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Old Sun, Mar-04-18, 18:41
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Calianna Calianna is online now
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Posts: 1,852
 
Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000 Female 63
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Progress: 50%
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Quote:
As long as the guidelines are controlled by the USDA, the guidelines will favor the USDA.
~snip~
Producers decide DGA - consumers consume producers' product

~snip~
The point is producers must have no say on DGA. Instead they must be made to produce according to certain standards for nutrition and health for example.


Unfortunately, the USDA actually controls the producers (farmers), instead of the other way around.

I know this for a fact, because I come from a farming family. Dad bought a farm in the mid-60s, which at the time was all corn production. Dad switched some of the acreage to soybeans, and for a while raised some wheat too, rotating crops from one field to another to improve the soil.

My brother has been farming that acreage since about 2000. My brother has eaten LC for about 20 years, so he's well aware of the problems with a grain heavy diet, just like I am. He would genuinely like to switch to some other kind of farm production, but as he's explained it to me, the USDA has the acreage of that farm designated for grain production, and nothing else can be grown there. Therefore, he is listed as a grain farmer, just as my Dad was when he bought that farm.

[Coincidentally, the reason he can grow soybeans -even though they're not technically a grain - is that the USDA considers soybeans to be a grain crop, even though they're a legume. How can we possibly expect them to get nutrition right, if they can't even get the classification of crops right?]

My point is that unless my brother goes through a tremendous amount of expense and red tape to get his classification and the farm's classification changed to some other type of farm production, he can't raise anything for sale, except what the USDA classifies as grain.

Actually, I guess he could stop growing grain, and raise vegetables, berries, grapes, dairy cattle, chickens, etc - the USDA just wouldn't allow him to sell anything from what he would produce, unless he wants to pay heavy fines on anything he earns (the fines are so stiff they'd be higher than what he'd earn from selling any non-designated farm production).

Basically, the USDA has a choke hold on farm production - the USDA designs the DGA's, and therefore they're the ones who decide what portion of total US farmland is to be devoted to each type of farm production - grains, veggies, fruit, dairy, and meat. Considering that so much of the DGAs is supposed to be grain based, obviously they have a huge amount of farmland in the US designated just for the production of various types of grains, in order to provide enough grains to meet the DGAs of every man, woman, and child in the US, plus enough extra to fulfill any trade agreements with other countries.

Please don't fool yourselves into believing that farmers are the ones who actually decide what to grow, except within the strict parameters of what type of crop production the USDA has designated for their farmland.
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