By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu Min Muhammad 2/10/2015

I Can’t Eat By Dr. Ridgely Abdul Mu’min Muhammad 2/10/2015

Bread 1 Wheat

From 1915 to 2014 the price of a loaf of bread has gone up from $0.07 to at least $1.98 for white and $3.00 for whole wheat. However, what the farmer receives for that one pound of wheat that makes that pound loaf of bread only went up from $0.022 to $0.088 over this same period. Loaves 25

10 Loaves

In other words in 1915 a farmer could sell a bushel (56 lbs) of wheat for $1.28 and then use that money and buy 18.3 loaves of bread for his family. However, in 2014 this same farmer can only buy 2.5 loaves of bread from that same bushel of wheat which now sells for $4.95. Now since that farmer’s wife can take that same bushel (56 lbs) of wheat and make from 40 to 50 loaves of bread, farmers should stop growing wheat for the market and grow just enough for their families and let the city people eat concrete, because as a farmer trying to grow food for the city people, I Can’t Eat.

Farmers are being targeted by this government for failure. First it was the Black farmers, now it is all family farmers. Soon the only producers will be those working for companies like Monsanto whose goal is to depopulate the world by at 5 billion people (see Georgia Guidestones). When I give live presentations it takes over 60 slides to explain the mathematics of our problem and solutions. In the meantime I want you to look at one of my 69 slides that I will use to explain what has been going on for a number of years outside of the consciousness of most Americans, Black or White. Our condition has been orchestrated; therefore our escape must be planned and executed with discipline. This “Adaptive Approach” has been successful at reducing the pool of future farmers by removing vocational agriculture out of the high schools and offering scholarships for farm kids to go into fields other than agriculture. The myth of the “hidden hand” of supply and demand producing low farm prices is shattered by this “adaptive approach” which suggests that “agricultural prices be substantially lowered” which indicates that prices are planned not found out in the “market”. Then who do you suppose that the USDA will choose as the most “suited for survival”? Below is a graph of how much farm subsidies were handed out by the USDA over a ten year period from 1982 to 1992. Over this ten year period white farmers on average were given $1,023.10 per acre in farm subsidies, while black farmers were only given $273.95 per acre. And at average farm land price of $1,000 per acre, this means that white farmers were given enough money to buy an additional acre of land for each acre they owned. Now who do you think they bought that land from? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this process of the government funding and supporting white farmers at the expense of black farmers and he was killed. White farmers understood this process and benefited from it instead of uniting with the black farmers to fight those who were artificially keeping farm commodity prices low.

The result has been the loss of black owned farm land. As the number of loaves of bread that a farmer can buy by growing and selling a bushel of wheat has gone down, so has the number of acres of black owned acres. In 1915 Blacks owned 16 million acres of farm land and as the comparative value of what he receives for his crop has gone down relative to what he has to pay to produce the crop, he cannot afford to farm. However in recent years now even the white farmers cannot even make a living from farming. They have to get a job off of the farm to keep the farm and feed his family. According to the USDA’s own website, now 85-95 percent of farm household income comes from off-farm sources. Even among the largest farming operations (the 8 percent of farming operations with annual sales exceeding $250,000), on average, off-farm income accounts for 24 percent of farm household income. For the 82 percent of U.S. farming operations that have annual sales of $100,000 or less, off-farm income typically accounts for all but a negligible amount of farm household income. As a result, for the majority of U.S. farm households, the availability of off- farm income is a more significant factor for financial wellbeing than are returns on farm production. (http://www.usda.gov/documents/FARM_FAMILY_INCOME.pdf)

To add insult to injury, while the amount of money that consumers pay for food is six times more than it was in the 1970s, most of that increased food budget goes to food processors and fast-food restaurants. The people are getting fat and spending more money for food while the farmer cannot make ends meet. This is why we developed a slogan to represent a food movement as a solution to the above stated dilemma called “Meet Me Halfway.” For instance the farmer can “meet me halfway” by milling his wheat into flour, while the consumer can “meet me halfway” and take that flour home to make bread. Now instead of the farmer receiving only $4 for his wheat, he could receive $24 for his whole-wheat flour. Independent Black truckers could transport this flour to the cities for an additional $6. Now the consumer can get the flour at about $0.75 per loaf and add another $0.50 to $0.75 for the other ingredients needed to bake the bread. So instead of paying $3 per loaf of bread, the consumer can have his bread and eat it too for about $1.50. This is a win-win situation for the farmers and consumers, if they would just meet each other halfway.