Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 47 PREVIEW: Farming

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

fucking eggs! comes out of their fucking arses! full episode on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/122067171

We'll do three, two, one, mark. Oh shit, sorry. I jumped the gun on that one. That's good enough. Rob, Rob, you, uh, you know, we, we are bad at this. Four and a half years in, four and a half years in, damn near five and we suck at this. Well, I mean, I don't know, Praxiscast has been going for DF fucking five years as well and we're still shit too, so don't worry about it.

We started in 2019 actually, so it has been literally before the pandemic. Yeah, we started, go ahead, Rob. We started when Corbin was still leader, you know, there's some interesting episodes in the start where we had hope and it's kind of depressing to listen back now. Yeah, yeah. I was going through our old catalog at work forcing the my poor innocent co-workers to listen to my own voice. And there's some ones were like, oh, it's like, COVID is not going to be that bad. And we just like, we so own own own.

It's important to embrace being owned and just run with it. Right. I mean, and I'm never wrong, as we know. Yeah. Was it Cassandra? Was the prophet that she was always right? Cassandra's the one who was always right, but nobody listens to her. Yeah, that's me. Probably. Yeah. This is the problem with being on the left politically as you do wind up being Cassandra.

Being right four years before everyone else gives a shit. Yeah, then Florida sinks or whatever. I was talking with my dad about this over the Christmas break and he was like, yeah, like you're so often right. But like, you know, you it's not nice to talk politics with you because like you're so cynical. I'm like, I know. That's why I'm always right. That's kind of about square that circle. All right, hold on. So to give the viewers a peek behind the curtain as to what I'm doing while I'm also recording this podcast, I mentioned this on 10,000 losses yesterday. This is a bonus episode. I can do

whatever I want. I know it was not here to just slow me down. So I, my father-in-law has access to my Plexer. He sent me a list of approximately 500 movies he wants. So while I'm doing this, I'm also on torrentleach.org, highly recommend it, got six invites if y'all want them. And I'm just like chewing through, like read you some of these movies. Interview with the Vampire, What Lies Beneath, Air Force One, Clear and Present Danger,

great fucking movie. The Future, Patriot Games, Presumed In games presumed innocent frantic the Mosquito Coast Witness apocalypse now great fucking movie What can you just like not crap like the Harrison Ford bundle cuz I can't Take Rob I don't talk to you about your ratio do I know I don't All right, let's crack on I'm English now or whatever. Unfortunately for the listeners, November is not here on account of being killed by a horrible storm in Glasgow.

Scotland's gone. My wonderful, beautiful home country has been wiped off the mat. It's very sad. Did you say the mat? I did say the mat, and I thought, what mat am I referring to? Well, I suppose it's been wiped off the mat. I was thinking, I don't know, there was some shit joke in there, wasn't there? You know, it's been wiped off the, the, the, the heel of Britain's shoe by a storm. It just broke off along like a canal and just drifted away.

How did the, how did the SNP know? Um, have you started toilet training your child yet, Gareth? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They've, they've got a potty. In fact, they asked for a potty just during the night, randomly without any warning, just on the kind of the rundown towards sleep. She, she, she, she kind of said, mommy, buy potty. I was like, Oh, okay. Okay. So, so we did. And she's been sitting on it, but without take, but she takes her trousers down, but she keeps a nappy on, which is, it's just, what's that called? Yeah, she's got it. She's, she's, she's kind of working out. Yeah. Oh, by the way, this

is a bonus. So first, this is a bonus, which is great. Hello everyone. Um, who's, who's paid money to be here. You're wonderful people. Um, two things. Firstly, I know there's, there'll be loads of queer people watching this. Please send me suggestions for toddler books that are super queer, um, queer friendly. Cause although we've done our very best, our book collection is still quite heteronormative. A lot of it's kind of random and abstract and fine, but there's definitely going to be lots of heteronormative stuff. Please send queer book suggestions. I got you. Hold on. You're not going with the exclusive diet of Thomas the Tank Engine?

No, I've been out to be avoiding it. I've been doing my very best to avoid train indoctrination. She'll find her way there herself, although she does love trains. I got you. This was my favorite book as a kid. Oh, Kermit Learns Windows. What? Yeah, it's Kermit learns Windows, dude. It's the one where Bill Gates Bill Gates grooms a muppet. It's, you know, oh, that kind of wind.

I I have the PowerPoint up so I can't see it. I assumed like Kermit was, you know, going to come and, you know, install some, you know, new triple glazing on there, you know. No, I was learns Windows three point one because this book came out in 93. you know, going to come and, you know, install some, you know, new triple glazing on there, you know? No, Kermit Learns Windows 3.1 because this book came out in 93. Oh, wow. Nice. This was a book I begged my parents to read to me.

My mom has said over and over, the most important thing I did as your mom and is read to you as a kid. And I think it really like 100% yeah, yeah, yeah. Every loads, loads, loads. But she was like, you didn't want to hear anything other than Kermit learns Windows. So that may explain some stuff. There's no Kermit Learned Linux is there? That is so, I mean, oh my God. Yeah. Incredible. So I'm still reading.

Like Gareth, you could you could teach your child like MS DOS. Like it's the equivalent of Latin at this point. Just you could teach your child like Emma Stoss. Like it's the equivalent of Latin at this point. Just... It's true. Yeah. Lost language. That's it. Dead language, some might say. So I started reading the URL, Liam, that you dropped me in and I started reading. I was like, oh, interesting. Kermit. And I read Lean's and I was like, oh, is this going to be like Kermit's Gay Awakening as a book? But it's canonical. Because I would be pleased about that. I mean, Miss Piggy might not be, but also, you know, it can be polyamorous, sort of bisexual situation.

It's about the lean angle. Like, Miss Piggy standing up straight and Kermit's like slightly tilted, you know? Yeah, quite. No, and the last thing I want to say before we actually get on with this episode and start recording is to the Network Rail Com's representatives who've had to pay for a patron to listen to this bonus episode. Hi. Hi folks. Anyway, let's talk about something. Rob, what's, if I know, it's a bonus. There's no structure or anything. I was going to say, Roz, I don't want to ruin the start, but it's a bonus. Any shit goes down.

You know who we are, but you don't know our guests. So Rob, could you introduce yourself? Yeah, sorry. Well, I have been known once before, you know, for some of your listeners with with, you know, more memories than I do, genuinely speaking. No. Hi, I'm Rob. I live in Switzerland and I run well run. I'm one of the co-hosts of Praxis cast, which everybody on the call here has been on before, which has been always been delightful. And it's nice to be back. Was wonderful podcast. I always enjoy listening. Yeah. It's on my, it's on my, uh,

on my ever increasing pool of podcasts. I enjoy that. That I now have to, as my ADHD climbs deeper and deeper into my brain and towards, I don't know, my spinal column, I don't know how it works physiologically. My list of podcasts, my list of, my, like my list of FOMO podcasts where I get it like itchy if I don't keep up with it, gets broader. But Praxiscast has been on that fairly high up that list for a long time. So yeah, it's great listening. ADHD is like one of those tiny fish that swim in like jungle rivers. And if you like pee in there, that's how you get ADHD. Oh, they go through your race through, which is on the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions

because apparently it never happened. But also the Nazis over at Wikipedia. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the problem with ADHD getting into your brain stem is then suddenly the fight or flight response doesn't work anymore, you know? You know, all sort of your basic functions stop working. I was about to say, let me get the charts. all sort of your basic functions stop working. One of my main problems is that I don't really have a fight or flight instinct. In that situation

where I'm provided with extreme threat or someone shouting at me, I kind of stay like uncannily relaxed to the point of usually screaming. I was reading about this, about the fight or flight thing. Apparently most people don't actually do either of these things because they were talking about it in the context of some fucking airline disaster where two planes either hit each other or something. One of them was a KLM and one of them was something other you guys might know. Oh yeah, Tenerife disaster. Yeah, we did that.

And apparently like, cause one of the pilots managed to like jump out or something and survives an insane story. And apparently they interviewed survivors and most of them said, yeah, like 10 people tried to run and like bolt out of the plane and the rest just fucking sat there in silence. So there is a third option. There's, you know, fight, flight, the ADHD bond, which is ooh, butterfly. It's like a deer in the headlights. Yeah. Yeah. Well, mine's less deer in the headlights more. I don't have the instinct for what I'm supposed to socially do here in the hierarchy. This may, this is not ADHD related, probably other neurodiversity because these things always come in little clusters and connections and collections. Right. Anyway, this is the neurodivergence corner. Everyone has the neurodivergence

corner. That's a, I can't stop her. So in terms of excellent segues, if we can, you know, talking of things that can't stop burping, let's talk about cows. Mildly. Right. Can we make the slides any bigger? Cause I can, so I can sort of see what the fuck I'm doing and also what slides like coming up next. I'm not sure.

I always just crack the crack the Google crack the Google Doc up on another window. Yeah, that's probably a worse idea. Yeah. It just means, I've never worked, it means I have to guess what Roz's John Matting is. Another little peek behind the curtain if Devon doesn't cut this out. Hi Devon, by the way. I love that this has a picture of Clarks that it just says, fuck. Period.

You. Period. Well, we'll get to that in a minute. Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. Devin, YouTube that, YouTube it. Yeah. Sounds like our own bonus episodes. Yes, go ahead, please.

So today's episode, I wanted to actually, I offered my services to come on, and I want to talk about farming, because I think farming is A, very, very interesting, and B, is essentially like a massive slow rolling crisis that, like many other things, is slowly coming towards us. But this time for a change, I bring solutions to you in the end. So the opening shot is probably something that Gareth may recognize. This is the BSE crisis. This is how Britain got the way it is today. It's a, they, this is BSE, brofine,

sponge form, and cephalitis, which essentially is the disease that cooks your brain that you get when you eat the cows that have been fed on other cows. So they were feeding cows cow meal. And then that made the meat go bad. And then very famously, that's the one you see on the left. It's the minister for farming whose name I've now forgotten, famously fed his daughter a British beef burger on live television to prove that British beef was safe. I think in the end it killed like a hundred thousand people or something, and they had to destroy most of the cattle in the country. Mason- The devil's milkshake, they're rarely given to another person, but you know. Mason- Yeah, not good. No, and it's, this's, this, this means a lot to me because I come from

beef farming stock, admittedly much smaller where they did not indeed feed the beef, the cows to the cows. But yeah, this is the, my, my, my, the Dennis side of the family has been stuck in the North, the Northern little corner of Devon and the same bloody parish for like a thousand years. Um, it's why it's something about the web feet situation going on there. But anyway, so yeah, no comment. Right. So yeah, I want to talk about farming. I've sprinkled in actually a couple of mini actual engineering disasters, you know, your problems. So, you know, bonus listeners won't feel left out when I'm just like chattering about farming, common bullshit like that. But before we get to all that, I do want to do a little bit of self criticism.

I think it's important, Maoist as we may or may not be. So next slide please. We're not bud. Well, well, well. My dad is. I am not. In reference to the previous episode, because I saw there was some controversy about that. This is a German man. You will not convince me otherwise. You show me the long form birth certificate and until I've seen the proof, this is a German man.

Shut the fuck up. Next slide, please. So why are we here apart from that I want to talk about farming. So over the Christmas break, my partner went to see her family for a few days and I was left with nothing better to do. So I watched all three seasons of Clarkson's farm available on Amazon. Don't watch it. It's actually actively bad for you. It's a terrible, terrible show.

So sorry. Yeah. My main problem with it. The worst show in the world. I mean, it's history's greatest monster. So you know, second greatest monster. So it's not quite the same as the other shows that are terrible. But the main thing that's my problem with it is, especially in season one, he does get a few things right about modern farming within a British context, but also in a more sort

of Western context. But it is essentially an entertainment product. And he is, Jeremy Clarkson is a terrible fucking human being who, you know, this is a bonus, right? And it's recorded in the U S so I can say whatever the fuck I like. Right. Yep. He did buy the farm purely for like tax avoidance reasons. Yes. Yes. He did. He, yeah, he, he admitted it at the time. He literally said it in print. He admitted it at the time, oh yeah, I bought it as a tax

dodge. And now when there were farm protests going on about inheritance tax in the UK, he said, no, actually I'm a really real farmer. And it's like, no, you're not. You're just a guy who wants to give a bunch of wealth and form of land to his children. And now he pretends that he's an actual farmer. The real problem with farming, with modern farming in general, is basically it is a system that is designed to ignore two basic things. All natural systems like water, biodiversity, the climate, all that stuff, as well as a sort of production system that is stuck in the 1950s and refuses to evolve for many reasons that we'll get into during the course of this episode. Next slide, please.

I will say in Clarkson's defense, at least in the American context, land speculation is like 50% of the farming business. Oh, it's a huge thing in the UK. Yeah. It's a huge thing everywhere. For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No,. Oh, it's a huge thing. I'm suspicious we'll get there. It's a huge thing everywhere, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can be a farmer and just do land speculation. Let's be real. Most of them do.

I just want to re-emphasize that point that Rob made there. It's very much like, we are, because it's true for absolutely so many things. We have 1950s capitalist production system that just assumes the planet will just be like this infinitely without any downsides. And that includes things like the availability, as Rob said, the availability of things like water and soil nutrients and general biodiversity and the absolutely critical invertebrate fauna that keep soil alive. My dad is a land use ecologist. So I will be, yes, I actually have thoughts on this. And all of this has come through nutrition and all of his life has done research into this stuff. So

yes, I might share a few things, although I will shut up mostly. Steve McLaughlin We'll be fine if we just send out a few more boats and discover some new continents, you know, probably on the ice wall, you know. I'll be on the ice wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, obviously, dude, do you want to get the expedition ready or is that my job? Well you talk about this, but like China has done, China's doing this.

They've gone to, they're already going to, to Eastern Africa and for example, they're all over Madagascar plugging it with like peanuts and just like destroying like just like two seasons and you're out type situation where there's obliterating thousands of square kilometers of, of, of Bay about beautiful Bay about terrain for the benefit of peanut growth. Um, because China's doing that, They're doing the capitalist colonial expansion thing. So the other reason, the more slightly more serious reason, next slide please, that I wanted to talk about this is this shit. This was last year, end of last year in the UK. There was a whole bunch of farmer protests all over Europe last year and the year before.

I think the year before that, they pretty much happened like clockwork. Every time I see the worst people in the world talking about the same thing, which essentially the right wing, the fasc are gearing up to make farming and farmers specifically a blood and soil issue. It's a very emotive subject. It's you want back British farming, back French farming, small farms are important, daddy dad. Whether they are or not, I'm kind of agnostic about that. But a lot of right-wing people place a lot of stock on farming in particular because it has that, like I said,

it's literal blood and soil shit. It's a national security issue. It has that. And one of my main problems with it is like, liberals have no answer for this crisis because they created it and liberals never have an answer for anything. And leftists, I think in general, don't think nearly enough about food production. We tend to think about industrial production, unions, that kind of stuff, which is all very cool. But we tend to ignore the bit that says where the food comes from, because every time somebody

on our side of the fence talks about where the food comes from, then everybody starts yelling about collective farming and things of that nature. And then it all gets very messy. So this is why I want to, the other reason why I want to talk about this is because a couple of years ago during the Brexit debate, a very similar thing happened to the UK fishing industry. All of a sudden they were national champions. They were very important. And then the second, the people who wanted Brexit got what they wanted. The people who the fishing industry got dumped over the side, pardon the pun, and then were

immediately sold out in the post Brexit trade deal. And we're just kind of forgotten about. And I think farming is really important. I think farm is interesting as well. So like, it is, I have a point to note, which is a couple of things. Number one, if you're a farmer who can afford that tractor, you are not likely to be running a small farm because that is an extremely expensive bit of kit. Yeah. They're the same issue in the states.

I think that should kind of be obvious. But yeah, we have the, I think the myth of the sort of down home farmer, which is, you know, it's all massive agribusinesses and shit. What's the really big one, Roz? The privately owned one? Conagra? Cargill? Cargill, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, Cargill's more of a trader and less of a farmer, but it's, we'll get into it. There are slides about cargill coming up later for people like their agri trading things. My second point on this is if you've got time to go to London in your tractor, no, my grandfather still farming in his, his 80th year. And you did how you again, big farm because he does not have time to do that. He could go on holiday for two weeks every now and then, but he does not have time to do that. And certainly didn't when he was running the farm in its totality because he did mixed out arable and cattle. He had no time to do stuff like that. So yeah. It does seem like whenever there's one of these big, highly publicized protests where they roll the tractors into like London or Paris and then they spray manure on something,

it's only like huge farmers protesting whatever the latest EU sustainability regulation is. The key thing is, this is not like, this is emphasizing Rob's point is that this is getting hijacked by a certain set in a certain class of, of people and all farmer. But just to emphasize Rob's point, so many farmers are who have lots of challenges were kind of having those challenges sort of either amplified, but for the wrong reasons or ignored by some of this money-based stuff that we saw in these recent arguments. Yeah, Rob, yes. Rob McClendon Yeah. Essentially, and I also think a lot of farmers in the UK, in Europe, and also in America have very legitimate reasons to be incredibly pissed about how they have been treated in the last 20, 30, maybe 40 years.

They have legitimate complaints in this specific case when it comes to paying inheritance tax on your farm. That's not one of them. Shut the fuck up. That is not one of them. Anyway, so that's sort of the table setting. One more thing. Next slide, please.

Oh Jesus fucking Christ. Oh, warning. We're going to have to get you into it for once. We should have done a full test seizure warning. We're doing it. We're gonna have to slap it in. You should have done it for once. We should have done a seizure warning. We're doing it.

We're doing it. Yeah, we will have to slap a seizure warning on that. In all seriousness. It's a lot less, I will say when I put this together, this looked a lot less violent than I can see that it is now. It looks like a pool of boiling blood with the words in general. In general. Rob, this is what you've manifested.

Okay. Yeah. So this is the big in general warning because I'm going to say a whole bunch of things which are generally overall statistically mostly true, but because farming is incredibly unique and every farm is genuinely different, the soil aspect, what you grow, how you grow, what your market is, it's so different. I cannot speak to every farm. Everything I say, somebody is going to be able to say, well, or Gareth will be able

to say, my grandfather's farm doesn't work this way and it's very different and you don't know what you're talking about. My statements, I think overall are in general true that there's an immense variability that, that like, if we talked about individual farms, we would literally be recording until the end of recorded time. And you know, we can't quite make it like that mainly because I like to go to bed at some point. Nope, nope, nope. You are the bomb callers tightening, Rob. You are, you are a hostage indefinitely. Sorry about it. Goodoterios Johnson 30.10.21 Good to know. The other in general is like, I will mainly be talking about European, Western European and American farming about which I know the most. I know that leaves

out like most of the planet. I'm well aware of it. But the thing is, I don't know shit about farm systems in Southeast Asia or what China's doing or like most of Sub-Saharan Africa. So I won't talk about it because I simply don't know. That's the only way I can talk about it. The third in general thing is I'm mainly going to be talking about arable farming, those things that grow. I'm going to try to talk about cows less because again, I have to put some restrictions on this already too big a topic. And again, it's not something that I don't know enough about to speak with full confidence in. So, you know, that's the seizure warning and that's the in general warning in advance.

All right. So let's get started with the very tiniest of history lessons. Next slide, please. I just want to, sorry, Rob, sorry. I just wanted to chip in to kind of support that point. In the UK, there are like around about 60,000 farm businesses, around about that number. And only a third of them are like small, like two thirds of them are small. Two thirds of them are medium or large or extremely large. So just to give an idea of scale, hopefully that shows how diverse the map is just in the UK, which is a tiny stupid little island. Stig Brodersen Yeah. And then even then, what the UK would consider a large to very large farm is like a small one in the Great Lakes.

It's very difficult to be sort of broad about this, but I'm going to do my best. Anyway, very briefly, without doing the entire history of agriculture and the altogether, a lot of the history of humanity and what we've done since we stopped doing hunter gathering is sitting down in one place and then having increasingly fewer people needed to work the land. So most people could go out and do other things, you know, like do podcasts and other important work. Apart from that, you know, that's just a general evolution. It's also a general point. We don't do that anymore because farm work by hand sucks fucking ass. Like you may have like romantic visions of

like, oh, but I have like 12 tomato plants in my backyard and I really like picking them. It sounds so romantic. It's like, yeah, it's really good fun. But most like commercial horticulture things have like a hundred thousand tomatoes and you have to wait until you're in a couple of hours, four and a half miles to pick all the tomatoes and bent over the whole time. Yes. Yes. There's a reason we'll talk about farm labor in a little bit, but there's a reason why, that is a job when societies reach a certain level of economic sophistication and the income goes high enough. There's a reason that you get very, very few people who still want to and the income goes high enough, there's a reason that you get very, very few people who still want to pick the strawberries, slice the asparagus, do all that stuff. There's

a very good reason for that and why the people who still do that in Europe, in America are among the most, are usually illegal and usually exploited because there's a reason we don't do that shit anymore ourselves. And even putting migrant labor- That doesn't make it good, mind. No, it doesn't make it good. Even putting migrant labor to one side. There's a reason why, like child labor, by which I mean your kids are still doing a huge amount of farm work because if you didn't use your kids, the child labor to do a lot of the farm stuff, like hoiken bales around if you're

an arable farmer and stuff, the business wouldn't work. The numbers wouldn't work. Like you wouldn't be able to make the thing work. I also want to talk about this guy's nipple. I know. Because it is. I also noticed that. It is enormous. And I think we need to just address this. Mommy milkers. And that's okay. Absolutely.

I have man boobs. Specifically the nipple though. It's extremely. Oh, like a. An imposing presence on the, on this. Like gumdrops on pepperonis. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I also wanted to correct something from earlier. In early agriculture, podcasts would would have been called oral tradition.

That's true. Yes. How do you think we got Tora, man? Return with a V. Yeah. Tora was the first podcast. Yeah, that's the first podcast transcript. Anyway, in the West, I'll say that a few more times just in case, we have, historically speaking, we're living in a madly unprecedented period of history, which is food abundance. Food abundance is one of the most uncommon things you will ever find in recorded history. We have been living in a

world novelty of the last three, maybe four generations now, where food is abundant, it's available, it's cheap, it's safe, and it is simply there. You can go to any gas station, supermarket, wherever you go, there's like food available For very little money a bit more money now than like five years ago, but you know in general it's it's It's gonna lower the price of eggs, bro. You won't get it bro Why does it cost so much to order a taxi for my burrito then? Because your gig a condom because your gig economy. Oh, not even as a joke. It's because the economies of having the guy get on the tractor from Gareth's farm and

drive the breeder to your house is just like, you know, you have to ship the thing. You have to get it to Pennsylvania. It's up in Marks and Spencer's.encers. It's the good quality stuff. But anyway. Yeah, yeah. Philadelphia is in Pennsylvania, Rob. You were right. Yeah. Don't worry about it. Anyway, one more caveat. I have, I will keep doing these. I know there are food deserts, especially in urban environments where there are no supermarkets. There's like quarter

stores or bodegas if you live in New York City, which I hear are filled with cats, cats are cool. But in general, overall, it is next time you go to the supermarket, especially in the fruit and veg and the bakery aisles, just take a second to genuinely marvel at the modern miracle that there is that much food year round available for you to purchase at relatively low prices. It is like, you know, that line about how you would kill the medieval peasant with a Dorito is that but like you would have shown them the fucking produce aisle in Kroger's like there you would have been mopping brains up off the floor for hours after that. Oh yeah. You know, you could, you can buy an avocado in January and they're like, they don't even

know what that is. How do you say that word but avocado I was wondering I was wondering if you were asking about that or noting that Rob said Kroger's instead of Kroger yeah Rob gets a pass because he lives in Switzerland. I was trying to be localized. No no that's that's actually that is a localized version, cause a lot of people, even though it's called Kroger, they call it Kroger's. Yeah. Tesco's.

Tesco's. Tesco's. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, oh no, Wegmans is, Wegmans is with an S actually, so yeah. Yeah. Look, now that Nova has canonically died in, you know, the Glasgow storms, it's, you know, all I'm sensing is, you know, there may be an opportunity coming up on, well,

there's a problem. And I thought, you know, if I sounded more like a native. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, I, I, what's really great is that that food, that, that food abundance is going to continue at infinite for our society. And there's no major kind of oncoming threat to that. I'm really glad about that. Queue the last slide. Again, you just got to discover a couple more continents beyond the ice wall. Oh yeah. Well, you know, you might be really delicious food out there. You know, I mean, there is every chance that as the, you know, the tundra's melt in the

polar ice cap or treats that, you know, Greenland could become like an actual like farming hub. So you know, there's hope for at least for America, I suppose. I'm just imagining how much current agricultural land would become desert. Well, we'll get there. That's towards the end. That's the, that's never going to happen. Of course. I'm just making some random stuff up. That's junk. You know, global warming. Oh, we'll just move north. Well, all the lands there, while the land there is shit. So the Canadian shield is not so good for you. Yeah. Yeah.

The other, I wouldn't necessarily say it like it's a problem. It's more like sort of an evolution is that we don't just have like more people overall on the planet than we ever have before, but specifically we have more and more middle class people. China, India, Brazil, you know, other places. The demand for food, especially different foods at high standards is projected to increase for the next 40 years, if not more, depending on how the income gets distributed in the next 50 years. But overall,

there will be more people with more disposable income who don't want just the food they grow locally. They want avocados in January. They want- I want truffle in my microwaveable macaroni cheese. A terrifying future where Indian people become middle class and they start replacing all the delicious food with like Wonder Bread and boiled chicken breasts. Yeah, like all the vada pavs get converted into just, you get rid of vada pavs and they just become burgers. Ugh, no, no.

Oh my god. Don't do that, my god. We have to avoid this future. So the other thing, which is also because now we live in a period of super abundance. So that is next slide, please. That is, it's not necessarily didn't start with her. I know environment and the environment and conservationism is much older, Theodore Roosevelt and national parks, etc. But one of the things that we do now that we have at least much more conversations about that people like recognize more overall is that like farmers aren't just farmers anymore. We ask them or

we demand of them that they grow not just food, but they protect the environment. They do good stuff for water. They do good stuff for the soil. They have a duty of care and forced subsidized or otherwise, but we have reached the point of our understanding that if we don't look after the underlying ecosystems that make farming possible, clean air, clean water, good soil, all that stuff, we'll get into it. There is no farming and there is no future and the whole thing gets very fucked. But essentially, certainly in terms of farming, this is new, like the first real environmental regulations on like the pillar, the pillar two, which is the common

agriculture policies like that comes from the mid eighties, maybe 1990s. That's Europe. I know America is different. How like America doesn't really do like that kind of protection. It's kind of, I was going to say it's kind of, because yeah, it's absolutely new and certainly the regulatory terms absolutely new. But in a way it's rediscovering how we did farming originally, which was much more subsistence based and probably, and actually there's a lot of indigenous populations around the planet understand that actually you trash the land that you rely on for food and then you have no food. And so, so in a way, as we've discovered, you know, again, thanks dad for all the research you do and your colleagues do on this. As

we've discovered, like you do the trash of the land, your, your business ends. You have no fun. I am pleased to announce for a while, but I hate to cut it. Actually, no, I don't. Fuck you. But Nova's coming. Oh, good. We are not starting over. She's just going to have to join. And it'll be fine. It's a bonus. The hogs love the, they love us for being real. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. So I was just reinforcing that point. But it's interesting. It's almost like we're, it's like regulation is kind of forcing farmers to rediscover something that we as a species knew just, you know, 1500 years ago. I have a certain amount of...

I mean, I think that's valid. I have a certain amount of skepticism about like rediscovering the wisdom of the ancients with regards to farming. Yes, I agree. That's getting a bit nachish. Yes. That's getting nachish. Yes.

There's a certain extent to which, okay, we could go back to like, you know, the more sustainable agriculture. Well, the aquifer underneath the Midwest is still going to get drained. Well, spoilers for later slides, but we will talk about the Midwest aquifer. Oh God. Oh no. Oh God. The only fun thing that, you know, the Nazis ever did for farming was to try to bring back the Auroch,

the square Germanic cow, the prehistoric cow. The cow only made of 90 degree angles, yes. Yes, which is kind of mind-boggling. Or swastikas, one or the other. Anyway, so let's see where we are. And the other thing that this book did, and still does in the popular imagination is it focuses a lot of the discussion about sustainability and farming on the issue of pesticides, about which I used to work. I didn't work for a pesticide

company. I used to work with farmers' representatives on pesticide issues. So I know bits about that. I think it's not a red herring. Anyway, we'll get there. We'll talk about, but like there's more going on than just the pesticides, essentially, is what I'm trying to say. Anyway, next slide, please. We will be doing stats and graphs for a bunch of this presentation because we have to talk about stuff. This is the third thing. It ties in with the environment thing. We have realized later rather than sooner that the other reason farming is really important

is for the European Union, as you can see on the left-hand side, the general bar, about 40% of its total land service is covered with farming. Farming in general, that doesn't include like large scale forestry. This is just pure farming, grazing, arable, horticulture, everything. It's 40%. In America, I think the percentage is even higher because you have like the Great Plains and everything where nobody lives, but the farming is fucking enormous. And, oh, sorry, actually the number turns out to be is about the same in the U S it's about 40% of all land is, is, is farmed or ranched or whatever. The rest is parking lots. Yes. Yes. And in the UK it's even higher. It's almost 70% of all

land is under some form of the number. Read no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no It's about tourism. It's about the rural economy as a whole. There's a whole lot tied up in it. But in terms of economic terminology, farming is very negligible. It's not as bad as fisheries.

UK fisheries genuinely contribute less to the UK economy than Warhammer does. So it's not that bad. But think about the poor... But it's a bit of a thing. The carbon economy things, the carbon economy is a key part of it. And that's something that we've understood a lot more in recent years. It's like farming is a absolutely critical part of the carbon economy and of the carbon cycle that's just really been poorly understood until really quite recently. So yeah, that's another part of why the EU have got very excited about this in recent years.

It's awesome. I mean, the GDP problem is like where you consider it industry only as much as that it contributes to GDP. It's like, well, you know, you can't eat money. Yeah. Yeah. No, you can try. It leads like politically speaking to like Warhammer figurines.

Oh, you could eat Warhammer figurines to just get mad at you at the game store. But you can eat eels. Yeah. Oh, no, that's not for Liam, dude. Sorry Rob, we're talking about eels. It's fine. It's fine. I was just trying to like, you eat a couple of like Warhammer figurines to sniff the glue

and it's just a nice evening all around and, y'know. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH. JUSTIN There's a lot of iron in your diet. ALICE & LIAM No, 38 minutes. LIAM Oh, you're alive! You're alive! You've been killed by the storms! ALICE Yeah, we thought you were killed by the storms.

JUSTIN I should have said that that was what had happened, instead of the fact that I got used to us working at 11, and so I assumed that I was gonna be at work at 11. I'm so sorry, but it is... I actually thought the same thing. Do you wanna hop off? You sound like you're dead. I don't feel great, but it's fine, you know what, how many farmers across history have

had to go to work and felt terrible about it? Alright. Well, I mean, I was about to, you know, drop my... SEAN Everyone was always very happy about farming. ALICE I was about to drop my, you know, replace NOFA at, well there's your problem and application in the bin, but you know, if you die anyway, then you know, I'm re-upping. SEAN I think if I die there's gonna be a kind of,

like, civil war amongst frequent guests, and I look forward to seeing who gets my spot. You know? Oh shit, yeah, from the trenches. I look forward to that. Yeah. I was gonna say, you know, we'd have to probably hire a woman, but then I remembered, oh right, Trump got rid of DEI, we're good.

Yeah, that's true. Wow. Like I'm saying, if I get to do Trash Future as well, I will consider transitioning for the gig, you know, that's a conversation we have to make. Or they make you do it. Yeah. That's fair. You do it.

Yeah, well, you thought I was just doing this off my own initiative? No, come on, it's been a huge, a direct correlation between my transition and my sort of ascendancy as a contact person. Yeah, it's a transition for tax reasons. Yeah, you wanted to pay more. I... oh man. I love bonuses. That's some harebrained chaos.

We're talking about carbon economies. Okay. My main, my main question is whether I miss the... You can say that on YouTube. No, you haven't. No, no. Yeah. Oh, my God.

Devon, Devon, YouTube that please. It's the second time we've had to YouTube spoilers. That's fine. He was in the third slide, dude. I think also using YouTube there really suggests that what's what I've said is, am I in time for? All right. Well, you can't say that. Which is how I feel.

That is how I feel. You're not too bad. Too bad. No, no, I'm not doing this with just Roz, buddy. You got to I will pay for your mental health treatment. I don't give a shit what I got to do. Okay. I bring it out the big guns. We're going to do electroshock therapy.

We're going to do a electroshock therapy. They changed the name. I'm the one who's doing all the derailing. I've got to giddy. I've had too much sugar, clearly. Why didn't I have my mental health when we had a spare co-host temporarily? Oh, Nova, I would be a shit Nova, let's be quite honest. You haven't even started transitioning yet. I can give this a go.

I got this, let me do my Nova. Hello. I know seemingly everything about every subject under the sun. I have a walking Wikipedia to the point that actively scares my co-hosts who run like frightened bunnies. This is my friend. I run like a private. I just like I like I have said this about I'm never fucking finishing this episode. I don't give a shit if it kills us. My wife, my wife just left to go stand in line for hot dogs. My wife just left me at the bar.

Yeah. What? They're green hot dogs. Go birds, baby. Go birds. Go birds. Yeah. She she just burst in to yell at me that they're green and then left again.

So I don't know where Megan is. I don't know what's happening to me. So I got nothing but time. And now that I know that I can annoy Nova even more. It's true. I'm in the front seat of the car, like Kim Kisak and Parasite. I'm like, yeah. I love you so much buddy. Love you too man. Let's go to the next session. Let's talk a little bit about who does the actual farming, about the actual people. Jeremy Clarkson. No, not that guy.

No, he does not do that. As previously discussed during the deduction, he doesn't farm. He is in it for the inheritance tax avoidance as the other guys are. He is a television personality. Yeah. James Dyson is a, you know, horrible piece of shit who I, you know, which should be put in front of the firing squad as you know, the other guys should be as well. I haven't heard that in a Christian anime. It's so nice to record in America so I can say these things.

And those live shows are gonna go hard. Yeah, the most actionable live shows we've yet done. And the action is clapping. That's the action we want you to take there. It's gonna be fine. Most online secret service visits since the something awful forums. I mean, listen, but whenever you see a tweet and it's like, this doesn't look good printed out in your kitchen with like two secret service agents, it printed out podcast transcript

probably looks fine. I don't know. I would assume so, yeah. You guys transcribed me? Just referencing a joke you were not here for. No, but it lies on its own feet. I leave you guys alone for thirty minutes and you eat a hard pivot to atheist amethyst and...

No, no, no, no, I didn't do that. No, no, no. I leave Justin alone for thirty minutes. Yeah, those old Polish genes run real deep, don't they, asshole? I have the calipers, bring me your skull. We're gonna do scientific racism from the left, buddy. That's what I'm going to make red scare. We're saying never been bored.

Let's let's. We're both going to wind up in the camps together. I know. Yeah, it can be by using my Maximilian cold. Yeah. Yeah, Rob. It's the kind of joke you can make when you're not in the first and the first they came for the bit, you know. Yeah. Well, as long as I'm not first, I can just kick back and go, ah, it's not me, I'm fine.

If I'm in the second line of that, then I've got some warning, you know. That is how the poem goes, I think. I just kicked back here in Switzerland, your way down the line. Exactly. I will simply collapse the mountain passes before they can come find me. Rob, pod casting from the bunker. The 30 foot lead walls make it a little hard to be heard, but you know, you can't put a price on safety. Anyway, so all the guys on the left, they're not farmers, they're landowners.

They own land as an investment product. And every time people talk about taxing it like it should be, they all pretend to be noble sons of the toil. Jerry McCluckson in particular, but the others as well. At the same time, people always forget that Bill Gates is also one of the largest, Jeremy Clarkson in particular, but the others as well at the same time, people always forget that Bill Gates is also one of the largest land owners in America. It's as wild, the guy owns this huge vast tract of land. Yeah. And it's really, this is where you get the like European farmers mobilizing behind the

worst political cause you've ever heard in your life joke from. You increase the tax on the land that these guys own as a financial instrument and they take their muck spreader and drive it to the nearest EU building. We on Trashyuture, we've done a couple of really interesting things. We have this investigative journalist called Emiliano Molino on... Yeah, he's great. Yeah. Love Emiliano.

To talk about some of the reporting he's done into labor conditions for your actual agricultural laborers in this country. I haven't, we will get to the actual agricultural laborers in but a moment. Oh God. And like I said, like Gareth was talking about earlier, farming, especially in Europe and also in the UK, less so in the US, but that depends on how you define a small farm because the properties are just much bigger. In general, it's overwhelmingly like a small holder type place.

I have some details about it later, but a lot of farmers in the UK and Europe are very small and in the US they're also small, but surface-wise they're just bigger. The people who do the actual farming are like farm managers. Like, you know, Jeremy Clarkson has a farm manager that whatever the blonde muppet, like he does most of the actual work along with the bald muppet. And the other people who do the actual work, which are the people on the bottom right, that's the US farm laborers. That's the, that's, um, uh, US farm laborers, uh, that's pictures from the US farm labor, uh, union website, which is very cool. Um, see spread and so on and so forth.

Um, but in a European and in the UK context, you also have these guys. Next slide please. You have actual aristocrats still. It's, it's, it's why you why you send your stupidest son to whichever agricultural college, and he gets several years of wearing red trousers, inhaling port, and learning how to, like, you know, plow. JUSTIN Yeah, it's... Is that Hob...

No, it's not Hobten. That's not Hobten hatch, is it? ALICE Where's my god? ALICE I mean, the problem is that these people are also armed, right? Besides all the class solidarity, they're also, it's a real, everybody and their mums got guns around here thing. Yeah, but it's like, armed in the UK sense, like, it's not that armed. Yeah, we can do better than you can.

It's muskets. Yeah, I was about to say. Oh, what are's true. Break out the flintlock rifle at me. Yeah, exactly. Our right wing militias can take out your right wing militias. No problem. Oh, have you been to rifle barreling yet? Oh, okay. We're like a disarmed society apart from farmers.

And what we need as much as gun control is we need farmer control. Because statistically, if you are shot in the UK it is either by the police or by a farmer who thinks he's the police. So... Right, yeah. Someone's mad you're exercising right to Rome. Yeah. It's actually like, especially mentioned to the UK and European aristocracy, loads of

whom survive and still own an insane percentage of the land. They have done so, especially in the UK context, because you guys never got around to having you know, the good choppy, choppy revolution. So like you have like landowners who have genuinely squatted in the same place since they arrived with the Normans in 1066. There's like a couple of hereditary titles with huge tracts of land that have literally gone down the lines of William the Conqueror. It's crazy shit. Will Barron Yeah. This is not Hopeton House. This is Dal

Keith House. Hopeton is another massive landowner's house that I worked in several times when I was doing silver service. This is Dal Keith House, which is the Duke of Beclue. It's the Beclue. Yes, it is the Duke of Beclue. It's the fourth largest landowner in the UK. In the UK, the estimate, because they all try very hard to disguise how much land they own, but the rough estimate is about a third of all land, including agriculture, forestry, but just all surface land in the UK still belongs to the aristocracy, which is wild. In Europe, it's different depending on whether or not there's been sufficient revolutions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like in Germany, for example, you have like a bunch of the princely houses

which still exist because when Bismarck came around and said, we are now a Germany and not like a disparate collection of weird shit. The ones who knocked on and said, okay, it's okay. We'll follow you from now on. They all got to keep their property. So like, that's why the princess of written bed and stuff still have like crazy amounts of land because they never had to give it up essentially, unless they were made to by the communists, which is cool. Uh, you know, and then, but then there was land restoration. It's a whole thing.

It's very complicated. Won't get into it because that's a whole different fucking podcast. Um, yes, but a practice cast, you can find it on all good podcasting platforms. Anyway, biggest landowner in the UK is Charles the second, third, of course, 2.7 billion hectares of land, which is insane. Also still, side note, but also owns all the seabed in the UK. So if you want to build a wind farm, you have to get permission from the Crown and then you have to pay the Crown's debt. How do you own the seabed?

You guys had a revolution, what fucking happened? I mean, not a real revolution. They are revanchism is what happened. We got scared and decided that we didn't want to do that anymore. The guy we let do it decided to then do genocide in Ireland and they all went to shit. So yeah, it's gone poorly. I mean, we should have got a different guy. Yeah. I mean,

you will be glad to know that like America is essentially in the process of creating and maintaining its own rural aristocracy. Um, you have, if the land is big enough, you can like agglomerate on smaller farms around you, make your estate bigger to the point that it's incredibly profitable and you can pass it down through the generations. Like the big ranching estates in the West, especially are all family owned and they're like third, fourth, fifth generation now. So like you have a landed aristocracy in the US, they just don't call themselves Margraves.

So you tend not to try, like people don't notice it as much. Will Barron I forget which one it is because they all have the same fucking name, but the likes of BlackRock, are they getting involved in it as well in the US? And massive land holders? Sjoerd They're also getting involved in the UK and in Europe because like land as an investment, it's simply land, especially farmland because there's obviously subsidies tied into it. So like you have, agricultural land has a baseline income because there's, especially in Europe, if you own land, you get per hectare, you get an X subsidy depend, which is the

very- It depends on how you manage it. If you decide to have it set aside where you just kind of leave it as it is and then scatter a few seeds on it, you get paid to do things like that or manage it as open aside where you just kind of leave it as it is and then scatter a few seeds on it, you get paid to do things like that or manage it as open scrub or manage it as managed forest. You get paid to do that without much input. And so yeah, it is an investment for morons and evil people. Steve McLaughlin Yeah, I wonder how much of the agricultural land in the United States is still

owned in some way by the railroads. I know that, um, the Central Valley in California was up until like the 80s, almost entirely owned by Southern Pacific. ALICE On the other hand, keeping hold of that as an asset would require railroads to have a good kind of business sense. JUSTIN Yeah, this is true. That is not the case any longer, yeah. ALICE You know, I think at some point some efficiency-minded young executive might have come in and sold all that off in order to run fewer trains.

In terms of squatting on unproductive assets, they are very good at that. True. Anyway, in a European context, next slide please, this is sort of how it looks like in general in Europe. Most farms by far the biggest amount are far on the far left. They own less than five hectares, which in American context is like a lawn essentially. And very few people, that's all the way on the right hand side, own very big farms, which is a standard farm in the US, but they also, that's the orange bar, they are the people who make the money

off farming. There's an inverse relation between how small the farm is and how much money you make off it, which makes a lot of sense. But this is also like, I personally am like very agnostic about whether or not big farms are good or small farms are bad or the other way around. I don't really give a shit. For me, it's like, as long as it's done in a relatively sustainable manner and like you support the... there's a local economy that can like keep existing, I don't care. Like some people are like really... love small funds for reasons, but... ALICE I have an idea about this. No, no, no, no, no, listen, I appreciate everybody likes, you know, nice hedgerows and stuff, uh, however, fuck you. You get in the soft cause.

There is one big nationalized pool of tractors, and everybody draws off that and you're organized into a collective named after a guy we sent to die in, like, a boarder war that we started by accident. Y'know? In the fucking Go Plow the Leifang Memorial Field. JUSTIN Yeah, like a farmer's co-op in like, Minnesota or something. And every farm is exactly one square mile, and, uh, yeah.

Or, you know, I don't know, maybe you do, maybe for efficiency, you know, we have the French method of, uh, divvying up land, where it's like, okay, I have one tractor, it goes out and back, I've plowed the whole field, the field is 49 miles long, and 50 watts. ALICE Did you tell that joke that everybody tells already? American guy, but he's sort of bragging about how big his land is, and how big his farm is, and he's like, I can get in my truck and I can drive for like a week and still be on my property. And the British farmer goes, yeah, I used to have

a truck like that too. It's true. To be fair, there's some actual craziness. I have been to one of the biggest ranches in America in Texas, I forget the name of it, but like that was an insane place. Like there you could literally drive almost all day and like just, it would just keep going. It's the craziest thing. One of the craziest places I've ever been on, like all the way from the border and like just, it was like a third cotton, a third hunting and a third grain or something like that. Like craziest place I've ever visited in terms of size.

Yeah. You can feed yourself, clothe yourself, and also have recreation, I guess. Anyway, the other thing to know about the people farm, next slide please. There we go, they're old. Farmers are all old as fuck. This is America, the stats aren't much different in the US, and also the replacement rate isn't great, essentially. Like, a lot of people, in most places, like, a lot of farmers can't find successors now, because like, why would you go back to the farm and you can do bullshit for meta?

ALICE There's a few things here, right? First of all, this is happening weirdly in like, every profession, right? this happens to architects, where it's just like, oh we just can't train enough new ones. So it's partly like general malaise, it's partly also because these people all keep killing their kids in great engulfment accidents. ALICE You don't want to be in a great elevator. JUSTIN Except for, apparently, the Amish. SEAN Oh, yeah, it's a cult, dude.

They are gonna farm, and they're all wealthy, and no one can fucking disprove that. I had to grow up around these fucking people, I know about the fucking Amish, fuck you. ALICE You get a child, and all of a sudden that child is like a valuable agricultural implement, because you're like, get in the fucking silo, scrape that grain off the walls of the silo, my son has been killed by the silo. And the thing is, yeah, and the problem is that it takes, y'know, like, 18 years for that, y'know, son to generate into new farmer, right, and it takes way less than 18 years

to fill a silo tall enough to kill a child. ALICE Wow, would you rather lose your kid to the silo, or to horror horror's rum springer? ALICE There's so many ways to kill a kid on a farm. Like there's silo, there's the open thing of, like, sewage, there's, like, silage pits and stuff. LIAM Yeah, sharp pointy implements everywhere. Yeah. I don't love, Nova, that you have said the phrase, there are so many ways to kill a children-

kill a children, piece of fuck. Kill children, more than once on this podcast. Well, listen, there are, okay? Like, I don't want people not to know that it's very easy to kill children. Children are very flimsy, you have to really take... you have to look... ALICE Yeah, that's why I say that, it's in the spirit of do not send your child to the silo. JUSTIN Yeah, toddlers are pretty durable, they can

like fall down the stairs and stuff, they're fine. ALICE Anyway, thanks everybody for playing, you know, the protocols of the Pennsylvania Dutch, which we'll be publishing soon. You don't understand that secretly all wealthy and they control politics. Yeah, that's not even wrong. My grandfather, 80, literally 80, turned this year, happy octogenarianism, grandfather, still farming. My great uncle who died last year was farming basically up until that point and similar

age. Like yeah. Get away. Milkshake. Don't do that. Milkshake. Hello milkshake. Milkshake auditioning to be my replacement.

Yeah. No one's replacing you, Nova. Okay, I withdraw my candidacy. I can hear a superior voice. Yeah. No one's replacing you, no one. Okay, I withdraw my candidacy. I know I can hear a superior voice. Yeah, old, old. And also no succession. Like no succession. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of it is no succession. The other thing is like farmers are a fucking stubborn bastards and you know, like your grandparents, they simply don't quit. So like often the sons have to like wait until, until the parents die for them to become title holder owners of the farm. ALICE Yeah, like in Stade du Val. And I mean, also, to be clear, it's also because farming makes you evil, because you are bourgeois and also you are constantly exposed to the pesticides that make you evil, and so as a

result, even if you have kids that you haven't killed in the grain engulfment, you're like, even if you have kids that you haven't killed in the Grain Engulfment, you're like, I hate my fucking kids. All my life I sent them into the silo to get killed, and now they want to like, spit in my face by developing apps and having pronouns. Well, it's certainly in the UK, most kids didn't, like a hell of a lot of kids just don't want to go into the work. It's hard, it's not rewarding, it's... ALICE Yeah, I mean the whole kind of like arc of human history has been the struggle to stop doing farm labour because it fucking sucks.

SEAN I'm sorry. Anyway, speaking of farm labour, next... SEAN I'm back, I had my little milkshake out of the room. ALICE Brilliant. SEAN That's okay. ALICE Yeah, but like, genuinely, like, this is my like, sort of pop history thesis.

There'll be a slim paperback with my name on it with this, which is that working on the farm fucking sucks is one of the biggest drivers of all human history. Well, that's trying to find someone else to work on the farm, then the natural progression from that trying to make someone else work on the farm involuntarily to fleeing the farm to the cities, it's all... Because like, it fucking sucks. People hate it. You get killed in great engulfment. Yeah.

Sorry, before we go to the next... Ah well, we're in the next... Nevermind. Before we get there, I had a look into this for Praxiscast, because like two or three years ago the Conservative government was like, shit, we've done Brexit, we're not allowing people anymore, but we still need farm workers. This is a problem now. So they did like a trial thing where they got like 15,000 people who registered an interest to like work for slightly above minimum wage and like do farm labor. Like these are unemployed people and

the government was like, we will make you work on the farm, you know, to get your benefits, essentially. That feels kind of inhumane. work on the farm, um, you know, to get your benefits essentially. Um, yeah, well it was, it was quote unquote voluntary, but you know how these things are. So like out of the 15,000 who they either indentured or showed an interest, like I think less than 5,000 showed up for the first day of work because like they all were like, Oh no, this is actually f*****g terrible. And then I think after the end of the first season, they found literally out of 15,000, they found three guys who wanted to keep doing it.

Who really liked farming for some reason. But yeah, no, I mean, all of the Bureau of Museums journalism stuff. Those three guys were having a toast with the farmer's wife, let's be honest. That's the only reason they were staying. You know, where else is doing really great here is Aroustu County. You can have those great Maine potatoes, wow. Mousse! Mousse!

Mousse are the only friends! It's not like, it's because, like, oh, people who aren't, like, desperate immigrants don't know or want, y'know, don't know how to or don't want to work, or, y'know, whatever shit like that, it's the, this is, literally, the working conditions have gotten so bad, in a way that, like, no one who isn't an immigrant, who is dependent on it, is even aware of it. And you... KM Which, next slide please.

Sorry, because this is like, timing wise, pretty good. That is reporting from Emiliano Molino, it's one of his pieces, it's very very good, this is about UK farming in particular, but yeah. The people who do the real dirty work, the actual hand manual labor on farms are very often migrants. They're seasonal workers. They are in Europe, in the UK, in America, treated overall atrociously, pay poorly and work in conditions that are like indentured servitude at sometimes at the best of times. Very common one is like bring people in and then take away their passports and then tell them they can't leave or like their visa

is bound in the UK. Now this is one of the ways the system works. Their visa is bound to one like subcontractor that delivers farm labor to farms. And like if they leave the farm, they immediately have to like, they get kicked out of the country. It is a system that is top to bottom full of exploitation. It's wild. Mason- It's absolutely shocking. I mean, entirely predictable if you know what the UK is like, but it's just grim. It's fucking grim. Rob- Yeah, absolutely. Al- I mean, like I said, it's true in America, it's true in Europe, it's true in the UK.

And the very sad fact is, is because of the way the current agricultural system is structured, also in relation to price, because the way we have these people and we exploit them the way we do is to keep labor costs down as much as possible, which is, this is not excusing obviously indentured servitude, but labor is one of the few variables that farmers can keep low in the production cycle. We'll talk about the rest of the inputs in a moment, but it is baked into the cake of the way we have structured economics. The system almost forces you to exploit people. Of course it doesn't, but it incentivizes exploitation rather than paying people a living wage. Like on a scale everywhere, this is true because capitalism is capitalism, but this is particularly true

in this circumstance. Mason- Now Aribel, we can mechanize and automate. For the most part, Aribel we have mechanized, we've automated, we've taken the kind of the workers out of it, which is a good thing. It is a good thing that we've taken workers out of it. Not so formidable, huge amount of other things that we eat. I would love to see anyone invent a machine that successfully harvests raspberries without just fucking obliterating them into juice. We'll talk about it with Alex later, but it's one of the hardest things in the world. But if people are wondering, well, why are we still using workers rather than, you know, surely machines are better and cheaper. You will never build a machine that does most.

And that's before we start talking about some of the complicated sort of products, complicated crops that, that require, that raspberries are relatively straightforward if they're soft, but some of the stuff that requires like the really complex and like spectacularly impressive sort of like artisanal skill to, to, to get out of the ground or to get off the plant, you're not getting the machines, not doing that. No, no way. No way. Anyway, so we're going to be talking about inputs next about labor is obviously one of the main inputs and what I would talk about, like some of the other ones. And for the rest of all the slides, we'll be talking about for the rest of the evening. Next slide, please. Oh, this.

Like for the rest of the podcast, just assume that after almost every sentence or like every sub topics we discuss, I can just add the line climate change will make this particular problem far, far worse because I will have to repeat myself over and over and over again. Great. Um, and also like it's, it's, it's a vicious cycle because like, um, one, about one quarter of all carbon emissions in the world are related in some manner to agriculture. So agriculture produces a lot of CO2, which is then very bad for the farms, which causes them to use even more inputs to keep the system going. It's a vicious cycle or a doom loop, if you will. It's not very nice.

And an accelerating one, a really, really fast accelerating one. Yes. Yes. As everything gets more unstable, more inputs are needed. Next slide please. ALICE- Straight up running out of topsoil, you know. Like, you know. We found a second important top shortage, and it's soil. RILEY Someone just scanner-rot his head, like, you're alright buddy, it's still attached. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah. Did you do the thing, like I told you to do, which is take your fucking allergy meds. I woke up really stuffed up this morning. I don't know if I'm a little sick or not.

Take your meds. Take your meds. Fuck on the nerve. Oh, my goodness. On the neurotypical podcast, we all, take your meds at each other for the rest of the evenings. He knows what he's doing. Golly.

Wowza. So apart from farmers and farm laborers, you need inputs to get food out of the ground. Yeah, we had that sort of green miracle of what if we just fertilized the absolute shit out of everything. Now the global population goes way up because we can feed way more people. No doubt Mr. Borlaug. I'm not doing Malthusianism, right? It's good that there are more people, right?

Like, one billion Americans or whatever. You're doing yimbyism. Yeah. So like, mostly there are exceptions everywhere, of course, all the times, you know, so see the seizure slide. But to feed billions of people very, very sleepily regularly with good safety standards, etc. There are, we haven't yet found a way to not do it like, like this with a lot of like external inputs with fertilizer, with pesticides,

with all the stuff that we'll be talking about for the next little while. Who the fuck knows if we invent something better in the future, but most of bonnet farming exists on the right-hand side of the slide. As you can see, this is the difference between stuff that nature does because of nature and the stuff on the right, which is the anthropogenic input, which is stuff that we make. Fertilizer is a thing we make, pesticides are a thing we made, seeds are a thing that used to be natural that we have made now. And you can see on the left-hand side, subsistence logging, cast net fishing, that's just getting fish that are there. Hydroponic shrimp farming is completely dependent on human inputs. You cannot do this shit without human inputs. It's physically

impossible. You gotta love that Haber-Bosch process. Yeah. It's scenes from Dying Planet. I mean, one of the things that's always fun, and this always does numbers on Twitter when it comes up, is the kind of... even allowing for exaggeration reports of European settlers visiting the Americas for the first time and being like, holy shit there's so many fish you could walk across the jesapeake, or whatever. Or like, there's so many deer you don't even have to hunt them, you just grab one out of the forest with your bare hands and... ALICE You can still sort of do that in Pennsylvania,

because again, they won't put the wolves back in. Stig Brodersen There used to be, I think in the 19th century in New York specifically, certainly all over New England, there would be clauses for servants where a servant said, I will only come to work for you, Mr. Landowner Man, but you may not feed me lobster more than twice a week because there was so much lobster. That's 100% true. Yeah. So like we have to now spend some time because we talked a little bit about labor. We have to talk about the various inputs.

And also to please to be remembering, you need these things either constantly almost every week or every season. Like this is not a one time thing. This is a, you need to do these things and bring them into your farm over and over again. So the first thing you need, next slide please, you need some soil. This is a- Mud. It's the mud. Ah, you need the mud. Yeah. You need mud. Preferably you need good quality topsoil because it contains,

A, it allows the plants that you want to grow to grow because it's a good medium and it has the nutrients that you need. And basically the entire world depends on a few centimeters now of good topsoil. It grows like a 95% of all food. Like it's, the layer that supports like plants for food is incredibly thin. Like it's less than your arm in most places in the world Yeah, every time I think about this I got real anxious Yeah, you need the Midwest and you need Ukraine Boom, that's the whole world. That's that's good. That's fine. Both those are politically stable

Also, whatever which one's less politically stable at this point in the Midwest or Ukraine? You know, it's kind of a toss up at this point. Hopefully the Midwest is conquered by Jay Pritzker. I want to say a thing here, which is, um, uh, it's also, this is relevant to all the weird discussions about the fucking HS2 bat tunnel, which is why I want to kind of address this. Oh, I read that article in the times that was published today. I know why you're talking about this. Did you read it? So I didn't actually know, but basically the, that soil relies on invertebrates. It relies on bugs. Like if you don't have bugs, that soil is dead and inert. The bugs are absolutely

critical in the soil being having even any ability to grow anything in it. And what, what, how are those bugs kept alive? Well, they're kept alive by there being the rest of the food chain. You need the birds, you need the other creatures, you need the plant life that then sustains the marginal plant life that sustains the bugs. Without the bugs, we have no farming and all of the human stuff we've been doing for the last, well forever, but certainly the accelerating the last few decades has been killing the bugs at scale. This is bad.

Oh yeah, you say this in the notes. I haven't been reading ahead of the notes. I'm a good boy. Yes. For those who don't know, invertebrate means the bug is upside down. Yeah. Either that or it works for the Democratic Party. Hey.

Hey. Topical humor. It's either that or it works for the Democratic Party. Hey! Hey! Oh hey! Topical humor. The damn hugs in Congress. Wow, that was damn fun. Oh dear. Anyway, there is surprisingly little, as you can see on this map, there is surprisingly little places where the topsoil is both really high quality and also resilient, as in, you

can put shit in there over and over again without the whole thing breaking down. One of the master problems that like you see, that's why Brazil is so bright red is like, once you clear a patch of rainforest, the soil is really good for like a season or two and you can grow a lot like a lot of soil on there. But then like the soil is totally fucking complete that you can't do anything with it anymore. And then it erodes away and then you get like terrible, terrible things. So like a lot of the red zones is where farming is expanding rapidly into because like we have more mouths to feed and we're not doing that very well. So like-

Yeah. And if your soil kind of stops working as good, you look at the big Amazon next to you and you go get more soil, I guess. Yeah, exactly. More fields, dig more in. Plus those trees, I can sell that, that's money. ALICE Yeah, that's hardwood. That's delightful hardwood, yeah. So, as you can see... JUSTIN Quebec could have one really great season.

Excuse me, let me cut that part off, that's not Quebec. The Newfoundlanders are gonna get mad at me. ALICE It's just, listen, all of these guys, all of these Brazilian farmers and loggers are just like, living of these guys, all of these Brazilian farmers and loggers are just like, living in the moment, right, and they're just trying to be legends for just one perfect summer. And, y'know, the haters at the Alta Plano and at the Brazilian Environment Agency are trying to stop them, and It's a great shame. My wet, hot Brazilian summer.

Yeah, because they have to raise $50,000 by the end of the farming season or else the local youth center closes. It's a heartwarming story if you think about it. Don't ask about all the German names running that. Anyway, so according to the FAO, we've been talking about topsoil and topsoil loss in particular. We are currently losing topsoil at the rate of one sucker pitch every five seconds. So we've been going for a little over an hour now. So just do your math and then have fun with that and sleep well. Anyway, if it goes to shit, and I said I would do tiny mini, well there's a problem within

the bigger episode, this is the first of those Matryoshka dolls, next slide please. If it goes to shit, this is what you get. This is the Dust Bowl. Yep. It's a famine, we don't call it that. Yeah. No, famines of the communists. Yeah, only communists can do famines. So the Dust Bowl is pretty much the most famous erosion farming soil disaster of all time,

certainly one of the best recorded ones. It's basically a combination of very bad plying practices combined with a decade of drought in the Midwest, that's something that's obviously never going to happen again. Don't worry about it. Followed by very strong winds, which then blew the topsoil into the ocean. Again, strong winds, not something that happens again. I don't know what California is that we shall not be discussing today. Anyway, so the worst were, and that's what this is in the picture.

This is what's known as a black blizzard. This is like these huge rolling storms of black dust, of topsoil, essentially that golf and golf, everything in the path, like hundreds of miles around. The worst ones started in the Great Plains and ended 200 miles out in the Pacific, like into the Atlantic. Sorry. Like it blew 200 miles into the. I saw it sail. Yeah. That's benefited. That's right. Pennsylvania. We got all that Christ on sale. JUSTIN Yeah. And who benefited? That's right, Pennsylvania.

We got all that great topsoil. LIAM Yo, drop it! ALICE Drop it, it's coming! LIAM Pennsylvania dominance! JUSTIN We squandered it on the Amish. ALICE I hate those sucker pricks. JUSTIN Exactly, I read it in that book called The Protocols, about how all the Amish were there with little fishing nets to catch the dobson and put it back down.

Using their weather machine that they have. I mean, basically the protocols of the elders of Lancaster. It's basically real! I'm from Central Pennsylvania, I know these things! You weird child abuse sex cult farming bullshit nonsense. ALICE Don't forget the puppy farming. JUSTIN Also the puppy farming, yeah! ALICE And, you know, they drink the blood of good Christian men, you know, we know this as well.

JUSTIN Anabaptist freaks. Yes. Carry on. What happened to the cool Anabaptism that was like living communally and abolishing gender and all that stuff? They were all set on fire in Germany. Yeah. Yeah, that didn't happen. Yeah. Basically, so like what happened was the topsoil of the Midwest in this era was held together with grass and grass root systems, which were removed because we figured out how to plow mechanically. And then we led a bunch of cattle overgraze as well. And then in a nice coincidental

thing, this is the 1930s, when the depression hit, farmers responded by frantically growing more food on more areas to keep the farm economically alive, and therefore they moved into more and more marginal land. And basically, in order to survive economically, they took off all the grass and then let the cows go ham, and then this happened. ALICE No, cows go beef. LIAM Cows go moo. No, cows go... Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo This has been all the, you know, the reason for the whole confusion, what you have there is some kind of like, you know, very, very small calf. Very small calf. Yeah.

In the good news is like, even today, a lot of the US high plains, where this picture was taken, remains classified by the US government as being in an exceptional drought, which is the highest grade on offer by the US government. So like, we haven't, we've kind of like stabilized this thing, but basically the way we've stabilized it is with next slide, please. Sweet, sweet water. Irrigation. Yeah.

Like the problem is like, you don't just need any old water. You need the right amount of water at the right time. And that can very often be a big fucking problem because nature is often very inconvenient with the amount of rain it distributes over a given season. So irrigation is, you know, it's why we have done irrigation since, essentially since we sat down to farm and did sedentism instead of hunter gathering, irrigation very quickly followed the arrival of farming because you have to get the water to the thing. A lot of modern farming is still like the infrastructure of it is very old. It's very inefficient. Like in terms of like how you should see it, it's like trying to fill like

your kettle in the kitchen by like sticking a fire hose through the letterbox and just like aiming it roughly in the direction of the kitchen. You will fill the kettle, but it's not like the best sort of way of doing it. However, it is also 100% necessary to turn unproductive or medium productive dry soil, sandy soils in particular, you know, again, see the Great Plains into fertile land. That's why the Nile and Egypt have been a breadbasket since the dawn of time because the Nile would flood, the desert would bloom, and then we'd get the sand worms, but also you'd get crops. And that's how you get the kingdom of Sedgium B in the upper and lower Nile, et cetera, et cetera. That's how you

get the cool hieroglyphics and the pyramids and the... Mason Hickman Yeah, just for civil engineering, it's argued that some of the very earliest, if not the earliest, civil engineering was irrigation work actually, was extending that. And a lot of that happened in Egypt was actually extending the benefit of the Nile flood further by and broadening the season by using some pretty extensive irrigation. Yeah, by managing the, by building canals and managing like run over. It's very cool what they did back then. It's a lot of cool stuff that's going on. So like essentially you can get water from two different ways. You can get it from below the ground where you can massively over extract it, slide to come.

The other one is you get it from surface water. And especially that is like as droughts become more common, as there is less like water available to do irrigation with, water is going to become like a physical battle site or a massive policy issue in the years to come. One of the abiding conflicts between India and Pakistan, two nations that already don't love each other for many of the reasons C.B. Britain, is because they both need the water from the Indus River for their respective food security.

So one of the reasons they can, they can't agree is because they need to divide that water from, from the Himalayas essentially. Mason- Israel's shotgunning the sort of key water supply for Jordan and Syria, not to mention Palestine, by doing their recent land grabs in Syria. Don't you mean the burst water wars? Yeah. Have they considered replacing the water with brondo? That's what plants crave. It's got electrolytes, it's what plants crave, yeah.

Just feeding monster to irrigation. Yeah, the white monster to irrigation system, sunflowers 48 feet high and trying to fight you outside his love-fist. Just managed to create Trifids, but real. Yeah, okay. Exactly, who needs John Wyndham when you have fucking monster energy? He's a monster, putting white monster and desperately pumping it into the irrigation system.

Yeah, okay. I mean, listen, I will say this center pivot irrigation thing you've got here, it might be killing the planet, but it does look kinda cool to fly over, all the little circular fields. ALICE Yeah, it does. Yeah, it's very cool. JUSTIN Can you imagine introducing this to a medieval peasant? ALICE No, they're immediately getting killed by it.

They're immediately being killed by it. Like, killing Christa. They're immediately being killed by like a Caligula style. Me and my fellow surfs would have killed this thing with, with Oz. Immediately destroyed. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so we've never seen a contiguous square mile field before. Why I could take my Oxen cart and it takes me a day to drive all across this. Anyway, so what you get, if you don't manage this whole thing well, which is what we've not

been doing, is next slide please. Yeah, you remember very quickly how the Soviet Union and the Aral Sea means that communism can only ever be anti-environmental. Yeah, that's definitely only happened there. Isolated case, because of communism. That's true. And of course, of course. Look, we give Mexico, through the Colorado River, by treaty, like a full 38 fluid ounces

per year. It's fine. S.S.C. ceremonially presenting it like a big sippy cup full of water. It's a yeti that just says Fred's forever smiley face. Steinbach cracks Trump over the head with it. So yeah, this is what happens when you don't manage it well, which is what we've been doing. I could have done this in Europe with the Rhine almost running dry, which has happened in the last two years, which is quite terrifying because then the shipping can't go up the Rhine anymore and there's a whole other kettle of fish.

But yeah, this is America. This is on the left, you have the drying out of the Ogallala Aquifer, which is one of the biggest groundwater systems in the world. It's huge. You can see how big it is. And as it stands, about 2 billion gallons of water, of sweet water a day, are abstracted every day to support the farming on the Great Plains. So this is essentially... Tanner Iskra So yikes. Soterios Yeah. So that's like, I mean, the Ogallala

aquifer is very, very big. That helps, but it's not big enough for that. So like, you you can see the declines in the dark red, I don't know if you can make it out on screen, because it's a bit tiny, but like, more than 150 feet decline in the last couple... Jesus! Yeah, it's insane. It's so amazing all over again. It's the only way you can farm in this way, in like, Texas. Right? They're doing pretty good in Nebraska though.

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah. So this drying out has been, you know, people much like climate change in general, scientists and conservation groups have been warning about this system drying out for decades now. But someday in that day is much closer now than it was like yesterday. The bill was going to come due. Because of climate change, the rainfall patterns, there's less rainfall and the patterns are more irregular. There's not enough rain. There's not enough river water left to fill all this back up essentially. The terminal point is literally coming closer every day. In Kansas, at least

this delightfully is because, as you were saying, in the 1950s and 60s, everybody thought that the water supply was infinite. So what they did is they just handed out water abstraction rights to everybody and far too many of them. So now all these farmers have all these ancient rights to abstract however many liters of water. Will Barron I think there are some other people that have more ancient rights. Stig Brodersen Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. But yeah, like, so like you have to...

Will Barron We took that. Stig Brodersen Yeah. Stig Brodersen I know in Kansas, at least they're like trying to, they've like stopped that system, I think. But. I know in Kansas, at least they're like trying to, they've, they've like stopped that system, I think, but you know, new government, who knows what the fuck's going to happen. And like, that's, that's, that's aquifers. That's, that's a subsoil and obviously the stuff on the right. This is the drying up of Lake Powell. It's fed by the Colorado river, which you can see coming in on, on the right hand side. It's fed by the Colorado River, which you can see coming in on the right-hand side.

It's a huge, huge dam. It is an important sweep water reservoir for parts of the US as far away as California. It's literally critical infrastructure for the United States to exist, for the West to exist in a lot of interesting ways. Again, due to the lack of rainfall, replenishment and water abstraction, you get the 20-year, 30-year differentiation there. This is within living memory. I don't know, I haven't visited, but this is 1991. I was eight when that picture was taken. So I could have stood on the side and seen the difference. I didn't take a picture of it, but like, you can find pictures online where you can like, see like bathtub rings in Lake Powell, just like down, down, down, down, down, down. There's also the very famous one name I've forgotten, the big

lake that like feeds Las Vegas. Lake Mead. Lake Mead, I think it is. Yeah. Lake Mead is like also drying up as fuck. And like, when that that happens, Las Vegas is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States, I wouldn't buy a house in Las Vegas for many reasons, but this is one of the big ones. Like, that... ALICE You're not gonna have any tap water. There's not gonna be water there. Yeah.

SEAN It's all gonna have to go to alfalfa. ALICE Yeah. The extremely, extremely well-watered alfalfa and you at the blackjack table who's been drinking only comped Johnny Walker for the past four weeks. LIAM So this is, in terms of inputs, water, this is obviously not enough water. You can also have the reverse, which is more of a UK and European problem, and Florida. But next slide please. You can also have this, which is too much water.

This is too much. You could barely even film an episode of Clarkson's farm there. My favorite bit of this picture is down the right corner. You can just see the little boat that they had to like use to get in and out. Yes. Yeah, we should have to get in now. Yes. Yeah, we just have the certain case. Yeah. So this is a picture from, I think, Yorkshire in the UK in 2020, just by way of referencing to show you how serious the then Tory government was taking this.

For this whole area, so not just this farm, but like the whole area, three impacted counties, there was an emergency fund of four million pounds. Oh, wow. companies, there was an emergency fund of four million pounds. Wow. Mason- Is it just like tossing like a couple of 20s on the farm and being like, get yourself something nice? It's pretty much, yeah. Al- Don't spit it all in one place. Mason- I didn't realize it was that low. Like four million is the value of the buildings that you can see right now.

Al- Probably, yeah. Mason- And that's it. Al- I mean, that was on top of like other forms of aid. So like there was more available, but the formula was like the special reserve part for this particular flooding. Obviously like flooding drowns the land, washes away any crops you planted on it, washes by the topsoil when it retreats as well, because it's like it retreats in big waves and then just like scrapes more of the topsoil away to the ocean where there's nobody any fucking good. So like, because of all those reasons to topsoil, like we say, isn't doing that well. So what you need to do is you need to top it up with nutrients. And the way you do that is next slide. Fleed,

please you do that with fertilizer. This is not how you're supposed to apply it. That's not what you think. It was a catastrophic fertilizer application accident. Many applications for this material. With some fucking idiot who was never gonna make it as a farmer appears to have mixed a bunch of ammonium nitrate fertilizer with fuel oil, and then just kind of exploded it and killed a bunch of people. ALICE You know, I mean, you say that's not the way you're supposed to apply it, I leave it to the imagination of your audience.

SEAN I think in this case, like the specific one, I mean, weirdly there's a lot of misery on every end of fertilizer as a chemical, I remember reading a lot about the YouTube rate in rural Indian communities went up dramatically with easy availability of commercial pesticides and fertilizers. This means people started fucking drinking them. Just out of, well this is a ready availability of YouTube method, right? I can sort of like, you know, just take myself out pretty easily here, so that's what I'm gonna do.

And of course the results are agonizing. It's a bonus episode, you can just say suicide. Ohhhh! Yeah, yeah. Well, people keep killing themselves with it. Yeah. Not a fun way to go, though. Not how you recommend it.

No, no, no. I mean, weirdly it's one of those things that the overlap is pretty considerable with nerve gas poisoning. Because organophosphates. So you have whole pinhole pupils, just every single orifice leaking. Yeah, bad news. Bad time. JUSTIN She has this on deck, folks.

This is just on deck. This is why we love her. ALICE Yeah, you know. The sort of medical mnemonic for diagnosing organophosphate poisoning and also nerve gas is sludge in large parts, because there tends to be a lot of it. ALICE Yeah, two sludge-style art and two sludge-style social health return. JUSTIN and ALICE Laugh.

JUSTIN Primordial ooze, you know? ALICE Oh dear. style art and two sludge style silkshield return. Primordial ooze, you know? Oh dear. Anyway, for most- And PK time. For most arable farming, most of the time you will need fertilizer. You basically, like I said, you need to constantly top up the soil with the nutrients plant that they need to abstract into their root systems and into leaves in order to grow and grow the wheat and the maize, as the Indians call it, and the beets and the whatever and the whatnot. It's basically

fertilizer as a combination. It's not one thing. It's commercial fertilizer, always combinations of different nutrients, a major ones being nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, which are the well-known ones, but it also contains calcium, magnesium, sulfur, a bunch of micronutrients in tiny, tiny amounts. And the reason most of the world really likes the commercially made stuff with the Haber-Bosch process is because it's utterly dependable and reliable. You know exactly the chemical content of every fucking bag of fertilizer you buy. Therefore, you can farm very efficiently versus stuff like, you know, dried cow manure, which is good, but like it doesn't always have the right nutrients and the

right balance. We may not get like the identical result on the same field as you would year to year from like using manure. It's very controllable. It's, it's, it's, if it wasn't so fucking terrible, it would be amazing, but it is amazing. And Haber-Bosch runs off of, you know, infinite cheap feedstock, which is oil. Um, yes, natural gas specifically. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so in generally over time, uh, uh, soil and top soil in particular will do a lot of this replenishment of its nutrients on its

own, basically through like decaying plant matter, et cetera, et cetera. But because there's so many people now, we don't have to, the time to wait around for that shit anymore. Like that's medieval three field rotations, ask Eleanor Janegut to come on and she can talk to you all day about that. I would love to. Yeah. But like, yeah. Yeah, through a three field rotation, three sisters, any of that stuff where you're like sort of growing different plants together to supplement things.

Yeah, sure. It's also why one of the, it's certainly in Europe because it's, I don't know if it's mandated anymore because there were a bunch of derogations, but like in the last two rounds of the common agriculture policy, that was a mandate that farmers had to grow cover crops in winter like beans and stuff. So that's why in Europe, at least you see, and in America in winter, when the land looks fallow, you see this like light green cover. That's usually like beans. That's nitrogen fixing. That's not there for- Beans, beets, and yeah, bits and pieces. Yeah.

Mainly it's beans because they fix the nitrogen back in the soil. So like in Europe, I think it's still policy that you have to do cover crops if you're, what's what they're called. They're not really there for profit. Like they get raked up at the end of the season. Sometimes they get mulched in. Sometimes the beans get sold as animal feed, but like that's the, that is why a lot of farmers when they're not growing wheat have a green cover on them.

It's called a cover crop. That's what that is. Next time you're out and about. Next time I'm out and about getting shot at by a farmer I can be like, hey, cool beans. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE That's where the phrase comes from, famously. SEAN Yeah, you'll say, but that's my right of way,

cool bee, and then that's like the last thing everybody will... JUSTIN Last word, it's cool beans. ALICE You know what's not very cool beans is you threatening me with this shotgun while I try to access the English heritage protected site on your land. JUSTIN Yeah, you also know what's not cool beans, it's the Amish. LIAM Ah, fuckers. JUSTIN True, true, They're more of a... What do they farm?

Corn, puppies, soybeans. Cow's nothing, corn. A lot of dairy. A lot of dairy. Yeah, a lot of dairy. Some tobacco still, but... Yeah. One of the other side effects, which is not so good about fertilizer is, next slide please,

runoff. Runoff. Oh dear. Yeah. Tends to run off the fields because application tends to be inefficient and a lot of farmers also apply too much because a lot of farmers are stuck in their ways and they're just like, if I just chuck more fertilizer on the field, I'll just get better results. That's not true.

You don't understand dumping an extra bag of fertilizer onto every field is the only defense strategy, the only coping strategy I have for all of my sons being killed in grain engulfing accidents. This is in memory of them that I'm doing this. Meanwhile every fish in the nearby river just floats up dead. SEAN This is my emotional support fertilizer, I say, clutching your bag. Ah, yes, the IRA, of course.

That's a political support fertilizer. That's different. They don't do that anymore. They're nice people now. Yeah. So what it tends to do is run off the fields, but because it's got all those, you know, nice nutrients in it, nutrients end up in the water and they create massive algae blooms. That means the chemical composition of the water changes and also there's not enough light that can go through with it. Cause like the water's- And they absorb all the oxygen. They take all the oxygen out. So everything fucking dies essentially. And in this case, the Gulf of America, USA, USA, woohoo. Let's fucking go.

So, the Gulf of America, USA, USA, woohoo. Let's fucking go. Let's fucking go. Let's fucking go. Let that, like, that yellow band there, that's like a marine dead zone, nothing is alive in there anymore. That's just like, that shit's just fucked there. Like, that's just like, yeah. You know, pretty soon, as you can see...

To do this to one of the greatest, like, seafood regions in the world. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And basically because we have increasingly dead soil due to lack of natural replenishment and we need to farm more and more marginal land, not so much in America but in other places to feed more and more people, the demand for artificial fertilizer is projected to double to the year 2100 from today.

So, you know, between the fertilizer and the wars for, wars for the, you know, land to fertilize. The water wars. Yeah. Yeah. It's good business for... The first water war. Yeah, yeah. It's really good business for, like, the chemical industry.

Yeah. It's also really good business for, next slide please, the natural gas industry, because you need lots and lots of natural gas to create fertilizer. That's the Haber-Porsche process. We've been talking about it before. Essentially, it binds nitrogen in the air into, I don't know, go read about the process. What is this? And then you can post it in the podcast. And you did a lot of stuff to the world. Like, again, I heartily recommend the book When We Cease to Understand the World, not least because it ties in Fritz Harbour as the guy who is responsible for all modern

agriculture and also chemical warfare. And also indirectly the Holocaust. It's modernity. Modernity happens through chemistry, it turns out. And then later physics, and somehow that's worse. So, you know. Ross, you need to push the slide forward. I had to go use the restroom pretty urgently, I'm back now. Okay, there we go. We have editing, Devin can fix that. Nope, leave it. It's fine.

It's the bonus. I just mean putting the slide change at the dramatic moment that Rob said. Next slide please. Moments gone now. Anyway, if you take nothing else away from this podcast, the main line is the price of gas equals the price of fertilizer equals the price of grain equals the price of food. The correlation between energy and food is not one on one, but it's pretty fucking close. And that's because-

I thought the price of food was related to the number of DEI programs and federal government agencies. Oh yeah, yeah. Also that. Yeah, yeah. Thomas fucking Timeline. Yeah. I mean, look, last time I was in the US I was surprised that like literally half of every

hectare was covered in trans flags, and that does seem like a weird use of time. It's a cover crop, okay? It's like beans. Cool beans. I say as I empty a shotgun into a transphobe, I can say that on the bonus. The other thing that fertilizer can do, which is, you know, maybe less desired, next slide please. Oh.

Explode. maybe less desired next time, please. Oh, that's why you explode. You've done the episode about this, you know, little callback, little treat for the fans. Yeah, it can go. Everything needs to be protected by huge concrete grain elevators. Yes. Oh, God. That's why I'm recording from a huge concrete grain elevator. Good idea.

Come get me Amish motherfuckers. Counted out on the roof of the grain elevator with a rifle. Yeah. You laugh, but that's like all of our futures and that's if we're lucky. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus. Anyway, that's so that's for life. So next thing you're going to eat is the next slide. Uh-huh. Um, is you're going to need, uh, you're gonna need some, uh, you're gonna need some seeds. Seeds? Seeds?

Yeah. Seeds are a huge, huge market, and they're all made by your favorite companies. If everybody, if anybody's mad at like how food is made, it is with these guys, with these logos and these companies that you have a problem with. Oh, BASF! They do keep, they do keep doing things like doing things like putting DRM on the weed seeds. Yeah. Yeah.

That'll do it. They'll get you. Yeah. Apart from the history, which is its own thing, of all these companies. But yeah, you will have a beef with these guys, but not necessarily with... I think it's called the Saskatoon Potash Company, which is like the biggest fertilizer producer in the world, 50 billion turnover a year. You won't have heard of those guys.

I'm gonna start having beef with them. I'm gonna start being a hater of those and be like, I fucking hate you Saskatoon Potash. Are they the guys with the big red covered hoppers? Hold on, I'm looking it up right now. Oh my god. Yeah, I'm also googling this right now. We're all googling. Potash corp.

That's it. LIAM Potash corp. I looked at the New York Sox and she just, pot! ALICE Potash corp, yeah, that's them. LIAM And now they're merged with agrium to form nutrient. ALICE Yeah, agrium nutrient. LIAM This is pure fucking evil, dude. Jesus. Yeah. And they are the ones with the red hoppers, yes.

Yeah. Damn, I see their cars all the time. They're reporting KOTX. In modern agriculture, the blander the name, the more likely it is to have been made by like, Satan essentially. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. to have been made by like Satan essentially. So anyway, of these, just in case you're interested, Corteva is what we used to call Dow AgriScience until they got spun off and became their own company. Basically, by the way, to Switzerland, Yahoo, where at least three of these companies

have their global headquarters. Syngenta or Syng, uh, which used to be Novartis and AstraZeneca makers of weight loss drugs. They used to have an agricultural division. There's a lot of overlap between farm pharmaceutical companies and former ICI spin off there. That's this, this ICI in amongst that lot. Stuff getting bought and then unbought, then split out and then cut in half and then sold off IC ICIs in amongst their imperial connections. Sengenta now fully owned by Sinochem, so a huge Chinese conglomerate. So this is, as you can see, these are the top four manufacturers of seeds in the world by a margin that's very hard to describe. It's an insanely concentrated market. Part of the reason for that is mergers and

acquisitions and governments being too soup-bind to do anything about it. But also because bringing a new seed to market from the first idea to a commercially viable product is like a multi-year development cycle, endless testing, endless retesting. It's like molecule generation. It's very, very complicated. You have to think in terms of how these things come to market and are developed, you have to think of like how a new medicine is developed and then licensed and then comes like, you know, into your pharmacy rather than like you fucking around in the garden or like some monk with a couple of beans. It's like, it is very, very, very complicated. It's very, very difficult. It's very, very scientific.

And only that means like only a handful of, I think the number last time I looked was something like at least in Europe to get something from seed to like regulatory approval, the cycle costs something like somewhere between 500 and 800 million euros. There's just not a lot of companies around that can afford that kind of, you know, decade investment. Yeah. Yeah. afford that kind of decade investment. Brief side note, this is also, I don't know if you want to, we can talk about GM crops. Are they bad? No, I don't.

Will Barron No, they're not. What's bad is the fact that it's absolutely fine. It's just accelerating what we've done for millennia already. What is bad is the big companies doing it. It's the DRM. And also the risk, although this does get modeled into the GM stuff, it is the risk that if you have a GM crop, it gets obliterated. If you get one, like you get one particularly bad sort of crop failure or disease that it's susceptible to and it wipes out the lot in one go. ALICE Yeah, but that's also true of bananas anyway, so like, you know, that's not...

JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE Olives. Yes. ALICE Yeah. So like... ALICE I hope whenever bananas get wiped out again, the new banana is like, you know, a flavor I actually like this time. JUSTIN That's a good point.

Yeah. I have a question. ALICE It's like James Bond actors, it's like, you know, okay, well I don't like this one, maybe the next one though. JUSTIN Yeah. I have a question. It's like James Bond actors, it's like, you know, okay, well I don't like this one, maybe the next one though. Yeah. I have a question. So I know there's like a lot of controversy around like, oh my god, farmers can't reuse the seeds from their own plants, but with these things being like so heavily, you know,

engineered and genetically modified, are the seeds from these plants even viable? Nope. No, they're all dead. Like you can plant them for one season, but they don't naturally germinate and men's sprout. No, you can't. It doesn't, they don't do that. They're designed not to do that as well. Like that's, you know, that makes sense.

Yeah. Cool. The new hotness, by the way, genetic modification is essentially like you would make a cut in the DNA strand and you would like introduce a bit of a strand from another plant or another organism, which is the genetic modification. The new hotness is called CRISPR, which is very, very cool. It's not like injecting quote unquote foreign DNA, but you can turn on and turn off sequences inside the existing DNA of a plant. And the question is, is that genetic modification in which among those things, especially Europe is tying itself into 50 million knots over

because it's a very loaded conversation because it's about food and culture and you know, who owns what and all that stuff. People get really weird over GM. Like, yeah. And yeah. I have a second question. If these plants don't produce viable seeds, where do the seeds come from? Oh Christ, I used to know the answer. I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to this anymore. Perhaps a more pertinent question is, when these companies all fall over, when climate change and the wars happen, where are we getting our seeds?

The small barns? Oh, you know, don't worry about it. JUSTIN Yeah, just carry around some in your pocket, I'd say. ALICE Yeah, you're gonna be Gareth Appleseed. JUSTIN Yeah. You know, like, all you need to do is go back to Mesoamerica, you find some Teosinte, and then you do literally question mark question mark question mark, and then at some point you have maze you have literally no idea how mesoamericans created maze it's like if you look up Alright, I... Yeah. Yeah, that feels appropriate. You dickhead. Anyway, you need some seeds, and to go with the seeds you need the other thing.

Next slide please. You are going to need some pesticides. Weirdly enough, same bunch of guys. Oh, that's handy. That's integration. Just one easy stop and I can load up like a trailer for this stuff. And I'm good to phone, you know, markets competition, as we know, competition drives innovation. Yeah. You know, this is a hate the bug.

I hate the bug. They eat my crops. They smell bad. Too many legs. Kill them all. Like, about Zunclef?' And so on and so forth. Yeah. So pesticides are a huge, huge market filled with all your favorites. If you have beef with people in the agri-production side, it's these guys that you will have a problem with because they are exact same people, because there's a lot of overlap. side, it's these guys that you will have a problem with because they are exact same people, because there's a lot of overlap. Like the plants, the seeds are bred in such a way that they're resistant to the pesticides

that these companies also make. So it's a very natural, like duopoly essentially. Why do we have these things? While they're necessary. Basically nature hates your unnaturally regimented crops, the pure straight lines in a row. It hates them. They are in front of God. Nature hates your unnaturally regimented crops, the pure straight lines in a row, it hates them, they are in front of God, and if given a chance, nature will kill them. ALICE We are all playing Leaf Factorial.

And as such, we fuck him up. We have no choice. LIAM That's why Ross disappeared so long. They're like three broad- EVOLUTION. Can I have higher brain processes? To, like, you know, reproduce more efficiently? Yes. Actually just creates way more straight lines. And crap.

In fairness, like, we're doing maybe, like, too good of a job at reproducing efficiently, like, that's kind of how we get into this mess in the first place. But like... We're actually an evolutionary accessory for corn to reproduce itself. Yes. I've heard that theory, yeah. Yeah. So, three categories of pesticides, and in most years most arable farmers will need all

three herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, herbicides kill the weeds, fungicides kill the fungal infections, and insecticides kill the bugs. You know, I am on the planet planet. I'm in other places. It's weird that I need fewer and fewer insecticides every year, but you know, saving money here. Yeah, I mean- Roundup, it works real good. It does.

And then what? And then what? Glyphosate. It's, it's active ingredient. Yeah. Great stuff. There's no more plants that are going through the bricks in my patio. That's what happens. Yeah. Like glyphosate, you know, all time, you know, market killer invention. Like no joke. That's, that stuff's really fucking good. You know, there is some question marks as to whether or not it gives people cancer, but that, you know, we'll, we'll get to that in a moment. Fucking living too long gives people cancer, you know, licking the bricks. Why not? What are you Hamish or something?

Anyway, pesticides are like nasty, nasty, nasty stuff, but that's because they are designed to be the purpose of pesticides to kill things. Therefore it needs to be toxic and it needs to be unpleasant because, you know, the problem essentially again with modern agriculture is there is no way on God's earth that we are doing this type of farming without pesticides. Unless like we could 100% fix the issue of food waste and switch most people to a mostly vegetarian diet, you're not going to be able to produce food at scale without pesticides. It's almost an impossibility.

Even then, the climate is too variable. Year on year seasons are too variable. You just wouldn't do it. You still need to fungicides at least to keep the fungal infections. If the weather is wet, you get fungal infections. You know, sometimes you get noble rot and you get really nice wine, but you know, most of the time it just kills your crop stone dead. You can't do much with it. Riley just sitting up feeling his ears burning. You know, there's also the famous stuff like, like ergotism, which is like a disease that you get from

a fungal infection in wheat that like some people theorize costs like the medieval medieval dancing plague. Like you, there's all kinds of like really interesting stuff going on, but like none of which you want any part of in your food supply. Essentially, you don't want to be brining bread with ergotism for many of the reasons basically. Have an interesting time. Yeah. Yeah. There is, as you understand, because you know, this stuff is not exactly popular, like this enormous debate as to what would happen if you you understand, because this stuff is not exactly popular, this enormous debate as to what would happen if you got rid of all this stuff in modern agriculture,

it wouldn't surprise you to learn that the pesticide companies have research that says, oh no, you'd lose like 80% of your harvest. And there's research from Greenpeace that says, oh, you'd lose like two plants. Surprise, surprise, the research ends up exactly along the ideological positions of the organizations that sponsor it. But like it, roughly speaking, it's anywhere between 20 and 50% yield loss. If you didn't have any of this stuff, depending on who you believe, that's a huge variation. I know, but no, I would lean towards the larger number.

Yeah. I would say 30, maybe 40, and then depends on crop and year and whether or not it's been moldy and that kind of shit. Mostly for like, us as consumers, none of this stuff matters. This is all, this stuff is chemically designed to like, fall apart before it gets into your food system. Rob, we lost you. Rob, you cut out. Oh, shit.

Damn. Not good, not good. Monsanto got him. They got him. They'll get you. I always knew we would lose a guest on air sooner or later. The last time I was recording with PraxisCast on last week Friday this happened like three times in a row, so, you know, pray to Christ this doesn't happen again.

Switzerland, fix your shit. Yeah, I know, I know. Everything except the internet there. Yeah. Alright. Alright, I can probably just like cut it back in from 27. I'm just trying to put the test card up. It'll all work. Yeah. Anyway, so like the risk is not so much to like consumers still recording on Zencast.

I just checked that. Sometimes when someone's internet goes, it kills everything, but it has not done that. Cool. We've survived. So like the risk is not so much to consumers, because like I said, this stuff is like designed to fall apart. The real risk is next slide please. Is for these guys, it's for the workers, for the farm workers, you know, apart from like really well known disasters like Bhopal, see previous episodes,

farm workers are often at the very highest risk, farmers as well, because of frequent exposure, very poor safety equipment, and little training in the way of the substances that they are dealing with. This is actually a picture of how it, reasonably speaking, should be done. This is high protective gear. You can see everybody wearing the stuff that they're supposed to. speaking should be done. This is high protective gear, you know, you can see everybody wearing the stuff that they're supposed to. Um, most of the time everyone wears this. Yeah. Yes. Question mark. I mean, PPE is supposed to be the last barrier and not the first. Yeah. It's, it's, it's not ideal. Like, um,

ideally you would do a lot of this shit with mechanization, you know, on arable farming, you do it, you know, from the inside of your tractor, which is hopefully sealed so you don't breathe the shit in and you have decontamination protocols, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the problem is not so much like acute poisoning, although that is very, very terrifying. My sister who's a doctor has occasionally had to, in emergency room, like to, had to treat farmers who try to commit suicide by drinking pesticide. Not a way I would recommend going out. That's bad. That's bad.

That's horrifying. It also doesn't seem to work very well. No, that's the other bad thing. It doesn't work in killing you. It does like ruin the rest of your life. Right. Because what a different thing. Let's not go into that. That's a dark place. Anyway, so they did a large study a couple of years ago on the effects of pesticides

on farm workers in Brazil specifically. I was going to read you a little bit about it from it. Pesticide contamination can have acute and chronic effects on exposed individuals, farm workers mainly ranging from mild toxicity to neurotoxicity and even death. Pesticides have been associated with neurological, endocrine, psychological, immunological, respiratory, hematological, skin, kidney and liver issues, as well as fetal malformation. Like I said, that's not a pretty list, but these chemicals are designed to hurt things because that is their job in the farm world. It's just like you just don't want to be too close to it. In tropical countries, pesticides can remain in the soil and water for a period of one

to two months, depending on temperature, sunlight, and the presence of microorganisms, increasing the risk of contamination for workers and all other individuals who live in areas where these products are used. This is why you get higher cancer clusters and deformations in areas where there's a lot of pesticide use, because it drifts off the field, it sticks in your garden. It's not like... Acute exposure is quite rare. Chronic low-level, low-dose exposure is not that rare. And also very, very, very very very bad for you. Not just bad for workers, but bad to be around and be downwind of.

Yes, very much so. I can't imagine people are wearing their PPE all the time just on account of, okay look at this horrible plastic suit, and if you're in somewhere like the California Central Valley, it's like 150% humidity at like, I don't know, 110 degrees. So I don't know if I'm going to put on a plastic suit. I think I might risk, you know, just run the gamut. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, part of the problem is like that it's not so much that like it, that is a real problem. It's also part of the bigger problem is not, it's not always like malevolence. It's just like negligence or ignorance is a lot of the problem. Like I have been on like modern farms with, you know, relatively well off farmers who should know better, but like who still keep their like, you know, jars and boxes of pesticides in like, you know, on the ground, not elevated, like cardboard boxes. Yeah. in like, you know, on the ground, not elevated. Deteriorating cardboard boxes, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's, and a lot of it is like, especially with the older farmers, it's like, well, 50 years ago, like, we weren't sissy and didn't wear a mask, you know, masks are DEI, so I don't need to wear one now, you know, it's just like, it's, it's... Look, back then you had great safe chemicals like DDT, which are illegal actually, because

of woke. Yeah, which my grandmother stockpiled. Wish I were making that up. Blessings to you, grandmother Agnes. In a clip that I would prefer, in a bit that I would prefer you not to clip, but DDT is very good at what it does. Like, it's horrifying, but it, you know, works a treat. If you've got malaria problem, if you've got like a full on malaria problem,

still one of the best things is to like just go ham with the DDT. Cause you can just have like a truck that sprays it down the street and like all the kids, you know, get sprayed with DDT and they're fine. I have two pods. First, these three. It's 1950s America. Yeah. Well these three guys have been wearing their PPE for about a minute and a half because that PPE is straight out of the packet. Second point, Scotland did so much research into whether the economic offset, whether

the benefits or disbenefits would balance out on saturating enormous amounts of terrain with DDT to get rid of midges. Like, there are extensive reports in the 70s. ALICE They should have done it. You have any idea how much of it... If we can come up with a way to kill those and ticks other than just climate change, the amount of hiking I would be doing... Yeah, it's true.

SEAN Yeah. I mean, Nova, what you can do is just move to Switzerland. We don't have midges. I have some ticks, but is just move to Switzerland. We don't have midges. I have some ticks, but not as many. You don't have midges yet? I have been stung by a wasp in your beloved country, it was fucking horrible. I've done a little bit of hiking in Switzerland, the problem is you keep running into naked Germans, so...

Oh god. Yeah, I don't wanna do that. I don't wanna do that. Just don't go near the northern border. This was my mistake, I should've been hiking and like... Not the attractive Germans either, I'm assuming. No, it's not a 20 ounce Red Bull. Exactly.

You could run into a naked Rhino of Messner who is canonically German, I cannot stress enough, show me the long form certificate. Anyway, so the alternative pesticides, like this is very, very nasty stuff, like it's very, very unpleasant. And like, you know, there's a lot of practical things that we could do to make this more safer, certainly for farm workers and the application. But like the application of pesticides in general is not going to change in, much like the use of fertilizer, unless we come up with something really fucking incredible. This kind of stuff will continue to be used. The alternative is of course, because we have to talk about it a little bit, is next slide,

please. Organic farming. Oh my God. It's woke. It's woke. It's soy. Look at that little soy man there with his skin. To be fair, I don't like that guy. Yeah, that is not- That guy's got a pretty punchable face.

That is not a box of ivermectin, which is what it should have been. Yeah. Yeah. You say some things and then I have some scientific thoughts on organic farming or to add. So the first thing out of the way is organic farming, counter to very good marketing, excellent marketing, I don't fault it for that, but organic farming does use pesticides. It just doesn't use synthetic ones. Lab-grown pesticides are bad for organic farming. Stuff that comes from nature is fine and good.

High concentration spearmint oil is a pretty big one. There are some quartz minerals that you can use. It's like, ah, is that good? Mason- But also it's kind of woolly on what is and isn't synthetic. It's kind of like the council of elders decide is or is not allowed to come. It's really dubious. Greer- Yeah, I mean, it's also really dubious. It's also like one of the things I used to work on is like the regulation in Europe, at least of what governs organic, what is the limit for organic. And like the lines there are incredibly fuzzy. And also like in case there's a very wet summer and you have like a lot of fungal pressure, even organic farming can get a derogation from the existing

law and then it'll still be fine to use like synthetic stuff because otherwise the Harvard Bushes fucking die. The main ones- Reminds me of like here in the United States, there's a common belief that like imported or craft beer is better than domestic beer because it doesn't use preservatives. And it's kind of like, what about the alcohol and hops? Yeah. They forgot how the beer works.

Yeah. No, that's... There was one study, which I can't remember who did it, but there was a delightful one, this was made by one of the German green NGOs that got a lot of press back when I was working on it was like, there's like pesticide residues in beer. And it's like, that's true. There are micro microscopic amounts of pesticides and herbicides and stuff in beer because it's made with hops and barley. So like you'll get trace amounts of it. But like the toxicity threshold for like, if you

wanted to consume enough beer to get sick from the pesticide residue, you would have to drink something like 300,000 litres of beer in a day, and I'm not saying- This is much behind your time, Walter. I mean, you know, I'm always up for a challenge. I like the instant heavy-getting hog of could we drink 300,000 litres of beer in a day. 300,000 litres of beer or one small glass of Austrian wine? Yeah.

Ah, yeah. 300,000 liters of beer on a wall, 300,000 liters of beer, take one down, pass it around, 299,999 liters of beer on hold. I do like the courage implicit in that statement, that you're just like chugging a liter of beer every time that song is finished. Just expanding, expanding, expanding. So organic farming, right? There's a natural association that organic farming means that you have a more biodiverse farm. Yes. This is not correct. No. If you compare

like for like, because all of the biodiversity in farms is in the field margins. It is not in the actual area where you have crops, whether it's organic or not. There is nothing in the inside area. It's the margins where all the biodiversity is. And because of the lower yields of organic farms, they generally have narrower field margins and as a result of that, they have less biodiversity. So I'm not just making that up. That is a paper and a series of papers extensively researched by my dad. So yeah. And that work has been done. Yeah. Yeah. Hello. Eco Pete. He doesn't use Twitter anymore. It's a shame, but I still call him, I still call him Eco Pete rather than dad. So that's fine. Shout out to Eco Pete. Hello milkshake as well. My goodness.

And the return of the milkshake. Hold on. I'm taking off my sweater. Yeah. It, it, it like you're right,, Gareth. People have a lot of this idea that organic farming automatically means nice, super friendly, fluffy, good for the birds, good for the insects thing. Definitely in all this story, in my experience though, organic farms are slightly better for the environment, but that's not because of their- But it's for other stuff. Yeah, exactly. It's not because of their practice. It's because they tend to be run by farmers who give a shit about the environment

in the first place. So they can run a conventional farm as well. For me, like, all per farm, individual biodiversity has much more to do with like farmer intent than it has to do with production methods. Do they rip out the hedges? How much set aside do they provide? All these things. Kjo Chulker Although hilariously, there was a while in Ireland where there were two competing subsidies in the 1980s, where the European Union was paying Irish farmers to rip up all the hedgerows. And then the Irish government was paying people

to plant the hedgerows. So what farmers would do for the double subsidies, like rip them out and put them down in the next year, just cycle the same hedgerows. That's like death by bureaucracy. I love that. By which I mean, I hate it, but I do love it. Part of the growth in organic farming is like, there's a growing demand and the farmers follow it not always, especially like now, more farmers grow organic because there's a price premium for the crop.

Like you're slightly better off farming organically. Therefore like more farmers are organic now, but like the more that do it, the less of them are into it because they want to be, they just see a better price and then they're not necessarily better for the environment. Like you know, it's, it's, you know, it's a, it, everything's a trade off essentially. That's a big thing. Anyway, so this is all the input stuff. You put that together. What you get is... Next slide, please. Unless... Cool. It's very, very difficult. It's very, very difficult to get a good overview of everything that's going on, but this is

a not bad, this is Kansas. It's very hard to find good data. That's one slide and not 5,000 slide, but this is sort of a decent estimate of what it looks like to run an arable farm in America. It's big cost is machinery because included that is diesel fuel, fertilizer obviously big spikes. Obviously when the gas price goes up, like, you know, say when a war happens, seeds, herbicides, you can, you know, some of it's more variable than others, but there's a pretty decent overview of what you lay out every year.

Seed costs jump up, have jumped up quite a bit over time as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Anyway, last thing on the production side is, next slide please. Essentially, there is no way to do modern agriculture in a way that doesn't damage the environment. You're just trading off different harms. Harms to the crop versus harms to the environment versus harms to the water. It's all trade-offs. So far as I'm aware, there's no positive form of farming that has high yield and has no negative downsides. It doesn't exist. There are forms of it that do exist, but there are fully natural farming where you just plant a bunch of stuff and you just like let it go and then just literally you walk through like garden paths and pick off an ear of corn. Just lovely.

Yeah, you come back and grab all the tomatoes that squirrels haven't eaten. Yeah. Yeah. So like having said all that, that's like all the production stuff. That's the input side. So I do want to, you know, I'm whatever word, this is our two, so fuck it. Why not? I do want to talk a little bit about, sorry, sorry, November. If you're going to bed and like, it's fine. It's fine. Hang in there, Nova. So that's all the input stuff. That's like the money that you spend. Now, how do you get your money back as a farmer? Next slide, please. Milkshake. God damn.

Farmers are, even very big farmers are very relatively speaking, small producers with very little individual powers, especially not in big commodities like wheat and grain because wheat from Kansas is wheat from Kansas is wheat from Kansas. You know, like if the traders can buy from you or from your neighbor, there's no differentiation. Wine has huge differentiation because the individual wine is different from the neighbor. Big arable is not. Beef also not. Cattle was cattle. Wheat, sweet, not quite like that, but broadly speaking. So if you're selling your crop, there's two main channels you can do it. You can sell either direct to supermarket or to big companies like good friends Nestle, a company that's never done evil in its life.

Niel Cartier, you son of a bitch. And then a lot of that price you get, it depends on quality. If your wheat is bad due to shitty conditions, for example, it'll go for animal feed and you won't get that much per bushel. If it goes for bread or for pasta wheat, you will get a lot more because you're producing a high quality level. There are certain indicators like moisture levels and such that determine that essentially. The other channel to which you can, that's that's like, um, if you sell it to like Nestle for biscuits or something, um, if you can also sell shit straight to the supermarket, uh,

and they can and do drive down prices because especially like versus an individual farmer or even like a collective in Kansas has nowhere near the purchasing power of Walmart. Like you are a price taker in that situation. Yeah. Walmart says, this is what we pay you. And you say, well, I won't sell it to you. Well, you have a perishable inventory and it'll just rot into the ground if you don't sell it. Yeah. They just tell you to get fucked and that'll be the end of that. Yeah.

Supermarkets can and do that also because they can get produce from other countries. They don't even need to wait for your ass. They can get it from across the border if they need be. At least in the UK, there was a report in 2022 that found after all the intermediaries and retailers had taken their cut, farmers get less than 1% of the profit of the product sold in the end. For example- It's been fun seeing Jeremy Clarkson discover that one in real time. Yeah, exactly. For example, a wrapped slice loaf of bread, a cereal farmer spends 9.3p and receives less than 0.09 overpens on the selling price. So like your margins

as a farmer are like razor fucking thin and you don't get that much. Like everybody else, the intermediaries, the supermarket takes a cut, the trader takes a cut, the grain storage facility takes a cut, the transporter takes a cut. Mason- And this is the socialist bit, right? Because it's like, leave the farm, just fine, whatever with the farmers. If you want to sort these problems out, and you might, Rob, just shout at me if I'm about to shoot your fox, but I'm so angry watching this. But, like, get rid of the profit element of the supermarkets. ALICE It is, it is.

LIAM It's not just the profit element of the fucking supermarkets. ALICE It is the profit element of all of it. LIAM Yeah. ALICE So of course, time now. RILEY Yes. Look, even if we take the rail matter, can it go bust rule, right? Can Tesco's, could Tesco's actually go bust and all of the Tesco's is closed across Britain? Of course it couldn't. That could literally not happen. And therefore, is that an actual material private company that can exist as a private company? No, it isn't. So actually they should

be state-initiated. That's literally nationalized Tesco's. Yeah. Sjoerd- That's fucking right. I mean, internationally, like what you could also do is like sell your stuff internationally. It's certainly from like, if you're a big exporter, like Brazil, you sell a shit ton of soybeans. Argentina sells a shit ton of soybeans as well. They don't normally sell them directly. They sell them to what are known as the big five agri traders. These are the men in the middle. They're, they used to be known as the ABCDs, but the Chinese are here now. So they're the ABCDs now. It's Archer Daniel Midlands, Bungie, Cargill, China Oil, and Foodstuffs, and the Louis Dreyfus Company, these are, they pretty much control like up to 90%-

Like Julia Louis Dreyfus? Yes. From Feep? Yeah. Oh, God. Oh my God. Aristocracy! Yeah, you didn't know that?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. She's very wealthy, yeah. Yeah. And her only color is from the Louis Dreyfus Company. Trading company Yeah. Yeah. She is. She's very wealthy. Yeah. Yeah. And her, her, her only comes from the Louis Dreyfus company, a trading company. So basically what they do is they are, they are the classic, you know, capitalist men in the middle. They take a certain amount of traders risk because they buy shit and then they have to find an outlet for it. But they also make huge profits and mediate between countries that grow, that import and export

and between them, like these five companies control somewhere between 70 and 90% of all commercial grain trade. All of it. In five companies. It's insane. Like, this is an insane... I think should not be legal. Sorry, I've ordered on a species so well. Lisa Julia Lewis-Dreyfus who is like one of the most beautiful women in the world, but

like also, you know, great actor too. But no, I don't think that she should have an infinity billion dollars of that. You know? Some of these are also still fully privately owned still. I think Cargill's still owned by one family. Speaking of American aristocracy, Cargill's- Doing the Stephen Jay Gould quote where it's like I'm less concerned with the heartness of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and more concerned with the equal heartness of people who like labored in farm fields.

Yeah. So like I said, farmers in general are not price makers, they are price takers. But on the other hand, and that's the really bad thing about all this is like farmers take the majority of the actual risk of like climate pests and all that stuff and energy prices. Farmers are, they take all that risk and then everybody else lets farmers take that risk. Like there's a- And that's part of the reason why you have this- Pethy Bordwell, precarious capitalist.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so you have them, but also all the smallholders and relative small farm owners who, it doesn't matter if they go, it doesn't matter. Because in the grand scheme of things, there's always another guy. But that adds up, grains of sand, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, the thing with farmers, like if a farmer goes bust or a farmer decides to stop, what is increasingly vanishingly rare is like a fully new entrant.

Let's say Gareth, you were like, I don't care about the trains anymore. I want to become a farmer. You would have the advantage of having a family farm that you could possibly take over. But if my family hasn't farmed- I'm not doing it, Fred. I'm sorry. What if you ran a little train around a farm? Good question. My family has a farm for like 500 years, right? So if I was to like, got a bug up and I wanted to go home to Holland where farmland is incredibly expensive and I was like, I'm going to go to agricultural college.

I'm going to get a degree. I'm going to like prepare myself in all the ways I should. And then like a farm comes up for sale and I would go to the bank and say, can I please borrow, I don't know, medium sized potato farm in the good growing area, let's say somewhere between five and 10 million euros. And you go to the bank and say, can I borrow 5 million? Cause I'm on the start an incredibly precarious farm business. And then they would say no, tell me to get fucked. So, yeah. Right. Yeah. So what happens is like essentially, um, uh, either it's inheritance or it's, um, the big fish,

eat the little fish and farms get bigger over time. That's the sort of natural progression. Uh, as you can see on the next slide, because small farms make no money, it's almost impossible to get really good data on what farms earn because you have to separate out on, is it the earning of the farm, the farm worker, the farm owner, the land, it's a whole kettle of fish. This is a decent one. You can see the smaller the farm is, this is Europe. So a lot of very teeny tiny- know, like the average value net, that's the fourth column, is like what you make is like under 3,500 euros a year if you're a very small farm.

That's not survive. Yeah. Just, just in case anyone was watching this and thinking, wait, I thought Gareth was like, you know, like not that well off and didn't come from, yeah, no, that's correct. Like, uh, there is, there's no big grand inheritance that people who have small family farming, most farming people, well, certainly like, I don't know, I wouldn't call my, my grandparents working class as farmers, but equally they're, they're not rich people. There's nothing to be there. Yeah, no. And that's the case for the reason I raised that isn't, isn't a person that's like the case for a lot of these farms. That's like, there isn't much inheritance other than the land value. Exactly. I haven't got like some grand income that they've earned that every year they kind of like make enough to go on one

holiday and that's, you know, holidays getting the ferry to Ireland, maybe. Yeah. So like, and essentially as you can see on the chart as well, it's like you can, you will only earn big money if you're a very big farm. That's like a minority in Europe to be sure, but the same holds in America. And it's like, it depends on what you're producing. There's like a ton of variables, or this is sort of statistically average. This is what you're looking at. To briefly go back. No, we really found a podcast voice this episode.

He's he's being very feisty. Oh, it's nice. No, I don't have Gino with me. He's already asleep. So anyway, so to briefly go back to like Kansas, because like I showed you the expensive side, I had a quick look at Kansas. It's like average farm income there is about $100,000. That's pretty good for like a farm income. But I don't know if that goes for then the farmer, the landowner, the land manager,

and the workers, like if you have to then split that out or like, it's very difficult for me to get a good grip on that. But on the other side, the same piece that I read said that about 30% of Kansas farms in 2023 reported a negative income. So they lost money. So- Will Barron Wait, a negative income? That's not an income. That's the opposite of an income. A farm. Yeah. I mean, part of the reason my grandfather farms is because basically his cattle are his pets. Like he absolutely loves them. And to be fair, I also love cattle. They're really cute. But like, they're so, they're okay. You can, you get the crazy ones and dairy cattle are mental, but the, um, the beef cattle, the steers, the bad prion thoughts again. Oh yeah. Well, yeah. Don't think about the prions. No, but don't think about the prions. But I know cattle

are cute. Yeah, cattle are adorable. They are fantastically stupid, but that's what makes them adorable. I might send Devon a picture of a very cute cow to insert at this point. Yeah, you should. Yeah, please do. Anyway, the flip side of having no income or low income in general, broadly speaking, etc., is next slide. Land does tend to be very expensive, is getting even more so. This is US dollar per acre. Acres are not real.

You know, they can't harm you. Hectares are real, but I can't be bothered to convert them. I don't know what a hectare is. It's 100 by 100 meters. Metric system, baby. That's not real. I don't believe that. You can't do that. It's something you can do. It's good. So yeah, most farmers are cash poor, but asset rich. Most farmers on paper are millionaires, but that's because the land they own, if they own it is very, very expensive, but they may not have

much to do with that. But the problem is they can only realize being a millionaire if and when they sell up. And then they're a millionaire, but you can only do that once and then the family doesn't have that anymore. And like I said, this is also one of the massive barriers to entry. If you want to go in, have a new idea and buy a farm with the land, you can't because it's too expensive. And this agricultural land prices don't go down. That doesn't happen. I mean, I'm sure they can.

And at some point they will because it's becoming a speculative asset. Blackrock is into farmland now. A lot of investment trusts are into farmland now, which is what makes it even more expensive if you want to do some actual like growing stuff on it. But you know, like this is a central problem with farming. It's also because like when a lot of people say like, oh yeah, you're a farmer, you're a millionaire. It's like, yeah, technically you are, but you earn for shit and you can't like, you can only sell up once. You sell all of your land and then what?

The problem with land everywhere, land is going up in value everywhere all the time. It's the basis for the modern economy. We have this one asset that must always go up. Yeah. So, you know, why, why do we not like to get out of this? This is a terrible trap if you're a farmer, right? Why do we simply not pay farmers more? You know, that would be one way out of this

system. And that's because next slide, please. The other one would of course be to finally go out and discover some more continents behind the ice wall as mentioned earlier. Yeah. Yeah, but they got the white walkers there. Oh my God. Yeah. So the problem is if you pay farmers more, it will feed into the price of food. I mean, in general, you pay farmers more, that's not going to come out of the pocket of Arthur Daniel Midlands or Kroger's or whatever. That's going to come out of your pocket because they're the middlemen and they're not going to lose money on the transaction. All other things being equal, raising the price of food is not a good idea for any political system.

Like, you know, the recorded history of everything is if you get food rights and food instability, you get social unrest followed by revolution, followed by the choppy choppy. That is roughly how it goes. It's usually not a good idea. You know, even though everyone factors in the cost of the taxi to their burrito these days. Yeah. I mean, for, for, for most countries, even for like, you know, high, high welfare economies,

like, you know, Western Europe, America, whatever, um, high prices of food are not sustainable for most countries and most political systems. Rapid increases in the price of food are catastrophic for food systems and things like we've been seeing for the last couple of years, like the price of olive oil doubling or more than that, that's a consequence of climate change and olive oil is a staple. If food doesn't remain cheap as like a percentage of household income, the bad things start happening or the good things, depending on what country you're in and how much you like revolutions. I was looking at some stats, like according to Oxfam, at least

a 1% increase in the price of global food prices drops about an extra 16 million people below the poverty line. That kind of correlation. It's also something that certainly Western politicians haven't had to think about much for two, three generations. Because where we started, there's been super abundance for so long. Supermarkets are full, right? Except for when they weren't briefly during Corona and like people started really fucking freaking out.

I was trying to find the numbers for this. I couldn't find it anymore, but like I'm reasonably sure that like most advanced like urban economies like Western Europe and parts of America and the UK, like they have food stocks, like urban economies, like Western Europe and parts of America and the UK, like they have food stocks, like supermarket food stocks have like warehousing for like somewhere between six and 10 days. And after that, if those warehouses don't get resupplied by the countryside, if that cycle breaks quickly and catastrophically, the supermarkets are empty and then the shit hits the fan in 48 hours. I love just-in-time logistics, I love not even having a royal granary to be able to

raid at bayonet point. Yes. Yeah. We could. Do you want me to hop on a plane? I got you. You stay out of my fucking grain elevator. I'll tell you that for free. Anyway, so how have we been getting around this for the last two or three generations? How have we, like, you know, this fundamental contradiction? What is the, not the synthesis, but what is the patch we've put on this? That's next slide, please.

Um, that's, yeah, I hope this is not AI. I think it might be us trying to fight non-AI pictures that were not like just more stats around. It just looks like shit Photoshop. Yeah. The way politics, political systems, Western political systems get around this shit is farm support programs and subsidies. Back when one of the express missions of the founding of not the EU, but its several predecessors before in the 1950s, when they started first developing an ag farm subsidy was explicit to say, well, it's post-World War II, we can never have hunger again. And we want to support a family farm with a good income. Back when it got started, 80% of the EU's budget back then went to farm support.

Now it's like 40%, but it's still a huge chunk of the EU's budget goes to farming. One of the reasons, side note, but one of the reasons that like UK farmers have a very legit reason to be super fucking pissed is that like when you did Brexit and you left the European Union, you also left the farm subsidy system and several governments then said to all the farmers, don't worry, you're going to get a new system. It'll be the same amount of money and it'll be better. And it'll have a blackjack and hookers, there is a new farm system.

Oh, I'm back in. What? I'm a magic money tree farmer. Yeah. So one of the reasons- Yeah, I played Animal Crossing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm ready.

Without these subsidy farm programs, if they were to be removed tomorrow, most Western farming systems would collapse within a year because none of them are economically viable without a constant stream of subsidies because you are paying for that differential between the production cost and the food cost. In some way, this in Western, we do it through taxation. ALICE This is really funny that we have a kind of, like, false consciousness generator where we convince all these people that they're capitalists. LIAM Yeah.

Yeah. ALICE Yes. ALICE Sovkaz, put a big, like, statue of Lenin at the entrance of it so everybody knows what the deal is. LIAM Yes. I like that. statue of Lenin at the entrance of it so everybody knows what the deal is. I like that. You are being paid to grow cotton and totally fuck up the ecosystem of Tajikistan in advance of the cause of world revolution.

You are not a rugged individualist. Now start farming. Every form of government assistance is creeping socialism except assistance to farmers. Which actually is creeping socialism. That and DI initiatives for farmers are also socialism, but in a good way. I love the nova delirium. I'm doing bad lately, guys. It's no good. Pause for love.

Aw, baby. Go see the great podcasts of November Kelly. Zubma statue. We're the only people who make money in the modern economy. I will be building the statue of Nova. Yeah. Anyway, so I can't get into the weeds on this because let me start talking about the common agricultural policy of the European Union.

We will be here, I swear to Christ, for another three hours. So I will simply say the European Union has one, it's badly designed and we will leave it at that. The US Farm Bill is also badly designed, but in the EU you get paid per hectare. So the more hectares you own, the more money you get. That's a stupid system with a lot of flaws. In the US, it's insurance based. The government subsidizes insurance policies for farmers. You can insure against like weathers, pests, like disaster insurance, and you can also insure a price floor. Without that government-backed insurance system, also American farming would

collapse because you would be exposed to the violence of the markets without the insurance. Much like with California real estate or Florida flooding issues, this kind of insurance gets more expensive over time as the weather and everything becomes more unstable and everything gets slightly more fucky. It's bad. And also as- I love the idea that- Oh, sorry. Go on, Rob. You finished your point. And also as farmers, as a group, there's less and less of them pretty much every year. In America, it's like two, maybe 3% of the population is engaged with farming. In Europe, it's much the same.

They own a lot of land and they're in a lot of constituencies where three guys live. So in that sense, they're important, but as a constituency, they're not important. Whereas people in urban areas are, and they have conflicting demands, that's an unmanageable situation on the long run, essentially. Mason- I love the idea that the Institute of Economic Affairs and other people who think that we can actually have, like the problem we have with our society now is that there's not enough completely free market capitalism. I love the fact that it would almost instantly result in all of us starving to death if we did that.

They never seemed to engage at that point. Again, it's about GDP, not like physical goods. Like what you really want is something that just turns money into more money. You have to be prepared for the possibility of outside the box solutions, right? Like, everybody gets rusticated and we all go and pick beats by hand for a couple of years. Exactly. A forced return to the land. Or, you know, we could all become Bree-varians. It's true.

Exactly. You know, I would simply snap everybody's glasses and send the bourgeoisie back to the countryside. Yeah, works great. Anyway, next slide. Nova, I did promise. This is malicious compliance. This is beautiful. I had one demand when we were doing this episode, which is please use an illustration of the beautiful Age of Empires 2 farms. What you have given me instead is an Age of Empires 2 Britain's Siege Workshop,

which is what we're gonna have to use on the grain elevators in the very near future. LIAM I got you. In the form of Lego. JUSTIN Aw, it's beautiful, eh? ALICE Yeah, that is really pretty, actually. RILEY Sadly, all of like library sound effects I have in my head are all from the first stage of empires. So you know, all of them, they're all on deck. They're all from the wrong version of the game. Just change color. Rogan. I want to do a few more things then we wrap up, but in summary, you have this world with an increasing population, with fewer farmers as a percentage of the population who need

to produce more and more in an increasingly insecure world, not just because of climate, but also politically and the annexation of Greenland and what have you, and so on and so forth. Food must be cheap, but also we rightly demand that, the annexation of Greenland and what have you, and so on and so forth. Um, food must be cheap, but also we rightly demand that it is environmentally and food safety standard wise, um, of very high standard. And it must be available cheaply everywhere at all times. Um, I also think by the way, that this is what we deserve as actualized human beings.

I don't think like food insecurity and starvation and like cool or good, or it makes us like better people. I think it just gives you rickets and then you die. Farmers are, the people who make the food are at the mercy of increasingly concentrated market forces that governments are unable or unwilling to rein in. This is true of every domain of society in which we live, but it's very true in case of farming. And that makes them mostly dependent on a subsidy system, which is very badly targeted and doesn't really produce good outcomes in any really good category. And also because farmers as a group and farm lobbyists in specific are conservatives fuck and they don't want to change. It's also like

farmers are innately conservative fuckers who don't want to do anything, even if it would be good for them. Trust me, I've worked with them for a very long time, they do be like that. Um. Let's not talk about this. It's all industry. That's a huge problem in general. Yeah.

It's like these weird competing problems, like we have this replacement crisis where nobody wants to work in this thing anymore as a young person. Also the industry is controlled by guys in their 60s who will call you a slur and also don't want to be told that the thing that they're doing, they've been doing in an obviously wrong way for 40 years. They've got power. Yeah, they've got power. Why on earth would they do anything that might reduce that power? It's quite obvious.

Yeah. Alistair I mean, this as a system is entirely fucked. And that's like, I won't mention it again, but one more for the people in the back. Next slide, please. This is before it gets really fuckin' scary. And this is really fuckin' scary. Oh dear. This, like, you know. Whoa, hey, check out More. Right here.

Yeah, we like More. I know. Alright. Not great. We're saved. We got this. Yeah. We got this.

Although that's also where the- We're saved. That's also where the- Sorry guys! I think that's also where the Ogl's also where the- I think that's also where the Oglala aquifer is, so at that point that might have run dry, so I don't know if that blue is gonna hold. LIAM Smell that, dickheads! JUSTIN That's north of there. That's actually where the Black Hammer bought land, I believe.

So shit. ALICE So maybe they were onto something. JUSTIN Yeah, they were subjugated, yeah. No change in Mongolia, apparently. Yeah, Mongolia is the cello. They're good. Yeah. This is the really really scary bit, we will stop looking at it now, wanna riff through

a few things that will not save you, mainly they are based on technology, next slide please. These three things will not save you. Vertical farming, indoor farming is fucking stupid. Don't do it. It's so stupid. All the attempts to do it. Like are we turned like a warehouse in Newark into a big farm and we use it to grow all of United Airlines salad, vegetables or whatever.

Uh, and it's like, okay, man. Sure. It's like, okay, in the future we'll have skyscrapers that will, y'know, there'll be a hundred floors of vertical farming, and it'll be equivalent to like, one square mile of corn. ALICE Until we get, like, Fusion, and that would be the only way to do it. I mean, I did see today some Altman babbling that we would have fusion within the next five years because

he's a fucking idiot. He can get, he doesn't know what the fuck is a sweat lettuce. If ever someone ignore that guy. Yeah. So like indoor farming is incredibly fucking stupid. It takes huge amounts of energy. And basically the only only things that they've been successfully able to produce at scale are salad leaves and herbs. Nice, but not essentially like a filling nutritious diet. I would say so. Kind of a novelty. Yeah. I mean, they do use less pesticides, obviously, because it's a highly controlled

environment and less water, because it's all drip irrigation, efficient, but it all comes at the insane cost of energy. And a lot of the ways these guys, they keep all the bugs and stuff out is by overpressuring the buildings to keep everything out. The problem with that is the moment- So you come out thinner. Okay. If you work in there, you come out slightly skinnier. Okay. Noted. Yeah. This is, this is also called the Ozempic building. Um, no, so, but the problem is like with overpressuring is like, yeah, sure. They have backup generators, but once the backup generators go and like the, the normal stuff just comes rushing in because nothing in here

is any natural or otherwise resistance. Like a disease rips through this in like a day or some shit. Like everything is dead. Like it's a stupidity. So it's like a chicken farm. The only guys working there, they're gone. They're done. That's it. It's just a skeleton at that point. One day, gone. One of the largest ones went bankrupt, I think a couple months ago. It was like backed by Bezos and a couple other people. It's like a couple billion worth in startup funding. I pulled it, I can't remember couple billion worth in startup funding. I pulled

it, I can't remember the name of it, but like I pulled this from an article about its collapse. Even when they were doing like at their peak, the break even costs for them of a, sorry, the break even cost of production for a pound of leafy greens came in at $3.07 compared to only 65 cents for conventional outdoor farming. Jesus. Okay. Yeah. No, that's zero percent interest rate shit, right? That's what that is. This bullshit only works in the era of infinite free money and like for a novelty, like you were saying, no, this doesn't work. The other thing that won't work is next slide, please. Nope, not going to work either. I mean, it's a delightful little robot and I won't own

for a pet, but people have been telling me that robotics and picking strawberries with a robot is going to happen any day now and it will do a lot of manual labor. Won't do it. Will Barron We did all the mechanization in the 50s. There has been nothing new since then. I mean, there's been some cool advances. There's been some cool stuff that's been done, but like, yeah, the basic technologies are nothing. It's like tickling around, it's like diminishing returns, right? Okay, you can stick a GPS in your combine harvester and you can, and you know, there's the technological stuff

around seeds and pesticides. But in terms of the actual machinery, the actual collecting stuff, it's, you know, we mechanized everything we could. We got terms of the actual machinery, the actual collecting stuff, we mechanized everything we could. We got rid of as many workers as we could in the middle of the 20th century and since then, not much else. KS The one thing we could do, which I would find very cool, is the Horizon Zero Dawn thing, is if we replaced everybody with giant metal dinosaurs and they do the farming for us. And that I would find kind of... Obviously, yes.

I mean, they would go insane and kill us all, but you know, swings and roundabouts. I'm happy to take my shot. That's a more interesting way to get killed than, you know, generative AI turning us all insane. But man, that's like Jurassic Park, but like Jurassic Farm, it's just like the robots. There's a couple of things I stake my reputation on. One of them is that there will never be driverless cars functionally. The other is that they will never build a robot that can pick raspberries. They will never achieve that. I think they have built one, but it's not one that you can practically use. But exactly, it does actually, you know, like building it and having one that's operated by a guy in a morph suit in the Philippines is one thing. But like actually having them working in farms, no, it will never happen. And by the time we could get near it happening,

the doomsday clock will have ticked another second towards midnight. So yeah, we'll have bigger fish to fry at that point. No Jurassic quarry though. Yeah. But dabba doo. So apart from anything else, like it's a budget issue, these things are always fucking expensive. And like we've talked about before, many times most farmers don't have enough disposable money to buy the really fancy toys. And there's also still in the US and in large parts of Europe, a huge question that there's no rural high speed broadband internet also in the UK, by the way. So like, even if you did have the robots, you wouldn't be able to send the data because there's not enough internet around to like show it around.

It's pointless. The robots won't save you. Uh, one more thing that won't save you. Next slide, please. Get fucked. Jeremy Clarkson. Um, no, it's, it's this, this is also very often touted is like, why don't you have short supply line?

Why don't you do your own farm shop? Why don't you have some, you know, farm tourism? Um, essentially, why don't you have a farm, uh, on a hilltop in Italy where people actually want to go, that's where most farms aren't there. And like, I don't know if you've ever been to a wheat field in Nebraska. I can promise you, you don't want to stay there for a week. Cause you would go fucking insane. If the children of the corn don't get you.

Go Huskers, baby. Yeah. You get the, uh, you get the corn sweat and get you first. JUSTIN Yeah, go Huskers, baby. Yeah. JUSTIN You get the corn sweat, and then you, uh, you know, it's like... LIAM Oh god, not the corn sweat. JUSTIN Yeah, the corn sweat. JUSTIN Do I even want some, though? LIAM No, it's just...

JUSTIN Corn sweat is, um, I believe it's a late season thing where the huge corn fields in the Midwest start to lose their moisture moisture and then there's just a massive swing of humidity in late summer and everyone's miserable because it's like 90 degrees and like 150 percent humidity. Yeah. Right. You are soup. You're noble soup.

You are swimming through soup on the way to work. I do not like that. You essentially turn into superheated corn chowder for a little while. It's just. Yeah. Yeah. Like your standard American huge farm isn't going to make money selling artisanal bread to tourists. Jeremy Clarkson can because a lot of idiots love that man

and they will travel for like hundreds of miles to buy an egg off him. That's not a fair, you know, that's not a prospect for most people. You cannot fix... Diversification is not bad. It wasn't even for him because that's in this farm shop closed. It went bust, didn't it? So it didn't work for him. It wasn't a regulatory thing for a while. But very briefly on this subject, because it drove me fucking insane, he spends most of his time complaining about why the council won't just let him do whatever the fuck he wants. The reason they don't let him do what he wants is he's got a farm, or

he's not got a farm, he's got a very big house with a farm attached in the Cotswolds, which is an area of outstanding natural beauty, which is very, very beautiful because it has a lot of regulation that keep it like that. So every time he complains he's like- Mason- Yeah, and also it's twats like him who have pushed all of that regulation into place because they want it to look nice so their house prices stay high. So your house price is high because of the regulation you want to break. Clarkson, you daft prick. So Clarkson is a yimby is what I'm hearing.

Don't do that. It's essentially like me buying a house in the middle of Yellowstone National Park if I could and then saying, well, why won't you let me build a huge grain elevator there? And then getting mad at that. And they're like, it's just, it doesn't. It's my ritual sacrifice elevator. Yeah. Yeah, essentially that won't save it.

The only thing that will save it. Next slide, please. On ironically. Damn it. Oh yeah, there drop lined up, damn it. Oh yeah, there we go, that's it. Yeah, no, the only thing that's gonna save this is like climate styling needs to be expanded to climate and food styling.

I'm like not kidding about that. Yeah. This thing, if we assume that like a right to food is a human right, which it absolutely is to be free from hunger, this system is broken and it will not be fixed by capitalism because all the incentives point the other way. The incentives point to, we will simply keep exploiting nature until the whole thing goes kablooey. And then, you know, it was a brief but lovely flash and, you know,

some people got to drive Ferraris around. This completely broken system can only be fixed by nationalizing not just the farms, but the middlemen, the supermarkets and like, nationalize restaurants. The whole thing needs to be one streamlined system. So farms can be paid a good living wage, regardless of how the outcome is, they can be retrained. We can get rid of a lot of middlemen and supermarkets don't need profit because supermarkets sell food and food is a human right. So, there you know, supermarkets don't need profit, cause supermarkets sell food, and food is a human right. So you know. There you go.

That's my solution. I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful that- If we nationalize the restaurants, you won't need to order a taxi for your burrito. You can have a burrito delivered to you on a train, much more efficient. Speaking of food deliveries. I'm hopeful of climate Stalin, you know? Cause you gotta be hopeful of something. Yeah.

Yeah, so anyway, that's clocking in a smooth three hours. That is genuinely not all I have to say about farming, but I think that'll do for now, Pig. Yeah, that's... Thanks, Rob. I was sad before before and now I'm more sad. That's a. Yeah. That's gone poorly. That is not like. Nationalized, nationalized Tesco's is what we're taking away from this. That I can agree with.

We need a state owned for over. We need an American acme. Yeah. What are other grocery stores? Nationalized yet another railway. We need an American Acme. What are other grocery stores? Nationalized, yeah another railway. And by that railway I mean the railway above my head in Wegmans. Yeah exactly. We need Westphalian Wegmans.

Westphalian Wies might have worked a little better there. No, that was the first one I thought of, but then Gareth said, wagmans. I am obsessed with wagmans because I had a train above my head. Like, you know, these things don't leave me like all the wagmans have trains. Also, you did choose to take me there. So you know, I was right to do it. Well, that is sort of like, you know, bringing like Khrushchev to, you know, the supermarket. I mean, I don't know, we have big asda here. Oh fuck. That's Walmart. Never

mind. Not anymore. The, uh, the, the gas station brothers. That's, and that's not, that's not asda's that's Morrison's, um, which used to be owned by Walmart. It's a whole, no, asda was, asda was definitely Walmart. Asda was definitely Walmart. Oh, you know, you're right. You're, you're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. It was Asta. Yeah. Yeah. Ah, yeah. Now I'm going to have to look up where, because Asta originally was from Leeds. Leeds. So, which is near me. Nth podcast, please. I beg you. I was about to say. No, I, I've, what, next slide please. I have something I want to say.

Oh yeah. Which is, uh, I, yes, I mentioned this in the previous mainline episode, because we're in a bonus, I could say more, which is I'm going to be playing on the episode 15 of Well There's a Problem podcast. I'm going to be playing with the test track where we develop the APT. I'm going to be playing with old Dolby. I'm the other one at Highmarnham. That's going to be my job is making that work. Which is amazing very, very cool, which is amazing. It's very cool. Um, but it does mean that this is my last episode as a, as a, as a temping cohost, which is quite sad. Um, and I just wanted to say to the whole, firstly, I would say to the hogs, thanks for paying me a bit because it's helped me to not, um, you know, uh, if it

wasn't going to be the Mexican Navy, it was going to be not being at the for my shop in Sainsbury. So thank you hogs, but, uh. Thanks. Thanks to Nova. Thanks to Ross and thanks to Liam for having me on. I've had such a fun time. It's been wonderful. It's been, it's been some of our greatest episodes. It was our pleasure. It was, it's been an absolute delight and, and I'm sure I'll be back as a guest cause by cause Victoria's beaten my ass. So, um, so I need to come back as a guest. You've not had me on enough as, as we've made that joke again, you've not had me on enough recently. So, uh, yeah, no, I've just been thinking some way to us to get a guest. Yeah. No, um, no, thank you. Yeah. Thanks. And also listen to, um, listen to practice cast, listen to podcasting is practice

because thank you so much. That was great. Yeah. They did. Very good. I do. They let me talk for three hours about this shit. You know, they cut me off at some point. That's it. Oh yeah. That was a podcast. You've got your bonus episode folks. Don't complain anymore. Yeah. I was about to say it's a lot of content right here. My heart is about to explode. Oh for God's sake. Listen to Podcasting Spraxis, we also have Patreon, five pounds a month, we do two bonus episodes a month now, you know, where you're getting twice the value. Oh, don't mind.

Yeah, fuck you. Well, I'm off. Yeah, and that, I don't know. Congrats on the new job, Garth, and I think they'll- Well done. That'll do it. That's it. Good night.

Good night. End it. Good night, everyone. We're done. It's done. They've killed me. The brick has been released to hit me on the back of the head. Bye bye.

Bomb collar stays on during sex.