Defining Healthy Thriving Communities Through Local Farming

By Paul A. Philips

The best investment you can ever make is not in some good savings scheme; stocks and shares or pension fund… no!  The best investment you can ever make is in your health.  What’s the point in having a paid-for house, fancy car and lots of money when you retire but you’re unable to reap the benefits because of your ill-health? Indeed, some may not make it to retirement day because of seriously ill health…

Nothing could be more important to our health than the food we eat. However, in the current paradigm, our food system under the corporatist ruling thumb is driven by questionable unsustainable policies and practices. Corporate political self-interest agendas involving bribed politicians, mass media biased reporting, bad science and deliberate narrow academic approaches are the essential operatives.

So instead of contributing, the corporate-based large-scale food production system is detrimental to health. It gives far more problems than solutions.

It gives us illness-causing GMOs from unexpected toxic genes with agricultural chemicals also having adverse effects, like that of Monsanto’s billion-dollar earner herbicide, Roundup. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, may well be contributing significantly to rising chronic disease.

Roundup compromises our food’s nutrition value by preventing the crops’ ability to uptake nutrients essential for crop development. It also destroys beneficial bacteria present in the soil needed for crop health. The crops need beneficial bacteria for an involvement in defense against a variety of pests.

Further, animals are confined to small spaces in unnatural surroundings. They are reared and fed on GM food such as a diet of grains. In these unnatural unhygienic surroundings the animals have become a major source of antibiotic resistance to disease. This epidemic as a knock-on effect has killed well over 20,000 Americans in a year.

Testament to the large-scale food production system as an abject failure to promote good health

The corporate-controlled food system, in turn, reflects our health. Taking into consideration the system’s nutrition-deficient mass-processed foods which makes up around 85% of the food budget for the average Western world person, and the resulting poor health, it shows us unequivocally that it is failing miserably. In effect it puts big profits above a genuine welfare concern for people.

…but it doesn’t have to be that way

So many people, some without ever realizing, have strayed from their ancestral dietary roots by choosing to consume unhealthy quantities of acidic unhealthy and unnatural processed junk food, giving rise to mass sickness.

There is, however, a way of reconnecting to our ancestral dietary roots and eating real food for good health. The answer lies in small communities and organic local farming.

The small-scale production model

Having woken up to the realization that the current profit-driven corporate controlled industrial monoculture is unsustainable; a growing number of people are choosing a different paradigm. More people are choosing to grow their own food through involvement with the increasing numbers of small community-based local farms.

This sustainable and healthy approach could majorly transform the way we feed ourselves. Innovative and skillful family farm owners are spreading their knowledge to others on how to create thriving small communities through local farming.

Defining this new quality food system, in their vision, these individuals are involved in local politics, jobs, training and social set-ups… acting with solutions to many societal or environmental problems…  What an amazing achievement!

The War on Poverty

As part of the government’s promise to end poverty with the ‘War on Poverty’  more federal money could be put into these business innovations for promoting self-sufficient food communities. Many more farms could be set up and funded across country, especially in urban areas where poverty is at its highest, but I doubt that such government funding initiative will ever happen.

Those controlling the corporate large-scale food production model would perceive these farms collectively as a threat to their profit margins. Big Corporation has already influenced Big Government enough to not incentivize working with local farmers.  Sadly, another reason why the war on poverty is a farce and an abject failure.

Taking back our power

In short, an increasing number of people know that there is a fight on for their food freedom against the big corporations who don’t want to see small-scale food production, as it is perceived as a threat to their business. Governments, bought off by those corporations also don’t want to see small-scale food self-sufficiency as they have an agenda that requires people be more and more dependent on them.

However, that freedom can be achieved by courageously standing up to authorities and actively defining self-sufficient healthy thriving communities through local farming.

You can read more from Paul A. Philips at his site NewParadigm.ws