“I am more discouraged than I was when I started. The problems are so huge,” Mr. Buffett says.
In February 2007, his SUV pulled into Fufuo, a village in central Ghana. Accompanied by Ghanaian agronomist Kofi Boa, he hurried into a large cinder-block building where 30 farmers had been waiting, sheltered from the sun.
Back home, Mr. Buffett owned 800 acres of corn and soybeans and a fleet of the most modern John Deere implements. Now, he hoped to learn something from farmers who scratched the dirt with sticks and machetes. Mr. Boa, the agronomist, had been coaching them to replace slash-and-burn farming with a practice he called “no-till.”
In many African villages, poor farmers—who are often women—had traditionally made room for their crops by chopping down the brush and trees on a few acres of tribal land. It is hard on the farmer and the environment. The land is laid bare to erosion. As the soil deteriorates, farmers work harder and harder to produce food until they have to move on to another spot, repeating the cycle.
Mr. Boa told Fufuo’s farmers to disturb the ground as little as possible. Other than poking holes in the dirt to plant their seeds, the ground was not to be hoed or vegetation burned. Organic residue—such as leaves, stalks, and roots—was valuable, not trash. Fufuo’s farmers were taught to make room for their seeds shortly before planting time by squirting the competing vegetation with Chinese-made weed killer dispensed from backpacks.
The village quickly discovered that no-till plots yielded bigger crops with far less labor. The mulch acts as a sponge when it rains, banking water for crops, and then breaks down into plant food. The time the farmers saved by no longer hoeing weeds and cutting brush was time for money-making endeavors. Some started to raise cocoa trees, a crop prized by Ghana’s government for its export earnings; others began to raise chickens, feeding them with their surplus grain.
“How many seeds of corn do you plant on a hectare?” asked Mr. Buffett as he peered through thick eyeglasses and jotted down answers in a notebook. “Can you farm more land now?” he continued. “How much corn did you harvest?”
Further convinced he should support the no-till training of farmers, Mr. Buffett left. After his SUV drove off, swallowed in red dust, the farmers were told that their visitor was the son of a billionaire named Warren Buffett.
Trump’s Current Pick for Ag Secretary
Sonny Perdue III, the former governor of Georgia, is president-elect Donald Trump’s leading candidate to be his U.S. secretary of agriculture, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Perdue, 70, would succeed secretary Tom Vilsack. Perdue met with Trump on Nov. 30 and told reporters they talked about agricultural commodities traded domestically and internationally. While Perdue is the front-runner, the decision isn’t final, the person said.
Howard Buffett is a farmer, a very rich farmer, who is developing sustainable, regenerative agriculture in the US and Africa. Howard’s father’s bridge buddy, Bill Gates, is working the health track in Africa and India. Howard is saving Africa from hunger through ‘no-till’ farming. Trump still has time to pick a farmer over a politician as Secretary of Agriculture.
US Agriculture is not a swamp – it’s a barren lot that stretches from coast to coast with nothing on it but junk-yard dogs.
Subsidies
Factory Farms
Industrialized Farming with Chemicals
Degraded Topsoil
Depleted Aquifers
Earth Mother Farms, a subsidiary of Anala Goat Company took its turn at trying to make a living selling pasture raised chickens for $12.00 each or about $4.00/lb. All well and good save it cost Earth Mother $13.00 to produce the damn chicken. Fifty miles southwest of Houston anything goes so I made a deal with Senor Garcia in East Bernard. I would pay him $100 for one goat turned into 100% GOAT SAUSAGE NO NITRATES. Same deal for one lamb. Garcia paid $70-$80 for the lamb and the goat and I got 25 pounds each of fresh no nitrate, 100% goat and 100% lamb plastic wrapped sausage. That fifty pounds cost me $200.00 say $4.00/lb like the damn chicken but coming home after a hard 8 to noon day, unloading that 100% SHEEP & GOAT NO NITRATE ROADKILL SAUSAGE at $15.00/lb, I put that $750.00 in my pocket as cash flow.
Seated with hundreds of colleagues at the 
Tripped up by the tricky economics of sheep dairying, the Williamses are among several disillusioned dreamers who hoped to succeed with American sheep cheese, a niche that did not exist 30 years ago. There were 167 dairy sheep farms in the US in 2010 with an estimated 25,000 milking ewes.
A Greek guy tried our raw goat’s milk feta at the Houston’s Farmers’ Market and exclaimed that it was the best feta he had had since he left the ‘motherland.’ I thanked him for the compliment but credited the goats for their Vegan (Wharton County alfalfa) diet and that our feta was made with raw milk therefore the taste had not been cooked away through pasteurization. I went on blathering about real Greeks only consume sheep’s milk feta, maybe goat’s milk in a pinch but never ever feta made from cow’s milk. Why? It’s the 4 – 6 – 9 principle. The fat content four percent for the cow, six for the goat and a whopping nine percent for sheep. Thus, our $5.00/8oz price was cheap compared to $1.00/8oz’s at Kroger.
“A distributor can import manchego for maybe a third of what it costs us to produce,” said Laurel Kieffer, a Wisconsin sheep farmer and the president of the 
As the retired cheese-maker, I understand the dairy sheepherder’s “show me the money” dilemma. Seana Doughty, the proprietor of 
Small family farms (less than $350,000 in GCFI) account for 90 percent of all U.S. farms. Large-scale family farms ($1 million or more in GCFI) account for about 3 percent of farms but 55 percent of the value of production. Slightly less than half of U.S. farms are very small, with annual gross cash farm income under $10,000; the households operating these farms typically rely on off-farm sources for the majority of their household income.
How many ‘Cheeserias’ like this one in Barcelona have you seen anywhere outside of NYC or San Fran? The cheese was to expensive but a liter of kefir was only E4.00. Just as a ‘Dollar’ store can thrive a block away from Wal-Mart or Starbucks can charge you twice as much for coffee, specialty retail for small farm produce currently survives at farmers’ markets.
As a native Cincinnatian my dairy hero was Carl Lindner, who dropped out of high school to run his father’s United Dairy Farmers store in Norwood all the way to #167 on Forbes billionaire list. Living for the last two years in the 99% Muslim country of Turkey I became epiphanied with the Bacon shops in Spain and France – call them prosciuttorias to justify the higher prices.
Agriculture and Retailing are classified as Fragmented Industries where nobody even Wal-Mart or the biggest pig farmer Smithfield Foods has more than 1% of the business. According to Harvard’s Michael Porter, the only way to see the money is through DIFFERENTIATION and there are two paths to riches 1) Low Cost Producer ala Wal-Mart or 2) Uniqueness like Starbucks.
It took Seana Doughty’s, 
Coal fired power plants and factories create 80% of China’s air pollution, making life shorter for city dwellers. The United States has turned agriculture into an equally polluting State-Owned Enterprise through subsidies, industrialized farming and unregulated soil degradation. China pumps Carbon into the sky while the US has flushed 75% of the Carbon content of our topsoil out to sea.
Ted Turner (on the right) is the largest landowner outside of the Federal Government and because he raises free-range buffalo he is entitled to soil conservation subsidies of $150/acre.
The Hillary Archipelago voters have their own urban socio-economic problems because State-Owned Enterprise Farming has destroyed Agriculture the sole source of wealth and revenue of every nation.
Established in 1999, his Howard G. Buffett Foundation’s (HGBF) primary mission is to improve the standard of living and quality of life for the world’s most impoverished and marginalized populations. It apparently spends $50 million a year on various programs around the world, particularly in Africa.
As I was pontificating about how you could have an urban income and a rural lifestyle by raising 50 goats on five acres, my fellow Leisure Learning Unlimited teachers were educating others on Permaculture. Not wanting to expose my blissful state of ignorance to embarrassment I avoided my right of tuition free class attendance. However, Shelby, the sustainable agriculture and “Five Acres to Independence” advocate, took their course including the farm visit. When Shelby raved about the farm’s sawdust toilet I discounted Permaculture, whatever it was about was not for me.
The FED, since Greenspan has printed at least $10 trillion of ‘thin-air’ paper money with zero results and is now begging the politicians for Fiscal stimulus in Infrastructure. Trump is right there with them wanting to build walls, bridges and airports. Since 80% of the voters live in the city and another 19% live in the burbs the real 1%’ers are still down on the farm. Alas, alack, rural red meat farmers didn’t take classes in Permaculture, let alone practice Regenerative Agriculture because the Fiscal poohbahs don’t see the NEED!
Buy the Farm to Avoid a Crisis
