Impact of Industrial Agriculture on Democracy

Hey, everybody. Here I am in, um, Sherwood,

Connecticut, on Sherwood Island. Here's the little woodchuck hole.

Shirley Troubadour asked a question about why Gates and China

are being allowed to buy up all the farmland in our country,

and I'm gonna tell you something that I had an experience with.

I spent many years, about twenty years, suing the factory farms, the big

hog farms, and the big, uh, chicken producers like

Tyson and both Pilgrim and Frank Perdue.

But Smithfield Foods was the biggest pork producer,

and Smithfield came to the state of, of North Carolina.

They built a slaughterhouse that could process thirty thousand

pigs a day.

And then they had a partner named, uh, Wendell Murphy,

who was in the state senate, and he passed twenty-eight laws in the

North

Carolina State Senate

making it illegal to sue a factory farm.

He left and went into partnership with Smithfield,

created a way to raise pigs. Instead of raising them on farms, to

raise them in warehouses called Murphy eleven hundreds.

And

they, they dropped the price of pork from sixty

cents a

pound to two cents a pound. It put out of business all

twenty-eight thousand independent hog farmers in the state of North

Carolina,

and it replaced them with twenty-two hundred factories,

all of them either owned by Smithfield or contracted to

Smithfield. The only farmers who could stay in

business were

farmers who signed that contract with Smithfield

to mortgage their homes, to put those big hog

sheds, the Murphy eleven hundreds, on their property.

And then they lose all control. They become serfs on their own land.

Uh, Smithfield dictates all their farming

practices.

It gives them the food, it tell it, it delivers the,

the piglets, picks up the, the grown animals,

and brings them to slaughter. They put out of business twenty-eight

thousand farmers,

and they control now eighty percent of the hog production in North, in

North Carolina. Because they dropped the price in North

Carolina, Iowa

had to adopt the same system.

Had to, uh, cave into Smithfield. They

ended up taking control of eighty percent of the hog

production in our country.

Then they sold themselves to China.

So now China owns all that hog production in America,

and it controls our landscapes. And that's the end

of Thomas Jefferson's vision of an American democracy

rooted in tens of thousands of independent freeholds,

each one owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our system

of government.

And that's why all of this industrial agriculture not only gives us

substandard food, but they're also taking control of our

landscapes,

and that is a huge threat to American democracy.

I hope you guys have a good day. If you like this video and you wanna help

me become president of the United States, go to kennedytwentyfour.com

and donate now.