#arable farmer

[heritageposts]

Namibian Presidency (official account), 13 Jan 2024

this comes after germany announced that they, in defense of israel, intend to intervene as a third party in the ICJ trial

in the official government statement, they argue that the accusations of genocide against israel "has no basis whatsoever," and declares themselves to be experts on recognizing genocide by virtue of the fact that they're the ones that committed the holocaust (yes, seriously)

small problem for our self-declared genocide experts though — it wasn't until 2021, over a hundred years after germany killed and enslaved tens of thousands of herero and nama people (in what is now present-day namibia), that the german state was willing to officially recognize that they had committed a genocide; a genocide where, about 80% of the indigenous population of the herero and nama people were wiped out, thousands were enslaved in concentrations camps (with death rates between 45 and 75 percent), and many hundreds medically experimented on.

here's a good article from al jazeera which lays out the history of the genocide, and why germany's offer of "reparations" were met with disgust and anger in namibia

this part, in particular, is worth highlighting:

Today, German Namibians make up 2 percent of Namibia’s 2.5 million population but own about 70 percent of the country’s land, most of it used for agriculture. Multiple state-led efforts to legally restore ancestral land to Indigenous peoples by buying land from private farmers have only partially succeeded because it has proven too expensive for the state. Although the Namibian government sought to transfer 43 percent (15 million hectares) of its total arable land to landless communities by 2020, it has only succeeded in acquiring about three million hectares.

[reasonsforhope]

"Marginal improvements to agricultural soils around the world would store enough carbon to keep the world within 1.5C of global heating, new research suggests.

Farming techniques that improve long-term fertility and yields can also help to store more carbon in soils but are often ignored in favor of intensive techniques using large amounts of artificial fertilizer, much of it wasted, that can increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Using better farming techniques to store 1 percent more carbon in about half of the world’s agricultural soils would be enough to absorb about 31 gigatons of carbon dioxide a year, according to new data. That amount is not far off the 32 gigaton gap between current planned emissions reduction globally per year and the amount of carbon that must be cut by 2030 to stay within 1.5C.

The estimates were carried out by Jacqueline McGlade, the former chief scientist at the UN environment program and former executive director of the European Environment Agency. She found that storing more carbon in the top 30 centimeters of agricultural soils would be feasible in many regions where soils are currently degraded.

McGlade now leads a commercial organization that sells soil data to farmers. Downforce Technologies uses publicly available global data, satellite images, and lidar to assess in detail how much carbon is stored in soils, which can now be done down to the level of individual fields.

“Outside the farming sector, people do not understand how important soils are to the climate,” said McGlade. “Changing farming could make soils carbon negative, making them absorb carbon, and reducing the cost of farming.”

She said farmers could face a short-term cost while they changed their methods, away from the overuse of artificial fertilizer, but after a transition period of two to three years their yields would improve and their soils would be much healthier...

Arable farmers could sequester more carbon within their soils by changing their crop rotation, planting cover crops such as clover, or using direct drilling, which allows crops to be planted without the need for ploughing. Livestock farmers could improve their soils by growing more native grasses.

Hedgerows also help to sequester carbon in the soil, because they have large underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that can extend meters into the field. Farmers have spent decades removing hedgerows to make intensive farming easier, but restoring them, and maintaining existing hedgerows, would improve biodiversity, reduce the erosion of topsoil, and help to stop harmful agricultural runoff, which is a key polluter of rivers."

-via The Grist, July 8, 2023

[gallusrostromegalus]

Have you talked about the agriculture and infrastructure of AEIWAM? Cause in the show we see the people of Seireitei eating, but they’re dead, so that’s a lot of dead people to be feeding. Plus you’ve established the mail service so public services are available in a way.

What’s the food situation look like? Do we have entire districts of people farming? Are there laws about it? Who can be bribed with a very specific food?

Autism Voice: How much are you prepared to learn about this topic? Because there's 5,236 words under the cut. Godspeed.

So in canon, souls don't "need" to eat, but do so out of habit, and also the rukongai is largely a feudalistic economy, which is not how habits OR feudalism work.

Not to drastically oversimplify enormous fields of history, political theory and socioeconomic, but if you were ever wondering WHY someone would tolerate living in a feudal system, the answer largely is "Because it beat the fuck out of the previous system, 'constant and devastating warfare'."

How feudalism gets started is easy:

There's a very large amount of people with no effective unified government for whatever reason (humans just moved into the area/an empire collapsed/a volcano blew up the general everything, etc.), and a limited amount of arable land, and therefore, a limited amount of food.

There's always a few assholes, and those assholes immediately try to establish dominance over the good turf with violence. This is the "constant warfare" phase of the agrarian government cycle.

In response, everyone bands together with their families and immediate neighbors to create defenses against The Marauding Assholes.

If one village is particularly defensible, or one marauder is particularly good at defense-breaking, people start to move in with whoever they think will do a better job of helping them stay fed. eventually these groups get big enough to need some kind of organization, and the organization tends to default to transactional loyalty.

I swear to god this is about the food situation.

The Transaction is thus: In exchange for taxes and you occasionally being called in for military Service, your Lord keeps the Marauding assholes away and does the obnoxiously complicated work of governance that helps farming but is too time-consuming for any farmer to actually do. Sounds like a good deal, right?

Smart people will recognize several glaring omissions and problems with that deal, but that's not important right now. After decades of "constant and devastating warfare", this is a relatively sane and fair deal.

This transactional loyalty continues up the political food chain: The leaders of several villages along a river need to coordinate efforts along that river or whatever, so they pick One Guy to be The Lord of the River Districts, typically the most popular guy in the clique.

...Or the one with the most heavily armed peasants.

In exchange for coordinating all the traffic/trade/environmental conditions along the river and ensuring peace between all the river districts, The River Lord also gets paid taxes and can call on all the River Lords to turn up with the heavily armed peasants should trouble come knocking.

Eventually, the River Lord makes an alliance with the neighboring Plains Lord and Mountain Lord and the Beach Lord up the coast because warfare suuuuuucks, and the most popular member of that clique is crowned emperor.

After a generation or two of relative stability, people have forgotten what the previous period of warfare was like, and develop the unconscious bias that it's Always Been Like This/the horror stories of your elders are just superstition. See: people who don't vaccinate their children because THEY never met anyone with Polio.

So they start pushing their luck.

Get funny with the ownership laws and realize they can make EVERYONE a renter and get away with being a shitass landlord.

Justify being a shitass landlord by coming up with things like "The Divine Right Of Kings"

Someone figures out that if you make everyone pay taxes in a grain crop, you can get away with EVEN MORE shitholery because you can force the peasants to use the bulk of their time and space to grow a crop that they have a limited ability to process and eat themselves, and grow their actual sustenance on the margins, so you can keep them in line with the constant but unspoken threat of starvation.

So if the Rukongai is running on a rice-based feudal system (which it is, because Kan is a rice-based currency and there are Noble houses and Lords and Daimyo in canon), souls MUST need to eat or the lords would have all been beheaded for being assholes who can't govern a while ago without the threat of starvation.

See? It IS about the food situation.

SIKE

I need to talk about law enforcement and postal services in the modern Soul Society now.

So the thing is: Until Ichigo and his friends show up and Cause A Ruckus, The Gotei-13 didn't actually have the authority to arrest anybody besides other Shinigami, people actively trying to Kill Shinigmai, and Hollows (theoretically) in AEIWAM.

See, after the initial period of "Various Lords make friends with each other for fun and profit", some Lords got really, REALLY good at getting other lords to sign up for their Multi Level marketing Schemes, and got stupid rich and also regular stupid doing it. Five of them specifically. These five super-popular guys were the Five noble lords, and their families that everyone pledged loyalty to became The Great Noble Houses: Shihouin, Kuchiki, Ise, and Shiba. AND DEFINITELY NOBODY ELSE.

The fact that all four of these houses were involved in a peculiar incident that imbued them with terrible spiritual power and some really kicass magical artifacts sure helped too.

Theoretically, any of these Four guys could become Emperor, but nobody was willing to bow to anyone else and it rapidly turned into the tensest five-way Mexican standoff, with a shitload of proxy wars between the minor noble houses that served the Great ones.

Great.

We're back to "constant, if somewhat less devastating warfare" AND we have to pay rice taxes.

...so some peasants invent anarchist communalism.

Not communism, they don't have control of the state, but they DO have Lords that are too busy doing poetry and snorting drugs to do their jobs... or catch them doing things that aren't in their lord's best interests.

So one village elder quietly whispers to another about "Hey, let's agree to trade grain and other supplies to each other at a discount and ah... not tell His Lordship about it. We'll have to send messages to each other in secret tho."

So Some Fucking Peasant becomes The Messages Guy, hoofing it all over the Rukongai delivering messages and facilitating an entirely lordless agrarian economy.

It's Kind of a Big Deal.

It's Kind of a Big Deal because peasants who can communicate are peasants who can ORGANIZE, and when word comes down from the scullery maids and underpaid clerks in the noble houses that the minor houses of X and Y are about to go to war at the behest of their masters THE MOST PECULIAR THING HAPPENS-

Holy shit. Terrible plague outbreak in the lands of Lord X. Hundreds dead. No way any village has anybody to spare for the war. What, you want to look? You want to catch this too? That's what happened to the last guy who came to look and look at him now! Crow food :(

Meanwhile, Lord Y and his two jackass sons have suddenly fallen ill. Must be that Plague from District X. Oh no! They died! Now the only Heir left is his daughter Lady X Who Was Doing All The Work Anyway. How unfortunate :(

;D

and that's not even getting into the network of secret granaries, flash livestock auctions, refugee migration routes and fun new alliances with people like Bandit Gang That Is An Entire Calvalry But Better.

It gets to be such a big deal, there are TONS of message guys, and they organize and demand to be paid properly for all this running and not getting caught by the nobs.

And the first postal service is born.

And shit, now that they're organized, why not formalize some of these grain stores and livestock trades and does the cavalry want to help delivering these messages? Or how about all the Village Elders who are experts in various things write down how all that stuff is done so it can be shared? Maybe they should all have a chance to meet up and share wisdom in person...

Shigekuni Yamamoto is all of eleven years old when he hears the village elder who runs the orphanage float the idea. Much, much later, he'll recall that THAT was when the Central 46 began.

Gradually, the lordless network of elder advice and tax-free farm economy grows, and begins to develop internal structures of it's own, and slowly grows to rival the Noble Houses in power, the decentralization of the network making it difficult for the noble houses to even recognize as a player, let alone attack.

Sure, lone messengers are often captured by the armies of the noble houses, but the messages they carry make little sense- the peasants use an entirely different alphabet- and the messengers will bite their tongues off and drown in their own blood before speaking.

But the shape of this secret fifth house remains a mystery for a long time until it becomes An Fucking Problem for food-related reasons. Specifically:

Ever Since the noble houses came back with weird magic powers and fucked up artifacts, there's been more and more and MORE people who have their own fucked up magical powers who live bizarrely long lives and also there are these really fucked up creatures with skull-like masks and holes in their chest that FUCKING EAT PEOPLE??

Fortunately, if you've got one of these magical freaks in your village, they're GREAT at dealing with the hole-monsters or "Hollows"

Unfortunately, these guys need a TON of food.

I read a statistical analysis from a medieval European scholar who worked out that in an agrarian economy, if you want to have ONE full-time warrior, you need to have about 1000 people to support that guy in terms of services needed and the labor lost from them being a fighter. ...And these magical warriors have the appetites of three or four people.

So anyone born with Spiritual power in Soul society is a bit up shit creek.

While everyone experiences the threat of starvation but for them, it's a matter of days, not weeks. While their home village would love to keep them, they straight-up may not be able to produce enough food, even if he's a magical farmer most of the year.

The nearest noble house definitely has enough food. But they also know from the Magical Dudes in their own families just how hungry these guys are, AND how powerful they are and how badly a rival house would want them. So the Noble houses often default straight to conscription, threats of violence against the warrior's home and family, indentured servitude and straight-up curses to control any spiritually powerful people who appear in their districts before a Rival house can make them a decent offer. Or kidnap them.

Basically, unless you're actually a member of the family, the noble houses SUCK to work for. Magical warriors are treated like weapons or animals or worse, are forced to marry into the family.

What are you going to do though? Starve? Not a lot of other options.

...until the secret postal service starts.

Postal Service has Food. And decent wages and working conditions baked right into the way its run.

Sure, it's not easy work, but the magical warriors are the fastest and strongest out there, AND the people most equipped to handle suddenly running into a Noble Guard or a hollow.

Once the word gets out, the magical warriors are practically hammering down the post office doors for a job.

Bit of a rowdy lot, these guys. The Council of Elders realizes. Also, very noticable to the noble houses. it's going to becaome real clear what's going on real fast, and we don't have an army. Yet...

Enter Postmaster-General Shigekuni Yamamoto, who has been running this for the last 500 years and already built a Dojo to train carriers how to defend themselves. He's even a pretty heavy hitter of a magical warrior himself! We'll have him run the army. It's basically the same thing, right?

Yamamoto is made aware of his promotion when the news is first released up north where the council is holding it's meeting this year, and an adolescent Chojiro Sasakibe decides that a good way to apply to the Dojo is to Personally Deliver the News Himself.

At 1 AM

In Sensei's Bedroom. "...Are you all like this, or are you a special pain in the ass?" the man with the extremely impressive mustache and frightening glare croaks at the lad. "My ability to inflict discomfort on various backsides has been noted before, Sir!" Sasakibe reports cheerfully. "...But I'm not sure who you mean by 'you all'?" "You and every other maniac with an ounce of Reiryoku who's apparently headed here at speed?" Yamamoto glowers at the letter he's been handed. Chojiro frowns, looking off to the side and rubbing his chin, giving the question entirely too much serious thought. "Well-" the boy grimaces. "I'd say that compared to the population at large, I'm a statistically significant pain in the ass, but compared to just people with spiritual power, I'm only a minor nuisance." Yamamoto groans, laying back down and staring at the ceiling for a bit. "How old are you, boy?" "Fourteen sir!" Chojiro chirps. "Princess-Who-Understands-The-Heavens, he's fucking fourteen." Yamamoto groans, rubbing his face. "Well. You're my pain in the ass now. Make yourself useful and get me some breakfast."

Sasakibe has been faithfully following that order for the last 1200 years :)

Soon, the Lordless Council of Elders has themselves a sizeable, very powerful and extremely loyal army. In an act of extreme magnanimity, they extend an offer to each of the Four Noble Houses to bring an end to the feuding and create a government and laws for noble and peasant alike to follow and prosper under.

Every Single Noble House: 🗡️⚔️🔪FUCK. YOU. 🔪⚔️🗡️

Well, this was going to happen sooner or later, Yamamoto supposes, and readies for The Final War To End All Wars.

He was so full of hope and promise back then.

The Four Noble houses and Postal Army prepare their initial salvos but before anyone could strike, AN ABSOLUTE SHITWACK OF ARROWS rain down from the sky.

Knock Knock It's The Quincies.

Everyone scrambles against the invaders, but refuses to ally and soon the last hope of Spirit World is pinned on The Postmaster-General, the couple dozen surviving warriors of his Dojo, and Twelve Fucking Maniacs he hired off Death Row.

To ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE'S VAST SURPRISE, Yamamoto is Victorious. Well. Him and some weird monk guy who turned Yhwach into a bug, gave Yamamoto A Mandate From heaven re: The Hollows and Balance of Souls, and Dipped.

The tattered remains of the noble houses finally Unite, but Shigekuni Genryusai Yamamoto has three names now and is like unto a God. and the twelve shady bastards backing him up are no slouches either. ...Perhaps it's time to Negotiate.

And negotiations happen! - The Noble houses bring their not-insubstantial forces to the table, along with the fact they're the only people who have a System FOR collecting taxes, something a government really does need. - The Council of Elders brings it's vast organizational network, expertise in many practical subjects and Lifetimes of Wisdom, only accurate maps of the immediate spirit world. - The newly-named Court Guard brings it's Much more substantial force, it's Mandate from on high, and Yamamoto's scary mustache and even scarier wife.

Things are actually going pretty well. Yamamoto and the army are getting the civil protections they wanted, the elders are getting the fairer means of governement they wanted and the Noble houses are getting to still be Rich As Cream.

...then someone sneaks in to negotiations. Well, they were actually brought in, as part of the entourage of one of the Elders, who takes her advice very seriously. After all, she's the oldest being the elder knows- even older than whatever it was that made the nobles so powerful in the first place.

"Listen, I've worked with these slippery shits before. Make damn sure they can't betray you." she growls. "I know, Yamamoto-sama has laid a very clever trap for them-" the elder nods. "No, I mean Yamamoto." She growls, yellow eye narrowing as she tracks him and his wife as they meander around the gardens below the negotiation hall. "Not him specifically, but it was a betrayal by someone like him- someone gifted the power of heaven- who cursed me to be as I am." "...Oh." says the elder, realizing that if Yamamoto could strike down that monster that lead the Quincies, he could very easily turn his blade on the council too.

...And that's when the first cracks in the bond between Yamamoto and The Council appeared.

So it was declared thus:

The actual governing would be done by the Council of Elders, now called the Central 46.

The Noble houses would still be allowed to retain their lands and collect SOME taxes in exchange for clearly defined and legally binding responsibilities.

The Gotei-13 would be responsible for matters supernatural- People with strange powers, the balance of souls between worlds, hollows, etc. funded and housed by the Central 46.

Additionally, the four of the captain's positions in the Gotei-13 would be reserved for the scions of The Great Noble Houses, unless it somehow came to pass that there were no Scions left.

The former armies of the Noble Houses would become the Onmitsukudo*, who would do the actual enforcing of the central 46's laws and collecting of taxes in the Rukongai, as well as independently collecting information for the central 46.

The Central 46 would also cultivate and independent force of spiritually powerful souls to use the art of Kido for Civil Projects and assisting the Omnitsukido or Gotei-13 when necessary.

It's Peace, but it's a Very Uneasy Peace.

As it stands, the Gotei-13 is *a* military branch, and a force to be reckoned with should they decide to throw their weight around, but they are entirely legally beholden to the Central 46 and not allowed to enforce the law. In fact, the Central 46 and Onmitsukido are allowed to arrest and detain any shinigami they see as a threat, without notice, explanation or Trial. The Central 46 could even decide to stop funding the Gotei-13 altogether and leave them to starve if they chose.

That's why Yamamoto is so strict about direct orders from the Central 46, and why Shinigami aren't allowed into the government quarter of the city.

Is this an excessive amount of world-building? maybe Is it actually making the writing process easier because I actually know what the broader chains of causality already are so the plot flows more naturally? YES. More importantly, am I having fun? VERY MUCH YES.

...What the fuck was this about again?

Oh, right. Food.

So as you can see from the previous fucking doctoral thesis, the food situation is

INTENSELY POLITICAL

AND

EXTREMELY FRAUGHT

...but actually pretty stable!

The vast majority of flat-enough-to-use land in the Rukongai is dedicated to farming. The land mass of the districts gets larger as you get farther from Seireitei, and districts 40-75 are almost ENTIRELY agrarian, with substantial amounts of farming occurring in 20-40 and above 75.

The Primary crop is still rice, but that's been receding since Soul Society finally switched to a Fiat Currency in the 1800s.

Also since about then, a greater variety of crops from the living world have appeared, including: Tomatoes, Potatoes, Crummock, Salsify, Cantaloupe, Avocado, Jicama, Sunroot, Marijuana, Strawberries, Corn, Broccolini, blue berries, boysenberries, Chicory, Cranberries, asparagus, black berries, raspberries, black raspberries, red blackberries, Okra, Coca, lingon berries, elder berries, Rhubarb, gooseberries, salmonberries, bearberries, and so many fucking squash.

New livestock has appeared as well- Soul Society has had an almost unlimited supply of beef from the Chihuahuan Desert cattle trade, but recently there have been new arrivals from the living world- wool sheep, Dairy cattle, Llamas, Mini pigs, Micro Pigs, Guinea Pigs, Fallow Deer, and those fucked up damascus goats.

There is also a bunch of crops native to Soul Society like Hummage, Black yams, ratweed, Pinnerey, Tomangoes, Craic, Duck radish, Sisei, and So Many Fucking Beans. There is also, like Nano Pigs, Pico Pigs, Mega Pigs and the terrifying Giga Pig (actually a type of Cavy). There are also Meat Horses, wool donkeys, and riding cattle, as well as Fertile mules.

Are there Laws About It?

Bruh.

The Soul Society Department of Agriculture was the FIRST formal regulatory agency formed by the Central 46. Even before the IRS.

Soul Society Agricultural and Land-Use Law is so Complex and Arcane that Kaname invents* an entire Rice Farm Subsidy Fraud Case for that takes Momo over a DECADE to investigate in various archives (Aizen is allergic to paper dust), travel to distant districts of the Rukongai (He also gets sick on trains and gates are for emergency use only), and talk to a hell of a lot of lawyers about (Aizen hates talking to anyone who really understands contract law) specifically to keep her physically away from Aizen as much as possible. It even works! *Sort of. The Rice Subsidy Fraud is Very Very real, but difficult to investigate, so he was leaving her subconscious clues in the crossword to point her to more evidence.

Who can be bribed with Very Specific Food?

As a side-effect of shinigami appetites, very nearly everyone to at least some degree. Most have hard limits about what they will accept any kind of compensation for, but everyone can be at least inclined to consider your proposal with the right snacks.

Ukitake loves cookies. He won't break laws or promises or forgo prior engagements, but he will make little exceptions that will make everyone happier.

It's more effective to bribe Rukia with plushies instead of food.

---

Mayuri wants whole-roasted fish, especially the heads and eyeballs. Technically, Mayuri has no limits, but you're going to need to present him with something exceptional.

Nemu can be persuaded to do some truly startling things for a nice dessert. She's done felonies for a fruit parfait before.

You can't Bribe Urahara with food, but you can bribe him with edibles ;)

Akon has a chart posted on his office door what various favors cost in money, labor, cigarettes, beer and/or pirated media.

---

Zaraki doesn't have a specific food he likes, but is constantly craving calories. He's also very willing to eat all your food and then tell you to go fuck yourself. The most effective strategy is to share food while asking for nothing a few times and then ask for whatever you needed his help with outside of a food context. For better or worse, he's extremely trainable.

You can't Bribe Yachiru with what she's already stolen out of your pockets.

Ikkaku is sort of offended when people fail to attempt to bribe him, and VERY offended if they try to lowball him. What, do you think he's cheap? Will show up anywhere with a buffet tho.

Attempting to Bribe Yumichika is a great way to end up owing Yumichika for the rest of your life. He never fails to make it to Sasakibe's High Teas/Gay Bitching sessions and often takes the snacks home.

---

People try to bribe Rangiku with alcohol all the time, which is really annoying. She is Perfectly Capable of acquiring her own booze thank you! Also, they keep offering her shit like Aged Whiskey which tastes how burnt hair smells. What she REALLY wants is Neon orange "Cheez" or "Nacho Blasted" snacks from the Living World. She craves that Riboflavin.

Hitsugaya lets everyone believe he's a slut for watermelon so they don't offer him the thing he'd actually have to fight to not accept: Jerky.

---

Tousen will not be 'bribed' into doing anything and will get extremely offended if you imply that he might consider it. He will, however, go to remarkably extreme lengths to get his hands on persimmons without paying for them. Not theft, that's very unethical, but he holds a bizarre principle about never paying for that fruit so that means exploiting agricultural, fair use, zoning and Tree laws to find or plant persimmon trees that are Perfectly Legal for him to pick from.

Kensei is similarly stony about the idea of being 'bribed', and worse still has an utterly flavorless protien-based diet. Mashiro knows he's got a pathological craving for Oreos and exploits it regularly.

Shuuhei will not be bribed but he will be VERY grateful if you go fill up his water bottle for him. Dweeb.

Mashiro will sell her own granny for a corn chip because she likes snacks, loves shenanigans, and knows her granny can kick a man in half and could use the excitement.

---

Everyone *knows* Shunsui is a drinker, but the trick is that he's savoring some really, REALLY good stuff very slowly. You can't afford the shelf he's drinking from. He thought he was immune to food-based Bribery until Nanao was out of town one week and the rank-and-file Shinigami she left to mind him introduced him to the grand tradition of the post-spree Dirty Great Fry-Up. It was like waking up in heaven to his hungover ass, and now he's the one attempting to bribe his minder into making it again every time he wants to go on a bender because he refuses to wake up from one any other way again.

Nanao did not believe the minder when she told Nanao of the great power of The Dirty Great Fry-Up, but now that Shunsui limits his sprees to the availability of breakfast the following morning, Nanao is trying to figure out what kind of raise it's going to take to keep the fry cook on staff.

---

Sajin Komamura is a deeply honorable man who doesn't even like eating lunch out with a visitor lest it be misconstrued and because he's still self-concious about eating in front of others. Last spring though, someone put up flyers for Game Share tags, and Komamura met with them in private to negotiate terms and ended up putting almost half a month's salary towards at least two does, one wild sow, as many marmots as they can bag (they can keep the pelts), and the offal/feet of the other animals they bag on other tickets. Half of the following month's salary went towards an adequate chest freezer. It's worth it though. His diet had been suffering from lack of variety and some of the vitamins and other nutrients from parts humans don't eat and by December his coat is LUXURIOUS.

Tetsuzaemon won't do anything illegal but will do some remarkably stupid shit for a beer.

---

You don't even SAY the word 'bribe' in the sixth division. Byakuya will remember you forever if you bring him an extremely specific brand of seaweed snack though.

Renji will eat anything handed to him, which is a problem because he almost broke a tooth on a stapler he thought was going to be a sandwich. He's unbribable because his brain won't process anything you say to him while he's eating.

---

People kept bringing Aizen Chocolate when he was captain and he HATED it. It's not that he dislikes the food: it's that his Dead Twin Brother was an absolutely peerless confectioner and made chocolate that could make the angels weep. Not only are Aizen's standards ridiculously high, the food is a genuine trauma trigger for him.

Shinji loves him some Black Thunder Chocolate bars but is so goddamn bad at conversations that he will not grok what the FUCK someone is talking about when they try to bribe him. He'll think they're a bad conversationalist with good taste in candy.

Some god thought they were being real funny when they made Momo be born with an aversion to peaches and a deep fondness for Sour and bitter Flavors. Shinji did manage to remember her joking about that and bought her a jar of pickled lemons for her birthday as a joke, and was genuinely surprised when she was moved to tears.

You have to Bribe Hiyori to even get her to listen to your proposal for the thing you're actually trying to bribe her for. For Better or Worse, she trades in novel potato chip flavors.

---

Attempting to bribe Unohana with food is an absolute crapshoot, because what she'll accept is a complex internal metric of how serious the favor is, how much she likes you, and how much she likes the proferred snack. You might be able to get a perscription for something that's normally a band substance for some Senbei, you might lose your nose for even bringning Okra into her hosptial. Best not play that particular roulette.

Isane is impossible to bribe because she just agrees to stuff before you can bring out the payment. Sure, you got your surgery moved or your hands in some pretty heavy drugs, but you'll walk away with the feeling that, since you didn't actually pay her for this, you actually OWE her now, and you'd be right. You'd better believe she'll call in that favor whenever she needs it, because you're *friends*, aren't you? It also never occurs to anyone to offer her her favorite food: Apples.

Hanataro has accidentally taken bribes multiple times because he did not realize people were attempting to pay him. He thinks it's just basic manners to show up at someone else's home or office with snacks and also people are wildly misinformed about what he's legally allowed to do. What? they wanted me to BREAK A LAW? FOR KIT-KATS?? The boy loves him some kit-kats but not to the point of committing a FELONY, what the fuck???

---

Izuru once walked in on Gin swallowing a rat whole, turned around and tried desperately to pretend he hadn't actually seen that for a year, until he REALLY fucked up his scheduling conflicts and needed an extra week of paid time off to go to a friend's wedding and in a fit of panic, attatched a deceased rat suitable for serpentine consumption he purchased from a pet store. Gin was more than happy to give him the time off and hey, a little hazard pay so you can get something nice for the happy couple Unfortunately, this also condemned Izuru to having Gin lean out of his office at least every other month and holler "Hey Izuru? What's our Rat Guy's phone number?" loud enough to be heard by the entire Division.

Rose can be bribed with anything from a patisserie.

---

People keep givng Soi Fon honey which is honestly starting to feel like a microaggression at this point. What she REALLLY wants is a bucket of fried chicken.

You can't Bribe Omaeda with food, he's the one feeding YOU. Sit down and stop yapping, you're skin and bones!

---

Yamamoto does not accept bribes, at all, ever. He does accept all forms of SUPER MEGA SPICY FLAMING DEATH-REINCARNATION-AND-SECOND-FLAMING-DEATH TURBOFIRE HOT hot sauce.

Sasakibe has been assisitant headmaster of Shin'o academy since it was founded before the fall of Rome. no matter how delicious your offer or how clever your scheme, an adolescent dork already made a better version of it like 700 years ago. Pathetic. What Sasakibe REALLY wants is to be able serve high tea to an adoring crowd. Hope you like cucumber sandwiches.

Okay this is like 5.2K and it's 3AM I'm gonna end this and go to bed.

[najia-cooks]

[ID: Seven yoghurt balls on a plate drizzled with olive oil. The one in the center is plain; the others are covered in mint, toasted sesame seeds, ground sumac, za'tar, crushed red chili pepper, and nigella seeds. End ID]

لبنة نباتية / Labna nabatia (Vegan labna)

Labna (with diacritics: "لَبْنَة"; in Levantine pronunciation sometimes "لَبَنَة" "labanay") is a Levantine cow's, sheep's, or goat's milk yoghurt that has been strained to remove the whey and leave the curd, giving it a taste and texture in between those of a thick, tart sour cream and a soft cheese. The removal of whey, in addition to increasing the yoghurt's tanginess and pungency, makes it easier to preserve: it will keep in burlap or cheesecloth for some time without refrigeration, and may be preserved for even longer by rolling it into balls and submerging the balls in olive oil. Labna stored in this way is called "لبنة كُرَات" ("labna kurāt") or "لبنة طابات" ("labna ṭābāt"), "labna balls." Labna may be spread on a plate, topped with olive oil and herbs, and eaten as a dip for breakfast or an appetizer; or spread on kmaj bread alongside herbs, olives, and dates to make sandwiches.

The word "labna" comes from the Arabic root ل ب ن (l b n), which derives from a Proto-West-Semitic term meaning "white," and produces words relating to milk, yoghurt, nursing, and chewing. The related term "لَبَن" ("laban"; also transliterated "leban") refers to milk in Standard Arabic, but in Levantine Arabic is more likely to refer to yoghurt; a speaker may specify "لَبَن رَائِب‎" (laban rā'ib), "curdled milk," to avoid confusion.

Labna is a much-beloved food in Palestine, with some people asserting that no Palestinian home is without a jar. Making labna tabat is, for many, a necessary preparation for the winter season. However, by the mid-2010s, the continuation of Israel's blockade of the Gaza strip, as well as Israeli military violence, had severely weakened Gaza's dairy industry to the point where almost no labna was being produced. Most of the 11 dairy processors active in Gaza in 2017 (down from 15 in 2016) only produced white cheese—though Mustafa Eid's company Khalij had recently expanded production to other forms of dairy that could be made locally with limited equipment, such as labna, yoghurt, and buttermilk.

Dairy farmers and processors pushed for this kind of innovation and self-sufficiency against deep economic disadvantage. With large swathes of Gaza's arable land rendered unusable by Israeli border policing and land mines, about 90% of farmers were forced by scarce pasture land and low fodder production to feed their herds with increasingly expensive fodder imported from Israel—dairy farmers surveyed in 2017 spent an estimated 87% of their income on fodder, which had doubled in price since 2007. Cattle were thus fed with low quantities of, or low-quality, fodder, resulting in lower milk production and lower-quality milk.

Most dairy processors were also unable to access or afford the equipment necessary to maintain, upgrade, or diversify their factories. Since 2007, Israel has tightly restricted entry into Gaza of items which they consider to have a "dual use": i.e., a potential civilian and military function. This includes medical equipment, construction materials, and agricultural equipment and machinery, and impacts everything from laboratory equipment to ensure safe food supplies to packaging and labelling equipment. Of the dairy products that Gazan farmers and processors do manage to produce, Israel's control over their export can cause huge financial losses—as when Israel prohibited the export of Palestinian dairy and meat to East Jerusalem without warning in March of 2020, costing estimated annual losses of 300 million USD.

In addition to this kind of economic manipulation, direct military violence threatens Gaza's dairy industry. Mamoun Dalloul says that his factory was accused of holding rockets and subsequently bombed in 2008, 2010, 2012, and again in 2014, resulting in repeated moves and the loss of the capability to produce yellow cheese. The Israeli military partially or totally destroyed 10 dairy processing factories, and killed almost 2,000 cows, during its 2014 invasion of Gaza, resulting in an estimated 43 million USD of damage to the dairy sector alone. Damage to cow-breeding farms in 2014 reduced the number of dairy cows to 2,600, just over half their previous number. Damage to, or destruction of, wells, water reservoirs, water tanks, and the Gaza Power Plant's fuel tank exacerbated pre-existing problems with producing cattle feed and with the transportation, processing, and refrigeration of dairy products, leading to spoiled milk that had to be disposed of. Repeated offensives made dairy processors reluctant to re-invest in equipment that could be destroyed at any time.

Israeli industry profits by making Gazan self-sufficiency untenable. Israeli goods entering Palestine are not subject to import taxes, and Israeli dairy companies are not dealing with the contaminated water, limited electricity, high costs of feed, out-of-date and expensive-to-repair equipment, and scarce land (some companies, such as Tnuva, purchase milk from farms on illegal settlements in the West Bank) with which Gazan producers must contend. The result is that the local market in Gaza is flooded with imports that are cheaper, more diverse, and of higher quality than anything that local producers can offer. Many consumers believe that Israeli products are safer to eat.

Nevertheless, Gazans continue building and rebuilding. Despite significant decreases in ice cream factories' production after the imposition of Israel's blockade in 2007, Abu Mohammad noted in 2015 that locally produced ice cream was cheaper and more varied than Israeli imports. In 2017, the amount of dairy sold in 74 shops in Gaza that was sourced locally, rather than from Israel, had increased from 10% to 60%. Ayadi Tayyiba, the region's first factory with an all-woman staff, opened in 2022; it produced cheese, yoghurt, and labna with sheep's milk from affiliated farms. However, demand for sheep's milk products has decreased in Gaza due to its higher production costs, leading the factory to supplement its supply with purchased cow's milk.

The current Israeli genocidal offensive on Gaza has caused damage of the same kind as—though to a greater extent than—previous shellings and invasions. Lack of ability to sell milk that had already been produced to factories, as well as lack of access to electricity, caused an estimated 35,000 liters of milk to spoil daily in October of 2023.

Support Palestinian resistance by calling Elbit System’s (Israel’s primary weapons manufacturer) landlord, donating to Palestine Legal's activist defense fund, and donating to Palestine Action’s bail fund.

Equipment:

A blender

A kettle or pot, to boil water

A cheesecloth or tea towel

Ingredients:

1 cup (130g) cashews (soaked, if your blender is not high-speed)

3/4 cup filtered or distilled water, boiled

1-3 vegetarian probiotic capsules (containing at least 10 billion cultures total)

A few pinches sea salt

More water, to boil

Arabic-language recipes for vegan labna use bulghur, almonds, or cashews as their base. This recipe uses cashew to achieve a smooth, creamy, non-crumbly texture, and a mild taste like that of cow's milk labna. You might try replacing half the cashews with blanched almonds for a flavor more similar to that of sheep's or goat's cheese.

Make sure your probiotic capsules contain no prebiotics, as they can interfere with the culture. The probiotic may be multi-strain, but should contain some of: Lactobacillus casei, Lactobacillus rhamnosus, Bifidobacterium bifidus, Lactobacillus acidophilus. The number of capsules you need will depend on how many cultures each capsule is guaranteed to contain.

Instead of probiotic capsules, you can use a speciality starter culture pack intended for use in culturing vegan dairy, many of which are available online. Note that starter cultures may be packaged with small amounts of powdered milk for the bacteria to feed on, and may not be truly vegan.

If you want a mustier, goat-ier taste to your labna, try replacing the water with rejuvelac made with wheat berries.

You can also start a culture by using any other product with active cultures, such as a spoonful of vegan cultured yoghurt. If you have a lot of cultured yoghurt, you can just skip to straining that directly (step 5) to make your labna—though you won't be able to control how tangy the labna is that way.

Instructions:

This recipe works by blending together cashews and water into a smooth, creamy spread, then culturing it into yoghurt, and then straining it (the way yoghurt is strained to make labna). It's possible that you could skip the straining step by adding more cashews, or less water, to the yoghurt to obtain a thicker texture, but I have not tested the recipe this way.

1. If your blender is not high-speed, you will need to soak your cashews to soften them. Soak in filtered or distilled water for 2-4 hours at room temperature, or overnight in the fridge. Rinse them off with just-boiled water.

2. Boil several cups of water and use the just-boiled water to rinse your blender, tamper, measuring cups, the bowl you will ferment your yoghurt in, and a wooden spoon or rubber spatula to stir. Your bowl and stirring implement should be in a non-reactive material such as wood, clay, glass, or silicone.

3. Make the yoghurt. Blend cashews with 3/4 cup just-boiled water for a couple of minutes until very smooth. Transfer to your bowl and allow to cool to about skin temperature (it should feel slightly warm if dabbed on the inside of your wrist). If the mixture is too hot, it may kill the bacteria.

4. Culture the yoghurt. Open the probiotic capsules and stir the powder into the cashew paste. Cover the bowl with a cheesecloth or tea towel. Ferment for 24 hours: on the countertop in summer, or in an oven with the light on in winter.

Taste the yoghurt with a clean implement (avoid double-dipping!). Continue fermenting for another 12-24 hours, depending on how tangy you want your labna to be. A skin forming on top of the yoghurt is no problem and can be mixed back in. Discard any yoghurt that grows mold of any kind.

5. Strain the yoghurt to make labna. Place a mesh strainer in a bowl, making sure there's enough room beneath the strainer for liquid to collect at the bottom of the bowl; line the strainer with cheesecloth or a tea towel, and scoop the cultured yoghurt in. Sprinkle salt over top of the yoghurt. Fold the towel or cheesecloth back over the yoghurt, and add a small weight, such as a ceramic plate or a can of beans, on top.

You can also tie the cheesecloth into a bag around a wooden spoon and place the wooden spoon across the rim of a pitcher or other tall container to collect the whey. The draining may occur less quickly without the weight, though.

Strain in the refrigerator for 24-48 hours, depending on the desired texture. I ended up draining about 2 Tbsp of whey.

6. If not making labna balls: Put in an airtight jar, and add just enough olive oil to cover the surface of the labna. Store in the fridge for up to two months.

7. To form balls (optional): Oil your hands to form the labna into small balls and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. They may still be quite soft.

Optionally sprinkle with, or roll in, dried mint, za'tar, sesame seeds, nigella seeds (القزحة), ground sumac, or crushed red chili pepper, as desired.

Optionally, for firmer balls, lightly cover with another layer of parchment paper and then a kitchen towel, and leave in the refrigerator to dry for about a day.

Place labna balls in a clean glass jar and add olive oil to cover. Retrieve labna from the jar with a clean implement. They will last in the fridge for about a year.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Lately I've been reading "Drawdown", by Paul Hawken et al, a comprehensive set of strategies for tackling the climate crisis. Your Cambrian Wildwoods post reminded me of one of the solutions - Silvopasture, from the Latin for 'Forest Grazing'.

Essentially it means proposing to farmers that a portion of land be forested and that their animals freely graze there. It can be extremely flexible - planting trees in existing pasture, thinning down woodland to allow for forage growth, using trees as natural fencing, and more.

It's got good potential for carbon capture, and also for saving farmers money in feed and fertiliser, creating better conditions for livestock by keeping them in the shade, and potentially providing secondary income sources in fruit, nuts, etc.

What do you think of it as a potential avenue for Welsh farming? The focus in "Drawdown" is on cattle farming, but I don't see any reason not to trial it with sheep - especially since it could be spun as a hybrid of both aspects of traditional culture...

("Drawdown" also emphasises peer-to-peer uptake through word-of-mouth, rather than being pushed by outsiders.)

Oh, yes - it's basically what they did at Pontbren. That was a farmer-led initiative - one of the big expenses with sheep farming is having to bring them into barns over the winter and supply all feed, but traditionally they'd have stayed out all year. So these farmers got together and went, "How do we ethically and sustainably reduce this expense?"

What they realised is that they were paying for (a) the government-enforced decision post-WW2 to swap to high-yield breeds of sheep that weren't suited to the Welsh climate and topography (i.e. wet as fuck and mostly vertical), and (b) the decline of traditional hedgerow management and shelterbelts. And so the dream was born.

They contacted the Woodland Trust purely to act in an advisory capacity - they wanted to know which trees would be best, and where. They could take much land out of production, but the beauty of hedgerows and shelterbelts is that they're linear features that replace your fences. That was how environmentalists got on board - we were invited, and we remembered that. We were therefore allowed to do a couple of experiments as it progressed, such as testing the infiltration rates of rain into groundwater rather than run-off and comparing it between hedgerow fields and fence fields. Meanwhile, the farmers replaced their stock with native breeds - I believe mostly Welsh Mountain Sheep, which look amazing:

Ain't no rain getting in THAT.

Anyway, a few strategically placed shelterbelts and hedgerows later and:

The sheep can now safely stay out all year round, excepting storms

The sheep are actually healthier and have higher welfare standards

Floods have reduced thanks to higher infiltration rates

Soil erosion is reduced so the fields and river are healthier

The farmers have saved money

The farmers are now making extra money, because they started a tree nursery and sell trees as a side project

You can read multiple publications on it here

So yes! Silvipasture is actually a huge tool for the future that we need to be embracing, as is agroforestry for arable farming, and the frustrating/hopeful part of it is, these are tools we used to use. This isn't new knowledge - it's forgotten knowledge that we need to reclaim. But even aside from the immediate benefits, it also has massive implications for resilience in a world with a warming climate, and we need to do it faster.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Under the most ambitious climate change mitigation scenario, food production is expected to decline by up to 25%,” the report reads. “Ambitious combinations of measures, including reducing food waste, using arable land to grow crops for direct human consumption rather than livestock feed (and thus implying a dietary change), and increased productivity on remaining farmland, could fully mitigate expected reductions in food production.” After the UK left the EU, farmers were no longer part of the Common Agricultural Policy subsidies scheme, which paid land managers according to the acreage they farmed. Instead the devolved nations have set up their own farming payments system. In England, this is the sometimes controversial Environment Land Management Scheme (ELMS), which pays farmers to make room for nature by letting hedges grow wilder, or sowing wildflowers for birds and bees on field margins. Anecdotally, farmers taking part in the schemes have noticed more wildlife, but until now no data has been available. The new government studies found that more mobile creatures, such as butterflies, moths and hoverflies, fared better when larger areas of land – a large farm or multiple small neighbouring ones – were involved in the scheme. Surveyed squares with high levels of eco-friendly schemes in the surrounding landscape had on average 117 more butterflies (a 53% increase), compared with the average for squares with low scores for schemes in the surrounding landscape. There were an average of 12 more moth species in areas with more eco-friendly schemes. Smaller, less mobile insects were boosted in smaller, more local areas signed up to the schemes. Numbers of barbastelle and Daubenton’s bats were also found to respond positively to eco-friendly schemes at the landscape level. Martin Lines, CEO of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, told the Guardian: “The evidence in the Natural England report confirms what many nature-friendly farmers are finding: delivering good-quality habitats, supported by public money, is helping to stop nature’s decline or even reverse it. Many farmers are pleased that their hard work is showing positive results, and with the support of well-funded ELMS, more farmers can deliver or help reverse nature’s decline.”

9 August 2024

[turtlesandfrogs]

One of the things I think about a lot is productivity comparisons between conventional and unconventional agriculture. Mostly because that's the first question you get asked when you talk about anything that's outside the norm*, but, on what metric are we measuring? Per acre? Per hour worked? Per cost of input? Are we measuring yields of product or dollars earned?

This question also, to me, rings of fear. Fear of food shortages, which are really a problem of greed & distribution, not the world's capacity to grow food. If we were really worried about calories though, I think we'd at least switch to pastured animals instead of sending so much corn and soy to livestock (for any non-farmers out there, you do not get nearly the calories out of a chicken or pig that you put in- you get much less**). Or we would put more effort into making cities great places to live so we stopped turning farmland into suburbia. Or we would be much more concerned with how to prevent erosion & loss of arable land. But we don't, and we're not.

I also think of the complexity of non- conventional farming, and how instead of it being a return to the past, it actually relies on new information and methods***.

Take the plot of land that I'm working to make into a market garden. It's soil is, from a farmer's perspective, crap. It's gravely, sandy, very little organic matter. If I were to farm it conventionally, I'd basically have till to open the soil and kill weeds, and then provide all of the plant nutrients through fertilizers, which would cause the plants to kick out their symbiotic fungi, leaving them vulnerable to pathogenic fungi, and more dependant on me for water. There would also be bare soil everywhere, increasing evaporation & providing plenty of opportunities for new weeds. My costs would be very high, paying for fertilizers, pesticides, & herbicides, and I would have to water, a lot. It probably wouldn't be at all economically feasible to grow food on this plot using conventional methods.

Now, I look at it and say, I'm going to do no-till. I look at the hard, weedy, depleted soil and there's no way a seed is going to be able to come up through that. But, I'm not just doing no-till, because I'm not looking at it from a conventional mindset and just trading out one practice. I'm doing basically everything different from above.

Instead of tilling, I'm laying down a thick layer of mulch, to shade out the weeds, increase soil organic matter (increasing the amount of water and nutrients the soil can absorb & good on to), and feed the soil ecosystem. By the time spring rolls around, the soil underneath will be much better, but I'll still add more compost in most cases.

Instead of fertilizers I've had to pay for, I'm using mulches that I got for free from my gardening work & composts made for free from restaurant kitchen wastes****. I'm going to use over crops, plants that fix nitrogen and also serve as perennial hosts to beneficial soil fungi, which will also form symbiosis with most of my crops, increasing their resistance to pathogenic fungi while also providing them with increased access to water and soil minerals.

Instead of bare soil, there will be mulches and cover crops every where. Instead of monocrops & pesticides, I'll be intercropping which will help by hosting beneficial native insects that will chow down on aphids and other crop pests.

From this framework, there's an upfront investment of effort and planning, but farming this land now seems feasible.

And the thing is, each of those choices is backed up by research. We know so much more now about soil and nutrient cycling and how it actually works than when conventional ag really got started. We know so much more, and so many practices are new, so growing non-conventionally isn't a step back into the past of how things were grown.

But at the same time, it's not exactly completely information either- other cultures have different ways of growing food crops, and if you broaden your concept of what cultivating plants looks like, there's examples everywhere. We're just studying it now and providing it scientifically.

*and I honestly think that it's a result of the extractive mindframe that comes from being the decendants of colonizers. Just look at the different perspectives between many western foragers ideas and Indigenous peoples' relationship with the land.

** chickens are one of the most efficient, with a feed conversion ratio of 1.6, which means for every 1.6 pounds of food you give them, you can expect the chicken to gain 1 pound (cows are over 4 pounds of feed to pound of live weight, and pigs are 3 to 4ish). That's the whole bird though, counting all the parts we don't eat- guts, feathers, bones, etc. Even so, a pound of chicken food has over 1300 calories, and is about 20% protein for starter/grower, where as a pound of chicken has about 500 calories and about 30% protein (for dark meat, you get fewer calories from white meat). I'm not saying everyone should give up meat, but I am saying that the amount of meat in mainstream diets has increased dramatically, much of it comes from cafos where animals are fed on grains & legumes, and if we're measuring productivity and yield per acre because we're worried about feeding the world, this is a huge factor. Look up how much of the corn & soy crop goes to actually directly feeding people.

*** from a western, colonizing prospective

**** is this a particular boon from my particular circumstances? Yes. But everyone has their own challenges and resources, there is no cookie-cutter solution to all agriculture, everywhere. You have to find the solutions that work for you.

[ramshacklefey]

Dear Person who Loves Hating on Veganism,

Not all vegans are white, USian, or wealthy. In fact, those demographics aren't remotely representative of people who practice veganism.

Most vegans aren't obnoxious fucking idiots, and we hate the idiots as much as you. They're just louder, and people see them because they're obnoxious fucking idiots who won't shut the fuck up.

We're very aware of the fact that the agribusiness industry exploits and abuses workers who are disproportionately immigrants and people of color. There's a big overlap between people who are vegan and people who try to buy local produce that we can confirm is made ethically. Unfortunately, this is expensive, and see above point about most vegans not being wealthy.

It's impossible to buy fucking anything these days without it being made by exploited workers. It is possible to avoid buying products that are produced by both worker exploitation and unimaginable cruelty to animals. Harm reduction.

Many of us also try to avoid buying stuff (Palm oil, quinoa, etc) that causes massive ecological harm.

Vegan "replacements" for animal products are not necessary for being vegan.

We know that eating eggs doesn't hurt chickens, that taking wool doesn't hurt sheep, and that eating dairy doesn't hurt the animals it comes from. Those of us who aren't idiots are fine with animal products that come from animals who are well-treated.

The animals that produce eggs, wool, and dairy for mass consumption live in conditions that would be illegal to keep a pet in.

Opinions vary on killing animals for meat if they're otherwise well-treated through their lives.

Eating vegan is straight up cheaper than not as long as you don't insist on buying luxury items to replace every single animal product in your diet.

Plant-based milk is only more expensive than dairy in the USA because of the extent to which the US government subsides the dairy industry.

The amount of meat that USians eat is fucking insane, unhealthy, and ecologically unsustainable. If we enacted laws that required farmers to give their animals the space and care needed for them to be remotely healthy and kept up the current rate of meat and dairy production, something like 70% of the available arable land in the country would be going to animal farming.

Cattle farming is the largest source of methane emissions on the planet. Methane is far more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Reducing cattle farming would have a huge impact on global warming.

Humans are not carnivores. We aren't even omnivores, strictly speaking. We are primarily frugivores with a limited ability to digest animal products.

There is no nutritional benefit you get from animal products that is not available from plant-based food. Often, your body will obtain the nutrients more readily and efficiently from plants than from animal products.

The only exception to this I'm aware of is vitamin B12. This is because this vitamin doesn't come directly from plants, but from the soil they grow in, and most plants are washed too thoroughly and grown in unhealthy soil. Vitamin supplements can easily replace this.

There are innumerable health benefits to plant-based diets, even if you aren't fully vegan.

Most of us have pets. Most of us support caring, sustainable animal husbandry.

Whether or not you are vegan, you should, imo, be aware of the reality of how the animals you consume are treated. What you do with that information is your own business.

We would also like to launch PETA into the fucking sun.

Sincerely,

A Vegan Who Is Fucking Tired of This Bullshit.

[solarpunkbusiness]

The production of low carbon, plant-based insulating blocks by agricultural workers from farm materials could help to support rural economies and tackle labour shortages, experts believe.

A major new study will test if the materials, for use in local construction, could lead to a “Harvest to House” system of building.

The University of Exeter-led study will show if small-scale farmers could diversify into making sustainable building materials for use on their own farms, or for construction in the local area. This could also benefit their own businesses, communities and the environment.

Arable farm workers in the region will be involved in the small-scale trial of a manufacturing process. Researchers will explore the human, environmental, and infrastructural barriers and opportunities for production through working with farmers and farm workers.

A short animated, visual ‘manual’ of the pilot manufacturing system, in an accessible and easy to digest format that can be readily shared and referred to by time-pressed farmers and workers, as well as people outside agriculture.

The project is part of the Ecological Citizen(s) Network+, led by The Royal College of Art, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of York and Wrexham Glyndŵr University, as well as a range of partners from industry, charities, culture and civil society.

//Ed's note: What they're doing is designing a social-economic-environmental intervention that attempts to address a number of complex problems simultaneously. Its a business model innovation also to see if small farms can also make sustainable building materials in their offtime as an additional source of income. Note how in all my African and Asian stories, social enterprises usually include farmers in their business models but this is a first in the UK and Europe I'm guessing to think about these things in a holistic socially oriented community-centric manner.

[mesetacadre]

The Land Reform One of the first acts of the newly formed provisional government was the Land Reform Law. The rapid organization of “People’s Committees,” described in the previous section, went hand in hand with the organization of Farmers’ Unions. Farmers formed some 60 per cent of the citizenry in North Korea, and they were also 60 per cent of the membership of the governing “People’s Committees.” The Provisional People’s Committee for North Korea, under Kim Il Sung as president, took power on February 8, 1946, stating that its chief task was “to fulfill the farmers’ demands.” At once the Farmers’ Union of North Korea, which had grown by that time to 1,500,000 members, held a congress at Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, and demanded land reform on the basis of “land to the tiller.” Two days later, on March 5, in the midst of a storm of letters and resolutions from farmers, the provisional government passed the Land Reform Law. It was announced on March 7 over the radio. Some 197,000 organizers were sent at once to the rural districts, where some 11,500 local committees were elected by landless farmers to apportion the newly acquired lands. The distribution was completed in twenty-three days, by April 1, 1946. The farmers, who demanded land in the first week in March began their spring plowing in April on their newly acquired lands. Probably no land reform in all history has been accomplished so swiftly and with so little turmoil. The Land Reform Law was sweeping. It confiscated all Japanese lands, whether public or private, all landlords’ lands, if the landlord owned more than twelve acres, or if, owning less, he systematically rented the land and did not work it himself, all lands of churches and monasteries that exceeded twelve acres. The lands were given to village committees to distribute on the basis of the number of people in each farm family, and also with reference to the number of adult workers. Landlords also might get land to till but not more than twelve acres, and this must be in another county where they would have no traditional influence. Of the 70,000 landlords in North Korea, 3,500 took advantage of this permission. Some 724,522 farming families got land, 72 per cent of all the farmers of North Korea. Of these 442,975, or more than half, had been landless share-croppers or farmhands, while the rest had possessed small bits of land supplemented by share-cropping. Of the 4,950,000 arable acres in North Korea, some 2,625,000 – more than half – was thus distributed. Before the land reform the average holding of poor farmers was half an acre; after the reform it was five acres. Before the land reform over half a million farming families could not feed themselves till the next harvest, but were forced to borrow food at usurious rates. After the reform, every farming family could feed itself. Even though 1946 was a bad crop year because of excessive rains, the farmers had much more food than formerly. They now gave 25 per cent of their crop to the government in tax, instead of the former 50 to 80 per cent to the landlords in rent.

In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report, Anna Louise Strong, 1949

[master-john-uk]

This is a worrying trend.

The UK's fruit and vegetable farmers have been struggling for several years due to our supermarkets choosing to stock cheaper foreign imports, rather than buying from local growers. Things have improved slightly this year. Five out of 6 of our major retailers have pledged to source fresh produce from UK farms... but. I do not think they have stopped buying the sub-standard fruit and vegetables from abroad.

Most of my arable farmland on the Dorset Downs is not suitable for growing vegetable crops... but after buying the neighbouring dairy farm in 2018, we gained a lot of extra previously unused land. some of which is in localised lowland areas with richer and deeper soil.

In 2021 we experimented with planting potatoes for the first time. Although the harvesting was rather labour intensive, it proved to be successful (and , more importantly profitable.)

In 2025 we intend to reintroduce potato, and other root crops on a slightly larger scale. We are also looking into the feasibility of growing fruit and salad in glasshouses, or polytunnels.

[starseedpatriot]

Regarding UN Sustainable Development Goals

An excellent reply by Alexandra Latypova when asked how her company would meet the UN SDG’s:

“UN is an unelected, unaccountable organization whose pronouncements have no bearing on our company's bylaws, management principles and corporate governance. We resent the implication that they do.  

We do not support UN's "Sustainable Development Goals" and related ideology as we believe it is vague, self-contradictory, unimplementable and overall damaging framework designed to promote the interests of wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations at the expense of the working people globally. 

"Sustainability" is a purposefully undefined but pleasantly sounding nonsense.  The 17 "goals" made up by overpaid bureaucrats are designed to obfuscate the reality - the monopolizing of control over the world's resources and subjugation of the people who never consented to be governed in this manner.  

As an example of absurdity, the core of the SDG program for development and poverty reduction relies on industrial growth — ever-increasing levels of extraction, production, and consumption.

Goal 8 calls for 7% annual GDP growth in the least developed countries and higher levels of economic productivity across the board, calling for less and more at the same time.  

The most recent example of SDG in action is the devastating collapse of the entire country of Sri Lanka precipitated by capricious "sustainability" burdens such as bans on fertilizer and ban on non-organic farming which led to widespread hardship and civil unrest. 

Widespread protests of farmers are currently ongoing in the Netherlands and other European countries.  The hardworking people are pushed to the brink of despair by the SDG inspired "green" nonsense while UN's corporate sponsors like Bill Gates are simultaneously purchasing all arable land in sight. 

“Sustainable water" agenda comes with Nestle's sponsorship which aims to have all freshwater on Earth owned by corporations. 

“Health" goals are sponsored by the global pharmaceutical companies and, unsurprisingly, aim at increasing government purchases of drugs, elimination of individual health choices and informed consent as already demonstrated by the global covid-19 policies to date. 

In summary, we do not support UN and its agenda 2030.  We think nobody should. 

Collectivist utopias have led to devastation both human and environmental every single time they were attempted, and UN's SDG is yet another attempt. 

We strongly believe in the individual rights to free thought, expression and self-determination, as only truly free individuals can build a just, moral, non-fraudulent society for common good.”

https://t.me/LauraAbolichannel

[najia-cooks]

[ID: A purplish-grey stew topped with olive oil and garnished with piles of pomegranate seeds. Plates of green peppers, bitter olives, olive oil, taboon bread, green onions, radishes, and za'tar surround the dish. The second image is a close-up of the same stew. End ID]

رمانية / Rummāniyya (Palestinian pomegranate stew)

Rummaniyya (رُمَّانِيَّة; also transliterated "rumaniyya," "rummaniya," and "rummaniyeh") is a Palestinian stew or dip made from lentils, eggplant, and pomegranate seeds, flavored with nutty red tahina and a zesty, spicy دُقَّة (dugga) of dill seeds, garlic, and peppers. A طشة (ṭsha), or tempering, of olive oil and onion or garlic is sometimes added.

"Rummaniyya," roughly "pomegranate-y," comes from رُمَّان‎ ("rummān") "pomegranate," plus the abstract noun suffix ـِيَّة ("iyya"); the dish is also known as حبّة رُمَّانَة ("ḥabbat rommāna"), or "pomegranate seeds." It is a seasonal dish that is made at the end of summer and the beginning of fall, when pomegranates are still green, unripe, and sour.

This stew is considered to be one of the most iconic, historic, and beloved of Palestinian dishes by people from Gaza, Yaffa, and Al-Ludd. Pomegranates—their seeds, their juice, and a thick syrup made from reducing the juice down—are integral to Palestinian cuisine and heritage, and images of them abound on ceramics and textiles. Pomegranates and their juice are sold from street carts and cafes in the West Bank and Gaza.

Today, tens of thousands of tons of pomegranates are grown and harvested by Israeli farmers on stolen Palestinian farmland; about half of the crop is exported, mainly to Europe. Meanwhile, Palestinians have a far easier time gaining permits to work on Israeli-owned farms than getting permission from the military to work land that is ostensibly theirs. These restrictions apply within several kilometers of Israel's claimed borders with Gaza and the West Bank, some of the most fertile land in the area; Palestinian farmers working in this zone risk being injured or killed by military fire.

Israel further restricts Palestinians' ability to work their farms and export crops by imposing tariffs, unexpectedly closing borders, shutting down and contaminating water supplies, spraying Palestinian crops with pesticides, bulldozing crops (including eggplant) when they are ready to be harvested, and bombing Palestinian farmland and generators. Though Palestinian goods have local markets, the sale of Palestinian crops to Israel was forbidden from 2007 to 2014 (when Israel accepted shipments of goods including tomato and eggplant).

Gazans have resisted these methods by disregarding orders to avoid the arable land near Israel's claimed borders, continuing to forage native plants, growing new spices and herbs for export, planting hydroponic rooftop gardens, crushing chalk and dried eggplants to produce calcium for plants, using fish excrement as fertilizer, creating water purification systems, and growing plants in saltwater. Resisting Israeli targeting of Palestinian food self-sufficiency has been necessary for practical and economic reasons, but also symbolizes the endurance of Palestinian culture, history, and identity.

Support Palestinian resistance by calling Elbit System's (Israel's primary weapons manufacturer) landlord; donating to Palestine Action's bail fund; and buying an e-Sim for distribution in Gaza.

Serves 6-8.

Ingredients:

For the stew:

1 medium eggplant (370g)

1 cup brown lentils (عدس اسود)

600g pomegranate seeds (to make 3 cups juice)

3 Tbsp all-purpose flour

1/4 cup red tahina

1/2 cup olive oil

Salt, to taste

Citric acid (ملح الليمون / حامِض ليمون) (optional)

Red tahina may be approximated with home cooking tools with the above-linked recipe; you may also toast white tahina in a skillet with a little olive oil, stirring often, until it becomes deeply golden brown.

For the دُقَّة (dugga / crushed condiment):

2 tsp cumin seeds, or ground cumin

1 1/2 Tbsp dill seeds ("locust eye" بذور الشبت / عين جرادة)

5 cloves garlic

1 green sweet pepper (فلفل بارد اخضر)

2 dried red chilis (فلفل شطة احمر)

People use red and green sweet and chili peppers in whatever combination they have on hand for this recipe; e.g. red and green chilis, just green chilis, just red chilis, or just green sweet peppers. Green sweet peppers and red chilis are the most common combination.

For the طشة (Tsha / tempering) (optional):

Olive oil

1 Tbsp minced garlic

Instructions:

1. Rinse and pick over lentils. In a large pot, simmer lentils, covered, in enough water to cover for about 8 minutes, or until half-tender.

2. Meanwhile, make the dugga by combining all ingredients in a mortar and pestle or food processor, and grinding until a coarse mixture forms.

Dugga and components.

3. Cube eggplant. A medium-sized eggplant may be cut in half lengthwise (through the root), each half cut into thirds lengthwise, then cubed widthwise.

Cubed eggplant, red tahina, and pomegranate seeds.

4. Add eggplant to simmering water (there is no need to stir).

5. While the eggplant cooks, blend pomegranate seeds in a blender very thoroughly. Strain to remove any gritty residue. Whisk flour into pomegranate juice.

Pomegranate juice being strained.

6. Taste your pomegranate juice. If it is not sour, add a pinch of citric acid or a splash of lemon juice and stir.

7. Add dagga to the pot with the lentils and eggplant and stir. Continue to simmer until the eggplant is very tender and falling apart.

8. Add pomegranate juice, tahina, and olive oil to the pot, and simmer for another 5 minutes, or until stew is very thick and homogenous.

Bright pink pomegranate juice in stockpot.

9. (Optional) In a small skillet, heat a little olive oil on medium. Fry minced garlic, stirring constantly, until golden brown. Add into the pot and stir.

10. (Optional) Mash the stew with the bowl of a ladle or a bean masher to produce a more homogenous texture.

Serve rummaniyya hot or cold in individual serving bowls. It may be served as an appetizer, or as a main dish alongside flatbread, olives, and fresh vegetables such as radishes, green peppers, green onions, carrots, and romaine lettuce. It may be eaten with a spoon, or by using كماج (kmāj), a flatbread with an internal pocket, to scoop up each bite.

[athingofvikings]

A Thing Of Vikings Chapter 47: Do You Hear Something?

Chapter 47: Do You Hear Something?

Pre-Viking Eirish society was, in technical terms, a sophisticated primitive society; it had formalized law, culture and social structures, but also lacked several elements associated with complex societies, specifically a written language, urban centers, and currency.  The social structure of the Eirish, in particular, was based on three axes, and where the individual Eirish person fell on them.

The primary axis was familial; an Eirish family was all of the related members living under one roof (a fine), and then extending out to one-degree extended family (sept), and there to blood-tied clan.  Related clans would come together to form a tribe (a tuath), related tribes would form a kingdom (dál), and geographically proximate kingdoms would form a province (coiced), of which there were classically five.

The second axis was occupational, and consisted of three groups: the warriors (láech / láecheanna), the craftsmen (cerd / cerdí), and the laborer farmers (aithech / aithecheanna).  The farmers produced the food required to survive, and were protected by the warriors.  The warriors protected the other two groups, but also ruled over them.  And the craftsmen produced the goods and services needed to keep the society running; this group included not only smiths, carpenters, masons and others, but also the lawkeepers, priests, musicians, scholars, monks, physicians and other such individuals.

The third axis was social class, consisting of five ranks. 

At the top were the rulers, the kings (ríthe), ranging from clan chief (rí) to tribal chief (rí tuaithe) to king of the kingdom (rí ruirí), to province king (rí ruírech), and then to High King (ard rí).

Second in rank were the privileged (flaith), essentially the aristocracy.  These individuals were the designated managers of the land, and controlled who settled where and did what.  While legally the land was held by the tribe as a whole and the privileged class merely managed it on their behalf, they still historically received the bulk of of the arable land, controlled who worked it, and worked the public resources for their private benefit. 

Third in rank were the non-noble freemen with property (aire), usually land or flocks.  There were two subclasses, both related to the occupations in the second axis—warriors and professionals, who engaged in privileged, trained crafts and skills, such as priest, law-keeper, physician, fili or other such skill.

Fourth in rank were the freemen without property (aithech); they were not privileged themselves and did not hold property, and worked the land or flocks granted by the upper ranks as tenants. 

Fifth in rank were the non-free.  There were three subdivisions of this category:sen-cleith, bothach & fuidir.  Bothach were essentially clanless individuals allowed to squat on tribal lands at the sufferance of the tribe.  Sen-Cleith were the personal servants and laborers of the Flaith classes, and the flaith members treated them as little better than the daer-fuidiri.  The fuidir was the lowest of the low, bound to the land and desires of their owning Flaith.  The daer-fuidiri being composed of debt-thralls, war-captives, and other human chattel, The daer-fuidiri were little more than property—indeed, female thralls, referred to as bondsmaids (cumhal), were a standard unit of currency against which other valuable items were measured in Eirish law. Finally, there were rare exceptions in the form of tribeless individuals, saer-fuidir, who were allowed to squat on unsettled land at the sufferance of the local Flaith, but otherwise had no rights before the law to speak of.

—A History Of The Isles, Oxford, England, 1591

AO3 Chapter Link

~~~

My Original Fiction | Original Fiction Patreon

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

My world's main agriculture is farming but I'm wondering if that's truly viable in terrain that's not ideal for growing stuff. Though I am certainly having the world be advanced enough to have greenhouses and so on but nothing too fancy other than some rudimentary GMO. With greenhouses, I assume the majority of land could possibly be used - including desert/polar regions. Just as long as they can transport all their needed supplies.

Ebonwing: If so much of your terrain is unsuited to farming that they’d have to build greenhouses everywhere, why would the main agriculture be farming? In areas where farming crops isn’t feasible, people have traditionally found other ways of feeding themselves, often by having animal herds and maintaining diets based on meat and dairy.

Tex: Arable land depends on soil fertility. While it’s true that this is climate-dependent, there are, for example, plants that grow in both the Arctic and the desert. There is currently an interest in some farmers adopting no-till farming due to more research being conducted on soil microbiology (Nature portfolio).

Successful agriculture is heavily dependent upon the health of the soil and the greater biome. Greenhouses are a popular concept for alleviated perceived issues with the production of crops, but also have issues with decreased microbial diversity, something that plants need in order to be healthy (Legein et al.). Accordingly, this microbial diversity has a perceptible impact on human health (PDF Samiran &  van der Heijden).

Genetic engineering is a new field and has only recently been involved in agriculture, with selective breeding of animals and plants the predominant method of cultivating desired characteristics the typical preference of farmers, when they have not opted for domestication.

What are your world’s main goals for agricultural production? How many people are they feeding, how many animals are they feeding, and what is the general density of these populations? What does an ideal diet look like? Is the food mostly equivalent in quality and accessibility across all social strata, or are there visible disparities? What are their major obstacles in reaching these goals? Agriculture does have a side effect on the environment, particularly with the use of tilling and chemical applications - the natural biome is altered, and sometimes permanently. When over-used and improperly maintained, it can create inhospitable environments (Wikipedia).

Further Reading

Lee, Sang-Moo, et al. "Disruption of Firmicutes and Actinobacteria abundance in tomato rhizosphere causes the incidence of bacterial wilt disease." The ISME journal 15.1 (2021): 330-347.

PDF Chen, Tao, et al. "A plant genetic network for preventing dysbiosis in the phyllosphere." Nature 580.7805 (2020): 653-657.

PDF Gu, Shaohua, et al. "Competition for iron drives phytopathogen control by natural rhizosphere microbiomes." Nature Microbiology 5.8 (2020): 1002-1010.

PDF Wolinska, Katarzyna W., et al. "Tryptophan metabolism and bacterial commensals prevent fungal dysbiosis in Arabidopsis roots." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118.49 (2021): e2111521118.

PDF Wei, Zhong, et al. "Initial soil microbiome composition and functioning predetermine future plant health." Science advances 5.9 (2019): eaaw0759.

Licorice: “Agriculture” derives from the Latin for “cultivation of fields”; “ager” is a field, and an ”agricola” is a farmer. So agriculture = farming. Agriculture is defined as “the practice or work of farming” by the Cambridge Online Dictionary; other dictionaries give a similar definition. 

The first time I read your query, I thought you meant your world was one where little or none of the terrain was suitable for growing stuff. However, on a second reading, it seems your question is more along the lines of “how do the inhabitants of marginal land produce their food”? If that’s the case, then it sounds to me as if your world is a lot like Earth. 

Human beings have settled in just about every environment on earth, adapting their lifestyles and diets to the local conditions. Some regions of earth have traditionally produced an abundance of food and been well suited to farming; others have not, and in those cases the indigenous people have generally relied on hunting and gathering for their food. Some places, like the Welsh Hills or the slopes of the Alps, are more suited to animal husbandry than to the cultivation of crops. And, of course, there was a time when the different regions and human societies of Earth each had their own unique food crops. 

There’s been a lot of interest in greenhouse farming in the Arctic, but as far as I know it remains small-scale and somewhat experimental. That could change.

https://www.arcticwwf.org/the-circle/stories/bringing-leafy-greens-to-northern-sweden/

And of course the inhabitants of your world will be trading with each other. Regions that produce a lot of fish will salt it and trade it with regions that produce a lot of wine or spices. Tea can be exchanged for gold. Maybe potatoes are abundant but wheat is a luxury? And so on; it’s up to you to decide what your world’s most precious food commodities are.. 

[workersolidarity]

🇨🇳

CHINA'S NEW FOOD SECURITY LAW IS A MOVE IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION, EVEN AS THE U.S. HANDS OVER ITS OWN AGRICULTURAL SOVEREIGNTY TO CORPORATIONS

China's National legislature passed a new food security Law Friday, aimed at securing its national food supply and reducing waste in food production in a country that feeds more than 1.4 billion people with less than 9% of the world's arable land.

At the very time when the United States is handing over it's agricultural sovereignty to giant multi-national corporations (including ones from China), China is moving in the opposite direction, looking to secure food supplies and exercise public ownership of agricultural lands.

China's Xinhua News Agency writes that the new food security Law stipulates that China must "'ensure absolute security in staple foods and basic self-sufficiency in grains,' indicating that the country must ensure that its food supply remains firmly in its own hands."

The new Law was passed by China's legislature at a session of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee on Friday, with the law taking effect on June 1st, 2024.

According to Xinhua, the law further stipulates that the "state shall restrict the occupation of farmland and the conversion of farmland to other forms of land use, such as forests and grassland."

The Law also emphasizes the establishment of a National agricultural germplasm resource bank, improvement of the national system for cultivating superior crop varieties, as well as promoting mechanization and building capacity for disaster prevention, mitigation and relief in grain production.

The Law also introduces measures to raise the income of farmers who grow crops.

According to Xinhua, China has produced a grain harvest of over 650 million tons for nine consecutive years, with a staple-food self-sufficiency rate above 100% and a grain-sufficiency rate above 95%.

The Law also contains a chapter dedicated specifically to food conservation, and creates enforcement mechanisms to reduce food waste from production to consumption.

Provisions also cover issues such as those concerning grain reserves, distribution, processing, and emergency response.

Xinhua says the new legislation on food security is "of great importance", and "lays a solid legal foundation for advancing China's system and capacity for food security governance, said Wang Zhimin, a member of the NPC Standing Committee."

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews