Natural News – by Mike AdamsAs things get ever crazier in the world, there are more reasons than ever to grow at least some of your own food. In fact, I say you’re crazy if you don’t grow some food!
Here are five huge reasons why…
#1) With food prices skyrocketing, you’ll save money by growing your own
Have you priced organic romaine lettuce recently? Or beautiful red peppers? With food prices continuing to skyrocket, the economics of growing your own food make more sense than ever before.
Growing food costs almost nothing in terms of actual dollars — it’s the labor input that represents the greatest input cost. But with container gardening, square foot gardening, simple hydroponics systems and even countertop sprouting, growing your own food doesn’t have to be a labor-intensive activity. You don’t even need dirt or a yard to do simple things like grow window sill herbs or countertop sprouts (alfalfa, mung bean, chickpeas, clover, broccoli, etc.).
Ever better, the much higher nutritional value of home-grown food (compared to processed factory foods you buy at the grocery store) actually saves you money on long-term health care costs. By eating your way to good health, you are eliminating your future need to buy expensive prescription medications and undergo costly doctor visits (or hospital procedures).
It’s true: Growing your own food saves you money both today and tomorrow.
#2) The end of cheap water is making food more scarce and difficult to produce
The end of cheap, easy water is upon us. Thanks to extreme weather events and runaway drought conditions in food-producing states like California, underground water aquifers are being rapidly pumped dry.
The end game of all this isn’t difficult to see: Today’s food-producing hubs will become tomorrow’s Dust Bowl regions. Without cheap water, there is no cheap food. And as water becomes increasingly scarce, food will become increasingly expensive, vastly outpacing price inflation rate for other product categories.
In addition to water scarcity, modern mechanized monoculture (chemical agriculture) also destroys soils, rivers, trees and healthful microbes. There is no long-term sustainability of modern agricultural practices, which are focused on “poison and pillage for profit” rather than growing nutritious food to nurture a civilization toward a better future.
The era of scarce, expensive food has already begun. You’re witnessing its beginnings right now, and as the march of human agricultural destruction accelerates, real food is only going to become harder and harder to acquire.
#3) Home-grown food is far more nutritious and medicinal
Stated plainly, nearly all the food you buy at the grocery store is little more than a mere shadow of real food. Processed, packaged food provides empty calories and little else. Dairy products are almost universally homogenized and pasteurized, and even the fresh produce that claims to be “ripened on the vine” was actually cut from the plant — with the vine still attached — weeks before it reached its peak nutritional potency.
Even more, the soils in which these foods are grown are nutritionally depleted and utterly lacking any real quantities of trace minerals. When you buy food or produce at the grocery store, you’re mostly buying the illusion of food — which is also why you’re always hungry for more of it. It’s never satisfying because it doesn’t provide the real nutrition your body craves.
When you grow your own food in nutrient-rich soils, you are producing the world’s healthiest foods and medicines right at home. Every edible plant in the world naturally synthesizes its own medicines to keep itself alive (and free from infections). These medicines are at their peak when you harvest vegetables, fruits and herbs after they achieve full readiness… and that’s something grocery stores can never do because they have to pick everything prematurely to account for transportation and distribution time.
In terms of minerals, phytonutrients and natural medicines, home-grown food is the world’s best source for nutrients. That’s why home-grown fruits and veggies also taste better — your tongue is telling you the truth about real food!
#4) Growing your own food strengthens your self-reliance and preparedness
You probably already know our world is headed for some extraordinary challenges ahead. Political strife, social chaos, weather radicalization and even prospects of war are all very real risks throughout the world. When regions are destabilized, food supplies are almost immediately wiped out or seriously disrupted.
Having the ability to grow your own food provides protection from the unexpected. While riots or war can wreak havoc on supplies of traditional grocery store foods, they usually have no negative effect at all on home gardens and a home food supply. Even better, if you’ve practiced the skills of growing food, harvesting food, saving seeds and nurturing healthy soils, those skills are immediately applicable no matter what scenario comes your way.
Ask yourself this question: If the food trucks stop delivering to the grocery stores, would you rather find yourself standing in a government food line, or popping open a jar of home-canned salsa that you grew yourself? Care to guess which food is healthier?
#5) When you can produce your own food, you can’t be easily controlled by others
The real danger of being entirely dependent on government for emergency food supplies is that you will simultaneously have to obey the government’s unreasonable demands. Depending on the circumstances, those demands might include giving up your tools of self defense, surrendering your personal property or even abandoning your own home and being relocated to a refugee camp of some sort.
Throughout world history, food has often been used as a weapon against the People. Even today, every dictator knows that the easiest way to control the people is to first control the food. (Just ask anyone who hasn’t yet starved to death in North Korea…)
In the days of ancient Rome, raiding forces are rumored to sometimes punish a conquered land by plowing the soils with salt, destroying the ability of that land to produce food. [1] This would make the conquered region beholden to the victor for food. Remember: He who controls the food controls the people.
The U.S. government increasingly criminalizes home food production
Growing your own food is one of the greatest expressions of freedom and liberty. This is precisely why governments across the United States frequently seek to criminalize those who engage in home gardening, small-scale farming or raw milk production.
Julie Bass of Oak Park, Michigan, for example, was threatened with jail time for growing vegetables in her front yard. Read about my interview with Julie Bass at this Natural News article.
Similarly, in 2012 the government of Tulsa, Oklahoma, deliberately destroyed the herb garden of a woman named Denise Morrison. Their goal? To make sure private citizens cannot independently produce their own food and natural medicine.
Government officials in both the USA and Canada have also frequently conducted armed raids on indoor vegetable grow operations, destroying indoor cucumber farms and terrorizing innocent families. As Natural News previously reported:
…the Harte family of Leawood, Kansas, was literally held hostage at gunpoint by law enforcement goons who ravaged their house and tore apart hydroponic growing equipment that they falsely believed to be part of a nonexistent marijuana grow operation in the family’s basement.
Just this year, another SWAT-style police raid on a home garden was conducted in Georgia, where law enforcement officers are apparently too stupid to know the difference between okra and marijuana. In a televised interview, Georgia State Patrol Capt. Kermit Stoke literally said on camera: “We’ve not been able to identify it as of yet. But it did have quite a number of characteristics that were similar to a cannabis plant.” (Seriously? People who live in Georgia don’t know what okra looks like?)
One of the red flags of knowing you’re living in a police state tyranny, in fact, is when government criminalizes home gardens and conducts armed raids on vegetable growers. That day has already arrived in America, where being arrested as a “criminal” only requires that you attempt to grow your own nutritious garden vegetables. And that’s all the more reason to grow them anyway… in defiance of the government insanity that seeks to jail home gardeners and force everyone to eat processed factory foods that promote disease and cognitive decline.
Learn how to grow your own food with these resources
Geoff Lawton teaches permaculture
www.GeoffLawton.com
Marjory Wildcraft shows you how to “Grow Your Own Groceries”
www.MarjoryWildcraft.com
The Square Foot Gardening Foundation:
www.squarefootgardening.org
Sources for this article include:
[1] http://www.dl.ket.org/latin2/historia/republ…
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