Food, glorious food
A country the size of the state of Maryland is second only to the US in exports of food. Everything from meat to onions. From tomatoes to broccoli. Cheese and eggs.
As we Americans play our pathetic political games, this European nation has developed a food system that embraces technology, innovation and the available natural resources of good soil and immigrant labor.
Read the article. It is stunning in its scope and scale. While we fight among ourselves, others produce and provide.
Many of those American workers who lost their jobs to globalization, NAFTA, outsourcing of all types and robotics could be employed in an industry that feeds - not fights. And of course, there are hundreds of thousands of hard workers applying for work at our southern border. What if we helped them escape the brutality of their lives by giving them jobs feeding the world?
If Americans focused on the innovative techniques in this article, there would be no reason for a single human being to be hungry. We have the land, we have the technology, we have the human resources.
What if we dropped our culture war weapons and got busy growing food on a scale that this tiny country has demonstrated is entirely possible?
”The Netherlands has used advances in vertical farming, seed technology and robotics to become a global model.”
Read it for free here:
Netherlands is the second largest exporter of food in the world.
Yes, I read this one and thought it was a wonderful article. Personally I wasn't thrilled with the images of monocultures under greenhouses, but then I thought - if intensive agricultural practices could raise food in these ways, could more land be left aside for mixed forests, prairie habitats, and other ecologically diverse places where species other than merely our own could thrive? There was a related article recently as well ... maybe in Wired? If it weren't likely to be hopeless I'd try to find it for you but if I run across it I'll remember where to share it :) !
Oh, the good things America could be doing were it not for the fact that we're in the middle of a time where we seem to have lost the damn plot, and think that our purpose is to get richer, become greedier, and hate one another. I'm so tired of it, that a political party has made its mission to destroy this country. I'm so happy to read good news but sad that, again, it's not about us. We're too busy worrying about taking children's books away and finding new ways to force women to incubate fetuses against their will.