The Engineered Idaho farming disaster

And an announcement

The first question going through the mind of many will be “What is The Fourth Option, did you rebrand ?”.

For a while, I thought about tackling other topics without “polluting” my publication, since the focus is mostly on Health, especially SARS-CoV-2 and its complexities. Sometimes I want to talk about other topics, mostly in short form (entirely different from my other publication, BMO focusing on long-term, long-form forecasting). This is when our friend

DoorlessCarp🐭

showed me a guide on how to set up Sections inside your current publication.

Sections are publications inside your main Substack. Thing Hidden in Complex covers the aforementioned topics, The Fourth Option covers whatever general topic I want, from serious topics such as the one you are about to read, to anything else. It is also a reference and a joke to something else =P. I took the liberty of bringing all my current subscribers here, you can unsubscribe from this Section but still get the “main” e-mails, here is Substack’s guide on how to do it.

These won’t have a specific frequency, whenever I feel something is worth talking about I will write it. Without further ado, let us talk about the engineered Idaho farming disaster.

A couple of weeks back I saw a few news articles about some farming restrictions potentially coming forth in Idaho, but research and life, and nowhere else to put a short form article all came together and I postponed it. Lo and behold, the situation evolved and not in a positive manner.

The wheat harvest takes place on the Youngs’ farm in Bingham County Idaho. Farmer Adam Young said he is subject to a water curtailment order issued by the Idaho Department of Water Resources on May 27. (Courtesy of Adam Young)

Faced with a water curtailment order issued last week, third generation Idaho farmer Adam Young isn’t just thinking about preparing to cut alfalfa or anxiously waiting for his wheat to flower.

Today, Young is confronting the reality of up to 70% of his family’s 2,700-acre farm in eastern Idaho’s Bingham County drying up this year. 

Unless there is an emergency stay to the curtailment order, Young said the water will be shut off. Meanwhile, the crops are already in the ground. Young has already invested in seed, fertilizer and other inputs he said total $400 per acre.

If the water is shut off, Young said that would mean a total loss for this year’s wheat and barley crop and he would expect to get one cutting of alfalfa in, instead of the three he hoped for.

“Being done for this year means absorbing several million dollars in losses this year and we don’t recover from that,” Young said in a phone interview. “That would spell the end of our business and that’s true for everybody else frankly who is farming.”

Young is among the eastern Idaho and Magic Valley family farmers and other water users who hold the 6,400 groundwater rights that are subject to curtailment. The Idaho Department of Water Resources said those water rights holders are being subject to curtailment because they are not in compliance with a state plan. 

While some groundwater users and districts are subject to curtailment, others users and districts found to be in compliance with a state plan are not subject to having their water shut off.

The Idaho Department of Water Resources said curtailment – or shutting off the water – is necessary because of a predicted water shortfall this year.

When it announced the curtailment order Thursday afternoon, the Idaho Department of Water Resources estimated 500,000 acres of farmland could be affected by shutting off the water.

To put that in perspective, Young said that amount of farmland is about five times the size of the cities of Boise, Meridian and Eagle combined.

The history of the Young Family Farms dates to 1952 when Young’s grandfather, Darwin Young started the farm.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so perhaps a short video from an Idahoan farmer is worth a short essay.

It is never as simple as the eyes see, so would you be surprised if I told you that right when this atrocious decision will affect not only Idaho’s farmers, inevitably forcing them to sell their farmers to big banks and big funds (reminder, Bill Gates loves buying farmland), but will also affect food supply and inevitably inflation, since Idaho is a farming powerhouse, potatoes especially. But it goes somewhat deeper.

The Department of Defense and the Pentagon wanted to aggressively expand the domestic manufacturing and supply chain of many of the most critical raw materials needed for Defense, since the reliance on adversarial countries, especially China and Russia, is a significant weakness. China itself holds a close monopoly to many refined minerals production.

Embedded in one of the, well, I am not American and I lost count of how many aid bills Ukraine got at this point, in one of the Aid bills to Ukraine, the DoD gave a multinational mining company a contract. The company is named Jervois Global Limited (an Australian company), and the agreement was with its American subsidiary, Jervois Mining USA.

Jervois USA, a subsidiary of Australian miner Jervois Global, holds mineral rights on the confluence of the Little Deer Creek and south fork of Big Deer Creek drainages in the rugged Salmon River Mountains, about a two-hour drive from Salmon on switchback roads.

Jervois Mining USA just got awarded said 15 million dollars and can now start exploring and mining, 24/7 in the Idaho Salmon-Challis National Forest. It will be able to mine Cobalt.

Exploratory drilling will last "up to 24 hours per day, 7 days per week" through mid-November before restarting again in June 2024. 

Do you know what Colbat mining is known for ? Mainly two aspects, one is its insane water-intense usage, and the second is its rather absurd toxicity as a byproduct of mining. Congo produces over 70% of the world’s cobalt, but do you care to guess who refines the most and gets the most cobalt from Congo, in the entire planet ? China ?

Cobalt is not only used for green technology and batteries but it is considered by the USG a critical component for semiconductor production. So, in the process of attempting a very hard “decoupling” from China’s absurd strategic positioning in the critical components of the future, the government shortsighted decides to reward bankers with farmland ?

I completely understand the need to rebuild its manufacturing base, cut the reliance of your entire Defense system on your biggest adversary as much as you can, but with decisions like this ? Well, who needs to eat, am I right ?


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