Chapter 4

Tom Farmer, with a frown on his face, grabbed the first of several envelopes that had arrived by private courier earlier that morning. The fact that they came by private courier, working for a Wache firm, was enough to let him know that the contents of the letters dealt with business of concern to the Pfand X. He had been getting a lot of letters, lately, and it was beginning to worry him.

He opened the envelope knowing that it contained a second envelope containing the letter. The inner envelope was sealed with wax imprinted with the seal of the family to which the sender belonged. He carefully examined the seal, convincing himself that it was intact.

He broke the seal and extracted the letter. Opening it, he saw that it was addressed, as expected, to 'The Landowner, ' his official title as head of the Bauer family line. he groaned on reading the first line.

Tom was well aware of the situation referred to in the letter. It was a triple whammy for farmers – drought, increases in urban demand for water, and an endangered fish believed to be threatened by pumping water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in Northern California. One million acres of farm land had been put out of production with another two million growing less food than normal.

Congress wouldn't touch the issue with a ten foot pole. The courts wouldn't even take up the case. The fact that they had been unable to prevent this from happening, despite their tremendous economic assets, worried and angered him. People could fill swimming pools and water their lawns to have green patches of grass around their house, but farmers couldn't water their crops. There was something seriously wrong when one of the most productive farming areas in the country was shut down like that.

He wondered who in their right mind would favor lawns and swimming pools over food. Nothing about this situation made sense to him. With unemployment in California at an all time high, they were putting even more people out of work by destroying so many farms. It was irrational, to say the least.

He grabbed the next letter off of the stack, and opened it dreading what it would contain.

Henry was the fourth generation Bauer to run that dairy farm. He ran a tight operation that was well above national standards. He was well connected and well liked within the farming community. Tom was sure that Henry's farm closure had sent shock waves through the farming community. There was no telling how people would respond to this action by the EPA.

This letter was very worrisome. He had heard that the EPA was proposing such a regulation, but had not heard that the regulation had actually passed. The fact that neither he or Henry had known about the regulation was very disturbing, although nowhere near as disturbing as learning that a Curador could not get a copy of it. The EPA was required to publish regulations, but ... there was publishing and there was publishing. For all he knew, the regulation could have been published in a mathematics journal ... by accident ... instead of a dairy trade magazine. The mailing list for dairy farmers could have been confused with the mailing list for cod fisherman.

Tom tended to side with the Curador lawyer. He felt that Henry would be found not guilty, but only on appeal. The absence of proper notification of the regulation would get the case thrown out during appeal. The rejection of the Curador's request for a copy of the regulation would be passed off as his contacting a low level drone, who didn't know any better.

If the EPA wanted to shut down the dairy industry, the EPA didn't need to win the case in order to win the battle. In the time that it would take the case to move through the courts, all dairy farmers would have been put in an impossible situation. They would have to comply with the regulation, possibly having to close their dairy farm during the approval process, until the regulation was thrown out by a court or a grace period was established by the court. Ignoring the regulation would allow the EPA to forcibly close the farm and revoke the farmer's license to produce milk. No matter what, the dairy farms would be closed.

The dairy industry had been hit with enough regulations over the past four years to effectively put nearly every farm out of business. It was plain to Tom that someone wanted the dairy industry shut down. A lot of dairy farmers agreed with Tom on that matter. Even arguing that dairy products were an important source of nutrition wouldn't fly. The typical dairy section of a store now had as much soy milk as dairy milk.

Farms that managed to survive the increased regulations weren't out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination. There were now attempts to require farmers to have enclosed, air tight barns to capture the methane produced by dairy cattle. The idea was that the methane gas would be used in generating electricity and eliminate a green house gas from the environment in the process.

It sounded good on paper. Of course, no one had showed that it would be cost effective. No one knew how much it would cost to put the kind of structure and supporting equipment into place. There was the added danger that OSHA would declare such a structure an unsafe work environment. Animal rights activists would argue that trapping poor defenseless cows in a methane rich environment was cruel.

There was an alternative to hermetically sealed barns. That was the cow backpack for trapping methane gas. It was basically a plastic tank on the back of the cow with tube running to the exit port of the poor animal to collect the methane released when it farted. Tom had seen pictures of the device and considered it the stupidest thing he had ever seen – his apologies to the person who invented it.

Disheartened by the direction that his thoughts had taken, Tom grabbed the next envelope, and opened the enclosed letter following his standard procedure of checking the seal before opening the inner envelope.

Tom sat back in his chair stunned by the letter. He couldn't believe that Lawrence was hauled off by DHS for ordering an excess four hundred pounds on an order of six thousand pounds of fertilizer. That was practically nothing for a farm that size. Lawrence would have just stored the excess and used it the next year.

The presence of diesel fuel on the property was another red herring. It was common practice for farmers to have storage tanks of fuel, gasoline and/or diesel, on their property. Fuels for vehicles and equipment that were for farm use only were exempt from excise taxes. The fuel was dyed red so that law enforcement could prove if the fuel in a truck stopped on a public road had been sold without paying the excise taxes.

Having fertilizer and diesel fuel stored on a farm was business as usual and not a terrorist act. The fertilizer was necessary to grow the crop and the fuel was necessary in order to farm. Effectively, Lawrence had been arrested for trying to grow food.

He grabbed another letter.

Tom's heart was pounding in his chest. This communication from the head of the Damenstern family line put everything that had been happening into context. Someone, or rather some group, was attempting to take over the entire agriculture industry. It explained why water was cut off to hundreds of farms in one of the richest farming areas in the country, why dairy farms were being shutdown, and dozens of other actions that were taking place to kill independent farmers.

The farmers without water would be forced to sell their farms. Without water, the land was useless for farming. No one wanted to live in a desert like that so it would be worthless for real estate developers. The value of the land would drop to nothing and could be bought up for pennies on the current dollar value. The water tap could be turned on and instantly the land would be valuable again.

If someone had been informed about the new EPA regulations, they would be in a position to purchase existing dairy farms that had been found non-compliant and claim they were now covered by an EPA approved milk spill prevention plan. They would get land, dairy cows, and equipment at cut-rate prices.

There were still envelopes to read.

Tom decided that the threat to the family wasn't only on farming, but food production as well. Edward had been trying for three years to open his production facility. The Pfand would continue to pump money into the project, but most individuals didn't have the backing that the Pfand could provide.

His jam and jelly companies had been hit with a number of new regulations over the past four years. There were probably a dozen government agencies that could pass regulations that impacted him. OSHA, FDA, EPA, and the USDA were the federal agencies that most easily came to mind. The state had additional agencies that were involved with health codes, worker safety, and tax codes. Then there was local government involvement with building codes and fire safety codes. He had even been required to perform a traffic impact study to determine if the local roads could sustain any increased in truck traffic to and from his factory. Complying with those regulations had nearly destroyed his profit.

Usually his problems started with some person showing up unannounced at the front door with credentials identifying him as an inspector for some government agency. The person would walk through the plant for an hour or two and produce a report declaring him to be out of compliance with some regulation. He'd be told that he was being fined and had to correct the problem within some impractical time period or face future fines. In one case, it had been discovered that the regulation hadn't actually been passed yet.

In light of what was happening, he realized that Carl Plante would have a very tough time getting his pickle factory opened. His time-line of having his facility operational within a year's time was overly optimistic.

Tom was beginning to get a headache. He revised his hypothesis to make the plot global in nature.

There were still more envelopes for him to open. He grabbed one.

Tom muttered, "There's a reason all right."

He grabbed another envelope.

Tom shook his head in despair.

A failure of the corn crop would be a major economic catastrophe. Thousands of small farmers could lose their farms with a significant failure of such an important crop. He had no doubt that the release of the virus was intentional. The MDMV virus was spread by aphids. Of course, aphids were small insects that were easily transported and distributed. He couldn't imagine anyone in their right mind raising aphids, but they made a simple delivery mechanism.

The timing of the release didn't fit a large-scale outbreak. For it to have a significant effect on the harvest this year would require that it had been released last year. He figured that this was a test crop and would likely be burned before it had a chance to spread beyond the field.

Tom knew that are only three things that are necessary for life-- food, water, and air. Someone was attempting to gain control over the world's food supply. With control of food, one could rule the world. Anyone willing to go to that extreme would not tolerate any competition. If he was right, then the entire Pfand could be destroyed.

The more he thought about the letters he had received, the more concerned he became. Today's delivery were not the first letters suggesting that something big was happening. The letters from Europe and Central America gave evidence of the full scope of the problem.

Tom was willing to treat the bee die-off as a natural phenomenon despite the fact that the timing was suspicious. There were natural cycles in which the population of a species fluctuated wildly. There were a lot of causes for it. For now, he felt the scientists had to address the problem. Lisa was a very good scientist with global connections. He had faith in her abilities and trusted her to report anything suspicious.

He picked up the last letter. Like all of the others, there was a sealed envelop within the outer envelope.

This last letter was one too many. Outside of the bee problem, too many of the letters pointed directly at a concerted attempt to destroy independent small farmers. The only survivors would be the huge mega-farms owned by the largest agricultural companies. It appeared that the large agricultural companies were deeply involved in the events that were occurring. He hoped that he was wrong, but feared that he wasn't.

The agriculture industry had been undergoing significant change since the mid-sixties. The political environment had grown increasingly more hostile to small scale farmers. It was a multi-pronged attack. Energy fanatics, animal rights groups, and global warming supporters were placing a lot of the blame for the world's problems on farming.

Regulations were targeting things that could happen rather than correcting problems that had happened. There had been huge increases in the amount of paperwork required to produce a crop. Tom had come to feel a twinge of fear each time a legislator made the comment that all that compliance would require was just a little more diligence on the part of a farmer.

There were food safety 'activists' who wanted a complete traceable record of food from the farmer all of the way through consumer. As a manufacturer of jams and jellies, that meant he had to have access to records that would identify the source for the ingredients for each batch of jam or jelly and who distributed each jar of his product. It sounded like a nice idea until one realized that each time he dumped a fifty pound bag of sugar into a batch of jam that he had to record the source of that bag of sugar. The same was true for each box of fruit.

He already had quality control processes in place that tested and recorded each batch of jam or jelly. Every jar that was shipped out had a batch number and production date stamped on it. He also had records of each purchase of ingredients and from whom he purchased them. If there was a problem he had sufficient information to identify the likely source of the problem.

However, his records weren't good enough. The food safety 'activists' wanted the ability to contact individual consumers who purchased a jar of his jam or jelly in case there was a problem identified with one of his sources of raw ingredients. That was an entirely different level of record keeping and would cost a fortune.

The flip answer to cost concerns that was often given was that it could be all handled by computer. No one thought about how it would add record keeping steps into his food production process and require a significant upgrade to his IT systems. The cost would be significant and the consumer would ultimately pay for it. At least, the consumer would pay for it if the business was able to afford the upfront costs that compliance would place upon his company.

This kind of legislation would also wipe out little farmers markets since the person selling apples at a roadside stand would have to record the name and address of each customer who purchased an apple. Pick-your-own farms would have to record the names of all customers and what they had purchased. There was a kind of intrusiveness to this that raised his hackles.

Huge fines were often imposed on individuals who violated one of the myriad of regulations. Legislators would often say that the million dollar fines were targeted at the large producers since they wouldn't feel a small fine, although many of the largest wouldn't be impacted one bit by a million dollar fine. However, the laws didn't distinguish between the family farmer and a huge corporate farm. Since the laws didn't distinguish between the two groups, neither did the enforcers of those regulations.

Tom's family members fell into an unusual middle group. They intentionally kept from becoming megalithic overt near monopolies, by maintaining multiple independent businesses that couldn't be classified as small. His six jam and jelly companies, each of which was owned through a holding company, were, in combination, one of the largest producers of consumer jams and jellies. The fines would hurt, but it wouldn't kill his businesses.

The more insidious threat was that as the smaller farms and businesses went under, his companies would become the smaller businesses. The fines would be increased until they were large enough to put him out of business. The large agricultural companies would buy up all of the small places and, hence, become even larger. It was a cycle that could continue unchecked until all that remained would be a few monopolies.

FDA regulations were nowhere near as intrusive as EPA regulations. The EPA wanted to regulate almost every aspect of farming. Even stock tanks were about to come under close scrutiny. A small catch pond intended to allow a farmer to use runoff water for livestock was suddenly being treated as 'wetlands' and hence under EPA regulation. Water quality, fish populations, and wildlife visitation records would have to be established. The EPA wasn't the only government agency interested in stock tanks. So were water management boards. Regulations could pop up from anywhere and everywhere.

Even simple things like disposal of trash could create problems for farmers. Without trash collection services in rural areas, many households used to burn their trash in open barrels. That was now illegal in a lot of areas. So were individual landfills. There wasn't a cost efficient option other than to haul trash, often hundreds of miles, to approved landfills.

A suburban homeowner could water his or her front yard without much concern except when water restrictions were in place. However, once the property became labeled a farm, watering the yard could be labeled irrigation and the farmer had to deal with regulations dealing with water runoff issues. A suburban homeowner could purchase manure and spread it in their garden. A farmer couldn't use the manure from his livestock for the same purpose without assuring compliance with a dozen regulations.

Tom wasn't against regulating real problems. He admitted that burning trash in open barrels was a real problem, particularly with the newer materials used in consumer goods. Paper and old wood didn't have the heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and other toxins that were present in modern waste. His concern was the imposition of regulations for which there were no cost effective means of compliance.

Farmers were being nickled and dimed to death. It might only cost a hundred dollars to comply with some regulation, but when you were faced with hundreds of regulations the costs became a real burden.

Tom grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper.

Tom sat back and read over the letter he had written. It had a number of hot button phrases in it that demanded immediate action from the other families. The Pfand X had emerged out of a catastrophe and, at heart, was a response to an existing threat. Throughout its history, members of the Pfand had remained paranoid in the sense that they were always looking for threats to their existence.

If history had taught the Pfand anything, it had taught them that governments were not to be trusted or relied upon to represent their best interests. Farms were destroyed when they became the site of a battle. Manufacturing facilities were viewed as legitimate military targets or national assets that could be confiscated. Bombs dropped from air killed indiscriminately. Governments, almost without warning, could nationalize businesses of all kinds. Regimes routinely killed or jailed the intelligentsia who might object to heavy handed policies.

Government stability was an illusion. Kings came and went. Kings were replaced by parliaments. Parliaments were replaced by popular democracies. Popular democracies were replaced by dictatorships. Each change could be for the better or worse, but it was always the small guy at the bottom who paid the highest price for each change.

The current situation was different from any that the Pfand had faced in the past. Tom knew that, but he wasn't sure in what way it was different. Even worse, he didn't have the slightest clue concerning how the Pfand could respond to the threat.

He placed the letter in an envelope, and then sealed it with two colors of wax impressed with the Bauer family seal. Sealing an envelope with two colors of wax was an archaic means for the receiver of the message to know that no one had tampered with it. The two colors of wax would leave a trace on the envelope that could be compared with the wax seal that had been removed. If an old seal was removed and a new seal were applied, the old trace would still be visible. He then placed the envelope inside a second, larger, envelope.

After making the call to the courier to come get his letter for delivery to the Watchman, he left the safe room to talk to his wife. She, of anyone he knew, would have an idea how to progress in terms of stating clearly the threat that the Pfand was facing. It was one thing to know that a threat existed, but it was another to convince others.

Tom sat down in the living room facing Silvia. She looked up from her knitting and frowned when she saw the expression on his face. He looked worried.

"What's the matter?"

"It is getting tougher to maintain our secrecy. At one time, we could send a coded message and no one would be able to break the code and read the message. Now they've got computers that can try billions of codes in the same time that it took to write and encode the message. We're left using old approaches that are novel only because no one uses them any more," Tom said.

He sighed.

"Tell me all about it, dear," Silvia said.

Tom told her about the letters he had read. As expected, she was angered when learning about the four women who had been killed. The women were not Damenstern, but she empathized with them. She understood the dangers they faced whenever they met with a client. She had faced those same dangers at one time in her life.

The Damenstern family members who went into the prostitution business knew they were putting their lives on the line for the Pfand. While members of the Wache were often involved in dangerous law enforcement, security, or intelligence activities, the ones in danger usually carried a weapon. That was not the case for Damensterns. They went into danger unarmed except for their wits.

While other segments of society frowned upon individuals involved in prostitution, everyone who had been in the Pfand for any amount of time respected the Damensterns. In fact, many of them respected the Damensterns more than other family lines. After all, a Damenstern had hung on the arm of a French Officer, listening while Napoleon discussed his strategy for the Russian invasion. A Damenstern, the male lover of an English officer, had traveled to India during the India campaign to scout out the opportunities present in that far away land for members of the Pfand. Damensterns, male and female, had infiltrated the highest levels of the Nazi party.

Gruns were also important sources of information. The general staff of the Allies during World War II had stayed in a hotel run by a Grun. Little was discussed among the officers that didn't make its way back to the Pfand. Conversations over dinner in restaurants owned by Gruns were recorded.

Because of Damensterns and Gruns, the Pfand knew just about everything that was going to happen long before it happened. There were too many examples of where the entire Pfand owed its continued existence to the Damensterns. In the words of Helga Damenstern, they were all whore, part diplomat, and part spy. They moved with equal ease among the highest members of society and the dregs. Mata Hari was a rank amateur compared to the least capable of Helga's descendants.

Tom asked, "How can I convince others of the danger to the Pfand?"

Silvia was quiet while considering everything that Tom had told her. On the surface, it looked like a problem that only affected the Bauer families. Her instincts were screaming that it was a threat to them all. She trusted her instincts.

"Let's start with something that we do know for a fact. There are fast food companies that already do everything from raising food, processing it, transporting it in trucks they own, and selling it in buildings that their own construction company has built. Fast food companies are not the only ones in the food industry that have that same level of infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them already have their own security companies. I know for a fact that a few of them have prostitutes on their payrolls. I would say that touches upon the interests all of the families."

"You've got a good point," Tom said.

"Now, what happens when a handful of companies effectively put all of the smaller companies out of business?"

"Disaster for anyone who owns a small company."

"Exactly. There won't be a single family of the Pfand X that won't be put out of business. We could very well be the last generation of the Pfand that own their own businesses."

Tom said, "I can sell that to the other families."

"It could be worse than that," Silvia said.

"In what way?"

"At some point in the future, we'll have a hundred or so companies that completely control the world. They'll have taken over the restaurant business. They'll have taken over the trucking industry. They'll have taken over manufacturing. They'll have built 'theme' parks and hotels. They'll have taken over the entertainment industry. They'll have taken over security. Where do they go from there?"

"I have no idea," Tom said.

"They will effectively have made slaves of every human on the planet. If you want to work, you have to work for them. The only game left to the people in charge of those companies is a trade war in which the hundred or so companies fight for ultimate control," Silvia said.

"You can't mean that," Tom said.

Deep down inside, Tom knew that she was right. If someone controlled food, then everyone was a slave. It wasn't a matter of choice, people had to eat. To eat, they had to earn money. To earn money, they had to work for the groups who controlled everything. The kind of person who could come up with the kind of plan that allowed them to control a major slice of everything wouldn't settle for anything less than total world domination.

"I do."

Edited By TeNderLoin