it.

Let me tell you about some of the pests that attack cotton. They include Alfalfa Looper, Boll Weevil Song, Cotton Bollworm, Cutworms, Leafhoppers, Pink Bollworm, Saltmarsh Catapillers, Silverfish Whitefly, Webspinning Spider Mites, and something called Thrips.

Those are just a few of the insect pests that attack a cotton crop and they are just a few of the hundreds of insect species with which farmers of every kind of crop must contend. The invention of pesticides tipped the struggle in their favor, allowing them to protect crops in a fashion that permits them to feed the rest of us.

Now, here’s where it goes beyond just the problems farmers encounter. The rest of us are subject to every kind of disease imaginable because a lot of insect pests transmit them. They did so quite famously during the Black Death that wiped out a third of Europe’s population and, these days, they spread Lyme Disease, West Nile Fever, Rocky Mountain Fever, Dysentery, and all manner of nasty stuff, including the Bubonic plague.

By 1996 the EPA had whipped up everybody’s fears that pesticides were so harmful to children that even more regulation was needed, so Congress obligingly passed the Food Quality Protection Act and it amended the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.

While it is true that the EPA hasn’t banned a pesticide since DDT, it is equally true that it has found all kinds of ways to eliminate a variety of pesticides from use. Usually they cite “studies” in which some rats are stuffed so full of high doses of a pesticide that it causes them to become ill. Short of drinking a pesticide directly from the bottle, this is not likely to happen to you. Most structural pesticides are so diluted when applied that they are a threat solely to the pests.

All of which means that, while the farmers are encountering difficulty dealing with Mother Nature’s nasty creatures, the rest of us are increasingly vulnerable to them as well. A case in point is the raging population of bed bugs that was the subject of a recent EPA “summit.”

Simply put, if the EPA had not forced Ficam, a bendiocarb applied with water, and chlorpyrifos, formerly known as Dursban off the market, there would be NO bedbug problem because either one of these excellent pesticides would eliminate them.

The EPA’s message to us is that we should learn to love bedbugs because they are difficult and costly to eliminate these days. Fortunately, they do not spread disease.

And you thought the EPA was “protecting” you?

No, they are protecting the “environment.”

A New Definition of Agriculture

By Alan Caruba

When is a car not a car? When you decide to call it a bicycle. When is a horse not a horse? When you decide to call it a cow. Just because you call something a name that does not properly describe it does not change its reality, but I live in New Jersey where reality is subject to the whim of the morons we elect to represent us.

Thus, I give you a piece of legislation sponsored by State Senator Bob Smith that would redefine wind turbines and solar panels as “agriculture.” And all this time you thought agriculture was about growing crops and raising livestock.

An Associated Press article in the July 1 edition of The New Jersey Farmer, one of my favorite publications, the headline read, “N.J. weighs bill encouraging alternative farm energy.” It would define solar and wind energy generation as an “agricultural activity.”

Now, I grant you some savvy farmers have installed solar panels to generate electricity to run their farms, but to suggest that covering acre after acre of preserved farmland with solar panels and wind turbines is a truly bad idea. In fact, it’s so bad that the bill offers those who would do this protection “from nuisance complaints from neighbors, similar to protections farmers have from complaints about the smell of manure, for instance.”

If you don’t like the smell of manure, it’s probably not a good idea to build your home near a farm, something that people who think food magically appears on the shelves of supermarkets, were unaware of when they decided to retire to the bucolic areas of the state.

“Despite New Jersey being the most densely populated state, it is a leader in farm preservation, with more than 18 percent of its farmland preserved.” This was one of the few good ideas the legislature enacted. It has cost the state $680 million and another $358 million from local government and charities to ensure that our little paradise is not entirely paved over or turned into wall-to-wall strip malls and housing developments.

I am not alone in thinking it is a bad idea. Alison Mitchell, a policy director with the New Jersey Conservation Foundation points out that “farm preservation is meant to save agriculture and farmland—not spur new construction on preserved land.” You think?

The bill has cleared a N.J. Senate committee and is awaiting a vote by the full Senate. It has yet to have received assembly consideration. New Jersey is a state in which its entire Congressional delegation and Governor remains unalterably opposed to offshore exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas, but apparently covering farmland with solar panels and wind turbines is a good thing.

Imagine the joy of going to the shore and enjoying one of our many beaches and then driving home past miles and miles of wind turbines or solar panels, some of which are actually producing a small measure of power if the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. The rest of the time they would just be a giant eyesore.

And then imagine that they are “agriculture” and not some demented politician’s idea of what farming and ranching really should be.

Here's what everyone should worry about. Laws like this get picked up and enacted by other States.

Who Needs Farmers?

By Alan Caruba

In a bygone era, New Jersey was so famous for its farms that it was nicknamed “The Garden State.” Today, Governor Jon Corzine is in charge. He is a zillionaire who first bought the job of Senator and, grown bored with that, bought his current position by virtue of being able to outspend any Republican opponent no matter how qualified.

Gov. Corzine has purposed, among a number of other ideas that have seriously annoyed taxpayers, that the State Department of Agriculture be eliminated as a way to reduce the obscene debt that has accrued from a succession of previous governors who could not see their way to actually taking an axe to an annually bloated budget.

Apparently the Governor has no idea the role that agriculture plays in New Jersey. That’s not surprising because, other than believing the sun rises and sets on the civil service unions, he doesn’t seem to know much about the State.

For example, New Jersey currently is home to 9,800 farms, comprising some 790,000 acres. In a State where open space is a valuable commodity, that’s 17% of the State’s landmass or 50% of the remaining open space. Fully 1,646 farms have joined a Farmland Protection program to insure that whole State doesn’t get paved over and turned into a parking lot.

Before you think that farming in New Jersey is a quaint leftover from the past, it’s worth noting that agriculture contributes $924 million in cash receipts to the State’s economy. When you add in a food and agricultural industry involving processing, retail sales, and the 60,000 jobs involved, you’re talking about a significant piece of the economy.

Still, despite the fact that the Department of Agriculture, a vital state agency that represents farming and ranching interests, only represents $10 million of an appalling $33.5 billion total State budget, Gov. Corzine wants to “save” that money, perhaps to transfer it to one of the State’s decaying urban centers that seem to suck up all the spare money while small towns and suburbs that vote Republican never seem to get anything but a few scraps.

The State government employs a total of over 68,000 people. That’s a lot of people to service just over 8 million citizens, many of whom are packing up and leaving thanks to some of the highest property taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes in the nation. They are moving, well, anywhere else except maybe Connecticut or California. The Department of Agriculture employs just 245 people or 0.004 percent of the total number of civil servants.

But, seriously, who needs a Department of Agriculture anyway? Unless, of course, you want to keep the animals safe from all manner of infectious diseases that seem to make it halfway around the globe in no time flat these days. Love Mad Cow Disease? Avian Bird Influenza? Mad about the Gypsy Moth or Asian Longhorned Beetle? The NJDA keeps a watchful eye out for threats to our food supply.

Getting rid of the Department of Agriculture might be noticed by the 144,742 school kids that receive nutritious breakfasts and lunches or the 27,382 students provided with milk every day.

The NJDA is involved in a lot of programs that don’t hit the front pages, but are vital for the welfare of children, the less fortunate who visit soup kitchens and pantries where surplus federal food is distributed. Then there’s the conservation of soil and water resources and protecting farmland from development while, at the same time, expanding export markets for fresh and processed products. The Department also promotes New Jersey’s fishing industry.

The recent largest recall of beef products by Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Company of Chino, California, is being overseen by, guess who? The State Department of Agriculture, working with the U.S.D.A.

Farm state governors understandably have a far better grasp of the role of agriculture, not just in their own states, but nationally. Agriculture is a major contributor to the nation’s economy, even if it has been distorted of late with an idiotic Congressional mandate to turn corn and soy into ethanol, thus requiring that we actually burn a huge portion of our food supply for no good reason.

It is not too much to expect New Jersey’s Governor to grasp the important role that agriculture plays in a state better known for its shore, its sports teams, and the now departed Miss America contest. What we need is some fiscal sanity. What we got was a succession of governors who borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. Now we have one who wants to financially penalize everyone who hasn’t left already.

So, while you’re at it, Governor Corzine, why do we need that dopey “Garden State” moniker? Why not something like the “Tolls On Every Highway State”? Or just the “I Don’t Have a Clue how to Run a State, State?”

Editorial Note: My thanks to William V. Griffin, president of the New Jersey State Board of Agriculture, for the statistical data cited above.