On the surface of the world right now there is war and violence and things
seem dark
But calmly and quietly, at the same time, something else is happening
underground
An inner revolution is taking place and certain individuals are being called
to a higher light
It is a silent revolution
From the inside out
From the ground up

It is time for me to reveal myself
I am an embedded agent of a secret, undercover
Clandestine
Global operation
A spiritual conspiracy
We have sleeper cells in every nation on the planet

You won’t see us on the T.V.
You won’t read about us in the newspaper
You won’t hear about us on the radio

We don’t seek any glory
We don’t wear any uniform
We come in all shapes and sizes
Colors and styles

Most of us work anonymously
We are quietly working behind the scenes in every country and culture of
the world
Cities big and small, mountains and valleys, in farms and villages, tribes
and remote islands

You could pass by one of us on the street and not even notice
We go undercover
We remain behind the scenes
It is of no concern to us who takes the final credit
But simply that the work gets done

Occasionally we spot each other in the street
We give a quiet nod and continue on our way so no one will notice

During the day many of us pretend we have normal jobs
But behind the false storefront at night is where the real work takes place

Some call us the “Conscious Army”
We are slowly creating a new world with the power of our minds and hearts
We follow, with passion and joy
Our orders from the Central Command
The Spiritual Intelligence Agency

We are dropping soft, secret love bombs when no ones is looking
Poems
Hugs
Music
Photography
Movies
Kind words
Smiles
Meditation and prayer
Dance
Social activism
Websites
Blogs
Random acts of kindness

We each express ourselves in our own unique ways with our own unique
gifts and talents

“Be the change you want to see in the world”
That is the motto that fills our hearts
We know it is the only way real transformation takes place
We know that quietly and humbly we have the power of all the oceans
combined

Our work is slow and meticulous
Like the formation of mountains
It is not even visible at first glance
And yet with it entire tectonic plates shall be moved in the centuries to
come

Love is the new religion of the 21st century

You don’t have to be a highly educated person
Or have any exceptional knowledge to understand it

It comes from the intelligence of the heart
Embedded in the timeless evolutionary pulse of all human beings

Be the change you want to see in the world
Nobody else can do it for you

We are now recruiting
Perhaps you will join us
Or already have….
All are welcome…
The door is open

-Brian Piergrossi
(From the book “The Big Glow”)

I’m not much of a blogger, or a writer for that matter, so the idea of maintaining a daily blog seems impossible to me. I like journaling and I used to do it quite a bit. I’m seeing this thing called blogging as an opportunity to journal my goals for the people’s republics. Kind of like my online vision board. By writing my thoughts and goals down and sharing them with whoever is tuned in, the closer I’ll get be to achieving my dreams.
I’ve been putting a lot of energy lately into expanding my line into Brooklyn, NY. I recently came upon the Portland Brooklyn Project on Facebook and saw this amazing picture which inspired me to create my first vision board blog. To anyone who’s reading this and is inspired by the people’s republics concept…if you have any connections to Brooklyn, NY retail stores that you think the people’s republic of brooklyn shirts would do well in…please contact me at info@thepeoplesrepublics.com. Thank you!

Until next time…

Barbara Kingsolver, author of many other acclaimed novels like Pigs in Heaven and Animal Dreams, came out with her first non-fiction narrative Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in 2007.
It’s a story of how her family was changed by their first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where they worked, went to school, loved their neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.
“It’s a hybrid book…part memoir…part call to action, part education, part recipe collection…Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes an important contribution to the chorus of voices calling for change.” -Chicago Tribune
Throughout the book, her environmental biologist husband Stephen L. Hopp, provides side notes that include facts, and figures about the state of our food chain, the politics surrounding food and farming, and what we can do as individuals and as a society to eat more sustainably. I would now like to share those notes with you.

For information on farmers markets in your area visit http://www.localharvest.org

All these heirloom eggplants and artisan cheeses from the farmer’s market are great for weekend dinner parties, but don’t we still need industrial farming to feed the hungry?
In fact, all the world’s farms currently produce enough food to make every person on the globe fat. Even though 800 million people are chronically underfed (6 will die of hunger-related caused while you read this article), it’s because they lack money and opportunity, not because food is unavailable in their countries. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops.
Is all this the reliable bounty of industrial production? Yes and no – with the “no” being more of a problem in the near future. Industrial farming methods, whenever they are practiced, promote soil erosion, salinization, desertification, and loss of soil fertility. The FAO estimates that over 25 percent of arable land in the world is already compromised by one of more of these problems. The worst affected areas are those with more arid climates or sloped terrain. Numerous field trials in both the United States and the United Kingdom have shown that organic practices can produce commodity crop yields (corn, soybeans, wheat) comparable to those of industrial farms. By using cover crops or animal manures for fertilizer, these practices improve soil fertility and moisture-holding capacity over seasons, with cumulative benefits. These techniques are particularly advantageous in regions that lack the money and technology for industrial approaches.
Conventional methods are definitely producing huge quantities of corn, wheat, and soybeans, but not to feed the poor. Most of it becomes animal feed for meat production, or the ingredients of processed foods for wealthier consumers who are already getting plenty of calories. Food sellers prefer to market more food to people who have money, rather than those who have little. Word food trade policies most often favor developed countries at the expense of developing countries; distributors, processors, and shippers reap most of the benefits. Even direct food aid for disasters (a small percentage of all the world’s hunger) is most profitable for grain companies and shippers. By law, 75 percent of such aid sent from the United States to other nations must be grown, packaged, and shipped by U.S. companies. This practice, called “tied aid,” delays shipments of food by as much as six months, increases the costs of the food by over 50 percent, and directs over two-thirds of the aid money to the distributors.
If efficiency is the issue, resources go furthest when people produce their own food, near to where it is consumed. Many hunger-relief organizations provide support technology for locally appropriate, sustainable farming. These programs do more than alleviate hunger for a day and send a paycheck to a multinational. They provide a livelihood to the person in need, addressing the real root of hunger, which is not about food production, but about poverty.
For more information, visit http://www.wn.org, http://www.journeytoforever.org, or http://www.heifer.org

-Steven L. Hopp

By purchasing local vegetables instead of South American ones, for example, aren’t we hurting farmers in developing countries? If you’re picturing Farmer Juan and his family gratefully wiping sweat from their brows when you buy that Ecuadoran banana, picture this instead: the CEO of Dole Inc. in his air conditioned office in Westlake Village, California. He’s worth $1.4 billion; Juan gets about $6 a day. Much money is made in the global reshuffling of food, but the main beneficiaries are processors, brokers, shippers, supermarkets, and oil companies.
Developed nations promote domestic overproduction of commodity crops that are sold on the international market at well below market price, undermining the fragile economies of developing countries. Often this has the effect of driving small farmers into urban areas for jobs, decreasing the agricultural output of a country, and forcing the population to purchase those same commodities from abroad. Those who do stay in farm work are likely to end up not as farm owners, but as labor on plantations owned by multinationals. They may find themselves working in direct conflict with local subsistence. Thus, when Americans buy soy products from Brazil, for example, we’re likely supporting an international company that has burned countless acres of Amazon rain forest to grow soy for export, destroying indigenous populations. Global trade deals negotiated by the World Trade Organization and World Bank allow corporations to shop for food from countries with the poorest environmental, safety, and labor conditions. While passing bargains on to consumers, this pits farmers in one country against those in another, in a downward wage spiral. Product quality is somewhat irrelevant.
Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most humane scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby-if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that’s no longer really about feeding anyone: in our own nation we export 1.1 million tons of potatoes, while we also import 1.4 million tons. If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home.
For more information visit: http://www.viacampesina.org
-Steven L. Hopp

Spring is springing and so is the people’s republic of portland’s color wheel. We thought after three years of black and green it was time for a little pick-me-up. Right now only 3 monkeys, Radish Underground, and Presents of Mind carry the colors so stop by there or contact me at info@thepeoplesrepublics.com if you’d like to get your color on!

Which are more economically productive, small family farms or big industrial farms? Most people assume they know the answer, and make a corollary assumption: that small farmers are basically asking to go bankrupt, they’re inefficient even though their operations are probably more environmentally responsible, sustainable, diverse, and better connected to their communities than the big farms are. But isn’t it really just about the profits?
If so, small farms win on that score too, hands down. According to USDA records from the 1990′s, farms less than four acres in size had an average net income of $1,400 per acre. The per-acre profit declines steadily as farm size grows, to less than $40 an acre for farms above a thousand acres. Smaller farms maximize productivity in three ways: by using each square foot of land more intensively, by growing a more diverse selection of products suitable to local food preferences, and by selling more directly to consumers, reaping more of the net earnings. Small-farm profits are more likely to be sustained over time, too, since these farmers tend to be better stewards of the land, using fewer chemical inputs, causing less soil erosion, maintaining more wildlife habitat.
If smaller is economically better, why are the little guys going out of business? Aside from their being more labor-intensive, marketing is the main problem. Supermarkets prefer not to bother with boxes of vegetables if they can buy truckloads. Small operators have to be both grower and marketer, selling their products one bushel at a time. They’re doing everything right, they just need customers.
Food preference surveys show that a majority of food shoppers are willing to pay more for food grown locally on small family farms. The next step, following up that preference with real buying habits, could make or break the American tradition of farming. For more information, visit www.nffc.net.

-Steven L Hopp

Industrial animal food production has one goal: to convert creatures into meat. These intensively managed factory farms are called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). The animals are chosen for rapid growth, ability to withstand confinement (some literally don’t have room to turn around), and resistance to the pathogens that grow in these conditions. Advocates say it’s an efficient way to produce cheap, good-quality meat for consumers.
Opponents raise three basic complaints: first, the treatment of animals. CAFOs house them as tightly as possible where they never see grass or sunlight. If you can envision one thousand chickens in your bathroom, in cages stacked to the ceiling, you’re honestly getting the picture. (Actually, a six-foot-by-eight-foot room could house 1,152.)
A second complaint is pollution. So many animals in a small space put huge volumes of excrement into that small space, creating obvious waste storage and water quality problems. CAFO animals in the United States produce about six times the volume of fecal matter of all humans on our planet. Animals on pasture, by contrast, enrich the soul.
A third issue is heath. Confined animals are physically stressed, and are routinely given antibiotics in their feed to ward off disease. Nearly three-quarters of all antibiotics in the United States are used in CAFO’s. Even so, the Consumers Union reported that over 70 percent of supermarket chickens harbored campylobacter and/or salmonella bacteria. The antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that grow in these conditions are a significant new threat to humans.
Currently, 98 percent of chickens in the United States are produced by large corporations. If you have an opportunity to buy some of that other 2 percent, a truly free-range chicken from a local farmer, it will cost a little more. So what’s the going price these days for compassion, clean water, and the public health?
- Steven L. Hopp

A common complaint about organic and local foods is that they’re more expensive than “conventional” (industrially grown) foods. Most consumers don’t realize how much we’re already paying for the conventional foods, before we even get to the supermarket. Our tax dollars subsidize the petroleum used in growing, processing, and shipping these products. We also pay direct subsidies to the large-scale, chemical-dependent brand of farming. And we’re being forced to pay more each year for the environmental and health costs of that method of food production.
Here’s an exercise: add up the portion of agricultural fuel use that is paid for with our taxes ($22 billion), direct Farm Bill subsidies for corn and wheat ($3 billion), treatment of food-related illnesses ($10 billion), agricultural chemical cleanup costs ($17 billion), collateral costs of pesticide use ($8 billion), and costs of nutrients lost to erosion ($20 billion). At minimum, that’s a national subsidy of at least $80 billion, about $725 per household each year. That plus the sticker price buys our “inexpensive” conventional food.
Organic practices build rather than deplete the soil, using manure and cover crops. They eliminate pesticides and herbicides, instead using biological pest controls and some old-fashioned weeding with a hoe. They maintain and apply knowledge of many crops. All this requires extra time and labor. Smaller farms also bear relatively higher costs for packaging, marketing, and distribution. But the main difference is that organic growers aren’t forcing us to pay expenses they’ve shifted into other domains, such as environmental and health damage. As they’re allowed to play a larger role in the U.S. agricultural economy, our subsidy costs to industrial agriculture will decrease. For a few dollars up front, it’s a blue-chip investment.

-Steven L Hopp

The increased availability of local food in any area is a direct function of the demand from local consumers. Most of us are not accustomed to asking about food origins, but it’s easy enough to do.
First: In grocery stores, when the cashier asks if you found everything you were looking for, you could say, “Not really, I was looking for local produce.” The smaller the store, the more open a grocer may be to your request. Food co-ops should be especially receptive. Restaurants may also be flexible about food purchasing, and your exchanges with the waitstaff or owner can easily include questions about which entrees or wines are from local sources. Restaurateurs do understand that local food is the freshest available, and they’re powerful participants in the growing demand for local food. You can do a little homework in advance about what’s likely to be available in your region.
Local and regional policymakers need to hear our wishes. Many forums are appropriate for promoting local food: town and city hall meetings, school board meetings, even state commissioner meetings. it makes sense to speak up about any venue where food is served, or where leaders have some control over food acquisition, including churches, social clubs, and day-care centers. Federal legislators also need to hear about local food issues. Most state governments consider farming-related legislation almost weekly. You can learn online about what issues are being considered, to register your support for laws that help local farms. In different parts of the country the specifics change, but the motives don’t. As more people ask, our options will grow.

-Steven L. Hopp

O sure, Barbara Kingsolver has forty acres and a mule (a donkey, actually). But how can someone like me participate in the spirit of growing things, when my apartment overlooks the freeway and other people’s windows? Shall I raise a hog in my spare bedroom?
How big is that spare bedroom? Just kidding. But even for people who live in urban areas (more than half our population), directly contributing to local food economies isn’t out of the question. Container gardening on porches, balconies, back steps, or even a sunny window can yield a surprising amount of sprouts, herbs, and even produce. Just a few tomato plants in big flowerpots can be surprisingly productive.
If you have any yard at all, part of it can become a garden. You can spade up the sunniest part of it for seasonal vegetables, or go for the more understated option of using perennial edibles in your landscaping. Fruit, nut, citrus, or berry plants come in many attractive forms, with appropriate choices for every region of the country.
If you’re not a landowner, you can still find in most urban areas some opportunity to garden. Many community-supported agriculture (CSA) operations allow or even require subscribers to participate on their farms; they might even offer a work-for-food arrangement. Most urban areas also host community gardens, using various organizational protocols-a widespread practice in European cities that has taken root here. Some rent garden spaces to the first comers; others provide free space for neighborhood residents. Some are organized and run by volunteers for some specific goal, such as supplying food to a local school, while others accommodate special needs of disabled participants or at-risk youth. Information and locations can be found at the American Community Garden Association site: www.communitygarden.org

Steven L. Hopp

Doesn’t the Federal Farm Bill help out all these poor farmers?
No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare. The formula for subsidies is based on crop type and volume: from 1995 to 2003, three-quarters of all disbursements went to the top-grossing 10 percent of growers. In 1999, over 70 percent of subsidies went for just two commodity crops: corn and soybeans. These supports promote industrial-scale production, not small diversified farms, and in fact create an environment of competition in which subsidized commodity producers get help crowding the little guys out of business. It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families.
But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they’re doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite.
Because of significant protest about this lack of support, Congress included a tiny allotment for local foods in the most recent (2002) Farm Bill: some support for farmers’ markets, community food projects, and local foods in schools. But the total of all these programs combined is less than one-half of one percent of the Farm Bill budget, and none of it is for food itself, only the advertising and administration of these programs. Consumers who care about food, health, and the supply of cheap calories drowning our school lunch programs, for example, might want to let their representatives know we’re looking for a dramatically restructured Farm Bill. Until then, support for local and sustainable agriculture will have to come directly from motivated customers.
For more information visit www.farmaid.org.

Steven L. Hopp

Cows must have some friends in high places. If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. When the voluntary recall is initiated, the federal government does not release information on where the contaminated beef is being sold, considering that information proprietary. Apparently it is more important to protect the cows than the people eating them. Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.
One serious disease related to our friends the cows has emerged in the past twenty years: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or so-called mad cow disease. Mad cow, and its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, are invariably fatal for both cows and humans. Unfortunately, tracking mad cow is complicated by the fact that it frequently incubates for years in the victim. The disease became infamous during the 1980s outbreak in England, where more than 150 humans died from eating BSE beef, and thousands of cattle were destroyed. A tiny malformed protein called a prion is the BSE culprit. The prions cause other proteins in the victim to rearrange into their unusual shape, and destroy tissue. Prions confine their activities to the nervous system, where they cause death. How do cows contract prions? Apparently from eating other cows. What? Yes, dead cow meat gets mixed into their feed, imposing cannibalism onto their lifestyle. It’s a way to get a little more mileage from the byproducts of the slaughter house.
An appropriate response would be to stop this, which the British did. They also began testing 100 percent of cows over two years old at slaughter for BSE, and removing all “downer” cows (cows unable to walk on their own) from the food supply. As a result, the U.K. virtually eradicated BSE in two years. Reasonably enough, Japan implemented the same policies.
In the United States, the response has been somewhat different. U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows. Since prions aren’t destroyed by extreme heat or any known drug, they readily survive this food-chain loop-de-loop. Cow blood (yum) may also be dinner for other cows and calves, and restaurant plate wastes can also be served.
After the first detected case of U.S. mad cow disease, fifty-two countries banned U.S. beef. The USDA then required 2 percent of all the downer cows to be tested, and 1 percent of all cows that were slaughtered. After that, the number of downer cows reported in the United States decreased by 20 percent (did I mention it was voluntary reporting?), and only two more cases of BSE were detected. In May 2006, the USDA decided the threat was so low that only one-tenth of one percent of all slaughtered cows needed to be tested. Jean Halloran, the food policy initiatives director at Consumers Union, responded, “It approaches a policy of don’t look, don’t find.”
How can consumers respond to this? Can we seek out beef tested as BSE-free by the meat packers? No. One company tried to test all its beef, but the USDA declared that illegal (possibly to protect any BSE cows from embarrassment). Would I suggest a beef boycott? Heavens, no; cows are our friends (plus, I believe that would be illegal). But it might be worth remembering this: not a single case of BSE, anywhere, has ever turned up in cattle that were raised and finished on pasture grass or organic feed. As for the other 99 percent of beef in the United States, my recommendation would be to consider the words of Gary Weber, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association head of regulatory affairs: “The consumers we’ve done focus groups with are comfortable that this is a very rare disease.”
For more information visit www.organicconsumers.org/m

The local food movement addresses many important, interconnected food issues, including environmental responsibility, agricultural sustainability, and fair wages to those who grow our food. Buying directly from small farmers serves all these purposes, but what about things like our pumpkin pie spices, or our coffee, that don’t grow where we live?
We can apply most of the same positive food standards, minus the local connection, to some imported products. Coffee, tea, and spices are grown in environmentally responsible ways by some small-scale growers, mostly in the developing world. We can encourage these good practices by offering a fair wage for their efforts. This approach, termed fair trade, has grown into an impressive international effort to counter the growing exploitation of farmers in these same countries. Consumer support for conscientious small growers helps counter the corporate advantage, and sustains their livelihoods, environments, and communities.
Coffee is an example of how fair trade can work to the advantage of the grower, consumer, and environment. As an understory plant, coffee was traditionally grown under a shaded mixture of fruit, nut, and timber trees. Large-scale modern production turned it into a monoculture, replacing wild forests with single-crop fields, utterly useless as wildlife habitat, doused heavily with fertilizers and pesticides. This approach is highly productive in the short term, but causes soil erosion and kills tropical biodiversity-including the migratory birds that used to return to our backyards in summer. Not to mention residual chemicals in your coffee. In contrast, farmers using traditional growing methods rely on forest diversity to fertilize the crop (from leaf litter) and help control coffee pests (from the pest predators that are maintained). Although their yields are lower, the shade-grown method sustains itself and supports local forest wildlife. Selecting shade-grown and fair-trade coffee allows these small-farm growers a chance to compete with larger monocrop production, and helps maintain wildlife habitat.
Independent certification agencies (similar to those that oversee organic agriculture) ensure that fair trade standards are maintained. As demand grows, the variety of products available has also grown to include chocolate, nuts, oils, dried fruits, and even hand-manufactured goods. For more information see www.transfairusa.org, www.fairtrade.net or www.ifat.org.

Steven L Hopp
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/