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livingontheland - Re: [Livingontheland] Pastoral ideas and Dead Cow Walking

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  • From: Dan Conine <dconine@dotnet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Pastoral ideas and Dead Cow Walking
  • Date: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 19:37:47 -0500

"Local" isn't necessiarily the opposite of "corporate".....depends on where
you live.

Barbara
I think it is. If corporation is defined by "incorporation", then a corporation is any group that is joined together in order to exploit people through the use of regulations, coercion, deception, or marketing, and "local" at it's most basic level is the individual. Therefore, "Corporatist" is a "groupist" philosophy, and "local" is the individualist philosophy. Individualists often form groups, families, and communities, but communities and companies can never form individuals.
It only works one way. The violence has to flow downhill from that. Localists
conduct their affairs in the opposite direction from Corporatists.

The "Organic" certification, then, becomes more of a tool of the corporatist
philosophy than the localist one, since it allows exploitation of regulations by remote
control to market products with no consideration of the individuals affected; only what
the groups agree to (customer groups, business groups, and now, the USDA group).

Groups and systems aren't all bad, they just have to be kept at the mercy of the individual, not the other way
around. That's why there was a Bill of Rights. The good of the many does not outweigh the needs of the one if the
many are no longer allowed to be separate units. There is no "I" in "Team", but without
"ME", there is no "meat" in it.

The story of the organic vs. conventional dairy also has a link to the story
of two
cows:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_42/b4005006.htm?champaign_id=msnbc_organic
This is a classic example of how to think of what I'm saying. If you only
look at the numbers, you see a bunch of averages, statistics, etc. When you
think about the individual cows, you see that when you subtract out the 30
months that it takes to mature and give birth, then the resulting MILKING
lifespan becomes: (conventional) 1 1/2 years (organic) 15 years (yes, my
father even had cows that were 17 1/2 years old) That is a multiple of 10.

When you buy milk from the conventional process, you are buying milk from
dead cows which haven't had the grace to fall over yet.

Let's put it in a catch phrase: "It takes 10 times as long to kill a cow
organically."

Economists will always look at a herd of cows. Farmers look at their cows as
individuals. Once they stop treating them as individuals, they aren't
farming, they are 'producing'. That's when a farm turns into a city. Welcome
to Futureland.

Dan





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