SPECIAL REPORT: Open Season, Without Farmers and Ranchers, What’s Next?
By Alex Newman
Cattle rancher Debbie Bacigalupi is working overtime to protect her family’s Northern California ranch. It’s not just the government’s newly “reintroduced” wolves or the poorly managed government forests burning up that threaten to destroy it. To Bacigalupi and other embattled ranchers in the Klamath River Basin, it seems like costly new decrees, orders, laws, and regulations are lurking around every corner. It has gotten so bad that farmers and ranchers are not sure how much more they will be able to withstand. Most recently, authorities undertook the largest dam removal project in history, all but destroying a major source of water and electricity to the rural communities. Under the guise of allowing salmon to swim freely, state and federal officials are destroying the dams that in many ways make the area habitable for people and many animals. The dam removal is expected to be finished before fall. But total control of all water across the entire Klamath River Basin—home to countless farmers and ranchers—has already begun. The “full basin management” scheme now looms over the livelihood of producers in the area. Meanwhile, the California State Water Resources Control Board has repeatedly targeted the Bacigalupi ranch for so-called violations. After approving their livestock-watering pond more than 15 years ago, the state now insists the ranch must redo and resubmit the plans to be reapproved. Apparently, the water control bureaucracy was understaffed at the time of the original application—though not too understaffed to collect the yearly water permitting fees, Bacigalupi tells RANGE magazine. And so, at great expense, the family must jump through all the hoops again. Bacigalupi can barely contain her frustration. “They will probably either tell us we owe a bunch of money that we can’t afford, or that we need to destroy our pond,” she says, noting that authorities admitted to using satellite imagery to surveil her family’s private property. “We are constantly dealing with this kind of stuff. We’re just surrounded by the intensifying pressure. You keep wondering when the next shoe is going to drop. You can never just enjoy the scenery, the warm wind blowing in your hair, because you’re always wondering what these agencies are going to do next—what is the next trick up their sleeves? The reality is they want your land and they want your water.”
Bacigalupi is just one of countless ranchers in Northern California and around the world who feel like they are under siege. Of course, they are. All over the planet, those who feed humanity are under attack, literally. Under various pretexts, governments and international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum are waging a full-blown war on farmers and ranchers—especially small-scale and independent producers. Different tools, policies, and excuses are being used depending on the country. From pursuing “racial justice” and “environmental justice” to protecting “endangered species” or the “climate,” not to mention “economic efficiency,” the guises employed by governments vary widely. But the goal is the same everywhere: Destroy independent food producers and centralize control of all agriculture, land, and energy—and ultimately, political and economic power with them.
This writer first noticed something sinister was going on with respect to farmers in 2012 upon hearing then-South African President Jacob Zuma singing, “Bring me my machine gun, we are going to shoot the Boer.” The Boers, of course, are a specific ethnic group descended mostly from the Dutch. But Boer in Dutch means farmer. And plenty of leaders such as Julius Malema, then leader of the ruling party’s youth league, regularly chanted songs such as “Kill the farmer.” Even as Zuma and other senior leaders were singing about slaughtering Boers, South African farmers, among the most productive in the world, were being massacred in unbelievable numbers and in the most horrific ways. Analysts estimate that as many as 10 percent of the nation’s commercial farmers have been murdered (and often tortured) as the government and even the foreign media ignore it. The situation got so bad that the world’s top expert on genocide, Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch, warned that genocidal forces were at stage six of eight on the genocide scale. Stage seven is slaughter and stage eight is denial after the fact. “There is direct evidence of SA [South African] government incitement to genocide,” Stanton said after a fact-finding mission.
The next year, authorities in Brazil began displacing entire farming villages across some of its most productive agricultural areas. Brazilian troops, some of them wearing U.N. insignia, ordered the residents—at gunpoint—to dismantle their ramshackle homes and load everything into trucks. No compensation was offered to property owners as multiple towns were wiped off the map. Officially, the far-left government’s operation was designed to return lands to native tribes that supposedly lived on or at least passed through it centuries ago. Ironically, leaders of the Xavante tribe who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of the landgrab denounced it, saying their ancestors had never lived on that land or even in that ecosystem. Around half a million acres of prime farmland were taken out of production—a precursor to similar schemes that would be pursued later. In Communist China, meanwhile, government officials are already moving peasants off their ancestral lands and farms at gunpoint. Dubbed the “National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020),” the scheme aims to move 250 million people into tightly controlled cities by 2026. Countless villages have already been razed as the regime promises that government-controlled corporate megafarms will be more productive. Starting more recently, the socialist regime ruling Sri Lanka, acting on U.N. instructions, banned chemical fertilizers and modern agricultural technologies under the guise of “sustainability.” “This has created opportunities for innovation and investment into organic agriculture that will be healthier and more sustainable in the future,” declared now-deposed “president” Gotabaya Rajapaksa at a 2021 U.N. climate summit. In reality, food production collapsed, along with the nation’s economy, as the government was overthrown amid mass hunger.
Even more recently, Western governments from Canada and Holland to Germany and beyond have declared war on their food producers. In the Netherlands, one of the top agricultural exporters in the world, authorities decided to slash “nitrogen emissions” to supposedly save the environment. To accomplish that, authorities are working to expropriate a third or more of the nation’s farms, many of which have been handed down in families for centuries. “The expropriation plans of the cabinet are a downright declaration of war on the agricultural sector,” says Dutch member of Parliament Gideon van Meijeren with the Forum for Democracy party. “Under false pretenses, farmers are being robbed of their land, centuries-old farms are being demolished and farmers’ families are being totally destroyed.” While the Dutch election secured a new ruling coalition that vowed to roll back many of the attacks on farmers and “green” climate schemes of the last few years, European farmers are hardly in the clear yet.
Of course, the war is in America too. One man who has been on the front line of the battle is Brett Kenzy, a South Dakota rancher and president of Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America (R-CALF USA). As the leader of the nation’s largest producer-only membership association for independent cattle and sheep producers, Kenzy has been sounding the alarm about what is going on for years. “America must realize that we became a net food importer in 2019,” Kenzy tells RANGE. “We’ve lost half our cow-calf producers, 70 percent of independent feeders like me in the last generation, 106,000 cattle producers in the last five years alone. These have not been ‘screw it, I’m cashing in and buying a house on the lake’ sales. These have been tearful dispersions of the end of often multigenerational American dreams.” Kenzy, who warns that America must kick out “the U.N. and its cronies” from U.S. food production, also explains that totalitarians such as Stalin and Mao already tried to seize control of food production—with horrific results. And yet today the effort to try it again is gaining steam. “The war on farming and ranching,” he says, “could be described as ‘farming the farmers and ranching the ranchers’ through centralized global control.”
In America, as in other parts of the world, the war on farmers and ranchers has been multifaceted. It is being waged through government policy, anticompetitive behavior by establishment-backed megacorporations, and other means. And the assaults just keep coming. The latest shoe to drop: “disease traceback,” which R-CALF describes as a “pretext to strip away freedoms, liberties, and property.” Before that, there was the Endangered Species Act. The infamous Bundy Ranch showdown actually had its origins in 1989 when U.S. authorities claimed the desert tortoise was endangered, effectively putting a giant target on the backs of local ranchers. At the time of the designation, there were more than 50 cattle ranches in the southern Nevada county where the Bundy ranch operated. Ranchers were ordered to limit their cattle grazing on lands many of them had used since the 1800s. By the time of the showdown, the Bundy ranch was the last cattle ranch in the area. The only reason it survived is because of a massive outcry that saw heavily armed volunteers from across the nation descend on the area to stand up to federal bullies determined to drive the family off its land. Similar persecution was used against the Hammonds in Oregon, though the pretext there was “protecting” a wildlife refuge.
More recently, the Biden administration sought to impose “climate” regulations on public companies that would have effectively required farmers and ranchers to “disclose” their “emissions” or be shut out of the market. The Clean Water Act has also become a weapon in the hands of federal bureaucrats waging war on producers. And more tools to wield against rural America are being dreamed up and manufactured even now. All this has contributed to the fact that the number of farms in the United States is plummeting. From a peak of almost seven million in 1935, there are now well under two million farms left, with government regulations and heavily subsidized corporate megafarms increasingly displacing those still standing. The decline also seems to be accelerating. The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that from 2017 to 2022, the number of farms fell by around seven percent. That is approximately the number of farms lost during the preceding 20 years. The number of acres in agricultural production also declined by about 20 million over the five-year period starting in 2017, even as the American population continued growing rapidly due to immigration.
Similar trends are occurring globally. According to a study published last year in the journal Nature Sustainability, the number of farms around the world will decrease from 616 million in 2020 to just 272 million by the end of this century if current trends continue. “We see a turning point from widespread farm creation to widespread consolidation on a global level, and that’s the future trajectory that humanity is currently on,” says study author Zia Mehrabi, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, Boulder. He warned that this posed significant risks to humanity. The official narrative is that nebulous “market forces” are largely driving these changes. There may be some truth to that, if the current government-dominated agricultural sector can even be considered a market anymore. But the reality is far more sinister. There is, in fact, a global effort to “transform food systems” and centralize control in the hands of Big Business and Big Government. Much of this is taking place under the guise of sustainable development, as RANGE documented in the Summer 2024 issue under the headline “In the Crosshairs.” Indeed, virtually every element of the global war on farmers can be linked back to one of the U.N.’s 17 “Sustainable Development Goals,” frequently referred to as “Agenda 2030.” Celebrated as the “master plan for humanity” by top U.N. officials when it was adopted by U.N. member governments in 2015, the plan seeks to “transform our world,” with a special emphasis on agriculture, lands, and related fields. The global plan seeks everything from global wealth redistribution (Goal 10) to education that gets children to promote controversial U.N.-backed ideologies such as sustainable development (Goal 4).
One of the critical elements of the plan is bringing about “fundamental changes in the way that our societies produce and consume goods and services.” Nowhere are those changes more dramatic than in agriculture and food production. Goal 12, for example, demands “sustainable consumption and production patterns,” especially in agriculture, and “sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources.” The U.N. plan also commits governments to “environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle, in accordance with agreed international frameworks.” Goal 14 addresses “marine pollution of all kinds, in particular from land-based activities, including…nutrient pollution.” In other words, agriculture is a threat to the ocean, the climate, natural resources, and more. The U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), led by a member of the Chinese Communist Party, outlined its vision right before Agenda 2030 was adopted in its 2014 report, “Building a Common Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture: Principles and Approaches.” The document demands drastic restrictions on the use of fertilizers, pesticides, emissions, and water across the agricultural value chain. As an example of how agriculture must be reformed to be considered sustainable by the United Nations, the FAO report declares that “excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer is a major cause of water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.” With that in mind, Goal 2 demands “sustainable agriculture” and “sustainable food production.” On a related effort, Goal 6 requires “sustainable management of water”—especially in agriculture.
Big Business is firmly onboard. In 2019, the World Economic Forum signed a “strategic partnership” with the United Nations to bring the global business world onboard in promoting Agenda 2030. And through initiatives such as its Food Innovation Hubs and the Food Action Alliance, it is working fiendishly on a global transformation of agriculture toward a system controlled by Big Government and Big Business. Bill Gates, the Rockefeller dynasty, and other major elitists, mostly operating through tax-exempt foundations, are also at the center of the global transformation. Genetic modification of everything so that DNA of crops, livestock, and more can be owned by megacorporations is at the center of the centralization process being pushed by the constellation of billionaire-controlled “nonprofit” organizations. But the sustainability agenda goes back half a century. Among the first official gatherings on the subject was the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I) that adopted the Vancouver Declaration. The agreement stated that “land cannot be treated as an ordinary asset controlled by individuals.”
Perhaps even more alarming, the controversial U.N. agreement argued that private land ownership is “a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.” As such, the declaration continued, “public control of land use is therefore indispensable,” an ominous foreshadowing of the World Economic Forum’s now famous “prediction” that by 2030, “You’ll own nothing.” Then U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger contemplated in the early 1970s using food as a weapon of foreign policy to get governments to limit population. It seems the tactic remains in vogue among the would-be ruling class. In addition to food, a similar war on energy exploration and production is being waged by the United Nations, the U.S. government, and other nefarious forces—and despite claims about “protecting the climate,” it appears to be aimed at the same goal.
While U.N. and U.S. government officials whine about what percentage of global emissions supposedly come from agriculture, they fail to even acknowledge that agriculture produces the food that keeps humanity going. This is an existential threat to America, freedom, and even to mankind. Experts and advocates told RANGE that this battle is critical. There are many ways to resist the global effort to undermine independent agricultural producers. When asked by RANGE how people could push back, R-CALF president Kenzy suggested getting started by educating consumers and the general public about the plight of farmers and ranchers. Then consumers should be encouraged to shop as locally as possible, to buy American, and to demand competitive markets rather than cronyism. The first step in addressing the crisis is raising public awareness about the threat. If Americans understood what was happening, they would demand action from their elected representatives at the state and federal levels. They would also make different purchasing decisions. This is not just about steak, though. The future of humanity and freedom are literally at stake.
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Removing the bells from the heifer cows after bringing them down to the lower foothills from the Sierra high country grazing allotments at the Busi family’s Stony Creek barn, Amador County, Calif.
Published with permission of libertysentinel.org