reSee.it Video Transcript AI Summary
I'm here to discuss why companies like Gates and China are buying up farmland. I spent years suing factory farms, including Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer. Smithfield came to North Carolina and, with a partner, created large-scale hog warehouses, dropping pork prices from 60¢ to 2¢ a pound. This put 28,000 independent hog farmers out of business, replaced by 2,200 factories controlled by or contracted to Smithfield.
Farmers became like serfs on their own land, losing control over their practices. Smithfield dictated everything. Because of the price drop in North Carolina, Iowa had to adopt the same system. Eventually Smithfield controlled 80% of US hog production and then sold itself to China. Now China owns a large part of our hog production, threatening Thomas Jefferson's vision of a democracy rooted in independent family farms. This industrial agriculture gives us substandard food and threatens American democracy.