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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Last year I had a jarring experience driving through some of the agricultural land near the Salton Sea en route to Bombay Beach coming down from JTNP, taking back roads.

The general region is desert, water and food is scarce, but through this agricultural zone there's this dense pocket of food and water on the surface.

I was in a Miata with the top down, and the amount of chemicals they were using to keep the pests/insects away from this lush green oasis in a land of nothing was noxious. I hadn't exited my car, just drove through these fields on the farm roads, and it left me feeling sick with a headache and nausea well into the next day.

Of course I didn't encounter a single insect, spotless windshield.

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Yes it’s very bad and it doesn’t have to be that way. The mass chemical use must be profitable but there is a great cost to the land and the environment to do so.

This is why it is so upsetting that Bill Gates is pushing this kind of chemical intensive farming all over Africa and positioning himself to profit off the transition too. Once again harming the continent and its people for profit while telling them it’s good for them.

EDIT: He's also buying up all the farm land with water rights in the USA. He is the single largest holder of US farmland. So when drought inevitably comes and swaths of farmland become too dry to use, he will profit. If you apply to one of their foundation grants for agriculture, you will see a big emphasis on "bundled services", so they seem to want to build a "farm as a service" system where farmers don't own anything. It's a new enclosure movement where the lords own everything and everyone else pays them to use the land. We have enough in this world we can live pretty cheaply if we work together and share in the right ways. But control of the land is vital or we will all die in poverty from rents.

Lex Luthor's mistake was causing the disaster he planned to profit from rather than preparing to profit from one that was inevitable in his lifetime.

Or just... being focused on profit instead of mutual support of others.

Comic book villains aren't known for having complex motivations.

What exactly is he going to really profit on? Guy is 65. Has said he's not leaving much to his kids. So I guess it's all going to a trust????

He is the single largest owner of farmland in the US. There are many ways to profit from this, with some options being to rent it or sell it.

I don't really know why billionaires do what they do, but he is investing in all that land for some reason.

If I was one of the richest man on the planet, I would also invest in various fields, which would probably mean I end up one of the single largest owners in that field (through sheer fact I am one of the richest people on the planet).

In general I have a lot of issues with the way the worlds richest people wield power over society through ownership of everything we depend upon.

65 leaves a lot of life for a guy with the money to get the best health care.

Since 1990, when the number of people living in extreme poverty peaked at 1.9 billion, we have been on the steady march towards eradicating extreme poverty. Despite the fact that there are almost 6 billion more people alive today than at the turn of last century, the number of people living in extreme poverty has reduced from 1.3 billion to 730 million [1]. Despite its flaws, the Green revolution and the modern system of agriculture has saved billions of people from starvation.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty#the-number-of-peo...

It's a popular narrative, but one that Jason Hickel argues falls short. He disputes the poverty thresholds used in these calculations as far too low - $1.90 per day today is lower than the consumption of 19th century US slaves, he argues:

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-i...

As far as the Green Revolution, again this story that is has saved millions from starvation is a popular one. But we can look at Vandana Shiva for example who says it became a way for multinational corporations to take over the farms and food systems of India, leading to mass farmer suicides, erosion of the soil, and poisoning the land:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/3/30/seeds-of-suicid...

"An NBC News analysis also identified Gates as the largest farmland owner in the US.

Almost 300,000 acres is a lot of land for one family or private individual to own, but it’s still just a small part of the estimated 911 million acres of farmland in the US." - https://www.vox.com/recode/22528659/bill-gates-largest-farml...

Not sure what is the point of this "Bill Gates is single largest holder of US farmland" narrative. It seems like a conspiracy theory in the making.

When put into perspective, amount of farmland he owes is not that big, if it was in a single square it would be 20x20 miles.

Drove through Texas agricultural land in spring of 2016. Windows up, not a convertible, and I was still horribly affected for 2 weeks. My eyes and nose burned the moment we started driving by the fields, and my nose continued to run and drain for 2 weeks after.

I believe it, but being Texas I imagine you drove through a much larger area.

The distance I traveled through this poison was relatively little:

https://goo.gl/maps/v7MQNgpffP2wNCrc7

It was Box Canyon S down to 111E, stair stepping a bit through the fields...

The name of that road is extraordinary appropriate, though, so I imagine under the right conditions it could trap and concentrate quite a lot of the aerosolized chemicals from the croplands it opens onto just south. While on the twisties through the namesake canyon you could have been blasted with several times the concentration found in the open air above the fields themselves.

The canyon road snaking up through the mountains was odorless, only the roads immediately through the fields were noxious... but it wasn't a windy day.

For anyone unfamiliar with the history of the Salton sea and the effect all these chemicals have had on the surrounding areas, check out this documentary: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8TjGAWxL23c

A part of me wants to visit just to fully take in the reality of it all. But I don’t think my family would be too happy.

I've done the same drive, thru the farmland and cattle ranches to the south of the salton sea by Brawley. God it was noxious. Despite the sea having a reputation for an awful smell, it didn't compare to the farmland below. My throat hurts thinking about it. You sometimes get a similar effect in the san joaquin valley.

How much of these crap chemicals are we consuming?

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