🚨 Robert F. Kennedy Jr on Bill Gates & China Buying Up Our Farmland
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) May 24, 2023
"[Smithfield] ended up taking control of 80% 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… pic.twitter.com/GCTYwC57GN
Here I am in Sherwood, Connecticut on Sherwood Island. Here's a 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 am going to tell you something that I had an experience with. I spent many years, about 20 years, suing the factory farms, the big hog farms, and chicken producers, like Tyson, Bo Pilgrim, and Perdue Frank and Smithfield Foods is the biggest pork producer. Smithfield Foods, headquartered in Virginia, came into the state in North Carolina and they built a slaughterhouse that killed, that processed 30,000 pigs a day. And then they had a partner, Wendell Murphy, who was in the state senate, and he passed 28 laws in the North Carolina State Senate, making it illegal to sue a factory farm. He left and went into partnership with Smithfield and created a way to raise pigs . . . instead of raising them on farms, to raise them in warehouses called Murphy 1100s. They dropped the price of pork from $.60 a pound to $.02/lb. They put out of business all 28,000 independent hog farmers in the state of North Carolina, and replaced them with 2200 factories, all of them either owned by Smithfield or contracted by 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 1100s on their property, and then they lose all control. They become serfs on their own land, as Smithfield dictates all their farming practices, it gives them their food, telling them, it picks up the piglets, the grown animals, and brings them to slaughter. Nothing and none of the decisions made on that farm are made by that family farmer. He's no longer a family farmer working on his own farm. He's a serf working on his own farm. They put out of business 28,000 farmers and a control now of 80% of the production in North Carolina because they dropped the price in North Carolina, Iowa had to adopt the same system to cave into Smithfield, taking control of 80% of hog production in our country. Then they sold themselves in China. 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, food that is not nutritious, that is filled with chemicals and hormones and antibiotics but they are also taking control of our landscapes, and that is a huge threat to American democracy. I hope you guys have a good day.
