Regenerative agriculture is farming practices that rehabilitate entire ecosystems by returning nutrients to the earth rather than depleting them. Regenerative is farming without synthetics and chemical sprays, diversifying crop rotations, cover cropping, and, where appropriate reintegrating large ruminants with rotational grazing.

Industrial agriculture wants everyone else to pay up and shut up. Even in matters that directly impact our families’ well-being and their future – like how they produce our food. It is no secret the industrial mono-cropping agricultural system is seriously depleting the nation’s soils. What may not be as widely known is the food grown today is less nutrient-dense with lower amounts of vital items like protein, phosphorus, iron, calcium, riboflavin, and vitamin C than just half a lifetime ago. Robust, healthy soils make robust, healthy human populations. Agricultures’ most valuable asset is healthy soil, but industrial agriculture treats this vital asset like dirt.

The industrial mono-crop agriculture system is a politically entrenched apparatus supporting heedless aggressive exploitation of the land, massive chemical application, and waste. They are driven by greed that obstinately obstructs the change consumers so ardently desire.

What we can do about it is purchase regenerative or organic foods and speak out. We can no longer shut the folk up and eat whatever is put in front of us.

The post Shut the Folk Up first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Shut the Folk Up appeared first on milkadamia.

Ambushes, frights, and being chased by a sibling, who at that moment represented all the terrors of the night, ensured we were flushed, wild-eyed, and fully hyped by bedtime. The nightmares we conjured as entertainment became real enough for our Mother as she attempted to quiet six uncooperative ratcheted kids and settle each in bed.

When the noise level threatened to lift off the roof, our Mother would throw open the door she had shuttered behind and yell at us to “BE QUIET” then she would add the line we came to despise. “What will the neighbors think?”.

In Mom’s defense, on many evenings, it sounded like a massacre was taking place.  Yet we came to resent the neighbors deeply – “they” spoiled our fun.  We perceived, in the way children do, that they were judging us. The neighbors became the focus of all our kid grudges against the world.  They of course, knew nothing of this, and the daily file of sullen, scowling school-bound children must have been a fount of some wonderment to them.  

“What will the neighbors think’?  Was so overused by our Mother we eventually cared not a whit what the neighbors thought.  We became emboldened to do what we wanted, even in (especially in) the teeth of others’ clear disapproval. 

I have since met many talented, capable people who are so in thrall of their version of what the “neighbors” might think they will not take the risk to be fully themselves. They are tiptoeing through life – a collection of performed duties and an endless round of people appeasing.  Taking the least frowned upon path to the sanctuary of the grave.  I have often wished I could reach in and flick the to-heck-with-the-neighbors switch and free them to be fully, gloriously, messily themselves, but I digress.

One of the larger questions ever asked cuts to the chase – who is my neighbor?

We are discovering the impending climate nightmare scenario is not kid-stuff, but global in scope, and devastating in scale.  We are all in a single atmosphere together, we are not climatically independent, there are no boundary fences, to separate our fates, no sheltering hedges.   On the planetary scale Earth it turns out is just one home, humanity one family.

We thought knowledge and technology might prove us separate and above interdependence – extinction of vitality on our lush raft in space could be the high price of our conceit.  What we each do from here on in percusses everyone else. Loving and looking out for our neighbors is loving and looking out for yourself  – this can’t be separated either.

Maybe if other planets are inhabited, they consider us neighbors.  Watching what we are doing to our beautiful world must be a wonderment to them.  If we do not collectively turn this around, Mother Earth might well enquire of us – what must the neighbors be thinking?

The post What Will The Neighbors Think first appeared on milkadamia.

The post What Will The Neighbors Think appeared first on milkadamia.

It is said that if we have the opportunity to look back from the summit of our lives, we will see unfurled a lifelong quest for meaning, purpose, and belonging.   Some look most earnestly for meaning, peering under rocks, thumbing pages, enquiring of the ancients, and traveling to all points of the compass.  The tools they employ in the hunt, their curiosity, their eyes, hands, openness of mind, persistence, and vitality are not solely for seeking answers on how and why you are supposed to live, these very tools can be redirected to actually getting on with it – living.  The experience of being alive, fully alive is what is truly transcendent, and the ultimate goal of the quest.

At the speed of time, our past expands, our future, diminishes. It is in the region between, the present, that we either risk being alive by opening to the idiosyncratic individual we are born to be, or we don’t.

The final words of too many are “I wish I had lived the life I wanted”. In the place of knowing who and what they could have been, is a yellowing page of performed duties and met expectations.  Mostly others, expectations!

Purpose meaning and belonging are syncopated with being yourself.  Our uniqueness is our piece of humanity’s jigsaw, our gift, and contribution. What holds so many back is fear and risk. Risk of better options, risk of being exposed as an amateur, the risk of ridicule, the risk of not being enough, of being unloved, hurt, and feeling unappreciated, these fears imprison.  Yet the bars have no more substance than smoke. They are only ideas – comfortable thought hammocks that cradle and soothe us with our accumulation of self-lies and little fears.  Yet they loom so large in our minds we think great courage is required to break free, where tiny baby steps will do just fine.  Gathering all our resolve, huffing up muscle and bluster, is unnecessary,  just a little momentum, works best.  If the journey to ourselves starts out as terribly humanly messy and imperfect – great, you are getting warm.

Perfectionism is the greatest enemy of creativity it is also the greatest enemy of yourself.  Allow imperfections – don’t try to make the imperfect perfect – strive instead to make the imperfections beautiful. Do that and somewhere along the way things turn about and meaning, purpose and belonging begin seeking you.

The post Allowing for Imperfections first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Allowing for Imperfections appeared first on milkadamia.

1. We can turn a blind eye.
2. We can accept the ethical custom that the imperative of delivering profits to shareholders trumps all and every other consideration. We can cut our production costs by using palm oil. Doing so is the business-accepted path, and no one in business will blame us for taking it.
3. We can accept the thin curtain of respectability that Sustainable palm oil affords. Even as we know, it is a lie constructed to appease consumers. It is not attending to the multiple eco and inhuman issues with any genuine urgency or meaningfully.
4. We can choose not to lose the reins of our character even as we are confronted with the subjugation and diminishment of children, women, girls, boys, and men. We can choose not to partake, even indirectly, in extinguishing their hope, prospects, possibilities, and potential. We are small and do not have the heft to bring muscle and bluster. We can, however, use our words. We can declare our opposition. We can shine some light on this systematic abuse and exploitation of the vulnerable. We can help bring the hidden into the light. Accepting this happening in our time, on our watch, and that we know about it should pain us all. Ignorance is no longer an option, and silence is support. About 50% of grocery goods contain palm oil. It is subjugation bent backs that support the low price designed to attract our patronage. The duty of straightening the backs of palm oil workers belongs, in part, to all who have, and continue, to support the abuse through their purchases. We each have been inadvertently building up a tab, an IOU to the indentured, enslaved, trapped, and exploited Palm oil workers. Every dollar we spend on products with Palm oil affirms and encourages the companies and countries that profit from the wretchedly eco-destructive and stunningly abusive palm oil production. For our small business, opposition to palm oil will be a most challenging, most fraught route, and we have no line of sight as to how it will play out. The forces arrayed to protect the profits companies make from Palm oil are formidable. The hired apologists for Palm oil are talented and well rewarded. There is a gross imbalance of power between the wealthy owners and the vulnerable kids and women. As always, power corrupts, creating tyrants drunk on money and power. We are not ennobled, leaving kids to marinate uncomfortably in the toxic mix of bullying, crime, exploitation, and abuse without at least trying. There is hope, no power, or authority, and no military might, can stand once its moral authority amongst the people is lost. It is a truism that the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead We maintain an unswerving conviction that human dignity is an absolute, not a piecemeal notion; it is all – or it is nothing. Palm oil is a terrible situation for workers. Palm oil is disastrous for tropical forests and calamitous for the planet. Palm oil is corrosive to the principles of our business leaders who are required to harden themselves against the plight of women and kids for shareholder profit. Our collective contribution is needed to save our business leaders. To help palm oil employees and save our civilization. The word civilization does not apply to any culture that allows the level of inhumanity to women and kids that palm oil does: and, untimely, to save ourselves. For milkadamia, it is not the conviction that this will turn out well for our business, rather the certainty that we can do no other regardless of how it turns out. What can you do?
5. You can write to the companies that use Palm oil and tell them what you think and plan to do about it. As you do this, take no particular note of our values, but take special note of your own.
6. Don’t underestimate the power of your voice, of your choice – of the power of one who dares.
7. Switch to brands and products that don’t use Palm oil. This action will complicate shopping greatly, it will be hard and require sacrifice on your part, and it will likely cost more. It may test how much you care and reveal something that may surprise – how, once gripped by conviction and purpose, you are entirely sufficient for any challenge and unstoppable. Be encouraged to speak to businesses in the language they listen to most attentively and react rapidly to their sales, market share, and reputation.
8. Research Palm oil – information is at your fingertips.
9. Talk, write, and tell your truth. Note: Sustainable Palm oil may one day be consequential in bringing about a degree of positive change. However, currently, it is mostly a toothless and truthless exercise in consumer placation. The more virgin tropical forest is being felled by supposed Sustainable Palm oil than the others. There is just no such thing as sustainable tropical forest destruction at this stage of Earth’s history – indeed, there never was.

The post We All Have Choices first appeared on milkadamia.

The post We All Have Choices appeared first on milkadamia.

While Thanksgiving is a national celebration, it is experienced in a private family setting.  The traditions, rituals, and particular values and mannerisms of our family are the building blocks of those memories, treasured or trashed, that make thanksgiving such an intensely personal national holiday. While no place in the U.S. is completely safe from the abrasion and spark of ideology clash these days, thanksgiving thankfully allows a reset and reconnection at the family level.  We, within the embrace of our family, are reminded what we all want to be free for, not just what we want to be free from. The “free” we as a nation demand includes the sort of freedom that has the space and grace to allow the side-dish of mixed-nuts we call family, to blossom freely into their full idiosyncratic whimsy. Whimsy that we sometimes find embarrassing, frequently find frustrating, but will always accept and ultimately love dearly.

The acceptance of differences that we learn in the family setting becomes the cornerstone of acceptance of differences encountered outside our immediate family. There is an awful lot going on in 2020 – a lot of it awful.   The lessons available at Thanksgiving can help us to be the nation we set out to be.

The post Reminding Us of What Binds first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Reminding Us of What Binds appeared first on milkadamia.

A lace of shifting shadows spun of sunlight, breeze, and leaves

Each silhouette in shadow but a moment on the grass

Like portend dreams of slumber that surface – then they pass

A “stand of trees” a point that’s fixed amid the flux of life

Sentinels of centuries take the long view of our strife

They gift us shade and majesty, point to heights we cannot know

Trap secrets of the universe, stand steady in the flow

Their stillness is prescient in histories sad gyration

And trees there be near you and me that’ll eclipse “civilization”

Our passing goes unnoticed long before they fall

Living with our trees we are not central after all

Alone they stand upon this land rooted in one place

Curing our souls, soil, and air while all around we race

What in life is not improved by a moment in their shade

Just you and me, a macadamia tree – our cathedral in the glade

The post you, me and a macadamia tree first appeared on milkadamia.

The post you, me and a macadamia tree appeared first on milkadamia.

Meanwhile the crash, roar, and thunder that accompanies so much of our usual activity remains muted and hushed.  That all this comes at a high price in human lives and is accompanied by grief and loss, ensures any acknowledgment that the Earth is being gifted some much-needed breathing space, must also be appropriately muted and hushed.

Earth Day – every day.

Milkadamia.

The post Happy Earth Day to You… first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Happy Earth Day to You… appeared first on milkadamia.

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The post Taking on Palm and Dairy first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Taking on Palm and Dairy appeared first on milkadamia.

Keeping updated on the emerging data of our climate crises and the actions taken to alleviate its impact, permits a similar idea to bud.  Within our own planet, there also exists worlds in parallel, upside-down and opposite worlds. In one the need for immediate and decisive action on the climate crisis is obvious, while another parallel world prefers its citizens just keep calm and carry on.  In one world we are invited to take up the yoke of responsibility and the other world prefers we just leave things and let the-as-yet-unborn deal with it all.  In one, the doctrines and processes of governments and politics employ cemented static mindsets even as the climate proves a tumultuous cascade of dynamic processes potentially propelling us to who knows what.  Parallel but opposite worlds.

Between the extremes is yet another world, the one we common folk commonly inhabit.  It is our neighborhood, where we live and work, our town, our city.  A place mostly comforting and familiar because over time it has been sculpted and shaped by the actions, motives and cares of local people to fit local needs.  This is our sphere of influence and the world we want to preserve.

We care about orangutans, koalas and polar bears, we really do, but the sheer breadth, scale, and complexity of the problems overwhelm. The many eco-urgencies progressively lose impact as they increase in scale and are located far beyond our reach.  Most of us have skill and geographical constraints on our ability to positively impact big issues like rising sea levels, melting glaciers and bleaching corrals.   We are best placed, and frankly most incentivized, to start where we are and work from the bottom up. Where we can be busy is in saving those things near us that we love, and then enlarging the space of our influence as we go.

Of course, we understand ecosystems are not respecters of town boundaries nor do they care about the depth of our attachment to local amenities like river-walks, and parklands.  We know our homes and towns cannot be insulated from the causal network in which everything is bound together.  Yet that same causal network allows that we can remain local and still have global influence if we choose our actions wisely.

Transportation of all forms is the cause of about 14% of the human-generated carbon, and incredibly Palm oil production is the cause of about the same amount of carbon going into the sky!

Our use of transport is not always a choice, it is hard to imagine life without some form of transport.  However, our use of palm oil is always a choice furthermore it’s easy to imagine life without it, after-all humans thrived until the 1960s with most not knowing palm oil even existed.  Not only is palm oil a choice, ultimately and critically, but it’s also our choice.

One important reason we need to actively save that which we love is, the actions of one person always influences the information base of another and on and on the impact grows.  Starting one thing will encourage and engage others and collectively we can improve the long-term destiny of our world with our own self-generated cascade of dynamic processes.

Palm oil is an unnecessary and offensive ecological disaster, the production of this one item is causing as much climatic damage as every single motorcycle, car, truck, train, boat, and airplane on earth.  Further tropical forests have been and are being burned recklessly and extensively to make way for ever-more palm oil monoculture.  The palm oil industry is boasting that our demand for palm oil is set to quadruple, vast and beautiful tropical Peat forests will be burnt to meet that demand, our demand, but only if we allow it.  All this mindless destruction is they say just the law of supply and demand in action.

Obviously, we are not consciously demanding millions of acres of tropical forests be burned on our behalf each year – if we could make the rules, we would, in fact, demand the very opposite.   But we do inadvertently incentivize and fund the destruction through our purchase of items made with palm oil – and we purchase lots of them.

Palm oil is in so many products it is really quite hard to avoid.  Manufacturers love to use palm oil because it is quite versatile and very cheap. But of course, Palm oil actually has, a hidden, but extraordinarily high eco-price, it is costing us the earth.

Palm oil is likely an ingredient in most of your favorite brands.  But if we commit to doing this thing, this one hard-ish thing, that will complicate shopping a bit and require persistence on our part – if we switch to palm oil-free products – we, together, will compel a positive and pertinent eco-impact that is equal to shutting down all transportation globally. Without leaving home we collectively can send a crystal-clear message to manufacturers. They respond to dips in their sales and market share with an alacrity and intensity we wish they reserved for measuring and reducing the eco-impact of their ingredients.

We, the people, can create new laws of supply and demand – any company that supplies products containing palm oil will see demand diminish, and their bright cheerful logo can come to symbolize the dark badge of corporate greed.   It is only our patronage and goodwill that gives power to brands, and it is our purchases that gift fortune to the companies behind them – they prosper only as they serve our needs and wants.  Change those wants and we change a great deal besides.

Watch out for claims of sustainable palm oil.  The truth is there is no such thing as sustainable tropical forest destruction.  Call BS on that sort of virtue signaling nonsense.

Not buying palm oil products will demonstrate even the biggest global issues are not beyond our reach or influence.  As we get strategic about palm oil, corals, glaciers, sea levels and even Borneo’s (oxymoron named) pigmy elephants will directly benefit.  Those koalas, polar bears and orangutans we care about will get to breathe easier also, as will we all.

We may have our backs against the climatic wall (so to speak) but neither the scope of the ecological problems, nor our ineffective leaders loitering in their parallel world, should cause us to ignore the problems that we, and possibly only we, can effectively attend.  We may not be able to address everything – but believe me, we can address this one big thing.

Historically the extraordinary courage of ordinary people manifests clearest in crises when we are rising to defend neighbors, neighborhoods, and homes – like now.  The intensity of stubborn determination and ingenuity we common folk can collectively bring to this fight is one of humanity’s super-powers.

Besides, we have to make our infinite number of parallel selves feel good about us, even that fortunate us living in the world populated by cute purple pygmy elephants.

The post Palming Off first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Palming Off appeared first on milkadamia.

Thankfully we can be unexpectedly jagged by some arrestingly beautiful natural vista so captivating it jolts us awake. Beauty can and does elevate something deep within our souls. Lifting us for a moment above the clinging molasses of the mundane, leaving us calmed and refreshed. Beauty reminds us we can be and want to be, much more than our base nature. Our sometimes startlingly powerful receptiveness to nature’s gorgeousness informs we own synchronicity with the natural and the beautiful; it vibrates an internal tuning fork.  It might be a single tree, a bird, a stream, a mountain, or a valley that captures. At that moment, we are not calculating its usefulness, profit or utility but are transported by beauty for its own sake. If the mere existence of beauty percusses so deeply that it elevates our thoughts and calms our fears, what does the opposite do? What does the destruction and loss of beautiful things do to us?

Heretofore we believed it ok to exploit large mammals, capturing them from the wild and caging them. They suffered as they performed circus tricks, the better to entertain us. We now realize mammals like Elephants, Orcas, and humans, are all participants sharing in the same splendid mystery of life. We have recalibrated what we value and can no longer endure the idea of these beautiful, intelligent creatures suffering the lifelong trauma of captivity on our behalf. We gain more excellent value, beauty, and joy from freeing them than we ever did from exploiting them.

At this time of unpredictable climate extremes, we are reorienting ourselves in other ways also, wanting to treasure rather than exploit the natural world. Saving the beauty and biodiversity that remains and regenerating what we have exhausted provides more excellent value, beauty, and joy than continued unfettered exploitation will.

Many are seeking a life of quality over pursuing the entrenched ideal of quality-of-life, even as it costs the earth.  We realize we have been too focused on turning our allotted hours into material and social gain. Blinded to the potency-of-worth, the restorative beauty supporting and surrounding us affords. The plundering of Earth’s treasure stores to enrich us is, it turns out, ultimately leaving us bereft. We are realizing that we have traded too much for limp pastimes and small pickings that will never satisfy or compensate.

The shift from wanting only the best for us and ours to calculating instead, what matters most, will most clearly illumine who we are, even to ourselves. Does the question change from how much is enough? – to – what is just too beautiful to lose? To choose what you love enough to save is not saying: this is better than that, it is saying this is more important.

Part of the whelming sorrow-scape shaping our reaction to the Australian fires is the degree of pain from the loss of that which is made precious through its fragile beauty. It hurts, and it hurts bad. Yet we cannot allow the vice-grip of horror at what we have wrought to freeze us into the fetal position. That is also a trap, another coma – just when the world needs you fully awakened to its loveliness and wonders.

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment if ever there was one. The child in you is sparking up again, outraged, but brimming over, as fresh young minds do, with expectation and possibility. The kid knows you will meet humanity’s most significant challenge with renewed zeal coursing through your veins, fired again by the aspirations and hopes that give life its gravitas. The kid knows, in the way kids do, you were born to palpitate with fullness of being and burn with fierceness of purpose during just such a time as this. The kid is confident the deeds you will do, and sacrifices you will make will weigh, against the backdrop of climate crises, as moral grandeur if that is what it is going to take. What do we tell that kid? And all the kids to follow?

As adults, we can choose to discover how much we can save if we wholeheartedly try – or- be forced to learn how much we can, or cannot, get along without.

As even kids know – a world is such a beautiful thing to waste.

The post A World is Such a Beautiful Thing to Waste. first appeared on milkadamia.

The post A World is Such a Beautiful Thing to Waste. appeared first on milkadamia.

We don’t pay much mind to hand-wringers, those who proclaim the world is dying. We choose instead to labor for its health. It is futile to agonize over the vastness of the task or to weep over losing that which is not yet fully lost.

Even soils degraded by plows and chemicals can be regenerated, restored and revived. Though their vitality and structure have been diminished from relentless mono-cropping, they can again be the silent engine of life they always were.

Regenerative farming focuses on the health of the soil. A good regenerative farm actually creates new layers of topsoil every year. The technique is to stop exploiting and abusing soil and to work with it. With crop rotation and cover crops, no plowing and no chemical or artificial fertilizer inputs, the soils can begin to regenerate. Given the opportunity, the microorganisms multiply into astound abundance and set about regenerating land.

All of life on Earth is possible only because of all the life in the earth. To save the Earth, we must first save the earth. Healthy topsoil sequesters astounding quantities of Co2 – enough that if 20% of the currently cultivated soils were farmed regeneratively we could halt and reverse the buildup of carbon in the sky.

How the food you purchase is grown matters. Your choice of regeneratively farmed food over the produce of industrialized farming has genuine and immediate eco-pertinence.

The post For The Love of Earth first appeared on milkadamia.

The post For The Love of Earth appeared first on milkadamia.

The early climate models they developed alarmed them but were crude and left room for alternative explanations. In time more powerful climate models confirmed their central calculations – unless we acted decisively, we were incrementing our way toward serious trouble down the track.

Scientists sounded a series of warnings. We were impacting the weather and were either cooling or possibly warming the whole place. Additional time, investment and computing power settled it – we were warming, not cooling the planet a little – 2-6 degrees over the next 100 years or so. Such a small change spread over such a long period seemed trivial, even desirable, to many of the world’s populace. Also, many scientific uncertainties emerged, and the sheer complexity of our climate left lots of space for doubts and limitless action, stalling debate.

The consequences of these seemingly trivial temperature changes slowly became evident, and we learned they were not going to be good for us, not good at all. Scientists sounded a louder warning citing something called the greenhouse effect.

Now, greenhouses are little islands of abundance, growing vegetables and ripening tomatoes out of season. My gentle and wise grandparents had a greenhouse at the bottom of their garden. They loved to spend the hours between naps there, pottering, muttering and humming tunelessly. Their greenhouse was a glorious disarray of mismatched containers and tiny pampered cuttings. This is where my grandparents most deeply communed with nature via long, rambling conversations with random seedlings. Why should we be terrified of the planet becoming a peaceful if somewhat odd and mildly chaotic greenhouse like my grandparents had?

They tried the label climate change – such a poor description for a crisis. Climate is always changing, always has been, always will be. It’s a bit like the weather, isn’t it? We discuss the weather endlessly, and much of the discussion is on how changeable it is. So, nothing new and no need for alarm there.

They tried global warming – “warm” is a nice word, cozy, snug and welcoming. Who doesn’t want to be warm? I love being warm. Walking barefoot along sun-warmed sand with my wife by my side is the most potent and happy sensory memory of mine. Warm spring sun on my back is my number one happy place. We embrace warming in a warm embrace.

Today some news outlets are calling it a climate crisis – ok, that is a bit better, a crisis at least sounds alarming. But meanwhile thirty years have gone by and much of the population remains a bit bemused and ambivalent. There has been little progress toward mitigating the impending crunch and not much strident demand from we the people. So, politicians know they can get away with kicking the can further and further down the road. Let the generations to come worry about it is their attitude.

What I ask is the next time the world is in deadly peril requiring alarm and action – for goodness sake let the marketing team do the naming exercise!

Words matter. Some have the power to startle, shock, incite, excite, inspire and cause action. Others comfort and lull. Our scientists chose the wrong words.

My choice in bold capitals is the acronym WTF.

I don’t mean to offend, but I find the inaction by our leaders even more offensive and such an inexcusable obscenity that only the strongest language will suffice!

WTF – to all of us. How can we love the good life so much that we casually impose crushing hardship on our own offspring?

Politicians, WTF and WTF again, calculating, cynical, callous cowards only interested in power, prestige and pockets, where is your leadership? Where is your compassion and empathy – where is your love of this planet and the people you are supposed to serve?

WTF no one is coming to save us – we are going to have to take action ourselves.

We propose as one action demanding regeneratively farmed products. We need 20% of currently cultivated land to become regenerative, thus halting the buildup of Co2 and creating some breathing space. This we can do.

We all need to get busy with WTF – Winning The Future.

The post How Not To Brand first appeared on milkadamia.

The post How Not To Brand appeared first on milkadamia.

Recent exposes have shown what our bovine friends go thru for the unethical dairy industry. Our creamy, delicious milkadamia is made from natural macadamias, not from cows.

2. TASTE

Plant-based milks, including our own milkadamia, bring you the creamy smoothness and delicious taste of milk in a way that’s sustainable and healthy for the planet.

3. REGENERATIVE FARMING

Our Jindilli Farm practices earth-friendly regenerative farming techniques that keep the rich carbon in the soil.

4. PERFECT SUBSTITUTE

Plant-based milk is the perfect substitute for dairy in recipes. Whether it’s baking or cooking, plant milk like milkadamia replicates the smooth, creamy taste that all cooks want.

5. COMPASSION

Unlike what you’ve seen from the dairy industry recently you’ll never see video of a farmer torturing a macadamia nut. Enjoy the taste you grew up with but leave the milk to the cows.

6. VARIETY

Animal-based milk comes in regular, chocolate or skim. BORING! Plant-based milks, creamers and butters come in a wide range of delicious flavors.

7. HEALTH

Plant-based milk, like milkadamia, is generally lower in fat, cholesterol and calories than whole milk, plus they contain zero hormones. Milk does NOT do a body good. Plants do.

8. PERFORMANCE

Plant-based athletes such as Lewis Hamilton, Novak Djokovic, Kyrie Irving know that one can achieve maximum performance on a plant-based diet.

9. OUR PLANET

Drinking plant-based milk is a great way to give the Earth some breathing room. Our Jindilli Farm employs regenerative farming principles to sequester carbon and feed the soil, so it feeds us.

10. GOOD FIRST STEP

Many people looking to make the change to move to a plant-based diet start with plant-based milk and eventually realize they don’t need meat or dairy in their diet.

11. GREENHOUSE GASSES

Big Dairy farms are a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions and the mishandling of fertilizer runoff harms rivers and streams. Transcend the herd!

12. WATER USAGE

Did you know it takes 144 gallons of water to make one gallon of dairy milk? The trees at our Jindilli Farm are not tethered to irrigation systems. We rely on Mother Nature. Thanks, mom.

13. DAIRY IS WEIRD

We are the only species who drink the milk of another species. Let’s leave cow’s milk for whom it was intended: baby cows.

14. PLANT-BASED PRODUCTS ARE NOT JUST FOR MILK

There has an explosion of new plant-based products in every dairy category from ice cream to yoghurt to cheeses to buttery spreads, further rendering moo moot.

The post 14 Reasons Why Moo Is Moot first appeared on milkadamia.

The post 14 Reasons Why Moo Is Moot appeared first on milkadamia.

What do YOU stand for? And what will YOU not stand for? It is the values we express and act upon that are the building blocks of our civilization. They sculpt and shape our shared future.
Jewel-Osco was congratulated for acting decisively after being made aware of the pernicious and systematic cruel treatment of cows and calves at Fair Oaks Farms. Theirs was not a financial decision; it likely cost the retailers significantly, added complexity and created some chaos. Theirs was an ethical decision and that is heartening and encouraging.

The question is, can factory farming of animals survive the social media age?

The dairy industry has a large and well-funded PR machine. They employ multitudes of political lobbyists who will soothe and assure Washington and us too if we allow. The workers in the video will be made scapegoats, it will be declared an isolated aberration, the industry will march on.
Dairy cows and their newborn vulnerable calves have no PR agency and no lobbyists, and they can’t speak for themselves – they have only our voices guided by our values. For any who chose to signal their values to corporations like Fair Oaks and Coca-Cola, here’s a tip – they listen most attentively to their sales volume, profit and market-share.

#ItsRChoice

Read more on our belief that moo is moot.

The post Anything But Fairlife first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Anything But Fairlife appeared first on milkadamia.

Originally, during England’s medieval period, moots (meets) were assemblies where important points of local government were vigorously debated. In these sometimes impassioned assemblies, items that were put up for discussion were said to have been mooted. Today the word “moot” is almost always used in conjunction with the word “point.” As in “it’s a moot point” or “I wanna tell her that I love her but the point is probably moot…I wish that I had Jessie’s girl.”

Over time the meaning of the word “moot” devolved from describing a meeting for meaningful debate to a description of insubstantial pointless noise. This change followed the introduction of moot courts, in law schools.

Moot courts are sessions where law students train by arguing hypothetical cases. That is, they create and then dispute moot points. The impossibility of any substantive outcome from these hypothetical cases has led to the unimportant/irrelevant/not worth discussing meaning of “moot.”

When milkadamia declares “Moo is Moot” on our packs we are voicing the opinion of the millions who have switched out dairy foods from their diets. Dairy milk is moot, irrelevant within and to the lives, aspirations, health and eco-desires of millions.

The significant eco-cost of dairy may be more tolerated if cow’s milk was necessary. However, thousands of vegan athletes are clearly demonstrating robust health, vitality, long life and vigor don’t require dairy. That they are better in every way without diary.

They demonstrate our bones don’t crumble, nor do we suffer the protein deficiency the dairy industry attempts to scare us with. They prove that its oft-repeated claims that dairy is critical to human nutrition are false. Millions have removed dairy from their diets (billions never included it) and have happily moved on.

Meanwhile the dairy industry is acting like the rise of plant milk is the end of all civilization (Dear Mr. Dairy). It is in reality only the end of us financially supporting the dairy industry’s uncivilized treatment of sentient animals. The end of us supporting its commercial exploitation of the act of motherhood (Anything But Fairlife). Mostly it is we common folk responding to the astonishing inefficiency and equally astonishing and disheartening eco-cost of the unnecessary dairy industry.

Eventually the dairy industry’s histrionic death throes will be a footnote in the history of our times, if even that. More than its own food production revolution, its own social movement or its own fact, plant-based diets and regenerative farming are set to be part of something much bigger, more dangerous and more important.

A righteous groundswell is building. A global eco-rights idea is taking shape. Common folk are spontaneously rising to the defense of the natural world. This is where the moral energy comes from, a sense of an interconnected natural world and natural order to rediscover, to rescue, bring back to life, to win. To live beyond simply creating no further harm, but to actively heal the harm already done.

Many, faced today with the knowledge of human-generated expansion of global eco-misery and want, are choosing to rise up and resist. To behave selflessly. We are inspired by such people whose personal choices, made for future generations, are beginning to measure at this moment in history as moral grandeur. They are mitigating as far as they are capable the impending crisis. They are active but are not motivated by activism; rather it’s an irresistible expression of their internal desire for our home.

Many are revealing humanity’s best spirit. Generations unborn may owe the opportunity to breathe a little extra humanity into the human experience, to the actions taken today. So much of what is yet to come is our choice.

To plant-based people, the lack of any possible substantive outcome from the dairy industry’s scare tactics, nutrition nonsense, bullying, lobbying, censoring of language and especially its energetic striving to continue polluting our land, water and sky, makes them, at this point of Earth’s history, the very definition of the word “moot.”

Moo is moot.

Jim Richards,

CEO milkadamia

The post Moo Is Moot first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Moo Is Moot appeared first on milkadamia.

The dairy industry wants us to accept the growth is due to consumers being confused over the usage of the term “milk.” However, a new survey by the International Food Information Council (IFIC), demonstrates this is not the case.

Plant-based “milks” declare loud and proud on pack that they are non-dairy, so claiming mass confusion was always going to be a long bow for the dairy companies to draw – but desperate folk….

The evidence is clear consumers are making a conscious, and in some cases a conscience-driven, choice to purchase plant-based milks. They choose for wellness, for the environment, for taste and for their animal welfare concerns.

Affronted and agitated, the peeved dairy industry is demanding government intervention. They seek the full weight of federal law be brought to bear on any and every use of the word “milk” unless applied to domestic animal lactate. They seek draconian censorship of the very word “milk.”

“Milk” has been in common usage for hundreds of years for plant-based milks: soy milk since 1365, coconut milk since 1698 and almond milk since the 12th century.

Dairy is presenting itself to the government as the champion of consumer interest. Dairy wants to “save” consumers from plant-based-milk induced confusion. Yet dairy aggressively fights off all government attempts to reduce the levels of somatic cell contaminant in the milk it supplies to the same consumers. The U.S. imposes on its consumers, at the determined insistence of the dairy industry, the highest allowable somatic cell concentration in the developed world. The dairy industry insists U.S. consumers just stomach it. With that as the measure of dairy’s concern for the wellbeing of consumers, the claim they are motivated by altruistic concern for consumers on this “milk” thing is unmasked.

Mr. FDA, consumers are not confused, and neither should you be. What is clear is this “milk” issue will reveal what it is each of the involved hold most dear.

For dairy, the fight they are in is for the continuation and expansion of the massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the dairy industry. An industry that is mostly made up of large agribusinesses far removed from the down-to-earth American family farm they want us to envision.

For many consumers, the values they hold and identify with dictate it is time to actively support more efficient, Earth-friendly forms of agriculture. Many others believe they cannot, will not, support the dairy industry’s treatment of animals. Yet others seek the wellness of a plant-based diet.

In opposing these consumer groups, dairy is placing itself on the wrong side of history. In a global shift of consciousness of historic proportions, end users are thoughtfully and purposely shifting their spending away from inefficient and polluting agricultural systems.

Consumers, inadvertently or not, express their values with every dollar they spend on food (see what is going on with Fairlife, showcasing why consumers are choosing not to spend on dairy). Every consumer will make thousands of food purchases in their lifetime. Consumers can speak to corporations and agriculturalists in the language they listen most attentively to – their market share and profit. Consumers can through their spending support an agricultural system, cause it to adapt or make it shrivel on the vine (so to speak).

U.S. dairy’s leadership group is demonstrating a lack of vision with the actions they are taking. They are demonstrating lack of empathy and are underestimating the rise into global consciousness of chronic eco–anxiety and the impact it is having on people’s priorities. Industries that pollute and exploit can fully expect reduced respect and greatly reduced consumer financial support to impact their valuation.

Mr. Dairy, they already have your attention – this is a good time to recognize the folly of totally alienating these most proactive and motivated consumers. Don’t confirm through your actions you care more about political influence than you do about them. Consumer numbers, their goodwill and purchases are the very basis of your political standing and as they go, so goes your influence.

The post Dear Mr. Dairy first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Dear Mr. Dairy appeared first on milkadamia.

We wholeheartedly agree and proffer the following “milk” definition from Merriam-Webster:

1. a: a fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young
   b . (1): milk from an animal and especially a cow used as food by people
         (2): a food product produced from seeds or fruit that resembles and is used similarly to cow’s milk coconut milk soy milk
2. a liquid resembling milk in appearance: such as
   a: the latex of a plant
   b: the contents of an unripe kernel of grain
3. Lactation in cows in milk

The FDA action is not born out of the desire to help confused consumers, but out the demand from Dairy to support a declining segment as the result of consumer choice. Redefining a word that has been used for the almost a millennia will not change this fact.

Read the full article HERE.

The post The Dictionary and the Constitution first appeared on milkadamia.

The post The Dictionary and the Constitution appeared first on milkadamia.