We have completed the ARISE USA Tour 2021 with a huge success story: 20,000 miles, 56 events in 33 states. Naturally, we had hoped to get to all 48 lower states but in no way will I let anyone tell me this was anything other than a huge success.
No one has ever done this before, and quite honestly I feel very privileged to be a part of such an endeavor. For no other reason than it created the opportunity for me to see the wonderful presence of humanity that still exists in the United States.
For the record, as one of those rural Americans who long pointed to rural versus urban, it is just another myth. Yes, on this tour I found folks from every walk of life that are like-minded and want to gain back the liberty our founding fathers envisioned for all of us. The problem is that most people just don’t know what they don’t know.
For example, at every stop I shared the concern that the government currently owns 1 in every 3 acres of land in the U.S. When you combine that with the proposed 30 x 30 land grab the federal government hopes to initiate, you quickly see that they want to control nearly 70% of the land mass. Don’t forget that 12% of the U.S. is currently in easements that have a public or private partnership so an additional 30% is equal to 42% in addition to the 33% that is fully owned. See a problem here?
As I share that bit of data, every single time there are folks who approach and say, “I had no idea.” In their mind, the only land the government has anything to do with is land used for the park system. Honestly, the ability for folks to connect the dots between where they spend their money determines how much control the essentials of life have and how much risk there is in having access.
I have seen thousands of people in the past 90 days that have had it with the direction of this government. I clearly see now how the concern in the food infrastructure in the past 18 months has been manufactured. The “bottleneck,” as it was called a year ago when milk and meat producers were impacted, looks to me in hindsight like a power play for more foreign control of our food system.
For years on this very venue, I have been shouting that there is very little domestic investment in the U.S. food system. For the most part the investment in meat packing entities has come from other countries, namely China and Brazil. It is not difficult for me to make the case that the perfect storm occurred with the hurdles that were put in place in the path of local and regional food systems.
We have long known that the meat business is either an economy of scale or niche marketing opportunities. For folks to survive outside of those two production strategies is nearly impossible. Now with the current path of inflation, changes in transportation of food to the retail outlets have accelerated the empty shelves in many retail outlets. Actual cost of the products will be higher. At the point that families need to really start pinching pennies, they will acquire nutrition at the lowest possible purchase point, which is likely Amazon and Walmart. That does not bode well for the small producers in their local communities.
At the end of the day, the message that must be repeated continuously is this: Where you spend your money makes all the difference in how we fix this. If you continue to shop at the global elite shops you will continue to be part of the problem. The world is at a crossroads in maintaining the level of freedom we want to hand over to our children, and that freedom will depend greatly on access to food. We have been spoiled, and things that spoil need to be thrown out. My goal is to prevent future spoilage to folks regardless of where they call home.
Editor’s note: Trent Loos is a sixth generation United States farmer, host of the daily radio show, Loos Tales, and founder of Faces of Agriculture, a non-profit organization putting the human element back into the production of food. Get more information at www.LoosTales.com, or email Trent at [email protected].