Author Topic: Agorism  (Read 965 times)

guest55

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Re: Agorism
« Reply #15 on: July 21, 2021, 09:57:28 pm »
Grow Weeds with Vegetables for Better Garden Soil Health
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nPILj5Nc10&list=TLPQMjIwNzIwMjEIpMDs9cGqiA&index=3

90sRetroFan

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Re: Agorism
« Reply #16 on: December 16, 2021, 02:13:19 am »
https://www.yahoo.com/news/farmers-ease-workers-path-citizenship-050100486.html

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Dec. 13—California farmers frustrated with congressional inaction on farmworker immigration and guest-worker reform have settled on another way to nudge their workforce toward U.S. citizenship.

A partnership announced last week between the California Farm Bureau and the Washington, D.C.-based National Immigration Forum gives ag employees access to an online portal guiding them through the naturalization process. The platform also helps with matters like protecting family members facing deportation.

The agreement reflects the worsening shortage of field workers as much as it does industry's cultivation of laborers fueling the Central Valley's economy, with restricted or no legal status.

"Offering farm employees who are eligible for U.S. citizenship a low-cost means to access citizenship puts them on a path to fully share in the American bounty they work every day to create," the president of the bureau, Jamie Johansson, said in a news release Monday.

For years the farm bureau has sided with immigrant rights organizations in promoting a path toward citizenship for farmworkers. The industry also advocates wider access to guest workers.

Farmworker immigration and visa reforms supported by the bureau and passed by the House earlier this year have stalled in the Senate. For the bureau, the partnership represents progress through another channel.

Under the new contract with the National Immigration Forum, bureau members will be able to refer their employees, free of charge, to an online service offering application preparation help, citizenship eligibility assessments and other legal reviews. The service also comes with case management services and noncitizen-related immigration inquiries such as deportation defense work.

NIF said in the news release its mission is to help immigrants eligible for access to U.S. citizenship "and we are grateful to the California Farm Bureau for giving us access to nearly 31,000 farm bureau members whose employees can benefit from the services we offer."

The organization also advocates for pro-immigration policies at the federal level, which is how it started working with the farm bureau years ago, said Bryan Little, the farm bureau's director of employment policy.

Little interprets the partnership as the state's farmers investing in their employees. It deepens the attachment some workers may feel for their employers, he said, and it may help with retention of top talent including supervisors.

"They're going to be key employees in that business so why wouldn't you want to invest (in them)?" Little asked. He emphasized information gathered by the portal will be kept confidential, inaccessible to the bureau or the NIF.

For years Kern County growers have complained of a worker shortage. The state's ag labor force has been stagnant for 15 years and averages 40 years of age, Little estimated, adding, "There are practically no people coming to the United States now to work in agriculture."

In its news release about the new partnership, the farm bureau reiterated its support for the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2021. The measure, passed by the House March 18 with bipartisan support, proposes to reform the ag guest worker program and provide a path to legal status for farm employees.

The Kern County Farm Bureau did not respond to a request for comment on the state farm bureau's partnership with the NIF.

The president of the California Fresh Fruit Association trade group, Ian LeMay, called the NIF's portal a "fantastic service" that increases certainty for people who can't afford a lawyer or advocate through the lengthy application process.

It doesn't lessen the need for changes to federal guest worker programs, LeMay said, and comprehensive immigration reform is still needed.

"It's an additional service to help our employees who might be in somewhat of a limbo state to have more confidence in terms of their status," he said.

A spokeswoman for the United Farm Workers Foundation declined to address the farm bureau's partnership with the NIF. She instead invited the farm bureau to add its support to the federal Build Back Better bill, which includes measures that would protect farmworkers and other immigrants from deportation.

But rightists prefer food to be expensive.

90sRetroFan

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Re: Agorism
« Reply #17 on: April 12, 2022, 09:13:58 pm »

guest78

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Why Crop Rotation is a Waste of Time
« Reply #18 on: June 12, 2022, 06:33:55 pm »
Why Crop Rotation is a Waste of Time
Quote
Timestamps:
0:43 - Time requirements of growing food and excuses
1:46 - Crop rotation purpose and refresh of what it is
3:05 - Gardening techniques have progressed over the years
3:53 - Why crop rotation is needed
5:01 - The important link between succession planting and rotation
6:25 - Observe and interact, inspired by nature
8:17 - Lack of flexibility of rotating
8:41 - My version of crop rotation
9:34 - How I deal with a plant disease
10:44 - Garden examples 1
11:58 - Garden examples 2
12:49 - Weather's impact on yearly yields
13:14 - Importance of creativity


"Low dig" and "no dig" methods. Fascinating stuff!

90sRetroFan

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Re: Agorism
« Reply #19 on: September 05, 2022, 09:08:59 pm »
https://www.yahoo.com/news/farmers-pushing-immigration-reform-counter-110000322.html

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Farmers push for immigration reform to counter labor shortages and rising food prices

Farmers across the U.S. are joining a push for national immigration reform that they say could ease labor shortages and lower food prices as surging production costs continue to rock the agriculture industry.

The farm operators say the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, already passed by the House and pending in the Senate, will provide them with a stable reliable workforce by creating a path to citizenship for undocumented agricultural workers and reforming the seasonal farmworker visa program, among other things.
...
Stephanie Mickelsen owns a large-scale potato farming operation in Idaho and said her farm began using the H-2A program for farmworkers, which has “made a huge difference” but because the visa only allows temporary authorization for nine months at a time, finding labor continues to be a problem.

“We have about 60 full-time people that work on the farm all year long, but that is not enough when you hit harvest to be able to get that crop out of the ground, so we need an additional 100 to 150 employees on the farm side, that’s not including the processing and packing facilities,”
...
As the country experiences the highest 12-month increase in food prices since May 1979, according to the consumer price index, farmers say this is in part because of labor problems.

A 2022 Texas A&M University study commissioned by the American Business Coalition, a bipartisan group of 1,200 business leaders who advocate for immigration reform, found that having more migrant and H-2A workers were related to lower inflation, higher average wages and lower unemployment. The study also found that “more denied petitions for naturalizations are associated with larger consumer prices and higher inflation.”
...
“It is very important to really pass something because labor shortages in agriculture are getting worse every year,” he said. “It’s very hard to know what exactly is going to happen but at least in terms of the number of workers you have every year it would eliminate some of the most pressing issues like the fact that workers can stay here all year-round so that’s kind of helpful.”

But rightists prefer food to be expensive.

guest78

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Returning the ‘Three Sisters’—Corn, Beans and Squash—to Native American Farms Nourishes People, Land and Cultures
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For centuries Native Americans intercropped corn, beans and squash because the plants thrived together. A new initiative is measuring health and social benefits from reuniting the “three sisters.”

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Historians know that turkey and corn were part of the first Thanksgiving, when Wampanoag peoples shared a harvest meal with the pilgrims of Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts. And traditional Native American farming practices tell us that squash and beans likely were part of that 1621 dinner too.

For centuries before Europeans reached North America, many Native Americans grew these foods together in one plot, along with the less familiar sunflower. They called the plants sisters to reflect how they thrived when they were cultivated together.

Today three-quarters of Native Americans live off of reservations, mainly in urban areas. And nationwide, many Native American communities lack access to healthy food. As a scholar of Indigenous studies focusing on Native relationships with the land, I began to wonder why Native farming practices had declined and what benefits could emerge from bringing them back.

Side note:

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Wild—but not domestic—turkey was indeed plentiful in the region and a common food source for both English settlers and Native Americans. But it is just as likely that the fowling party returned with other birds we know the colonists regularly consumed, such as ducks, geese and swans.
https://www.history.com/topics/thanksgiving/first-thanksgiving-meal

Back to the original article:

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To answer these questions, I am working with agronomist Marshall McDaniel, horticulturalist Ajay Nair, nutritionist Donna Winham and Native gardening projects in Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Our research project, “Reuniting the Three Sisters,” explores what it means to be a responsible caretaker of the land from the perspective of peoples who have been balancing agricultural production with sustainability for hundreds of years.



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Abundant Harvests

Historically, Native people throughout the Americas bred indigenous plant varieties specific to the growing conditions of their homelands. They selected seeds for many different traits, such as flavor, texture and color.

Native growers knew that planting corn, beans, squash and sunflowers together produced mutual benefits. Corn stalks created a trellis for beans to climb, and beans’ twining vines secured the corn in high winds. They also certainly observed that corn and bean plants growing together tended to be healthier than when raised separately. Today we know the reason: Bacteria living on bean plant roots pull nitrogen – an essential plant nutrient – from the air and convert it to a form that both beans and corn can use.

Squash plants contributed by shading the ground with their broad leaves, preventing weeds from growing and retaining water in the soil. Heritage squash varieties also had spines that discouraged deer and raccoons from visiting the garden for a snack. And sunflowers planted around the edges of the garden created a natural fence, protecting other plants from wind and animals and attracting pollinators.

Interplanting these agricultural sisters produced bountiful harvests that sustained large Native communities and spurred fruitful trade economies. The first Europeans who reached the Americas were shocked at the abundant food crops they found. My research is exploring how, 200 years ago, Native American agriculturalists around the Great Lakes and along the Missouri and Red rivers fed fur traders with their diverse vegetable products.
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Displaced From the Land

As Euro-Americans settled permanently on the most fertile North American lands and acquired seeds that Native growers had carefully bred, they imposed policies that made Native farming practices impossible. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which made it official U.S. policy to force Native peoples from their home locations, pushing them onto subpar lands.

On reservations, U.S. government officials discouraged Native women from cultivating anything larger than small garden plots and pressured Native men to practice Euro-American style monoculture. Allotment policies assigned small plots to nuclear families, further limiting Native Americans’ access to land and preventing them from using communal farming practices.

Native children were forced to attend boarding schools, where they had no opportunity to learn Native agriculture techniques or preservation and preparation of Indigenous foods. Instead they were forced to eat Western foods, turning their palates away from their traditional preferences. Taken together, these policies almost entirely eradicated three sisters agriculture from Native communities in the Midwest by the 1930s.
Entire article: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/returning-the-three-sisters-corn-beans-and-squash-to-native-american-farms-nourishes-people-land-and?utm_source=pocket-newtab

BONUS:

Three Sisters • Native American Flute Song • Jonny Lipford


Three Sisters

Scythe

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Re: Agorism
« Reply #21 on: September 17, 2023, 07:47:58 pm »
How to Scythe + STOP Weeding, Watering and Fertilizing


The company this guy bought is scythe from has been in business for 500 years...

90sRetroFan

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Re: Agorism
« Reply #22 on: December 21, 2023, 03:04:37 pm »
A rare flash of sanity from Greece:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/19/greece-to-legalise-papers-for-thousands-of-migrants-to-counter-labour-shortage

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Thousands of migrants are to have their papers legalised in Greece as part of efforts to curb an acute labour shortage that is hitting key sectors of an otherwise resurgent economy.

In a move that has thrown his centre-right party into turmoil, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, pushed through legislation on Tuesday regularising the status of about 30,000 unregistered labourers.

Critics of the bill, which was passed in a parliamentary vote with the endorsement of the leftwing opposition, have described it as dangerous. Mitsotakis’s predecessor, Antonis Samaras, who voted against the law, had argued it risked turning Greece into “a beacon of attraction for illegal migrants”.

Defending the one-off measure, the country’s migration and asylum minister, Dimitris Kairidis, told the Guardian that the legislation would help with not only labour shortages but also social cohesion.

30000 is a tiny number (the population of Greece is >10 million), but it is better than none. Why should it be a one-off measure? The workers will eventually move to other EU countries, and Greece will need new workers. It should be regular policy.

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Agricultural associations, which depend on immigrants to gather fruit and vegetables, have increasingly complained of their produce rotting, and MPs in rural areas have exhorted Mitsotakis to take action. Fears for this year’s olive harvest have similarly grown, with farmers whose yields have fallen because of the climate crisis voicing alarm over the prospect of reduced pickings on account of the labour shortages.

Under the bill, migrants will be able to legalise their status more easily by acquiring residence permits in three years rather than seven if they can prove they are employed. Greek government officials have been quick to emphasise that by integrating “invisible people”, the measure will help boost public revenue with employment taxes and contributions. Many of the jobs that people from abroad are willing to do are ones that unemployed Greeks will not touch, unions say.

At a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is fuelling far-right support across Europe, the law has been welcomed, with the left seeing it as overdue, if also opportune.

“Simply because it has proven incapable of confronting the big problem of labour shortages, the government has been forced to adopt [our] proposal and has moved ahead with the rapid legalisation of work and residence permits for undocumented migrants,” said Theodora Tzakri, who heads the main opposition party Syriza’s parliamentary group.

Greece still deserves to be made Ottoman again, though:

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On Europe’s south-eastern frontline, Greece has long been a gateway to the EU, and the centre-right administration has faced criticism for enforcing self-declared “tough but fair” migration policies that have sought to keep asylum seekers at bay through illegal “pushbacks” at land and sea borders, according to human rights groups.

With ruling party MPs told they would face discipline if they failed to back the bill on Tuesday, cabinet ministers were at pains to stress that the measure in no way presaged a relaxation of the government’s migration management agenda.

See also:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/enemies/hungary-v4/