I grew up in Manitoba, on the prairies. In the sixties when I was going to school, we were taught about the dust bowl of the thirties and it affected the northern prairies as much as the southern ones in the US. The great minds of the time decided that to best combat future dust bowls, the land had to be planted with windbreaks of local shrubs and trees around the perimeters of the fields, and the government also supplied free caragana shrubs to help start the process, caragana being able to stand the northern climate and being of the legume family, also helped supply nitrogen. The windbreaks stopped the wind and once they reached the right size, they stopped the soil erosion. Snirt is a combination of snow and dirt, and farm dirt would blow away and deposit as snirt on farms miles away if you didn’t have the windbreaks. This, and crop rotation on a three-year cycle proved to be the answer to keeping the prairies as prime agricultural land.
Then came the big Agricultural outfits with the big machines which promised to make it easy to plant and harvest your crops. That meant that in the eighties, the windbreaks came down as they made it difficult to use the big machines. The snirt came back. I taught at a country school and the dust storms in winter turned everything black. Shiny big machines, but land without much topsoil became the norm. The Luciferian lure of bigger and better and more of it became a false promise.
At the end of the eighties we bought a 15 acre piece of property in the country. Our property was bounded on one side by a windbreak of various tough shrubs that ran the full half mile of the property. I loved it for many reasons. It had chokecherries and saskatoons, wild roses, Russian olives, shrub oak, and other plants. I would walk along it and enjoy it and the robins and other migratory birds who fed on the fruit in the fall. It provided cover for the grouse and prairie chickens and it was one of the joys of the property. My husband rented out the back ten acres to a neighbor. The neighbor didn’t ask, but came along one day and set fire to my windbreak. Luckily I saw him do it and was able to stop him before he had done too much damage. Shall we say he knew I was livid. He thought he could make one big field with his own land to make it easier for his machinery.
Easier is not better. But that is the sales pitch that is destroying our food and our planet.
Wonderful article on point with the cause of our larger health issues. Obesity and starvation are both caused by malnutrition. Our modern societies' reliance on processed or ultra processed foods developed to be hyperpalatable, very inexpensive and utterly devoid of nutritional value. Single ingredient, whole foods are the foundation of a superior nutrition strategy. A superior nutrition strategy leads to better overall health, metabolic health and immune health. How I wish we spent $5 trillion on achieving this rather than the foolish public health response, societal lock downs and non-sterilizing pseudovaccines.
My wife and I went carnivore a couple of years back; both of us dropped veg from our diet completely (leptins and oxylates, no thanks). Whilst I like a bowl of porridge with raw honey in the morning, otherwise we live on animal produce solely, cooking wIth lard or dripping or goose fat or butter as appropriate. This has not only made us both drop weight without effort (visceral fat be gone!), massively improved our gut health, but almost all our food is locally produced, and we eat meat only that is grass fed. Happily our part of rural Somerset is full of farmers farming the right way, with grass fed livestock and arable and livestock rotation - carbon free, and the best food in the world - and minimal food miles. The only supermarket food I buy is goat milk, butter and coffee. And that's it. Going shopping means - I'm off to the butchers.,
Always love your posts, Kyle. Thanks for bringing this perspective I hadn't really considered, that the microbiome instructs the DNA, rather than the other way round. Yet there's an interconnectedness within the body that can't just be a one way mechanism of this does that to this, which is of course the mechanistic view exploited by technocrats. That interconnectedness extends from our bodies to the soil and what grows from it which we consume. What we eat speaks to us, informs us, as we inform it in return. Extend that out into all organic life and we have the music you so beautifully put, not just singing from our DNA but from the entire world which we belong, a symbiotic symphony. This crosses the realm of biology into spirituality (for want of a better word) where that music takes a divine quality of oneness. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I just wanted to add this to your remarkable piece.
I grew up in Manitoba, on the prairies. In the sixties when I was going to school, we were taught about the dust bowl of the thirties and it affected the northern prairies as much as the southern ones in the US. The great minds of the time decided that to best combat future dust bowls, the land had to be planted with windbreaks of local shrubs and trees around the perimeters of the fields, and the government also supplied free caragana shrubs to help start the process, caragana being able to stand the northern climate and being of the legume family, also helped supply nitrogen. The windbreaks stopped the wind and once they reached the right size, they stopped the soil erosion. Snirt is a combination of snow and dirt, and farm dirt would blow away and deposit as snirt on farms miles away if you didn’t have the windbreaks. This, and crop rotation on a three-year cycle proved to be the answer to keeping the prairies as prime agricultural land.
Then came the big Agricultural outfits with the big machines which promised to make it easy to plant and harvest your crops. That meant that in the eighties, the windbreaks came down as they made it difficult to use the big machines. The snirt came back. I taught at a country school and the dust storms in winter turned everything black. Shiny big machines, but land without much topsoil became the norm. The Luciferian lure of bigger and better and more of it became a false promise.
At the end of the eighties we bought a 15 acre piece of property in the country. Our property was bounded on one side by a windbreak of various tough shrubs that ran the full half mile of the property. I loved it for many reasons. It had chokecherries and saskatoons, wild roses, Russian olives, shrub oak, and other plants. I would walk along it and enjoy it and the robins and other migratory birds who fed on the fruit in the fall. It provided cover for the grouse and prairie chickens and it was one of the joys of the property. My husband rented out the back ten acres to a neighbor. The neighbor didn’t ask, but came along one day and set fire to my windbreak. Luckily I saw him do it and was able to stop him before he had done too much damage. Shall we say he knew I was livid. He thought he could make one big field with his own land to make it easier for his machinery.
Easier is not better. But that is the sales pitch that is destroying our food and our planet.
Wonderful article on point with the cause of our larger health issues. Obesity and starvation are both caused by malnutrition. Our modern societies' reliance on processed or ultra processed foods developed to be hyperpalatable, very inexpensive and utterly devoid of nutritional value. Single ingredient, whole foods are the foundation of a superior nutrition strategy. A superior nutrition strategy leads to better overall health, metabolic health and immune health. How I wish we spent $5 trillion on achieving this rather than the foolish public health response, societal lock downs and non-sterilizing pseudovaccines.
Your essays are always high quality Kyle.
My wife and I went carnivore a couple of years back; both of us dropped veg from our diet completely (leptins and oxylates, no thanks). Whilst I like a bowl of porridge with raw honey in the morning, otherwise we live on animal produce solely, cooking wIth lard or dripping or goose fat or butter as appropriate. This has not only made us both drop weight without effort (visceral fat be gone!), massively improved our gut health, but almost all our food is locally produced, and we eat meat only that is grass fed. Happily our part of rural Somerset is full of farmers farming the right way, with grass fed livestock and arable and livestock rotation - carbon free, and the best food in the world - and minimal food miles. The only supermarket food I buy is goat milk, butter and coffee. And that's it. Going shopping means - I'm off to the butchers.,
"As above, so below." Amen, biome brother.
Always love your posts, Kyle. Thanks for bringing this perspective I hadn't really considered, that the microbiome instructs the DNA, rather than the other way round. Yet there's an interconnectedness within the body that can't just be a one way mechanism of this does that to this, which is of course the mechanistic view exploited by technocrats. That interconnectedness extends from our bodies to the soil and what grows from it which we consume. What we eat speaks to us, informs us, as we inform it in return. Extend that out into all organic life and we have the music you so beautifully put, not just singing from our DNA but from the entire world which we belong, a symbiotic symphony. This crosses the realm of biology into spirituality (for want of a better word) where that music takes a divine quality of oneness. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I just wanted to add this to your remarkable piece.