It’s an old saying but it checks out. If you need hay you make it when the weather cooperates whether you want to or not. In our case it wasn’t a great time because a) it is hot and humid as hell here and b) we have smoke from the Canadian wildfires making it harder to breathe. Being outside is like sitting in the smokiest spot around the campfire, but all day long.
This is Thursday and the picture doesn’t do it justice but that is looking over the neighbor’s field and you can see the haze in the air. It has been like this for days including Thursday when we put 4 wagon loads of hay into our barn. When you couple horrific air quality with temps in the low 90s and humidity making the heat index climb into triple digits, plus of course the dust that comes with hay, and you get a rough few hours.
Fortunately for us I was able to send a single text and 20 minutes later had a neighboring Amish family on site to toss bales.
Now we are set for the next year with hay for our dairy cow we milk daily, the calf we are raising to eat later and our two horses that just eat hay and poop. I was dreading doing the hay in this weather but it is nice to have the barn full and not need to worry about it for another 12 months.
It got me thinking. We aren’t “farmers” in any sense. Someone else owns the fields and baled the hay, we just put it away for use later, but even that gets to something very critical. Even though it is July and hotter ‘n hell, we know that winter is coming and we will need hay to feed the animals. So we suck it up and do the hard work, not just to put the hay away but also the work we put in to pay for the hay in the first place.
What we do is a tiny microcosm of the agricultural system.
Agriculture is the practice of cultivating crops, rearing livestock, and managing integrated systems involving trees, fisheries, and forestry to produce food, fiber, fuel, medicinal plants, and other products vital for human sustenance and economic activity. Emerging around 11,700 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, it represented a pivotal shift from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to sedentary communities, enabling surplus production and the rise of complex societies in regions such as the Fertile Crescent, China, and Mesoamerica. This foundational innovation domesticated key species like wheat, rice, maize, and cattle, laying the groundwork for population expansion and urbanization.
Farming practices have become more efficient the further north you go and the Whiter the farmers became. Ancient civilizations like the Egyptians understood flooding and how that made the soil more fertile as well as rudimentary irrigation but it was Europeans and then North American White farmers who took these basic concepts to whole new levels.
In the U.S. we even created the “Land-grant university” system in the 19th century to establish colleges of agriculture in every state. My first year of college was at THE Ohio State University and it is the land-grant school in Ohio. Many students at OSU probably have no idea that in the northwest part of the campus there is a whole set of buildings dedicated to agricultural education:
I had to jump on a shuttle bus to get to my ag classes and lived in one of the two dedicated ag student dorms.
Anyway the point being that the modern agriculture that provides the food to feed a world of billions that will soon hit 10 billion hungry mouths only exists thanks to White innovation.
It also is another example of White creations that are in the long run going to end up being destructive of the very White civilizations that created them.
U.S. agriculture not only produces enough food to feed a growing and mostly obese American population, it also creates a 20% surplus annually that goes overseas. Like oil and other commodities, food is a global resource but our excess combined with that of other nations provides the food needed to feed third world nations in places like Africa and South Asia.
As I wrote in The Grim Global Future the world is quickly being overrun as charts like this one….
….and this one that Steve Sailer calls the World’s Most Important Graph show….
This wouldn’t be happening if it were not for agricultural and health innovations invented by Whites and thanks to these innovations the posterity of those innovators are being driven into enclaves in their own nations. To quote that post again:
The world is filling up with the stupidest people humanity has ever created.
Some of our greatest advantages, our intelligence and curiosity and the insatiable drive to solve problems, are going to in the end doom the White race and the rest of the world along with us.
Pretty grim thoughts driven by filling up one small barn with hay.
“…our excess combined with that of other nations provides the food needed to feed third world nations in places like Africa and South Asia.”
This quote reminds me of an article that I read decades ago in The Atlantic (of all sources). The Atlantic seems to have scrubbed the article (and all links to it) because it cannot be found. The title:
“The Case for Allowing Starving Nations to Starve.”
As I recall, the author(s) (?) put out the thought experiment positing, ‘What if the White West stopped providing free foodstuffs in bulk to the lazy, worthless hordes of “GGafricans” who eat it, only to regain the energy needed for reproduction, thus spiking the gg population once more–courtesy of stupid Wypepo who fail to make the necessary connections?”
Allow Nature to do what Nature does so well (by allowing the lazy & worthless & stupid to fail to thrive), thus ameliorating the surplus population by attrition rather than by war [Michael Yon’s “Pandemic, Famine, War” trifecta].
An Irish journalist, Kevin Myers, made a similar connection to the above by analyzing the population spike after mass feeding drives:
https://africaunauthorised.com/kevin-myers/
“Essentially, all that Western food aid has accomplished throughout Africa was to massively spike the population creating millions more hungry people with their hands out, while not incentivizing those peoples’ creative skills to learn how to feed themselves.”
Not surprising! We’re talking about Blafricans, fer Chrissake!
Given that Africans are the primary export product of Africa, the Wypepo concept of “Noblesse Oblige” was the single most disastrous concept to have ever been implemented.