Can you sell or share farm-saved seed?
"It is illegal to sell, buy, barter or share farm-saved seed," warns Sam. [1]
Can feed grain be sown?
No – it is against the law to use any bought-in grain to establish a crop. [1]
FTC sues John Deere over farmers' right to repair tractors
The lawsuit, which Deere called "meritless," accuses the company of withholding access to its technology and best repair tools and of maintaining monopoly power over many repairs. Deere also reaps additional profits from selling parts, the complaint alleges, as authorized dealers tend to sell pricey Deere-branded parts for their repairs rather than generic alternatives. [2]
What do you mean? This is very much true. We are economically compelled to buy food from supermarkets, for instance, because hunting and fishing have become regulated, niche activities. Compared to someone from the 1600s who could scoop a salmon out of the river with a bucket, we are quite oppressed.
Most people lived on the knife's edge of starvation before the application of fossil fuel energy and nitrogen to agriculture in the 20th century. That's why the global population exploded after the introduction of these technologies. Read "Energy and Civilization" by Vaclav Smil. For most of history, it was an open question the crops you grew would even contain more calories than the physical effort it took to grow them. This means you were spending ~90% of your time (or money if you were in a specialized trade) just on getting enough carbs in grain to avoid keeling over. And, your diet was 90% grain with almost no variety.
Were there a lucky few who found an unoccupied niche where there was some surplus for a generation or two? Sure. But pretending like this was commonplace is like pretending that everyone in the 1600's was a nobleman.
> Compared to someone from the 1600s who could eat a gourmet meal prepared by their 10 cooks every night, we are quite oppressed.
and then the population exploded such that it could only be sustained through modern agricultural methods. We are married to the technology more than before
It was interesting to me finding out how many "urban farms" are nestled in our own cityscape, and how many of those "farms" are actually selling their produce, meats, and even livestock.
Until very recently (like 6 decades ago) the area where I live was right up against rural countryside, with sheep grazing, cattle farms, vegetables grown and everything. And those farmers sold out to real-estate developers.
But there are literally homeowners in SFHs with chickens out front and roosters crowing in the morning. And some of my colleagues own chickens and harvest the eggs every day for their own kitchens and families.
But just going through a few urban neighborhoods on Google Maps, it was not long before I found little farms. And these farms sometimes have websites where they advertise that they are selling produce and dairy: raw milk, fresh eggs, fresh fruits & veg, mutton and even live sheep or goats. And they may be doing it on the sly or under the table, and "raw milk" is especially a controversial marketplace right now, but they do it and seem to do alright.
These "urban farms" are often real close to tactical supply shops running out of some guy's garage, and other little "cottage industries" where people who purchased "McMansions" are recouping their investments, basically by skirting the city's zoning laws and tax regulations around businesses.
So yeah, if you've got a brown thumb like me, you can go shop at a farmers market, or you can look up one of these "urban farms" and buy direct, cash in hand.
... provided you own land that the government allows for agricultural use. And most people can't afford to own enough land to be self-sufficient.
So you're not free to grow your own vegetables either; just like fishing, farming is regulated to manage limited resources. Things get ugly fast when you start raising pigs in your city apartment, or start polluting with pesticide runoff, or start diverting your neighbour's water supply...
You can grow some amount of produce, if you have a garden, but a lot of people don't have their own garden, and if they do it's quite small. To be entirely self-sufficient, you need quite a large area of land just to grow enough food for the entire year.
Most people don't have that, and can't afford that, hence why they take the route of earning money some other way, and using the money to buy food made by others, from supermarkets. They can supplement their diet with home-grown fruit and veg, but few can sustain their family on home-grown produce.
These are regulated by governments that, at least for now, are still working for the people. They're some of the first that get attacked and taken away when said government fails though, or when another government invades.
(ex: Palestine got their utilities and food cut off so that thousands starved, Ukraine's infrastructure is under attack so that thousands will die from exposure, and that's after they went for their food exports, starving more that people that depended on it)
Wars are frequently fought of these three things, and there's no shortage of examples of the humans controlling these resources lording over those that did not.
Gains from efficiency are experienced by labor in chunks, mostly due to great strife or revolutions (40 hour work week, child labor laws, etc.). Gains in efficiency experienced by capital are immediate and continuously accruing.
That you can't transfer large sum of money because money laundering rule.
and you can't break it into smaller pieces either because that is called "structuring" and is a crime?
He is meaning “money” = cash, and in practice he is correct. The mere possession of large amount of cash is a crime - a crime charged against the money itself in a bizarre twist of the law to end run constitutional concerns - and one which year by year it is getting harder to fight.
In the pre-banking era you could get robbed, killed, taxed to death, made to fight in a war, etc. That's all still true, but now most of your resources (savings) will be stuck in a place where there is no need for violence to cause you to lose all of it.
The way we normally deal with all these problems as a society is to apply force (via police, courts) to ensure that everyone has certain 'rights'.
The problem today is that while you have certain rights, like fairly strong rights to private property interests in real estate and such, we generally have very weak private property rights in financial properties. This is a problem world-wide. We need to fix this in our countries.
