there are bottom-up and top-down ways to grow food and deliver it to people's tables. Guess which is the big corporate way.

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I got an early start this morning, doing a few hours of farm labor-- weeding and squishing beetles on broccoli plants (it's an organic farm.)  It's nice to get back to nature. Afterwards, I chatted with John, the farmer who runs the farm, told him I was writing a book about bottom-up, and asked him how it applies to farming.

He replied that on earth, life begins with soil. There is more biomass below the surface, in the soil, like bacteria and fungus, than above, "even including elephants." And he explained that organic, small farmers work with the living things below the surface, for fertilizer, for growing. On the other hand, big factory farms kill everything below the surface, with things like methyl bromide, then add chemical fertilizers like phosphoric potassium nitrate, and then they spray to kill weeds and bugs. Organic farmers plant ground cover plants. They take the approach that things start below the surface of the soil, then add cover plants, then seedlings, then crops. People who are part of the co-op and a few paid workers, usually students or farmers in training, do the planting, weeding, harvesting. The harvested food goes to local community members with a stake in the farm. The bottom-up approach to farming is small, local, and good for the environment.

The top down approach-- kill all the living things in the soil, artificially-- chemically-- fertilize. Take a plane and fly over a crop to dust it with toxic pesticides. Harvest with big machines. Move the produce by truck and train thousands of miles away. Big corporations either own the land or contract with big farmers and then sell to grocery store chains or fast food or restaurant chains.

We need to start asking how we can move the big corporations to start seeing with bottom-up eyes to find bottom-up solutions that are good for the earth and healthier. There's a lot of gasoline in food that is transported a thousand miles.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation