The post From a Farmer and His Son, a Practical and Joyful Guide to Beekeeping appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When farmer Kamal Bell first established a beekeeping operation at Sankofa Farms in North Carolina, his son Akeem was four years old and scared of bees. But with his father’s coaching—and the help of a protective beekeeping suit—Akeem now loves tending the hives and is central to the farm’s beekeeping effort.
“I enjoyed it so much I wanted to keep doing it every day,” the now 8-year-old remembers.
“We need to be able to do things on our own, where we won’t have to be as reliant on this larger system that can change at any moment with the swipe of a big black marker.”
On a cloudy day in late February, under a tall loblolly pine tree at one end of the farm, Akeem uses a metal tool to scrape old beeswax off a beehive frame. With new bees set to arrive by early April, Akeem is helping clean and prepare the space. Kamal picks up a pile of the excess wax that Akeem has loosened and rolls it between his palms. “We want to take this and save it so we can make candles one day,” he tells his son.
In February, Kamal—with Akeem’s help—published a kids’ book, Akeem Keeps Bees! A Close-Up Look at the Honey Makers and Pollinators of Sankofa Farms. Illustrated graphic-novel style by Darnell Johnson, the book takes young readers through a beekeeping season at Sankofa. It provides detailed information about the bee life cycle, beekeeping tools and equipment, and how bees make honey, with instructions on how to establish a hive, feed your bees, handle harmful Varroa mites, and harvest honey. Kamal hopes the book can serve as a practical guide for young people who might want to get into beekeeping.
Akeem Bell scrapes the remains of old beeswax from a honeybee frame at Sankofa Farms in North Carolina. He and his father, Kamal Bell, recently published a children’s book about beekeeping. (Photo credit: Christina Cooke)
A North Carolina native, Kamal did not grow up farming, though he has always felt at peace in nature. After graduating from NC Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T), a land-grant, historically Black institution, with a master’s degree in agricultural education in 2014, he began teaching earth and environmental science at a Title 1 middle school in Durham. In 2016, he purchased 12 acres in nearby rural Cedar Grove to start a regenerative vegetable farm, which he named “Sankofa,” after the West African word for reclaiming and carrying forward what has been lost.
Education and community aid have always been at the core of Sankofa’s mission. In addition to raising vegetables—including kale, collards, salad mixes, cilantro, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and watermelon—to feed the food insecure in the surrounding area, Bell founded the STEM-based Sankofa Agricultural Academy, which engages Black youth in projects and learning on the farm. His new book ties into that same goal of helping kids learn agricultural skills, connect with nature, and experience, in his words, a “form of liberation.”
Civil Eats caught up with Kamal and Akeem on the farm recently and spoke with them about the evolution of Sankofa’s beekeeping program, their new book, the farm’s educational mission, and Kamal’s vision for the food system.
Kamal and his wife, Amber Bell, along with their son, Akeem, inspect the hives at Sankofa Farms in 2021 to ensure the colony is healthy. This involves checking for all stages of brood, making sure there is deposited nectar and pollen, and looking for evidence of a laying queen. (Photo credit: Mark Stebnicki, NC Farm Bureau)
How did you come to keep bees?
Kamal: One of the kids in the [agricultural academy] program, Kamron, mentioned, “Mr. Bell, I want to get bees.” He was an inquisitive child, and I was just like, it’s my duty to cater to that interest in this child. The part that sold me on it was when he said, ‘It would help keep me more involved in the farm.’
The only experience I had with bees was working with a farmer [during undergraduate school], and it didn’t go well—and then the movie Candyman—so I was terrified, like everybody else. But there’s a deep connection between African history and African Americans and beekeeping. Booker T. Washington actually pioneered a beekeeping program at Tuskegee [University].
And Charles Henry Turner, a Black man from Ohio who ended up being a geology teacher, proposed research on how bees can see in patterns. Once you start to uncover that history, you see there is an extensive history between African Americans and bees.
“[My dad is] giving people healthy food so they can be healthy and have a better life. And if a kid wanted to start a farm, they could ask our dad how to start one.”
I ended up going to Durham County Beekeepers Association. I met Matthew Yearout, and he brought us out to a campus right around corner. We all worked with the bees. And then a couple of weeks later, I caught my first swarm and brought the bees out here. And then that was a segue for Sankofa keeping bees. That happened in 2018.
Akeem, how did you start keeping bees? Do you remember your first time putting on the beekeeping suit and going into the hive?
Akeem: When I was little, when I saw a bee, I used to get really scared. But when I got into the suit, it felt really good to actually be able to work with the bees. [When I’m wearing it,] I’m not afraid. When I first started [caring for the hives], it was really fun. I was passionate about it.
To go into the hive, you have to grab your smoker, and then you use the hive tool to take the top off. Then you can take the frame out and see if you can see the queen or if you can see larvae. You see a lot of bees on the frame, walking around and exploring both sides.
What is the most fun part of keeping bees for you?
Akeem: Going into the hive. I like to see them making honey.
What is the hardest part?
Akeem: When the bees land on top of me, on the face part. I just stay still until they move off. Or my dad just takes it off.
How would you describe the state of honeybees in North Carolina?
Kamal: Bumble bees and carpenter bees are native to North America, but I think it’s important to identify that honeybees are not. They need a tropical environment. You will only find them in the wild if they were essentially colonized at some point down the line and then made it out into the woods [and adapted].
The winters are very harsh on them, and Varroa mites are as well, so they’re very dependent on the beekeeper in this part of North America. [That said,] we’ve had a lot of success with our swarms, because if you catch a swarm, they typically have the genetics to survive in this area.
Kamal, you’re primarily a farmer. What motivated you to write a kids’ book?
Illustration by Darnell Johnson, courtesy of Storey Publishing
Kamal: Just the idea of trying to introduce agriculture to kids at a younger age. [Akeem] and his brothers will be fine, because they are out here, and they get it by default. But I was thinking about how beneficial the experience can be when you are younger, and how you’re able to reimagine what society [could be like].
I don’t think there are many books that are tailored to teaching kids about farming. This book, you can use it as a guide—it has a glossary in the back—and you can use it to become a beekeeper. It caters to different learning styles too, because if you’re not a heavy reader, the illustrations can guide you through. I wanted it to be an inspiration for children.
How would you describe the mission of Sankofa in terms of how you work, what projects you take on, and who you feed?
Kamal: I would describe Sankofa as a place of redemption—where we have an opportunity to fix things that have gone bad. That’s from the students, to ourselves, to the organizations we work with.
I like working with organizations that are trying to solve something wrong socially. We work with Table NC. About 90 percent of our food goes there. They give access to kids who are food insecure in the area. They send them produce bags every week—right now, I think they distribute to around 1,000 kids. For us, it’s just about working to improve things that we think should be a right for people in society.
It seems like educating young people is at the core of what you do. Can you talk about how the Sankofa Educational Academy started and evolved?
Kamal: It started with wanting to get Black boys a stronger foundation using agriculture as the pathway. And what I started to see is that they became better students. They became overall better citizens. There was a feeling of ownership and belonging here at the farm. From 2016 to 2018, we had 10 kids. From 2018 on, we kept the four most consistent ones on.
When COVID hit, that’s when I started to see the work in the foundation become undone. I think COVID produced a hyper individual—kids who were only concerned about themselves because they were in isolation for so long. I started to see kids who had been really committed only coming to the farm when it was convenient for them.
They started to drift off and become the thing that we were trying to prevent them from becoming the whole time. From COVID, I decided to focus on the business part of the farm [and pause the academy]. Working with the kids, being able to teach them, is better when we’re not expanding the farm like we have been.
When we start the academy again [later this spring], we’ll have more mentors to help keep them on track. They need around-the-clock support. I was going around picking them up in the van, buying food for them, essentially paying out of pocket, using farm funds to support them. There needs to be more support when we launch. And the kids, I think, need to be younger. I think we start in elementary school this next time.
Illustration by Darnell Johnson, courtesy of Storey Publishing
What did you see the academy impart to its participants when it was up and running?
Kamal: They understood what they needed to contribute to society. They found a place. They had an identity, because we went over African history. We had conversations as they were coming into manhood. I think it would have been great if they were still here at their age now, because of all the opportunity that’s opening up in the food space. They would be primed to be able to own their own farms.
And I think philosophically, it was a meditative break for them to get away from the things that they were seeing. Some of those kids had seen people get killed; some of them had been involved in high-level violence. It gave them a place just to be. It gave them a sense of divinity and redemption, that they weren’t a product of a trauma that they experienced in their lives. From a higher level, I think it gave them a sense of balance.
Why do you think it’s so important to provide young people of color with farm education? How does it tie in with larger issues facing Black farmers and with your goals of promoting Black liberation and freedom?
“It’s the opportune time for farmers to unite from all backgrounds, to push for a better agricultural industry.”
Kamal: Because if it doesn’t happen here, where else are they going to go to find those things? There are not many spaces where that demographic can go for liberation-centered thinking. College is not necessarily the first thing on their docket. The school system isn’t that. Sports—.001 percent of people who play make it. For Black males who are not athletes or entertainers, there’s nowhere for them to go. There is only hyper-individualism for them, because society has told them that we don’t want you, besides jails and prisons.
We have a history of generational land loss [in my family]. My great-great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side owned 50 acres of land. But our family didn’t keep their land; I had to start all the way over. I wanted to be able to put [the young men] in a position to own something, to have something that they could call their own, and that way they could have some form of liberation.
The new administration is shrinking or eliminating efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and mitigate climate change. What effect do you think that might have on farms like yours, and do you have a sense of what approach you will take moving forward?
Kamal: When I saw that these things are starting to happen, I was just like—that’s why we built what we built. I think about the things that the USDA agent tried to get me to do so we would lose our farm. One thing they tried to say was, “Oh, you want to get an FHA [Federal Housing Administration] loan so you can tie in your house and your farm together.” But we bought our house separate from the farm on purpose to make it more resilient, because if I lose my house [and they’re tied together], they take everything.
I think the question that needs to arise is—how can we reduce the adjacentness of our farms to outside funding? There’s something wrong with it if we’re so heavily impacted by a [federal] funding freeze. We have to look at more resilient models so that when administration changes, when the climate changes, when everything changes, our models can adapt.
When are farmers going to start to come together across the board? The whole idea of climate change—if you talk to farmers on either side, they will acknowledge that weather patterns have changed since they’ve been farming, whether it’s by human output or by it naturally happening every so many years. We need to find more commonality so we can have discussions. There need to be more platforms where we can meet in the middle so we can advocate for a change to the farming system. Only 10 percent of farmers make over a million dollars in their operations, and everybody else is still trying to push forward.
In addition to producing honey, Sankofa, a 12-acre regenerative farm, grows produce to feed the food insecure in surrounding areas, both rural and urban. (Photo credit: Christina Cooke)
How do we need to think differently about food systems?
Kamal: We need to be able to do things on our own, because we can’t depend on the American system to always serve our needs.
Just look around now. We need more farmers. We need to be looking at how we can build more local food systems, with distribution, that are more vertically integrated. We have to be raising chickens around here. We need more seed-starting programs. We need more people with small gardens in their front yards. There’s no reason why we have should have grass lawns when we can turn them into small areas to produce food. We’ve got to reimagine this. Something needs to change.
At the end of the day, I know that we can build a home here. We can carve out a piece of this to fully sustain ourselves where we won’t have to be as reliant on this larger system that can change at any moment with the swipe of a big black marker. Why would we want to live like that? I’m 99.9 percent sure that I wasn’t born to be under the will of a black Sharpie. That’s what I want people to take from Sankofa, that you really can build something better—you can build an alternative.
Akeem, what difference do you see your dad making through the farm?
Akeem: He’s the only person that works out here, and he’s doing a lot of work to help our family. He does so much for us, so we can have a home and food and all those things that we need.
He’s giving people healthy food so they can be healthy and have a better life. And if a kid wanted to start a farm, they could ask our dad how to start one.
Kamal, what would you like people to know about bees that may not be common knowledge?
Kamal: We can learn a lot about their social organization and how there’s no individual bee in the collective. They’re all working together consistently. You can address gender roles, because the female bees are higher in the social hierarchy. They commit to their roles, and then as they get older, these worker bees change their roles. They start out taking care of baby bees, [and go] to making decisions, to foraging. They protect.
You look at all that the bee can teach, and then just about how their history is reminiscent of Black people. They were taken from Africa [as well as Asia and Europe], and they were shipped all across the world. In each environment, they take on these different characteristics, and they’re still a collective. If we look at just how America operates—it was built off our forced labor. Once there’s some healing done with us, [and] I think bees can offer a great lesson, we can start to heal and work on other issues in this nation.
We’re in a very interesting time of humanity where it’s going to call for collective work amongst all people. And I think it really could start with farmers. Farmers have a very important role in the future of this country. And it’s the opportune time for farmers to unite from all backgrounds, to push for a better agricultural industry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post From a Farmer and His Son, a Practical and Joyful Guide to Beekeeping appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Black Earth: A Family’s Journey from Enslavement to Reclamation appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the months before Patrick Brown was born in November 1982, his father, Arthur, lay down on a road near the family’s farm to prevent a caravan of yellow dump trucks from depositing toxic soil in his community. The governor of North Carolina had authorized the dumping of the soil, contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which had been linked to cancer, in the rural county.
A preacher and a farmer, the elder Brown knew the chemicals would likely leach into the sandy loam and clay soil of Warren County, located in North Carolina’s northeastern Piedmont region, up near the Virginia border. He knew they could contaminate the water and make residents sick—and like hundreds of his fellow protesters, he believed that his community was being targeted because it was one of the poorest in the state, populated mostly by people of color.
“That’s my dad right there,” says Patrick Brown, 41, pointing on his phone to a black-and-white photo of his father being arrested. Around 55 at the time, Arthur wears a suit, tie, and round spectacles, and he is being carried away by three helmeted police officers, one holding him under each arm, another under his legs. Looking straight ahead, he appears dignified, calm, and self-assured.
Ultimately, the protest was not successful. The state dumped 7,097 truckloads—40,000 tons—of toxic soil in a Warren County landfill. Though the community was forced to live alongside hazardous waste, their actions gained the attention of prominent civil rights and environmental leaders—and ignited the national environmental justice movement.
It raised awareness that polluting industries and toxic waste facilities are often sited in communities of color and established how ordinary citizens can organize to fight back. Many national and international climate-justice actions today, in fact, grew directly out of the model established in Warren County.
The protest also shaped the legacy inherited by the child born a few months later. “That’s how I got my name, PCB—Patrick Chandler Brown,” Patrick says. “I was named after what happened.”
Patrick’s connection to his land in Warren County—and his commitment to building sovereignty for his family and community—stretches back two generations past his father, to his great-grandfather Byron, who was enslaved nearby until the end of the Civil War. Patrick currently operates Brown Family Farms on the land that Byron worked as a sharecropper once he was freed.
In the rural Hecks Grove community—less than a mile from where Robert E. Lee’s daughter Annie Carter Lee was buried after dying at 23 of typhoid fever—the land has a long and complicated history. Patrick Brown, who was named North Carolina’s Small Farmer of the Year by North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University this year, grows almost 200 acres of industrial hemp for both oil and fiber, and 11 acres and several greenhouses of vegetables—beets, kale, radishes, peppers, okra, and bok choy. He also cultivates 75 acres of wheat, 83 acres of soybeans, 65 acres of corn, and 45 acres of hardwoods and pine trees.
On a cloudy morning in April, Brown stands outside the incubation house that holds trays of vegetable starts, each marked with a popsicle-stick label, mapping out the work for the day. The clouds hang dark gray in the sky, and tender new leaves emerge from the towering willow oak behind the brick ranch farmhouse at the center of the farm’s production area.
At 6 feet, 1 inch, he has large round eyes and a dark beard peppered with gray. He’s serious, measured, and focused, but also kind. Today he wears a dark gray button-up work shirt with two patches on it—one says “Brown Family Farms & Produce, Est. 1865,” the other “Patrick / Owner”—tucked neatly into a pair of black cargo pants. The white soles of his well-worn leather work boots are covered in dirt.
Isaiah White harvests kale at his family’s fifth-generation farm in Warren County, where the U.S. environmental justice movement was born in 1982 out of protests over the siting of a hazardous-waste landfill. (Photo credit: Cornell Watson)
“Ideally, we’d get this sweet corn in the ground today,” he says, indicating a bag of organic seed and a nearby half-acre plot of loose brown soil. In about a month, the second or third week of May, he will plant almost 200 acres of hemp, the cornerstone of his operation.
In this work with the land, Brown is carrying out acts of reclamation, finding ways to push back against the systems designed to oppress people of color. In a county that was intentionally poisoned—and a world suffering from a changing climate—he is reviving the soil under his feet by transitioning away from pesticide-dependent row crops like tobacco to industrial hemp, which is known to sequester carbon and remediate soil, and using earth-friendly organic and regenerative methods.
And in a region where many residents suffer from diet-related illnesses and do not have easy access to grocery stores selling fresh foods, Patrick offers vegetable boxes through a community supported agriculture (CSA) program, as well as by producing hemp-derived CBD products meant to reduce chronic pain by holistic, non-pharmaceutical methods.
“He is incredibly business-oriented and entrepreneurial, but he is grounded, he’s literally grounded in the earth and the values of Black family life,” says Jereann King Johnson, a Warrenton organizer and cultural historian who has long known the Brown family and hosted Patrick on a public panel discussion about Black land ownership and land loss a couple of years ago. “The values that have been instilled in him from his family—of being a good steward of the land, caring for the community, being a good businessperson—that whole legacy of the Brown family—when you see him and talk to him, he is enshrined in those values.”
In addition to admiring his approach to farming, Johnson respects the way he thinks beyond his own operation and advocates for policies that benefit others, especially young farmers and farmers of color—those the system excludes. “He is a guiding light for young farmers,” she continues. “It’s not just the practice of farming that he is engaged in, but also exploring ways to best pursue resources through America’s bigger farming system.”
Brown’s connection to his land in Warren County—and his commitment to building sovereignty for his family and community—stretches back two generations past his father, to his great-grandfather Byron, who was enslaved nearby until the end of the Civil War.
On top of farming, Brown works full time for the social justice nonprofit Nature for Justice, which helps communities at the front lines of the climate crisis work toward solutions. As director of farmer inclusion, his job is to distribute $1.7 million over five years to farmers of color in North Carolina in order to help them implement regenerative farming methods that sequester carbon and restore soil and ecosystem health. And he serves as chair of the board of the Eva Clayton Rural Food Institute, founded in January 2023 to help deliver healthy food to communities in rural North Carolina.
In 2021, he carried out the ultimate act of reclamation, purchasing the plantation house and surrounding 2.5 acres where his great-grandfather Byron had been enslaved. “Now, I own it,” he says, holding in his palm the weighty set of skeleton keys that unlock the doors of Oakley Grove house and the outbuildings surrounding it.
Over the next few years, he has plans to create a family museum, event venue, and education center for young farmers and farmers of color—ways to honor his family, make extra income, and serve farmers like him. While his ancestors were forced to inhabit this place, he is choosing to, and transforming it into a space that serves his needs.
Farming Through Four Generations
In the early 19th century, Oakley Grove plantation was owned by a medical doctor named Lafayette Browne and his wife, Mary Ann Falcon Browne. At its peak, it was a sprawling 7,000-acre operation that raised tobacco, cotton, and wheat with the labor of more than 175 enslaved people. It was such an agricultural player that the state of North Carolina ran railroad tracks to the property to export its goods up north.
Driving his white farm truck from the plantation house through the former Oakley Grove territory last year, Brown emphasizes its size. From the main house, we drive at 45 mph for 10 minutes, and we’re still on former plantation land. “All of this, on the left side of the road, is all plantation, all the way down here,” he says as we descend a hill. “It was huge. It was huge.” He shudders to imagine the amount of backbreaking work it would have taken to manage all that land without the help of modern-day farm equipment.
After Lafayette died in his early 40s in 1841, his son Jacob managed the plantation alongside his mother—and at one point inherited a young woman of color named Lucinda Fain, who is said to have had very light skin. Exploiting the unequal power dynamic, as was common on Southern plantations, Jacob arranged for Fain to work as a cook in the big house and had multiple children by her. Byron, the first of nine, was born in 1850. Because his skin was fair, he worked in the house, where his grandmother Mary Browne groomed him to become an overseer.
Jacob went on to have many more children by a white woman. While his white descendants spell “Browne” with an “e” on the end—and inherited all of his land and wealth—his descendants of color, as was often the case, were forced to drop the last vowel, and inherited nothing. During our visit, Patrick takes me to a Browne family graveyard tucked back in the woods, which holds the white descendants of Lafayette, Mary Ann, and Jacob. “Watch out for copperheads,” he says, as we make our way through the tall grasses to the granite headstones. “This is where I found out I had a lot of cousins.”
The gravesite of Patrick Brown’s parents, Celeste Brown and Arthur Brown, overlooking the family farm. (Photo credit: Cornell Watson)
In 1865, when he was 14, Byron was walking through the woods when he ran across a Confederate soldier, who told him that the Civil War had ended and he could no longer be forced to work for free. He returned to the plantation house to share the news with his mother and sister Flora, then fled on foot to the southeast side of Warren County, to the township of Shocco. He found work there as a sharecropper, on a farm down present-day Lickskillet Road.
When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. By the time Byron passed away in 1931, he had accumulated 2,000 acres, on which he grew timber and raised livestock. “My great-great-grandfather looked Caucasian, so he carried himself as if he was,” Patrick says.
When Byron died, he willed 200 acres of land and increments of cash to each of his children, but most of them had migrated north because they “wanted to get as far away from Warren County as they could,” Patrick Brown says. His grandfather, Grover, was the only one who elected to stay and farm—and as a result (to the dismay of his siblings), he inherited a sum of more than $100,000.
Grover established a peach orchard in 1935, and cultivated grain and raised livestock until the late 1970s. On the side, he ran a general store that contained a butcher shop—and even had part ownership of a bodega in Brooklyn, New York.
“My grandfather was a stubborn old man,” Brown says, pointing out a black-and-white photograph of Grover, sitting next to Arthur on a picnic table bench, wearing a suit and tie with his mouth turned down into a sour expression. “He was very business oriented. He never smiled. When he was in the field, he had suits on. He was a people’s person with respect and honor and dignity, but small talk and stuff like that? That wasn’t him.”
Brown’s father, Arthur, was born in 1927. Though two of his fingers were webbed on each hand, he never let that get in the way—and, in fact, played catcher for semi-pro baseball teams. “He never used it as an excuse,” he says.
As a preacher, Arthur—known as “Reverend Doctor A.A. Brown,” or simply “A.A.”—served more than six congregations over 60 years. “Everybody knew him—he was a patriarch in this community,” he says. “He preached a lot of funerals, a lot of weddings; he would preach on Sundays and go to convalescent homes in the evenings. Monday through Friday, it was all farming; Saturday and Sunday was taking care of members of his church, providing some type of support to the community. He just did a lot.”
Larry Hedgepeth, a 70-year-old Black farmer with a white mustache and two gold teeth, rented and farmed Arthur’s land for 15 years after Arthur retired. He still grows soybeans in neighboring Vance and Franklin counties. He describes the reverend as a quiet, gentle man who always looked out for others. “He’d plant watermelons and take them to a person’s house, and if they weren’t home, he’d leave them on the porch. Same thing with butter beans, string beans, and tomatoes,” he says. “He was a community man.”
He was also an activist. In addition to asserting the right of his community to maintain a clean environment by protesting the toxic waste landfill, he was involved with voter registration projects alongside Eva McPherson Clayton, a friend of the Brown family and the first African American woman elected to Congress from North Carolina, serving five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and holding a post on the Agriculture Committee.
“He was a standout person,” says Clayton, 89, over the phone while tending tomatoes in her backyard garden. “He was not only an advocate for justice, but he was an example of what you do trying to be responsible to have justice. He exemplified good citizenship, he exemplified good business, and he carried on his father’s tradition in farming.”
On the farm, Arthur raised some livestock and vegetables but mostly grew row crops like tobacco. Patrick’s mother, Celeste, was an educator. She served as a high school principal for 11 years and then worked two decades in the schools’ central office.
In 1998, after 52 states and territories signed a settlement agreement with the four largest tobacco companies in the U.S. to resolve lawsuits associated with the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses, Arthur accepted a buyout, distributed by the Golden LEAF Foundation, to help him transition away from the crop. He used the money to pay off the farm loans he had with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A year later, however, he began having strokes—two while atop the riding mower out on the farm—and had to stop working. He began leasing his land to Hedgepeth, who grew tobacco, soybeans, and wheat.
In August 2020, Celeste went to the hospital for a heart valve replacement and died unexpectedly the next day from complications. Arthur passed away in February 2023 at the age of 95. Their joint tombstone, featuring a dove, a cross, and an oval portrait of them together, sits in the cemetery of the brick Union Grove Baptist Church, overlooking the family farm—and, on many days, their son out working the field, following in the footsteps of the three generations before him.
“I see it,” Clayton says. “He is aware that he has the honor, as well as the responsibility, of carrying on the tradition of his parents and his family.”
The PCB Protests—and the Birth of a Movement
Oily in texture and without smell or taste, PCBs are synthetic compounds used in manufacturing transformers and other electrical equipment. And they’re nasty: They have been found to cause cancer, liver damage, skin lesions, and changes in behavior. In fact, the Toxic Substances Control Act banned them in 1979 from further production in the United States.
In the summer of 1978, however, a trucking firm hired by the Raleigh-based Ward Transformer Company took a shortcut in disposing of them. Tasked with recycling 31,000 gallons of PCB-contaminated oil, they instead dripped it—under the cover of darkness—along the roadsides in 14 North Carolina counties, including Warren.
Soon after, under the leadership of Governor Jim Hunt, the state government released its plan to dispose of the contaminated soil scraped up from the roadsides: It would establish a toxic-waste landfill in Warren County. At the time, the population of Warren County was 64 percent Black, the highest percentage of any county in North Carolina. The community most immediately surrounding the landfill site, Shocco Township, was 75 percent Black.
Over vehement community protest, the state moved forward with the plan. As the dump trucks advanced toward the new hazardous-waste landfill with contaminated soil, protestors—including Arthur—lay face up on the pavement of Sulphur Springs and Limer Town roads to block them.
During six weeks of protests, law enforcement officers arrested 523 people.
“I’m very proud of all that he did,” Brown says. “He didn’t have to do that. We’re on this side [of the county], where the dumping wouldn’t really have too much of an effect, but it was an effect for the members of the community that he knew.”
“The protestors of Warren County put the term ‘environmental racism’ on the map,” wrote Dr. Robert Bullard, recognized as the father of the environmental justice movement, in his seminal work Dumping in Dixie, published in 1990. In the early 2000s, the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency collaborated to have the landfill site detoxified, for just over $17 million.
Brown sees the government’s dumping of toxic waste in Warren County as connected to the county’s role as a center for Black life. In 1969, Durham attorney and civil rights leader Floyd McKissick developed a plan to transform an old Warren County plantation into a utopian metropolis called Soul City, dedicated to economic equality and empowering Black people.
A historical marker in Warren County, North Carolina, commemorates the start of the environmental justice movement. (Photo credit: Cornell Watson)
On the empty stretch of red clay an hour north of Raleigh—11 miles from the Brown family farm and 8 miles away from what would become the PCB landfill—McKissick planned to build a whole new city: houses, businesses, a school, a health center, tennis courts, etc. He envisioned that by the year 2000, the city would hold a population of 50,000 people and offer 24,000 jobs.
The project started out with a lot of promise. In 1972, President Richard Nixon granted it a $14 million loan guarantee to prepare the land for development. But once North Carolina elected conservative Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate the same year, things took a turn. A series of articles in the Raleigh News & Observer falsely accused McKissick of corruption and fraud, and the feds withdrew support from the project in 1979. Now, aside from a three-story concrete monolith proclaiming “Soul City” in modern sans serif script at the intended entrance to the community, the place is nearly a ghost town.
In 2021, Brown carried out the ultimate act of reclamation, purchasing the plantation house and surrounding 2.5 acres where his great-grandfather Byron had been enslaved.
“Jesse Helms got elected and stopped the funding from coming in, because he found out that it was mostly for a community for Blacks,” Patrick says. “It was almost like, ‘I’ve got something for y’all—I’m going to dump this toxic waste on you.’ We were already on the map. There’s 100 counties in the state of North Carolina, but you chose our county to continue to pick on.”
Growing up in Warren County—a place that has endured slavery, a utopian dream denied, and the dumping of toxic waste—shaped who Patrick has become. “My environment doesn’t define me,” he says. “It makes me more resilient, and proud.”
Tracy McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Black farmers and landowners in the South, says that as the homeplace of Soul City, Warrenton and Warren County feel special. And, she says, “I see that Patrick, in his own way, is moving the spirit of Soul City forward.”
Early Days in the Tobacco Fields
Growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, Brown helped out on the farm, mostly with the tobacco crop, after school and over summers. When he was nine, he started trucking the tobacco, or driving the loaded tractor from the fields where the hands were harvesting the leaves up to the barns where they were flue cured. “To fill up two barns, it would take us about nine hours,” he says.
When he was slightly older, he would also help the fieldhands top the tobacco, or break the flowers off to encourage the plant to grow wide rather than tall. “You’d get this tobacco wax all over your hands,” he says.
On Saturday mornings, he would join his father at the tobacco auction in Henderson. The two would load a trailer and the bed of their red Chevy with giant sacks of cured tobacco leaves wrapped in burlap. Because the truck and trailer were so full, their German shepherd Nicki would scramble atop the truck’s cab and ride on the roof all the way to the tobacco house.
“Everyone knew that was my dad, because they’d see his truck and his dog,” he says.
They’d drive into the warehouse, where farmers would have their tobacco on display, and unload and unbundle the tobacco, laying it out in piles on open burlap sacks.
The white owner of the tobacco house exuded money and power, Brown remembers. He’d wear brimmed hats, khaki pants, and wide suspenders, and he always had a cigar in his mouth. Patrick enjoyed the scene. At the same time, he saw his father lose out, over and over: The house would buy his tobacco wholesale at a low price, and then Arthur would look on as the auctioneers, with their rhythmic incantations, would drive up the price they were paid by companies like Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds.
The money they were able to take home was just enough. Nevertheless, he says, “Tobacco is what fed and clothed us.”
Patrick Brown runs Brown Family Farms in Warren County, North Carolina, on land that his great-grandfather worked. He grows organic vegetables and industrial hemp, as well as wheat, soybeans, and corn. (Photo credit: Cornell Watson)
Periodically through his childhood, Arthur would drive Patrick north across the rural county toward the town of Littleton and park the truck in the driveway outside the locked metal gate of the Oakley Grove plantation where his great-grandfather had been born. Together, they would stare at the abandoned but majestic two-story house through the white oak, black walnut, sycamore, and spruce pine trees on its lawn.
“He was educating me,” Patrick says of his father. “He would say, ‘This is where our family ancestry originated, this is the plantation that we came from.’” But while Arthur wanted Patrick to know where his family had started, he did not mention the circumstances of Byron’s tenure at the house. Only at the annual family reunions he attended after high school did Patrick learn from his other relatives that his great-grandfather had been enslaved at Oakley Grove.
“My dad didn’t really talk about slavery much; that’s just something that he didn’t focus on,” he says. “He understood slavery and everything that people had gone through, but his image was his father—and his father was a no-nonsense type of guy that really felt superior to slavery. Grover couldn’t relate to slavery in a way, because he felt like he was born into progress. His father [Byron] was wealthy, and all his kids were entrepreneurs. They didn’t want any association with that property over in Littleton,” says Patrick of his father and grandfather. “While they knew the history, they didn’t relate to it.”
Patrick, however, takes a different view. “Even if that plantation didn’t relate to me and my success in life, I would not be who I am today if my great-grandfather didn’t have to go through that portion of his life,” he says. “I pay homage to all the generations, and I focus to catch up on the things I didn’t focus on as a young person.”
Plus, he says, he feels solidly in a position where he can look at the painful parts of his family’s past straight on. “Now it’s OK to talk about, because now we actually have a little bit of ownership in the process,” he says. “It’s like full circle.”
Breaking Away From the Farm
Though Patrick’s childhood was steeped in farm work, he was not eager to carry on the family business. “Farming for us was like a chore,” he says. “Our payment was food, clothing, and a comfortable place to live. It wasn’t a ‘I get $100 at the end of the week like everybody else was getting paid that worked here.’ I myself wanted to leave here when I turned 18 and graduated from high school and go to college, because I had worked since I was 9 or 10 years old, and I didn’t think that this was all to life that I needed to see. I wanted to make my own way.”
After high school, Brown studied business administration and played football at the nearby Fayetteville State University, then secured a job outside Washington, D.C., as an account executive in the real estate market for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited. He made good money, but rather than putting it into the farm, he splurged. “I was young, I was in my 20s. I hadn’t made any money like that ever in my life. I was flying to Vegas, I was going to the Caribbean and traveling the world and hanging out with friends,” he says. “I felt independent, but I made dumb decisions.”
At the end of 2008, he was laid off during the recession. He spent just over half a year back at the farm and then got a position as a contract agricultural advisor in Afghanistan. Unlike most Americans in the country, who lived on military bases, he lived among locals in Afghan villages and taught residents how to grow, trellis, and sell grapes—to give them an alternative to growing poppies for the opium trade.
“I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time,” he says, “but I really put my life in jeopardy for something that really wasn’t going to make a difference.” He and his team would return to villages six months after they had left, and the Taliban would be back in control and the villagers back to growing poppies.
Patrick Brown’s nephew Justice White pauses while harvesting organic purple kale. Brown thinks a lot about improving the land and the family business in preparation for passing them down to the next generation (Photo credit: Cornell Watson)
After a year in Afghanistan, Brown earned a high-level security clearance and was able to get a job with the Department of Defense, which he held for 16 years, until June 2023. The whole time he worked for the government in the D.C. area, Patrick would commute to North Carolina every weekend to help his parents with the farm.
He soon realized that on the farm, he felt alive, and comfortable, in a way he didn’t elsewhere—in a suit, at meetings, jet-setting across the world. “Coming here, where no one knows I’m here—I’m just out here working on my tractor—I’m just enjoying the landscape and the atmosphere and the environment.”
He secured his present job in June 2023, as director of farmer inclusion for Nature for Justice, and has flipped his schedule. Now he spends his weekdays in North Carolina on his farm and traveling the state to speak with other farmers, connecting them with incentives, and his weekends in Virginia with his family, where his wife and their son, born in 2013, still live. It’s a two hour and 52-minute drive from doorstep to doorstep, he says.
While for the last two decades he worked a career job to get by and support his family, “I’m 100 percent ag focused now,” he says. And his full-time Nature for Justice job gives him an advantage that his father, who depended solely on the farm for income, did not have. He can experiment with different crops and approaches and purchase modern equipment to help him do the work.
He realizes he has a huge opportunity in the land that his ancestors stewarded and passed down to him. “I’d be a dummy—which I was for the last 20 years—by not taking advantage,” he says. And the knowledge and experience he developed in college and while working for the government have made him savvy at navigating the system to his own benefit, and the benefit of others working the land.
Opting Out of a Discriminatory System
On a mid-June morning, the farm is a comfortable 77 degrees outside, with an occasional breeze. Small white cabbage butterflies flit among the dandelion weeds and the rows of produce over in the hoop house. A couple hundred feet away, I can see the corn Patrick planted back in April standing now a couple feet tall.
Yesterday, while he was harvesting a field of wheat, the belts in Brown’s John Deere combine seized up, and the giant machine jammed. This morning, while he waits for help, he reaches a pitchfork up into a back compartment of the machine to pull out the straw that got stuck. “Oh, what a day,” he says. “I can’t cut wheat until I get that fixed.”
Meanwhile, across the yard, in the shade of the willow oak, Brown’s two nephews, Justice and Isaiah White—his older sister’s kids, both in their mid-20s, both full-time employees on the farm—sit on overturned buckets in the back of a low trailer amidst a sea of purple kale leaves. The trailer is still hitched to the old orange tractor they used as they harvested two long rows from a nearby field.
Across the road, peacocks shriek. They must be pets? Justice and Isaiah don’t know for sure, but, “If you scream loud enough, they’ll scream back,” Isaiah says, reaching down to select a handful of the deep purple leaves, then clipping their stems and fastening a rubber band around the bundles. A FreshPoint Sysco truck will be picking up as many boxes as they have packed tomorrow morning, so Patrick has asked them to work quickly.
Patrick takes his position as the steward of his family’s land seriously. “My primary mission is to make sure this land that I inherited has the capacity to generate income in agriculture for future generations—whether it be my nephews, their children, my son, or his children,” he says.
Previous generations relied mostly on commodity crops for their income, but Patrick takes a different approach. One of his key tenets is planting a diversity of specialty crops that can both supply his community with fresh vegetables and create a variety of income streams—and to sell CSA shares at the beginning of the growing season to offset the farm’s upfront costs.
While his predecessors—and most farmers—take out loans or rely on credit to run their businesses, borrowing against their expected harvests to purchase equipment, seeds, and other supplies, Brown has never borrowed money or relied on loans or grants. He has seen firsthand the harm that debt can cause farmers, especially farmers of color.
The USDA has a long history of discrimination in its allocation of farm loans—confirmed by numerous agency-commissioned studies. In the 1980s and ’90s, North Carolina farmer Timothy Pigford and other Black farmers filed a class action lawsuit against the USDA, saying the agency—via its local county committees—would deny Black farmers loans or force them to wait longer for approval than nonminority farmers. Additionally, the suit says, the agency failed to investigate and respond to allegations of discrimination.
Patrick saw his father experience the USDA’s discriminatory lending practices. The agency was frequently slow to approve Arthur’s request for loans and disperse the money. “They would continue to ask for more information, more documentation, in order to feel comfortable giving him a loan each and every year,” Patrick says.
The delays in payment could be devastating. With tobacco as his principal cash crop, Arthur needed to purchase fertilizer before December and prepare the land for planting by February or March. When the loan money was delayed, he would have to fertilize and plant late, and the farm would operate under stress all year, often experiencing low yield—and reduced profits—as a result.
In 1999, a $1 billion settlement was negotiated in the Pigford cases. Claimants were supposed to receive payments soon after, but because of confusing paperwork and processing issues, very few did. Congress appropriated money for an additional round of payouts in 2010 but similar issues abounded.
Last July, the USDA issued $2 billion in financial assistance to farmers it had discriminated against through its lending programs; before that, however, most Pigford claimants had received payouts of $50,000 or less, just a tenth of what an average midsize farm spends in a year, and fewer than 3 percent—425 farmers total—had received the debt relief they were entitled to as part of the lawsuit.
The older Black farmers who were involved with the Pigford cases regret having gotten entangled with the industrial agriculture paradigm and the USDA, says McCurty of the Black Belt Justice Center. “The elders refer to the USDA as the last plantation,” she says. “It really is modern-day sharecropping. It’s entrapment, so they can never have economic autonomy.”
In a region where many residents suffer from diet-related illnesses and do not have easy access to grocery stores selling fresh foods, Brown offers vegetable boxes through a community supported agriculture (CSA) program.
In large part due to the systemic discrimination, the number of Black farmers in the U.S. has fallen precipitously over the last century. Between 1910 and 2017, the percentage of Black farmers declined from 14 percent of all farmers to less than 2 percent. Today, the approximately 40,000 Black farmers remaining in America own less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland. “I can count on one hand the number there are in Warren County that’s still row cropping, not just backyard gardening,” Patrick says. “There’s hardly any of us left.”
And the disparities continue: In 2022, the USDA granted direct loans to only 36 percent of applicants who identified as Black compared with 72 percent of applicants who identified as white, according to an analysis by National Public Radio. That’s why Patrick has opted out of the loan system. “I don’t want to have to be praying and hoping that in order for me to have a good crop in the ground this year, I’ve got to wait for money from USDA to plant on time,” Patrick says. “I saw my dad deal with it. And I promised I would never operate this farm like that.”
In this often hostile environment, the farmers of color who do remain support each other, sourcing produce from one another to fill out their orders and helping each other with broken equipment and other issues.
Hedgepeth comes over in the afternoon to help Patrick fix the combine, which is still clogging up every time Patrick tries to run it down a row of wheat. Patrick adjusts the bolts that control the straw-release door on the back of the machine so it’s open 6 inches wider than it was, and then he and Hedgepeth climb the five-step ladder up front.
Patrick enters the glassed-in cockpit and fires up the machine, releasing a groan and a plume of smoke into the air. As he advances down a new row, Hedgepeth hangs off the side of the deck to see if the combine is releasing the straw onto the ground like it should. He gives Patrick a thumbs up.
Finally, the combine is fixed, and—after a day’s delay—the harvesting can continue. Hedgepeth enters the cockpit and takes the seat beside Patrick. Up high over the field, the two farmers—one older, one younger, both with an intimate knowledge of this land—sit side by side as they run up and down several more rows, leaving a row of freshly cut straw in their wake.
On the ground at the end of the run, Hedgepeth picks up a harvested kernel and examines it closely. He nods approvingly. “I believe that’s as good as you’re gon’ get,” he says.
Farming for Climate
It’s late August, and it’s hot. Sweat drips down my back. I walk with Patrick over fields that several weeks ago held onions, peppers, okra, beans, sugar peas, and other vegetables. His boots crunch over dry soil and dead grass.
“Normally by this time of year, by the second week of August, we’d have fall crops in the ground,” he says. But the fields remain empty. “We’re too afraid that if we put fall crops in the ground like we’ve done the last 15 to 20 years, we’d lose them to heat.”
When Patrick took over the farm, he decided to take it in a new direction. Concerned about the changing climate, Patrick is trying to use his land as a force for good—through strategies that also make financial sense. A key to this approach is growing hemp, which the federal government legalized in 2018 after prohibiting its cultivation for several decades, spurred by the war on drugs and its association with marijuana. (To note: Hemp contains only .3 percent of psychoactive THC and does not produce a high.)
A fast-growing and high-yield plant, hemp suppresses weeds, thrives without fertilizer and pesticides, and requires less water than many other crops. Plus, it sequesters carbon: “Over 90 to 100 days, an acre of hemp sequesters just as much carbon as a pine tree would over 20 years,” Patrick says.
Because North Carolina was among the states that allowed hemp cultivation prior to its federal legalization, Patrick started planting hemp in 2015 for the oil in its flower, used to produce CBD—and he patented a company called Hempfinity, which produces CBD teas, gummies, salves, lotions, and tinctures.
“We wanted to try to figure out an alternative to slow down the use of pharmaceutical drugs, like Oxycontin,” he says. Then in 2018, he began growing industrial hemp for the fiber of its stalks, which can be used to create everything from fabric to building materials. He sells the hemp to BioPhil Natural Fibers in Lumberton, which processes it into woven materials, textiles, and clothing.
Patrick also partners with Patagonia and VF Corporation (owner of The North Face, Vans, Timberland, and JanSport)—which are both interested in developing domestic supply chains for industrial hemp and have commissioned him to help with the research and development of its cultivation. Each year, he sends the companies data on his fields, capturing information on things like plant genetics, stalk densities, soil composition, and the amount of carbon the plants are sequestering.
Because hemp fiber only recently became legal to grow across the U.S., the industry is still in its infancy, and parts of the supply chain—like processing plants—are still few and far between. While Vans sources the majority of the cotton for its canvas shoes from the U.S., most of its hemp comes from China, says Emily Alati, Vans’ director of materials innovation and sustainability.
The company would eventually like to source more of its hemp fiber domestically, from minority farmers in particular, with the hope of increasing the diversity of the farmers in its supply chain. (Most of its cotton growers are white males and around 65 years old, Alati says.)
Brown is proving instrumental in helping the global company figure out how to make this transition and identify gaps in its supply chain, says Alati, who visits Patrick on his farm about once a year. “What I love about Patrick is his willingness to jump into anything new and try it,” she says. “Working with Patrick is helping us understand how we can support and potentially fund minority farmers to embrace regenerative hemp or regenerative cotton, so that we can start to shift our supply chain over time. We don’t know what we don’t know, and Patrick has been so critical in helping us understand.”
Justice White, Patrick Brown’s nephew, works full time on the farm with his younger brother Isaiah. The two oversee the cultivation of vegetables for the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. (Photo credit: Cornell Watson)
Brown and I drive less than a minute up the road to visit the closest hemp field to the main farm, the one right downhill from the cemetery at the home church. At full height, the deep green stalks of his hemp plants stand 16 feet tall and pretty thin, about the circumference of a thumb. But because Patrick cut most of this field two days ago, the stalks lay flat and are browning on the ground—drying naturally in a process called dew retting, where the cellular tissue and gummy substances rot away, causing the fiber to separate from the stem. After a week and a half, he will rake the stalks into 4-by-5-foot bales and send them off for processing.
So far, he’s pleased with the new crop. “Hemp puts more into that land than it takes out,” he says. “Every year, my yields are better, and I’m putting less and less into the land. I’m building the soil.” That’s hard to do with a crop like tobacco, because of the amount of chemicals it takes to produce it, he says. With synthetic fertilizer costing up to $900 per ton in 2022 and 2023, the natural feeding of the soil has the added benefit of saving him money and making his farm more profitable, he says.
Beyond growing climate-friendly hemp, he employs numerous farming techniques that benefit the soil and sequester carbon. While he has not invested in obtaining the official USDA certification (which is not worth it financially, he says), he farms his hemp and veggies by organic methods. He fertilizes with compost tea, a mixture he creates of compost and water.
Where he can—in his hemp, wheat, and soybean fields—he does not till the soil, a practice that disrupts its composition and releases carbon. He rotates his crops rather than planting the same thing in each plot every season, which builds soil nutrients and organic matter. And he plants cover crops each winter—barley, cereal rye, hairy vetch, red crested clover, and wheat—rather than leaving fields bare, which can prevent erosion, fix nitrogen, and sequester carbon.
In his shift to climate-friendly ag, Brown has tried to bring other farmers along with him. In 2022, he applied for a USDA Climate-Smart Commodities grant, a project that would connect Black and historically underserved farmers—prioritizing the legacy farmers involved with the Pigford case—with retailers and historically Black colleges and universities. Following the model he has established with his own farm, the idea was to help these farmers transition to climate-smart agriculture and hemp production.
“My environment doesn’t define me. It makes me more resilient, and proud.”
While the USDA did not end up funding the proposal—instead directing a good portion of the grant money to big-ag players like Tyson Foods, which received $60 million—McCurty said the legacy farmers appreciate Patrick’s vision. “The Black farmers, the elders, they love Patrick. I mean, it makes them proud to see the next generation running with the baton. And not just that, but that he reached back to them to show them a pathway out,” she says.
“There can be no justice for Black farmers without justice for the Pigford legacy farmers and what they endured,” McCurty continues. “And what I appreciate is that Patrick went back and really sat with the elders to try to incorporate them into this larger vision he had of restoring the Black agricultural land base through industrial hemp.”
Brown’s day job with Nature for Justice (an organization that did receive Climate-Smart grant money)—which consists of incentivizing Black farmers, 75 so far, to adopt many of these regenerative practices—marries his interests in mitigating climate change, making farming more profitable, and staving off land loss among Black farmers.
Former Rep. Clayton admires Brown’s tenacity and his concern for others, especially new and nonwhite farmers. “He’s willing to push buttons to get things done; he’s willing to advocate at the highest levels open to him,” she says. “He’s getting more new farmers in because he’s willing to fight the battles of equity.”
Purchasing the Plantation
Brown continued his periodic trips to the Oakley Grove plantation house into adulthood. The house was owned by a relative of Mary Falcon Browne until 2001, when the North Carolina Preservation Authority took ownership. In 2020, a Duke University doctor purchased the property under protective covenants from the Authority.
One day, when he was visiting with his young son Clayton, the owner was there, and he and Brown got to talking. The doctor had been collecting family history from the white side of the Browne family. “He was surprised I knew my family history like I did,” Brown says.
Realizing that Brown had a stronger connection to the house than he did, the doctor eventually offered to sell him the house. In May 2021, he purchased it and the 2.5 acres surrounding the house in a private sale. “I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I purchased it,’” he says. At the same time, he came face to face with the ugly realities. “When I first got these keys and documents from the other side of the family—the ledgers, the wills—I saw how they were willing off people like they were merchandise.”
Jerreann King Johnson visited the plantation with Patrick in 2022 after hosting him on the Black-land-loss panel. “When I got out of the car and walked onto the land, under that huge stand of oak trees, I got chills. I could have cried, because I felt like that land was coming back to where it belonged,” she says. “I felt so happy and joyful, knowing that the land, the house, and the property were in Patrick Brown’s hands. I felt so hopeful and encouraged, that this young Black man had the consciousness and foresight to acquire the property.”
The house was built on a high brick foundation and in two parts. The original, humbler part, now the back, was built in 1800. And the more elaborate second part was added in 1859 and attributed to the renowned architect Jacob Holt.
“This is where the Browns started,” he says as we cross the shaded lawn to approach the house. The white paint has worn off of most of the siding, giving the house a distressed look, and while two rows of boxwood bushes line what was once a front walk, the front porch and stairs are missing.
“It’s a breath of fresh air to feel like you own the property that your family was enslaved on.” (Photo credit: Cornell Watson)
We circle around to the back and climb the rotting wooden staircase to the back porch. I carefully place my feet on boards that look like they won’t collapse under my weight. Brown uses the giant gold skeleton keys to open the door. The light inside the house is filtered and subdued.
While the few rooms that had been partially renovated by a previous owner have finished drywall, in most of the house, the original wall interiors—made of lath, or narrow strips of wood, and plaster—are exposed. Boards and long pieces of molding are stacked on the floor and lean against the walls for future use. “All the wood in this house is original,” he says.
Back on his own farm later in the day, Brown reflects on the centuries of people and events that have led him here, to the gently sloping acreage on the far side of the county, to the tractor parked in the side yard, to the hemp growing by his parents’ graves. “I’m thankful for my dad and his father and my great-grandfather for working at what they did so long, to be able to give me access to the land,” he says.
After nearly two decades working mostly off the land, he now feels he’s doing what he was meant for—in the planting, in the harvesting, even in the fixing of the jammed combine. “This is my passion,” he says. “This is where I belong.”
The post Black Earth: A Family’s Journey from Enslavement to Reclamation appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post How to Help Farmworkers Impacted by Hurricane Helene appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Hurricane Helene triggered massive flooding and landslides when it barreled through Western North Carolina in late September, wiping out homes, businesses, roads, bridges, and farms—and claiming nearly 100 lives in the state alone.
While farmworkers experienced loss as well, their stories have been largely absent from the headlines. Because these workers are isolated in rural areas and often lack immigration papers, English language skills, and full control over their housing, transportation, and food supply—they are particularly vulnerable in times of crisis. Helene was no exception, compounded by the fact that disaster aid has been slow to reach Latinx communities.
Leticia Zavala outside the convention center in Toledo, Ohio.
In Western North Carolina, farmworkers tend and harvest berries, cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers, pumpkins, and Christmas trees, among other crops. While some live full-time in their communities and work whatever is in season, others migrate from farm to farm following the work, often from Florida to Georgia to western North Carolina. A good portion are in the country on temporary H-2A visas, which tie them to a specific employer who is responsible for providing housing.
Because of ongoing connectivity issues, communicating with farmworker advocates in the most severely impacted areas of the state, particularly surrounding Asheville, proved difficult.
“A lot of the Christmas tree harvest was not damaged, so even though some workers still don’t have electricity, the growers are wanting them to stay to get the crop out.”
Civil Eats spoke with Leticia Zavala, a coordinator with El Futuro Es Nuestro (It’s Our Future), a farmworker-led human rights organization that took root in opposition to the leadership of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) after a contentious union election in 2022.
Zavala has been in touch with organizers in the most impacted region—and has been providing support to workers further north. In a brief pause from her aid work, she discussed how farmworkers are faring after the storm, the type of aid available to them, and what the public can do to help.
Where are you now, and how are you spending your time in these post-hurricane days?
I am in Goldsboro [east of Raleigh], but we work with workers all over the state. We had actually been affected by [Tropical Storm] Debby first. We had a lot of rain, which flooded the tobacco fields, and a lot of the tobacco and sweet potato harvest went bad. So we were in crisis mode already, because some workers come here on an H-2A visa, and if the crop goes bad, they get sent home early or spend a lot of time without work.
Farmworkers are in need of food and supplies, plus long-term support regarding work and housing. (Photo courtesy of El Futuro Es Nuestro)
Then there was an issue with food access. We ended up refocusing that to the urgent needs of Helene. This week, we spent time at the Christmas tree farms [in the northern counties of western North Carolina] taking food to workers as well as gas burners and gas tanks. We took a generator out. We spent some time around Mouth of Wilson, on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, and Newland, North Carolina. We were in Boone and Jefferson and West Jefferson. We‘ve been visiting those workers.
We haven‘t been able to get to the workers near Asheville. We‘ve been talking to some of them and working with donation centers, but we haven‘t been able to get to them personally, because of the chaos and the accessibly to roads. We worked with an agency called Tierra Fértile, which had better access to workers we couldn’t get to. And other collection centers have been helping us, sending things to labor camps.
What is the current situation like for the farmworkers you work with?
Most of the workers we’ve worked with say it was a pretty scary situation. [Because they were not warned], it was something that caught them off guard. Most of them hadn’t been in a hurricane before, so it was very scary.
Some workers still don’t have electricity, and the growers are wanting them to stay, to help get the crop. They were expecting there to be damage to the crop and maybe being sent home early, but it’s actually reversed—a lot of the Christmas tree harvest was not damaged, so even though some workers still don’t have electricity, the growers are wanting them to stay to get the crop out.
What have you heard about the experience of farmworkers in the harder hit areas around Asheville?
That’s a scary part—we haven’t been able to connect with people in that area, so we don’t know. What I’ve heard from agencies [helping Latinx communities] is they’re just really overwhelmed. This is the time of year we normally get a lot of calls from workers in that area, because workers are being transferred out of tobacco to the Christmas trees. But we haven’t heard from them.
What type of aid is reaching farmworker communities from your organization and others like it? And what limitations do you run up against in trying to provide help?
The urgent need for water and food and things like that is being met [in the northern counties, by organizations that support farmworkers]. But we’re concerned about the long-term healing of the communities. There are people who have lost their jobs, and they can receive water and food for now, but what about being able to rebuild their homes?
“We’re concerned about the long-term healing of the communities. There are people who have lost their jobs, and they can receive water and food for now, but what about being able to rebuild their homes?”
We know that a lot of mobile homes were destroyed. What we’ve seen in the past is that in North Carolina, if you don’t have a driver’s license, you cannot own mobile homes. You cannot own vehicles. A lot of these mobile homes are still in the names of either the owner of the lot or somebody else. Getting access to FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Association] and explaining those kinds of things to agencies becomes difficult. There are issues with language.
There are also issues with transportation. Even if the roads aren’t blocked off, people lost their cars and so that is hard and complicated. We’re concerned about that.
As another example, it wasn’t like a big loss, but some of these H-2A workers had just bought a satellite so they could have internet access. Between the whole crew of 20 workers, it cost them like $600. It was knocked down and damaged by the hurricane. Where can they look to get that kind of like support and get that back?
H-2A workers do not qualify for FEMA disaster assistance. Undocumented workers don’t either. Can undocumented workers receive any type of help from the agency?
If they are undocumented, they may still be eligible for certain assistance. Like if there’s a family with mixed immigration status, even though you may not qualify, your children may, and that qualifies the family.
To receive assistance, people have to fill out a form. There are a couple agencies that serve farmworkers that have been helping them do it in Spanish. They can go to one of those places [for help]. They have to be able to document what was theirs. They can do that with photos or lists of things they lost.
Is government assistance effectively reaching farmworker communities?
We need more. It’s easy for government assistance to access people in the city or where a lot of people are congregated, but in the rural parts, it’s more difficult to get the news and information out. There’s more information needed out in the rural areas of North Carolina.
One issue [that is arising] is if farmworkers don’t have papers, they’re less likely to seek out help they may be eligible for.
Also we heard from an organization that they were trying to recruit people who were affected by the hurricane to fill out FEMA applications so they could have a source of income and cover some of the needs. But the organization wasn’t getting the resources to be able to pay staff to help [with the forms], therefore farmworkers were not able to fill out the applications.
What would you advise a farmworker who needs help to do?
The first thing is make a list of the things you have lost and the things you need—analyze your situation, so you know when you knock on the doors of churches, immigrant organizations, and government agencies, you can ask for everything. If they have a good list of the things that they lost and the things that they need, then it makes it easier for organizations to work together and refer to each other.
The second is keep knocking on doors. There’s gonna be people that say, “No, you don’t qualify,” or, “We can’t do this for you.” Sometimes it’s because even FEMA staff isn’t trained adequately. So the first time somebody says, “No”—don’t accept that. Keep asking and keep knocking on doors.
“It’s really important to recognize that [farmworkers are] the ones that get hit the most, and it’s longer-term than other people.”
The Farmworker Health Program has been active. They can call us [El Futuro Es Nuestro] and we can refer people, depending on where they are located, to different spaces. There’s a lot of immigrant organizations that are also working to provide help.
One thing to remember is there are always changes. There may be some services that open up within a couple weeks that are not available now. So be persistent.
What are the biggest needs in farmworker communities in the wake of the storm, and what can the public do to support them?
Right now, people are sending money, but after things kind of calm down, it stops. And what does that mean for families?
I feel like there’s going to be a big need for cash assistance for transition, like people who need to move or be relocated [to farms in different areas]. That’s where I’ve seen a lot of gaps with FEMA and other responses. El Futuro Es Nuestro is assessing those needs right now. It would require growers and us to work together. We are hoping if the need arises, we can help.
Farmworkers are often overlooked, especially at times of crisis. What do you wish that the public better understood, and how can the public best support them?
Farmworkers are hit first and most with natural disasters. I haven’t heard people talk about Debby and the impact it had. It flooded areas, and workers were going hungry. And nobody really found out about that. Another issue is the heat and how it affects us.
It’s really important to recognize that [farmworkers are] the ones that get hit the most, and it’s longer-term than other people. People who work in factories, they may be back to work a week or two after. But farmworkers, if the harvest was damaged, the harvest was damaged, and they don’t get to work until the next harvest comes.
We have a collective responsibility towards farmworkers, because we all depend on them on a daily basis. And it’s important that everybody learn what the conditions of farmworkers are in their communities and that they support the struggles that they workers are pushing.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about how these workers are doing or feeling right now?
I did hear a nice positive story. We had one worker who said, “You know, we’ve been here together for seven or eight months, and by now we’re usually kind of tired [of each other]. But when the hurricane hit, we had to come together. And we ended up dividing up our chores. Some people went and collected firewood, and some people would bring water from the stream, and some people would prepare the meal. We kind of became a little united group again.”
(But) workers are being asked to stay despite not having electricity because of the need to meet the [H-2A] contracts. They have contracts that they need to meet, and if they don’t meet them, then they could not have a contract next year. They are essential workers. Even Christmas trees are considered essential. But how do you feel about workers having to stay without electricity so you can have a Christmas tree?
It’s a tough decision for workers to make: “Do I want to go back to Mexico empty handed, or risk it and stay?” It’s also tough for the growers. One grower I talked to really tried. She’s like, “Tell me what I need to do to get water and food to the guys, and I’ll do it.”
This is about balancing the needs of the business and industry but also the needs of the humans doing the work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post How to Help Farmworkers Impacted by Hurricane Helene appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Where Do the Presidential Candidates Stand on Climate Change? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaign for the November election, farmers across the U.S. grapple with extreme and unprecedented weather: blistering heatwaves, severe drought, explosive wildfires, devastating storms, and deadly floods. Climate policies have not been a huge point of discussion on the campaign trail, but the next president’s approach to the changing climate will have massive implications, affecting everything from biodiversity to human migration to farmers’ ability to produce food.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sounded a final alarm for the planet in March 2023, emphasizing that we need to make “rapid and far-reaching transitions” across the board, including in food and agriculture, within the current decade. The report warns that as the climate warms and farmers face increasing challenges, food insecurity and supply instability will rise.
“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all,” the authors said. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.”
Details on the presidential candidates’ specific climate policies remain scant, but their track records, party platforms, and election-season statements point to the sort of approach each might take if elected. And they could not be more different. When it comes to energy production, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases—and the regulations that shape it and a number of other climate-related policies—the two candidates’ opposing approaches would have wildly different implications for the state of the climate—and the resulting stability of the food system.
The 2024 Democratic platform acknowledges the climate crisis as “an existential threat to future generations” and reflects that priority with robust support for clean energy and climate-friendly regulation. Meanwhile, to the Republican mantra of “drill, baby, drill,” Trump has called climate change a hoax and promised to achieve “energy dominance” while eliminating regulation and undoing the Democrats’ progress toward clean energy.
Numerous climate and environment advocacy groups have endorsed Harris for president. Meanwhile, agribusiness interests have poured their money into the GOP.
The Democrats’ Track Records on Climate
President Joe Biden’s administration has weathered mixed reviews on climate. For the past six years, the U.S. has produced more crude oil than any other country, and the Biden administration approved thousands of permits for drilling and fracking on federal land, like the Alaska Willow oil drilling project. And while Harris called for a ban on fracking in 2019 during a presidential debate on CNN, she has since changed her position.
Still, the Biden-Harris administration set the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and made unprecedented investments in renewable energy. The $1.6 trillion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—which includes $369 billion for clean-energy projects and decarbonizing the energy and transportation sectors—is the most aggressive piece of climate legislation in American history. Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass it.
Additionally, under Biden and Harris, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized strong pollution standards for cars and fossil fuel-fired power plants.
Though Harris has not made climate a focus of her 2024 campaign—and has not revealed specifics about her climate agenda this year—her campaign has said she plans to build on Biden’s climate legacy. Some look at her Climate Plan for the People, which she unveiled during her run in the 2020 primaries, as an indication of where her priorities might lie. The plan called for a $10 trillion public and private investment in climate action over the next decade and included funding clean energy, electrifying transportation, and pursuing climate-smart agriculture.
In her previous roles, Harris has held big polluters to account and supported bold climate action, often framing the crisis through the lens of environmental justice, recognizing that poor and minority communities bear the brunt of pollution and looking to reverse the inequities. As California’s attorney general, Harris sued the Obama administration to stop offshore fracking in the Santa Barbara Channel and amassed $50 million in settlements from lawsuits against fossil fuel companies including Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66. And as a U.S. Senator, in 2019, she joined Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in co-sponsoring the Green New Deal, a plan to transition the country to clean energy while providing job guarantees and high-quality healthcare.
“Kamala Harris has been a driving force in delivering the strongest climate action in history. She’s ready to build on those gains from day one as president,” said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund, in a statement. “Harris grasps the urgency and scale of the challenge…. She’ll raise climate ambition to make sure we confront the climate crisis in a way that makes the country more inclusive, more economically competitive, and more energy secure.”
The Biden-Harris administration has also cracked down on corporate consolidation. In many parts of the food system, a few massive companies dominate—the four largest meatpackers control 85 percent of all beef cattle in the U.S., for instance. Some contend that consolidated corporate power positions companies to successfully lobby against regulation that limits air and water pollution and see reigning in corporate power as a vital step in pursuing climate-friendly policies. Biden signed an executive order in July 2021 to promote competition in the American economy, including the meat industry.
While Harris’ running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, supported the creation of the now-defunct Keystone XL pipeline project, he generally has an extremely climate-friendly record as well. Last year, he signed a law that requires state power plants to transition to 100 percent climate-friendly energy—like wind and solar power—by the year 2040, eliminating gas and coal-fired power plants. And during the 2023 legislative session, he supported state Democrats in passing around 40 other climate-friendly initiatives.
The Republicans’ Climate Histories
Trump, on the other hand, denies the threat of climate change and makes inaccurate claims about sea level rise. In 2017, he withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Deal, the pre-eminent international agreement to stave off climate change. (Biden rejoined the Agreement on his first day in office.)
As president, Trump dismantled the agencies responsible for protecting the environment and climate, like the EPA, and rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. He also weakened limits on CO2 emissions from power plants and vehicles and removed protections on more than half of the country’s wetlands.
Kip Tom, an Indiana farmer who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations food and agriculture programs during Trump’s presidency and who currently leads the Farmers and Ranchers for Trump Coalition, said at a Farm Foundation forum in early September that the Biden-Harris administration hurt farmers in many ways, including with regulations like those issued under the Clean Water and Endangered Species acts.
“We have collapsing farm incomes. We’ve got a growing trade deficit. We have the tax policies, which are a threat to our industry,” Tom said. “We have the overreach of some agencies, agencies that should be working to help us bring these new innovations to market, yet they slow us down.”
Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has acknowledged the problem of climate change in the past, but he changed his views when seeking Trump’s support in his bid for Senate. Since then, he has denied the role of humans in driving climate change, championed the oil and gas industries, and opposed the development of alternative energy sources.
The Democrats Look Forward: Clean Energy and Regulation
While Harris emphasized her support of the oil and gas industries during the presidential debate, the 2024 Democratic platform calls for a continuation of the “clean energy boom” the Biden-Harris administration launched with the IRA. This includes developing solar, wind, batteries, and other clean technologies, modernizing the electricity grid, and running the American Climate Corps workforce training and service initiative. Recognizing that agriculture sector produces 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, the platform sets forth the goal of making “our farm sector the world’s first to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.”
Sheep graze under solar panels. (Photo CC-licensed by AgriSolar Clearinghouse)
The platform also supports using federal agencies to set and enforce regulations that protect the environment and combat climate change. In addition to regulating water and air pollution and making polluters pay, Democrats plan to use federal agencies to encourage climate-smart investment. And, it targets these investments “with the goal of delivering 40 percent of the overall benefits to disadvantaged and frontline communities,” or those who are most impacted by climate change.
With the help of IRA funding, for instance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is paying farmers to adopt climate-smart practices like reducing tillage and planting cover crops. According to the Democrats’ 2024 platform, more than 80,000 farms covering 75 million acres have adopted these practices already. The agency also funds projects that gather data on the efficacy of the efforts.
Harris has not detailed where she stands on breaking up corporate power, though her economic policy includes blocking unfair mergers and a federal ban on grocery-store price gouging. Harris has also tapped Brian Deese, Biden’s top economic advisor, who drafted the actions addressing concentration in the meatpacking industry, to join her campaign.
The Republican Plan: Fossil Fuels and Deregulation
Trump plans to pursue an agenda that is friendly to the fossil-fuel industry. His support for oil and gas companies, which he provided with $25 billion in tax benefits during his presidency, would likely continue. “Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World,” states the GOP Platform.
Project 2025, the roadmap for a conservative presidency developed by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped Republican administrations dating back to Ronald Reagan, also expresses a commitment to “unleashing all of America’s energy resources.” (While Trump has tried to distance himself from the Project 2025 as it has faced scrutiny, many of its authors are his former advisers and shaped policies during his presidency.)
Trump is expected to double down on his deregulatory agenda during a second term. The former president plans to undo many of Biden’s climate and environmental protections and dismantle the IRA by repealing sections that promote electric vehicles and offshore wind projects. (Since the IRA passed two years ago, Republicans have voted to repeal it 42 times.) He has also proposed eliminating key regulations for liquefied natural gas. At a dinner with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago in April, the former president suggested if they contributed $1 billion to his campaign, he would roll back Biden-Harris environmental regulations.
Drill rig working to drill a natural gas well to be fracked next to the Red Hawk Elementary School. Elementary school is the building behind the drill rig in the photo.
If elected, Trump told the American Farm Bureau Federation, “I will slash regulations that stifle American agriculture and make everything more expensive.”
Project 2025 spells out similar deregulatory plans. It calls for demolishing the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, which it describes as “the main drivers of climate change alarm.” (During his previous term, Trump required the term “climate change” be removed from government websites.)
Criticizing the Biden-administration’s EPA for pursuing a global, climate-themed agenda “against the will of Congress,” the document also advocates for shrinking the agency’s power, which would include eliminating its office of environmental justice and civil rights: “EPA’s structure and mission should be greatly circumscribed to reflect the principles of cooperative federalism and limited government,” it says.
The conservative plan criticizes the Biden-Harris USDA for encouraging “climate-smart agricultural practices” and says the next administration should “denounce efforts to place ancillary issues like climate change ahead of food productivity and affordability.” Along those lines, it recommends eliminating conservation programs like the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which pays farmers to stop farming on low-quality pieces of land to help reduce runoff, improve biodiversity, and hold carbon. And it calls for the president to issue an executive order that removes references to “transforming the food system” from all USDA literature.
On the corporate power front, Trump suggested to oil executive donors at a fundraising event in May that if he becomes president, he will fast-track their merger deals with the Federal Trade Commission.
It should be noted that implementing any of the candidates’ plans would require Congressional approval, which may or may not be achievable with the current configuration of the House and Senate.
Support for the Candidates
As of early September, agribusiness interests had donated $9.9 million to the 2024 Trump campaign and only $2.7 million to Harris.
“President Trump has a strong record of advancing policies to strengthen American agriculture,” Alabama FarmPAC president Jimmy Parnell told the conservative Alabama news website 1819 News. “His administration reduced burdensome regulations, held trade partners accountable, lowered energy costs, and invested in rural economic development.”
Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters, the NRDC Action Fund, the Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, the youth-led Sunrise Movement, and a number of other climate-focused groups have endorsed Harris for president. And in August, a group of climate organizations announced a $55 million ad campaign in her support.
“Kamala Harris’s record provides a stark contrast with Donald Trump and the far-right, pro-polluter Project 2025,” said Wenonah Hauter, founder and executive director of Food and Water Action, in a statement. “She has long championed bold clean water legislation, and the Biden-Harris administration provided a dramatic boost to clean energy, tackled corporate consolidation, and passed an infrastructure law that will provide much-needed resources to protecting clean water.”
Harris’ positions do not yet go far enough to tackle the existential threats to our food, water, and climate, says Hauter.“But with a President Harris, we will have a chance to build the political power to move the bold climate initiatives we need.”
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]]>The post Zero-Waste Grocery Stores in Growth Mode as Consumers Seek to Ditch Plastic appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As a barista in San Francisco for almost a decade starting in 2007, Joseph Macrino hated all of the waste the coffee shop produced—the disposable cups, the lids, the sleeves. He’d give his regulars grief for not bringing in their own mugs.
“I’d be like, ‘Bring your own cup! I see you every day, you get the same drink. I can still do a pretty rosetta or heart on top of your latte, but bring your own cup. It’s such a waste!’” Macrino said.
When he moved to Los Angeles in 2016, he and his then-partner decided to open up the city’s first zero-waste grocery shop. Drawing inspiration from the bulk-food-heavy Rainbow Grocery Co-op, one of their favorite haunts in San Francisco, they opened the doors of re_grocery on Earth Day in 2020.
“I really want to change people’s thinking around grocery shopping, around sustainability, around consumerism, around capitalism, thinking about how we can leverage our goals and principles but still run a profitable company.”
From neat bins, glass jars, and metal canisters, the certified B-Corp offers more than 500 refillable bulk goods including snacks, seeds and nuts, coffee and tea, oils and vinegars, cereals and grains, household items, and bath and body products. The store purchases in buckets and other containers they can return to the supplier for refill or recycle, and customers can bring in their own containers or cloth bags to stock up, or get reusable containers from the store.
In traditional grocery stores, plastic holds everything from apples to trail mix to detergent to water. “Plastic packaging is ubiquitous,” said Celia Ristow, who launched the zero-waste blog Litterless in 2015. (The site is down now, but will be back up this summer, she said.) “It’s cheap, it’s lightweight, if you need to ship, it’s non-breakable. So, there are some real advantages that you have to overcome.”
Yet given some of the shocking statistics—that 95 percent of plastic packaging is disposed of after a single use, that only 9 percent of the plastic ever produced has actually been recycled, and that 72 percent of plastic ends up in landfills or the soil, air, or water—some are trying to figure out how to sell food in a way that prevents plastic from being produced in the first place.
Since opening the first shop in Highland Park, Macrino has opened two additional re_grocery locations in L.A.—and has diverted 500,000 packaging items from the landfill. He would like to continue expanding, eventually to around 10 stores throughout L.A. and then more beyond that. And while the store currently offers delivery throughout the city and the shipping of non-perishables nationwide, he’s currently working to launch the shipping of bulk items nationwide as well, using compostable, biodegradable packaging.
“I really want to change people’s thinking around grocery shopping, around sustainability, around consumerism, around capitalism, thinking about how we can leverage our goals and principles but still run a profitable company,” Macrino said. “It can be done—we’re doing it. But I want to make it bigger than this.”
The first iteration of minimal packaging in stores was the extensive bulk sections in the hippie food stores of the 1960s and ’70s, said Ristow, who currently works as the certification manager for the Total Resource Use and Efficiency (TRUE) zero-waste certification. TRUE is offered by Green Business Certification Incorporated (GBCI), the same agency that oversees LEED and other green rating systems.
The second iteration—stores like Macrino’s, which produce little to no waste at all—have taken hold over the last few years, Ristow said. When she began tracking zero-waste and refillery stores in 2015, there were fewer than 10 in the U.S. “It started to explode over the next five years,” she said.
Inside a re_ grocery store in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of re_grocery)
While California and New York are hotspots for zero-waste grocery stores, Ristow also sees them in more unexpected places, like small towns and rural areas, in states like Ohio and Wisconsin. “As this movement took off, the people who started these stores were ordinary citizens. It wasn’t a centralized movement. People said, ‘I think my community needs it,’ and so they began opening them where they lived,” Ristow said.
Larasati Vitoux, originally from France, opened the zero-waste grocery store Maison Jar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two years ago. European countries are generally at the forefront of efforts to reduce and recycle, and the zero-waste grocery store movement is much more developed there than in the U.S. After visiting her parents in Orléans, France, early in the pandemic, Vitoux noted that their relatively small town, with a population of just over 100,000, supported five zero-waste grocery stores. Meanwhile, in the entire city of New York, with a population of 8.3 million, Vitoux knew of only one, called Precycle.
She saw an opportunity and started to put together a business plan. Her community—home to many young families—immediately embraced her. Eighty percent of her customers are return shoppers, and most live within a 10- to 15-minute walk. “We opened in March 2022, and by the end of the year, for the holidays, we received a lot of cards from people telling us that we were the best thing that happened to the neighborhood that year,” she said.
Larasati Vitoux in front of Maison Jar. (Photo by Arnaud Montagard)
The business started making money within six months of opening, Vitoux said, and year-over-year sales increased by 50 percent between the first quarters of 2023 and 2024. Additionally, as of their second anniversary in March, the store had sold—in bulk—the equivalent of 1,420 bottles of olive oil, 1,820 jars of nut butters, 762 plastic-packed blocks of tofu, and 2,443 bottles of kombucha.
In addition to offering local and organic food without packaging, plus perishables like fruit and vegetables, eggs, and bread, Vitoux aims to promote a sense of community around ideas of sustainability. The store has hosted a soap-making workshop, speakers on climate change and eco-anxiety, vendor popups, and happy hours, where all items are 20 percent off for a two-hour stretch. (These are very popular, she said.) Maison Jar is also an electronic waste and battery drop-off location and serves as a pickup location for Green Gooding, New York’s first circular economy rental system, which offers people access to small appliances like air fryers, juicers, and popcorn makers.
As she continues building her business, Vitoux is working toward a TRUE zero-waste certification offered by GBCI. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s important to have a third-party certifier say you’re doing things the right way,” she said.
There are, however, a number of challenges to operating a zero-waste grocery store.
“I think the hardest part about it is the consumer wants Costco prices from their local mom-and-pop shop,” Macrino said. “For people owning a small business, it’s hard to compete against those humongous companies.” Re_grocery tries to pass on to consumers the savings that comes from sourcing in bulk. “We’re really trying to be competitive with our pricing as best as we can,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of options for us to choose from. We really are always looking for other suppliers to give us better competitive pricing.”
(Photo by Arnaud Montagard)
For Vitoux, New York City rent is very high, and because cleaning and refilling the bulk containers is work-intensive, she also has to invest a lot in her workforce. Plus, because the number of package-free stores in the U.S. is still relatively small, systemic supports like the ones present in her home country do not exist.
In France, after package-free stores started booming in the early 2010s, she said, the government developed rules and regulations for hygiene and sanitization to govern them. Additionally, a zero-waste business association offers training and support to store owners and supply chains for bulk products developed because of the increased demand. (The movement’s ideals are taking hold in the mainstream as well, she said: By 2030, the French government is requiring that grocery stores of more than 4,300 square feet devote at least 20 percent of their sales area to bulk items.)
“The trend in Europe, it was really kind of a grassroots-type of growth and then regulation and supply chain followed,” Vitoux said. “I think it could happen here.”
Ristow sees the bulk aisles of traditional grocery stores as a good option for people looking to cut down on waste without access to a full-on zero-waste shop. At the same time, she hopes that as the package-free grocery movement grows, stores will continue to “invest in the idea of being community sustainability hubs” and will also “find ways to welcome in a larger demographic, maybe people who are more price conscious or need to shop with benefits.”
Some of the most important work these stores are doing, she said, is developing an alternative model to traditional, plastic-heavy grocery stores. “We have to find alternatives that work before we can scale them,” she said.
Macrino, for his part, is committed to figuring out how to scale. “My goal now is how am I going to get this thing so big that I can get a store in every major city and really make a real impact sustainably?” he said. “I think it can be done. And I think we have the tools to do it.”
Ultimately, he hopes for a cultural shift. “Everyone needs to take a step back and think, ‘These short-term instant gratifications are really piling up, and we really need to rethink how we’re operating.’”
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]]>The post A Guide to Climate-Conscious Grocery Shopping appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Between considering the impact of your food choices on your health and on the well-being of the planet—and accounting for the very real constraints of time, money, and accessibility—shopping for groceries can often feel daunting.
Purchasing food exclusively at farmers’ markets or local co-ops and buying 100-percent organic, animal- and earth-friendly products is not a realistic option for most people. So what do you prioritize? And when values conflict—like when a product is nutritious but hard on the environment (in the case of almonds) or produced humanely but packaged poorly (like Animal Welfare Approved milk in a plastic carton)—what do you do?
Sophie Egan, author of How to Be a Conscious Eater: Making Food Choices that Are Good For You, Others, and the Planet and former director of the Health and Sustainability Leadership at The Culinary Institute of America, offers advice for how to shop for the benefit of yourself, others, and the environment—without feeling guilt for the compromises you have to make.
While Egan lays out numerous, specific guidelines in her book, she provides here some key, big-picture concepts to keep in mind as you strive to align your food shopping choices with your values.
Photo credit: Cristin Young
Your shopping choices CAN make a difference in planetary health.
Embrace the incredible power of food choices as a daily climate solution. There’s an incredible call to action from leading global scientists, Project Drawdown in particular, which tells us that of all the climate solutions, the number one is reducing food waste. Number two is eating a plant-rich diet. And what I find so exciting about that is it’s something that every individual can contribute to on a daily basis.
Eat more fruits and vegetables, but drop the binary, all-or-nothing mindset, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
There’s too much black-and-white messaging and all-or-nothing mindsets. You do not have to go vegan to eat sustainably. As an individual or household, the more you’re generally aiming for plant-positive, plant-centric, flexitarian—basically just general emphasis on the delicious, abundant diverse foods from the plant kingdom—that’s great.
It’s a win-win that’s good for the planet and good for your health. It’s far more impactful to be a flexitarian for life than vegan for one summer.
One in 10 Americans eat the recommended value of fruits and vegetables. I often hear, “I don’t buy organic blueberries because they’re too expensive. So therefore, I just don’t buy blueberries.” The perceived hierarchy of produce just gets in the way of people eating more of it, in any form.
“Applaud yourself for eating foods that are supportive of your health and planetary health in whatever ways you have access to, and in whatever frequency is viable for your budget.”
I think whatever way you can enjoy access to fruits and vegetables—frozen, canned, if you grow them yourself—great. If they’re organic or regenerative—great. Truly, just eating more—some, any—is better than none. Applaud yourself for eating foods that are supportive of your health and planetary health in whatever ways you have access to, and in whatever frequency is viable for your budget. The goal is not 100 percent perfection.
From my perspective, conscious eating—trying to eat healthy, sustainably, equitably—is not about a diet. It’s not about hard-and-fast rules. It’s not about a no-no list or self-righteous over-emphasis on only a few foods. It’s not about giving up the foods you love. Food is also joy and deliciousness and heritage and family and connection and community. And don’t have blinders on in the pursuit of more sustainable eating to the crowd out those things that that are equally important.
Make small, strategic changes in your shopping habits that add up to the biggest cumulative impact.
Start with the things you do frequently, the food you eat often. Don’t stress about what you eat on holidays or vacation or birthdays or when you’re traveling and so forth. It’s really the routinized, regular items. What do you and your family eat every weekday for breakfast? What’s your Friday dinner ritual? What are the 10 things that you always buy at the grocery store? That’s where the biggest cumulative impact of you as a conscious eater is really worth the effort.
Start with a simple swap. So, if my weekday lunch is a turkey sandwich every day, look at a couple of times a week swapping avocado toast or a bean-dip sandwich or pita and hummus.
Shop at whatever store is accessible and fits within your budget, and seek out the healthy, sustainable choices there.
If you have to take two buses to get to a certain store and another store you can walk to, that’s a relevant consideration. It’s not just more expensive co-ops and Whole Foods that have healthy, sustainable foods. A tub of plain oats from anywhere is a phenomenally healthy food. Same for a bag or can of beans. Keep in mind that although some stores are full of highly processed junk foods, pretty much all of them tend to have those staple whole grains, legumes, frozen vegetables, and fruits. Sometimes you may just feel more like a salmon swimming up steam to locate them.
Look for trusted third-party certifications.
Third-party certifications can be the referees of values-based marketing claims. If your goal was to have eggs from chickens that are not just cage-free, but truly have more space and are pasture-raised or in more humane living conditions, you would look for a third-party sticker such as Certified Humane Raised & Handled.
It’s not that everyone is expected to memorize all the little stickers. It’s just to know that when there is a third-party entity, it means they went to the trouble of auditing against an evidence-based standard that they deem worthy of the marketing claim, as opposed to taking the company’s word for it.
Editor’s note: Egan shared an excerpt about labels from her book. In “Stickers to Know,” she explains the various certifications you might encounter as you shop. From Certified Organic to Biodynamic to Animal Welfare Approved, she offers this guide to what each certification does or does not mean, who is behind it, and why it’s legit.
When values conflict—for example, when a healthy, organic food is packaged in plastic—in general, put more weight on agricultural practices than on packaging.
More often than not, what good for you is also good for others and the planet. So thankfully, I feel very comfortable saying that the majority of the time, they’re actually in concert. For the handful of times when they are in conflict, it is likely going to be case by case.
Data actually shows that how foods are produced has a far bigger environmental footprint than packaging. Packaging is very popular to focus on because I think it is easier to see; it’s a more tangible concept. But question is, where’s the biggest bang for my buck, environmental impact-wise, and it actually does matter more—emissions, water, land use, biodiversity impacts—how the food is produced. [When choosing between organic milk in a plastic jug and conventional milk in cardboard], I would choose the organic milk and worry less about the packaging.
“If you’re making a choice that doesn’t reflect any of those three dimensions—if it’s not good for you, it’s not good for others, and it’s not good for the planet—how is that really worth your dollars?”
Sometimes, it’s also asking yourself the question, “As compared to what?” Almonds get a really bad rap for high water use, even though they’re super healthy. So that can feel like a conflict. But the problem is, the water use of almonds is looked at in isolation, instead of in comparison to foods like a hamburger or cheese. And when you compare it to those foods, which are not only much, much higher water use, they’re actually worse for you health-wise, you can actually reframe the almond equation to say, “OK, well, I’m eating something that’s healthy, and it uses some water to produce, but it’s better in both dimensions than some other things I might choose, like a beef jerky stick.”
The broader question if they’re in conflict comes down to which dimension you value more. If your own goal is more around supporting women-owned businesses than completely eliminating sugar from your diet, then maybe you feel great buying an indulgent cupcake from a woman-owned bakery for your kid’s birthday party.
If you’re making a choice that doesn’t reflect any of those three dimensions—if it’s not good for you, it’s not good for others, and it’s not good for the planet—how is that really worth your dollars? Maybe another way to navigate that conflict is just to ask yourself, “Is it at least checking one of the boxes on my personal checklist?” That’s a good starting point.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post A Culinary Worker Strike Could Reshape the Nation’s Restaurants appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In early October, thousands of bartenders, culinary workers, and hotel attendants formed a picket line outside eight casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip. It was the largest union demonstration on Las Vegas Boulevard in 20 years.
Since April, the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and the Bartenders Union Local 165 have been negotiating with the city’s three largest companies—MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, and Wynn Resorts—for a new five-year contract. To no avail, says Ted Pappageorge, who has served as the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer since 2022 and was its president for more than a decade before that. “We’ve been respectful, and we’ve been patient,” he says. “But it’s time now to come to the table.”
“To get through the pandemic, people did extra—they did more to save their own jobs, to help save the companies—everybody pitched in. But [it became clear that] regardless of the sacrifices you make, you’re dispensable.”
Meanwhile in Detroit, about 3,700 food and beverage and other workers at the city’s three casinos walked out on strike a few days after the Las Vegas action, demanding improved wages and working conditions.
Across the United States, the labor movement has gained strength in recent years. And while food system workers have historically been less organized than other industries, they are now more frequently using their collective power to push for demands that benefit workers.
In addition to higher wages, health care, and pensions, the Las Vegas culinary union is also fighting for a reduction of workload, expanded on-the-job safety protections including panic buttons to cut down on sexual harassment and assault by customers, and stronger technology protections that guarantee workers advanced notification if a new technology will be introduced that will affect their job, as well as health care and severance pay if they are laid off because of new technology.
While the picketing in early October was meant to apply pressure to the companies, union members have authorized their leaders to declare an active strike at any time. And with the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix race coming up in November, as well as numerous holiday festivities, a strike would cause challenges for the owners of many properties.
Pappageorge recently took a break from negotiations to explain what led to the latest action, how it fits into history, and what this picket line means for the labor movement across the country.
Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer, says massive corporations cannot leave their workers behind as they reap massive profits. (Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226)
What led up to workers picketing the Strip in early October?
We came through quite something during the pandemic. We were 25 percent back to work in 2020; 50 percent in 2021; and 80 percent back to work in 2022. Normally we were around 60,000 workers, around 50,000 dues-paying members in Las Vegas, and we leveled off around 40,000. The workers just didn’t come back.
It was for a few reasons. One was companies bringing in technology that eliminates jobs, and another was companies not bringing back workers and not having the same amount of service [but upping their prices]. Like you may not get your hotel room cleaned daily, but they’re still charging you rates that are 30 percent higher than what they were pre-pandemic. And now they have fewer workers doing more work.
All those things put together have given these companies incredible margins. I mean, the Las Vegas economy is on fire. Companies are setting incredible records. [But workers aren’t seeing corresponding improvements.] There are a lot of young people entering the workforce, and many ask, “How am I gonna own a home?” Forget about that. In Las Vegas, we’ve got this whole issue of Wall Street landlords buying up housing, buying up apartments, Airbnbs. Rents are up roughly 40 percent in the last three years. If you want to try to put your kids in college, or you’re mid-life, it’s harder and harder to get by. And if you’re nearing retirement, Social Security is extremely important, but it’s not enough.
These companies are on the wrong track. And we’re trying to push them to understand that time’s running out.
What about this moment has prompted the potential for strikes of these magnitudes?
This is not a Vegas phenomenon. It’s happening all over the country. To get through the pandemic, people did extra—they did more to save their own jobs, to help save the companies—everybody pitched in. But the pandemic made it very clear to workers that regardless of the sacrifices you make, you’re dispensable [in the eyes of the company]. And that’s the message that has come out of this—whether you’re a nurse, or you worked in a grocery store or a hotel.
These massive corporations have been merging and gaining power. Wall Street private equity influence is very powerful, and workers are fearful of being left behind. And that’s something that we see at our sister local in Detroit. We sent staff to help with the strike. Folks have really taken a hit after sacrificing during the pandemic, and there’s a lot of anger and nervousness about where these massive corporations are trying to go.
“We think service workers deserve to own their own homes and have health care, and to be able to take care of their kids.”
How does what’s happening in Las Vegas and Detroit fit into the larger landscape of food and beverage workers across the country?
The reality is a lot of our jobs across the country are poor people’s jobs when they’re not [connected to a] union. If you’re a server, you might do a little better than the cook. But restaurant jobs, room-cleaning jobs—if they’re not union, generally, it’s folks just getting by.
I was born and raised in Las Vegas. My parents worked in hotels. My grandfather worked in the food industry here. And a lot of us are like that. But the difference is we’ve been able to create a standard of living—through long, nasty strikes, really. We’ve been able to get health care and have job security in a restaurant or hotel, which normally doesn’t happen. We’ve been able to create jobs with security, health care, and pensions. We have a housing fund that helps people buy homes. We have a free legal services fund. What we’ve been able to do here is something that helps raise all boats.
The volume of workers here [has historically been very high]. Pre-pandemic, we [numbered] almost 65,000 with the bartender’s union, which is affiliated with us. Around the country, it’s a little different. But we think service workers deserve to own their own homes and have health care, and to be able to take care of their kids. And so our Culinary Workers Union—we’re part of Unite Here—is fighting and standing up and organizing.
The push for union protection is building across the U.S., including for food and farmworkers. What do you see as the biggest challenges confronting that movement?
I think companies have gotten addicted to these profit margins since the pandemic. These are massive corporations; they’re not mom-and-pop restaurants that we’re talking about. People look at MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, or Wynn Resorts, and they get it, they’re all over the world. You have to be able to join together to have the power to beat them.
One of the big issues is the decline of the labor movement [in recent decades]. You’ve got to have scale to be able to take on these companies. It’s a romantic notion that workers can just get together and win against big corporations—it doesn’t happen. If you want to beat Starbucks, it’s not about 30 workers and a locally owned franchise. You’ve got to beat the corporation. Labor has got to say, “we’re going to put X amount of money and resources and manpower into working with non-union workers and organizing.”
Culinary workers, bartenders, and hotel attendants strike in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 12, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226)
How is this movement for food and beverage workers different from others you’ve seen in your 30-year career?
There’s this idea that in Vegas we’ve been able to succeed because it’s easier. It’s not; it’s tougher. These companies are massive. They’re extremely powerful. It’s like a steel mill town or a coal town. But we’ve been one of the fastest-growing local unions over the last 25 years across the country in a right-to-work state. In other words, legally workers don’t have to pay their union dues, and they would get all the union benefits that we negotiate.
I think there’s understanding now that we can do this, and so I’m very optimistic about that. But it takes real sacrifice and real commitment. If you look at all the polling, the favorability of unions and the idea of belonging to the union is at its highest peak in the last 30 years. And it’s not because unions are doing something different; it’s because workers are seeing the fact that these massive corporations are gonna leave them behind.
It’s going to take unions willing to lay down massive funding to support workers and then workers willing to risk their jobs, and risk their families—to go on strike. It’s a very serious decision. But if workers have a plan to win and are backed up by the labor movement, there is incredible opportunity right now.
What counts as a victory for the Culinary Union, and how could that shape the working conditions throughout the country?
If you win $10 an hour tomorrow, but you can still be replaced by technology and AI, then what do you have? Nothing.
After five years, we’ve got this protection that helps workers deal with technology. Throughout our industry, we’ve been sharing that, and we understand that other unions have been able to go in that same direction.
I think folks are ready to have that fight. In Las Vegas, we’re trying to send a message to these companies that it’s time. And if not, we’re going to have a strike deadline and we’ll end up joining our Detroit brothers and sisters on the picket line.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Congress Likely to Preserve OSHA Loophole That Endangers Animal Ag Workers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Members of Congress will likely reapprove a policy that may be obscuring the deaths of hundreds of animal agriculture workers—and which leaves the vast majority without any oversight or protection—despite concerns from worker advocates and a key legislator.
A little-known appropriations rider has been attached to the budget of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency that oversees the American workforce, every year since 1976. The rider prohibits OSHA from spending money to regulate or investigate injuries or deaths that happen on small farms that do not have temporary labor camps.
Small farms are defined as those with 10 or fewer employees. Because the industry has consolidated operations over the last few decades, however, the rider reaches far beyond farms that could colloquially be called “small.”
“The rider puts small farm workers, who are already part of one of the country’s most dangerous workplaces, in harm’s way, with an outsized impact on racial and ethnic minorities.”
Instead, it often excludes from protection workers employed by complex corporations that are responsible for hundreds or thousands of animals on large farms—farms that, because of automation, employ very few people. This circumstance leaves those workers no way to report unsafe conditions and no recourse for them or their families if they are injured or killed.
Last year, a Civil Eats investigation revealed the scope of the rider’s reach: It exempts the vast majority—96 percent—of meat, dairy, and poultry operations that hire workers in the U.S. from OSHA oversight. And yet, between 2011 and 2020, around 85 percent of the deaths associated with animal agriculture happened at operations not under federal OSHA’s jurisdiction. During that decade, 1,006 people died in the animal agriculture industry, and only 149 of those deaths were investigated by the federal agency.
Since 2003, our investigation found, more than 13 people have drowned or asphyxiated in manure pits at dairies. Others have died after being attacked, gored, or trampled by cows or bulls, getting entangled in or run over by heavy machinery, or suffocating in piles of hay, grain bins, and silos. Many workers have also lost fingers, arms, and legs in accidents. And some have mistakenly injected themselves with vaccines meant for animals or drunk poisonous chemicals from unmarked containers thinking they were water.
President Joe Biden nevertheless included the rider on the first page of the proposed OSHA budget presented to Congress in March. Congress deliberates, then approves the nation’s budget annually before October 1. The White House did not respond to questions about Biden’s decision to continue to exclude workers at small dairy, poultry, and livestock operations from OSHA protections.
OSHA said officials take seriously their mission to keep workplaces as safe as possible and, faced with the small-farm rider, the agency “tries to utilize whatever remaining tools we have” to protect all agricultural workers.
A spokesperson for the president referred general questions about the OSHA budget to Doug Parker, OSHA’s assistant secretary of labor. Parker said OSHA officials take seriously their mission to keep workplaces as safe as possible and, faced with the small-farm rider, the agency “tries to utilize whatever remaining tools we have” to protect all agricultural workers.
The agricultural lobby, led by organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, has long led the charge to oppose regulation and worker protection, including efforts to remove or adjust the small-farm rider.
Republicans generally say they support the rider as a means of upholding the agriculture industry and rural economies, although the small farms purportedly bolstered are in decline as farms consolidate. And though Democrats have voiced support for underrepresented workers in other industries, few have been willing to take on the small-farm exemption.
Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), who has led previous efforts to remove the rider from House budgets, continues to insist on its removal. “The rider puts small farm workers, who are already part of one of the country’s most dangerous workplaces, in harm’s way, with an outsized impact on racial and ethnic minorities,” DeLauro said. “There is no good reason OSHA should not be able to monitor 96 percent of animal-ag operations. We need to bring our regulations into the 21st century and protect workers.”
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), which created the Fair Food Program to improve conditions for farmworkers picking tomatoes in Florida, also believes all agriculture workers should have government protection. “The size of an employer or agricultural operation—regardless of the subsector of the economy to which it belongs—should not determine whether workers have a safe and dignified workplace,” said Lupe Gonzalo, CIW’s worker education team leader. “All work has dignity, and no farmworker should have to forfeit their human rights when they go to work.”
Part of a Bigger Anti-Regulatory Picture
Limiting OSHA’s oversight of workers on farms is part of a larger partisan pattern of targeting and limiting the federal agency. In its first four years of operation, for instance, eight Congressional committees held more than 100 oversight hearings looking to restrict or abolish the agency.
Today, OSHA still lacks jurisdiction over public employees, and numerous other riders limit its ability to regulate workplaces and assign penalties, including a rider on small employers in so-called “low-hazard industries,” whose employees miss less work due to injury than the national average.
In January, Representative Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) attempted to curtail OSHA further by kicking off the current legislative session with the introduction of a bill to abolish the agency.
“In this political climate, accepting the small farm exemption is a nod to the unfortunate political realities of funding OSHA.”
None of the six Republicans with either rank or influence on key budget committees responded to Civil Eats’ questions about their stance on the rider. But now that Republicans hold the majority in the House, experts say the rider’s elimination seems especially unlikely.
Debbie Berkowitz, who spent six years as chief of staff and then a senior policy adviser for OSHA during President Obama’s administration and who now serves as a practitioner fellow with the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, said that OSHA’s existence is often questioned, making it difficult to try to add to the agency’s regulatory powers.
“In this political climate, accepting the small farm exemption is a nod to the unfortunate political realities of funding OSHA,” Berkowitz said.
With many pressing issues before Congress—such as states reducing child labor protections, for example—the rider, which affects a mostly immigrant workforce, is not where lawmakers want to spend their political capital, said Peg Seminario, director of occupational safety and health for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from 1990 to 2019.
“They are aware of the political situation with the votes that are there and that it’s just not possible in this climate,” Seminario said. “You focus on things that are possible.”
Seminario sees the introduction of the rider in President Biden’s proposed OSHA budget as a move designed to pacify detractors. It’s the White House’s way of saying, “‘We’re not going to make a fight over this,’” she said, in order to avoid jeopardizing other priorities.
Nevertheless, Emma Scott, associate director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, believes the issue of eliminating the small farm rider could be timely.
“There’s additional attention coming to child labor in the farming sector, so it’s a good opportunity to bring attention to the kinds of policies that foster this risky environment,” Scott said. “But it can be one of those things that people seem to feel, because it’s been one way for so long, there’s nothing that anyone can do—even though policymakers could.”
A Recent Push to Remove the Rider
Because of the current balance of power in Congress, there is little momentum to remove the near 50-year-old small-farm rider. But in the last three years, the exemption has faced a challenge to its existence for the first and only time in its history.
Under Representative DeLauro’s leadership—and with Democrats in control of the House—in fiscal years 2020, 2021, and 2022, the House passed appropriations bills that kept the small-farm and other riders out of the OSHA budget. In each of those three years, however, the rider was added back in during House and Senate budget negotiations.
“There are a lot of opportunities for not just mischief, but for real damage in the appropriations process,” Seminario said. “The thing about appropriations is there are hundreds of amendments that get filed to a bill. There’s a lot of back and forth during this process between staff, between the majority and the minority. There’s a lot of horse-trading that goes on” as lawmakers sacrifice lower priorities for higher ones.
The fact that the rider is enmeshed with other issues—and that budget negotiation is such a massive, complicated process—also works against its chances of removal, Seminario said. “The whole government is in play,” she said.
Since getting rid of the small farm rider would be part of the same budgeting process as getting rid of something like the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits funds from being spent on abortion, the two issues could potentially be pitted against each other. “Which one is going to win?” Seminario said. “There are a lot of other things that are a whole lot more important to people than worker safety.”
“The agriculture industry has enormous power over the federal government—Democrats as well as Republicans.”
Likely for this reason, nearly a dozen of the lawmakers we contacted declined to comment on the issue, including those often willing to take a stance on labor issues—Senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts).
As to the White House’s inaction in its own budget, “It’s disappointing, but it’s not surprising,” said Jordan Barab, who was deputy assistant secretary of OSHA from 2009 to January 2017 and a senior labor policy advisor to the House Education and Labor Committee for two years after that.
“The agriculture industry has enormous power over the federal government—Democrats as well as Republicans,” said Barab. “So, it’s extremely difficult, or impossible, to get anything through Congress or even sometimes through a regulatory process, that faces strong opposition from the agriculture community.”
Strength of the Ag Lobby
That agricultural lobby is stronger than ever. The meat and dairy industry—which has consolidated so deeply over the last few decades that four companies control the majority of the market in each industry—has powerful sway in Washington.
Meat, poultry, and dairy companies and their associated trade groups, including the American Farm Bureau, spend heftily to influence policy, generally promoting an anti-regulatory agenda. In 2021, for example, Tyson Foods spent almost $2 million lobbying at the federal level, and the National Pork Producers Council spent $2.2 million.
Meanwhile, isolated behind barn walls in rural areas, animal-ag workers are not organized and have no such advocates to counter the tide.
“All the OSHA rules that I am aware of pretty much—in general industry, and many of the ones in construction—come from the unions pushing for them, petitioning,” said Seminario of the AFL-CIO. “And who is there advocating on behalf of farmworker and agriculture rights? Not a lot of people. There’s not the organized worker power that there has been in some of these other sectors.”
Over the decades, a few lawmakers have tried to make targeted adjustments to the protections the rider denies—allowing OSHA to investigate deaths, but not impose penalties, on small farms if the victims were children, for example, and passing labor laws designed to protect children from dying on farms. The agricultural lobby, however, has pushed back—and defeated—the attempts at incremental change.
Agricultural lobby groups and animal agriculture corporations have demurred comment on this issue, with only the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) responding to questions. A NPPC spokesperson did not comment directly on the OSHA rider but instead pointed to voluntary safety programs like the USDA’s Pork Quality Assurance Plus (PQA Plus), which provides on-farm certification covering animal well-being and worker safety, as evidence of support for laborers.
“Nothing is more valuable to the success of our industry than having trained, knowledgeable workers to keep America’s pig farms operating safely,” the spokesperson said.
In 12 states and Puerto Rico, state-run OSHAs don’t observe the federal exemption in place everywhere else. If the rider was eliminated at the federal level as well, OSHA would receive reports about hospitalizations and fatalities from small farms across the U.S. and would be in a position to respond and investigate where needed. According to Barab, even if OSHA did not receive a huge boost in funding, the additional attention on small farms “would encourage compliance even over and above the actual ability of OSHA to inspect,” he said.
Some policy experts see incremental tweaks—investigations that respond to critical emergencies, for example, or that respond to small farm deaths without issuing penalties—as potentially valuable if the rider cannot be eliminated.
“These workers do some of the most dangerous jobs in the country,” Barab said, “and there’s absolutely no reason why you should have fewer rights because you work for a small entity than if you work for a larger entity, especially when it comes to such dangerous work. The whole thing is unjustified. It’s an outrage. Workers are dying needlessly because of this rider.”
While worker advocates and lawmakers do not expect movement on the issue under the current political conditions, Barab believes momentum could develop if Democrats controlled both chambers and had 60 votes in the Senate. “I’m sure it’s possible that under a better political environment, there could again be proposals to remove the rider,” Barab said. “I wouldn’t rule it out at all.”
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]]>The post What Cuts to the Food Safety Net Mean for People’s Lives appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>See the related feature article about the large-scale impacts of benefits cuts.
This spring, the pandemic-era increases to benefits offered through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) ended in most states, substantially reducing the monthly dollar amounts many food-insecure households receive to buy food. Together with inflated food costs, the end of the emergency allotments—and revised work requirements for SNAP—has meant that many people across the U.S. are struggling to put food on the table.
To shed light on the problem we spoke with four people—two food-assistance recipients, a farmworker, and a school food professional—about their day-to-day realities and what the dismantling of the food safety net means for them.
Kyler Daniels, SNAP Recipient
Kyler Daniels lives in North Carolina with her boyfriend and 4-year-old toddler, where she works for Down East Partnership for Children while completing her Master’s degree in social work. She has been receiving SNAP benefits since 2019.
When you were getting SNAP originally, what difference did that make for you and your family?
It was security for us. We started off getting about $212 or $215 each month. Then three or four months later, we started getting the maximum amount for our household because of COVID. Then we were earning about $600 total. We didn’t have to worry about meals. We didn’t have to worry about supplementing.
We could get our daughter the snacks she wanted—the fruit cups, yogurt, and applesauce. We could engage her in the shopping experience without having to worry about how much things were going to cost.
You said in April, you received $31 in SNAP benefits, and in May, you did not receive any benefits at all. What types of shopping decisions are you having to make given this decrease in support now?
Now, I go into the grocery store and try to crunch numbers. You don’t want to get up [to the register] and overspend and then have to go back and decide what to do.
At the beginning of the month, we look at what we have. . . [and] decide right then how much we’re going to take off for food after we pay the bills that need to get paid. If there is a bill we don’t have enough money for, we decide which one we will we get less penalties from—which one will work with us, which one will extend the deadline.
When I know we need it, I will [pick up shifts driving] for DoorDash. But then I’m tired all the time—when do we get to sleep?
I imagine access to healthier food is harder right now.
Yeah, definitely. Inflation has really hiked up the prices on things. Trying to get lettuce for a salad, or organic foods is higher. So, we don’t do that as often.
How does your daughter complicate the decisions that you’re making around food?
We wouldn’t eat at times to make sure that she had food—or we’d just eat noodles, something quick that we can make at the house—to make sure she can eat what she wants. She’s a picky eater. I don’t want to force her to eat something that she doesn’t like and then see her be hungry.
Are there challenges to navigating the benefit system? Did you run into any stumbling blocks?
I have never been 100 percent sure about why I received the benefits that I did. The application is not user-friendly. I am college-educated, getting a master’s degree, and there are things on there I don’t understand. For the average American, trying to get those benefits—and already being stressed out about needing them, with the negative stigma that goes along with it—is frustrating enough.
Can you describe the emotional toll on you?
Emotionally, there will be times where I would feel like a failure because we’re very low [on money], and it’s not the end of the month [so I’m not] about to get paid. It’s like, what do we do now? We’re constantly encouraging each other and ourselves to keep going. Nobody should have to deal with that on a daily basis. I feel like a bad parent for not being able to provide whatever my daughter needs, whatever she wants, especially when it comes to something as basic as food.
What would you like to see in this upcoming farm bill for SNAP and other programs that help people in need?
I would like it to be easier for people to apply [for SNAP]. If we had the revenue to give people the extra benefit during the pandemic, what is the difference now, especially if you are charging so much more for food?
There’s more that goes into needing food than what we make—I don’t think that [income] should be the first thing you look at. I moved in with my sister, so I don’t have a mortgage or a lease right now, but I’m still paying [for housing]. It’s hard to [reflect that expense] on the SNAP application.
So what do you wish that people—and lawmakers—who are in favor of cutting SNAP and other benefits programs understood about the people who use those programs?
We want the same things that they have. And not every person who needs assistance looks the same and has the same circumstances. It’s not black and white; there are areas of gray.
Adela Martinez, Farmworker
By JULIA KNOERR
Adela Martinez is a seasonal farmworker living in Immokalee, Florida—the nation’s “tomato capital.” The following responses have been translated from Spanish, and touch on many of the same themes as a longer feature on community responses to food insecurity in Immokalee that ran on Civil Eats.
Where do you and members of your community access food? How do challenges in access shape daily life?
Here in Immokalee, the [farms] primarily grow a lot of vegetables: tomatoes, chiles, cucumbers, and fruits in some areas as well. The growers bring them to a market area, and I buy food there when I don’t go to Walmart or Sam’s [Club]. Although I could buy food somewhere nearby, I [often] go further. I usually look for the place with the most affordable prices.
There are places that give out food, like vegetables, noodles, and rice. I look for food in the most affordable places because I don’t have a steady job. I’ve used coupons; I’ve used everything that I have at home so that I don’t waste anything. It’s also difficult for people who live far away from the places that donate food. Although they might want to go, sometimes they can’t drive, it’s very hot outside, or they have small children.
How has your access to food changed since the pandemic, and did changes in SNAP allowances impact you?
It’s a truly great help. There was an increase twice, and I didn’t want to spend it just anywhere. I had to look at what I bought and get what was affordable. In the small stores here, I have noticed that a single banana can cost you $1, but in Walmart, you can get lots of bananas for $1.50. [SNAP assistance] is very helpful for me. Now they don’t give as much, but it’s something.
I always try to economize what I can in every way. During the pandemic, things weren’t like they are now. Sometimes [the assistance] was enough for me to buy everything for two weeks—meat and lots of fruits and vegetables. But now, it’s not. I go to Walmart to buy what I need, and I sometimes spend $250 or $300. Sometimes I get extra things, but with this [reduction] and the lack of work here now, you don’t have the luxury of buying what you want. You think about everything: your rent, phones, and many things. Now I don’t buy anything like $250 or $300 worth of food. What they give me now [in assistance] for a month lasts me one week.
What are some potential solutions to improving food access in Immokalee?
The Cultivate Abundance community garden is a blessing for me. When I wasn’t working, we would go there to help, and they would give us herbs and other things. For me, that’s a lot, because in reality, if you go to the store, you spend $5 or $6 on herbs—for cilantro, for a cabbage. If [they were] able to do [the gardening] on a larger scale, it would be a great help for many people. The store owners take advantage of people who don’t have a car to get to more affordable stores. If there was a place that could help harvest more vegetables and fruits, that would be [helpful].
This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Tricia Kastelitz, School Food Professional
By ANNA GUTH
Tricia Kastelitz is the coordinator of nutrition and student wellness education at Suffolk City Public School District in Virginia. She is one of many in roles like hers who have had to find creative ways to feed families during difficult times.
How does food insecurity shape day-to-day life for members of your school community?
I wish more people could understand that food insecurity is a fluid situation, and it can go up and down during the month. It is also a spectrum. Sometimes, when we think about food insecurity, we only think about the students who don’t have any food at home. But there are also a lot of people in that gray range who eat every day, but maybe they can’t afford [to buy] healthy foods. Or, the kids are eating every day, but their parents are skipping meals. Or, they eat every day, but a lot of their food is coming from a food pantry or some other social service. I think it’s important to remember that those children, and families, are also food insecure.
After the federal universal meals offered during the pandemic ended, how did access to food in your district change?
We are a CEP [Community Eligibility Provision] district, which means that all our students are still eating free breakfast and lunch because of the amount of students who are “directly certified.” We actually opted into the CEP program in the middle of the pandemic, so our students and our families never really felt a difference between the universal feeding and free CEP meals we offer now. But I think making permanent universal free meals is definitely a concern on the horizon. We are a borderline district: Forty [percent] is the number to qualify for CEP. Last year, we were under 40.
As the menu planner, can you describe the challenges of shifting from remote meal deliveries back to in-person meals?
During COVID, we had to shift to mostly pre-packaged foods, mostly for safety reasons. The downside was that we became more reliant on those types of foods. Trying to make that transition back has been very challenging. Our biggest challenge right now is labor, and we are always looking to hire more people so we can begin to provide more home-cooked meals. We were really fortunate that our district chose to pay all of our [cafeteria] staff completely during the pandemic, but a lot of our older staff just decided not to come back, either because of health concerns or they had gotten used to being home.
How have recent cuts to the food safety net, following the end of the COVID public health emergency, affected your community?
The reduction in SNAP benefits often leads our families to make up that money elsewhere and to really try to find more resources. We have some close community partners—food banks and other feeding sites. I know they have [seen more demand] in the past few months. Recently, we’ve also had an uptick in people trying to go back and look at their P-EBT [Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer] benefits, [which are still available to families eligible for free or reduced-price school meals this summer]. And that makes me think that people are seeking more resources for food.
What is one thing that our readers could do to better support people in your position?
The more partners who get involved in school nutrition, and the more people who have a finger in the pot, so to speak, the better for everyone. If you feel called to help with school meals, call up your school nutrition department and see what they need. Asking the people you’re trying to help what they need is so, so important—especially in the food web, which is so different depending on where you are.
Jayson Call, Puerto Rico PAN recipient
For all the shortcomings of SNAP, the situation in Puerto Rico poses even more challenges. The U.S. territory currently uses the Programa de Asistencia Nutricional (PAN), but many Puerto Ricans are hoping Congress will help the territory transition to SNAP instead. Jayson Call, a current PAN beneficiary, explains how this program falls short and why he thinks it’s important to improve food assistance for the people of Puerto Rico.
How did you first learn about PAN? Were you on the program growing up, or did you begin to access the benefits as an adult?
My family did use it for a little while when I was a child, before they were able to establish themselves economically and leave the program. But I went on PAN as an adult because I have a child with type 1 diabetes. I had to stop working to help him.
The application system is very complicated, and every time I submitted, they denied it. But then I found out that I could submit my son’s medical expenses and my [medical expenses], and with that they qualified me.
My son’s expenses are about $4,000 a month in medication. It’s not easy. If I go to work, I can’t make enough money to maintain the cost of living and my children’s medication. It was a tough process to apply because not even the employees who work there advise you correctly [to figure out how to present your finances to qualify for food assistance]. They said, [because I made $1 too much] I didn’t qualify. For a dollar! And if you don’t have someone to help you, you don’t know how to qualify for the program. I was looking for alternatives for months until someone told me [about] the medical expense [deduction].
How does food insecurity shape your day-to-day life, and the lives of other members of your community?
We have seen how inflation has [raised prices]. There are times when you say, “How is it possible that with $100 or $200 10 years ago, I could fill my cart?” Today with the $400 that [PAN] gives me, it doesn’t come close. And now there is a third-quality product [food that is lower quality than what is sold in the mainland U.S.] that you have to buy in order to eat the same thing you ate before. Many people, a lot of senior citizens, have even less and have to choose between buying food, personal toiletries, or medications.
What is one thing that could make a substantial difference in the lives of food-insecure Puerto Ricans?
The creation of community kitchens is really needed. A fund for the people to convert abandoned schools into community kitchens. Because, remember, communities know what is needed and how to solve things here.
Another thing that could be beneficial is more food banks. Right now there is just a single [food bank in Puerto Rico,] in Carolina, and it really can’t keep up. We need one in Ponce, one in Ceiba. It’s not like in the United States, where many of the churches have food banks.
How have recent events, from the hurricane to the earthquakes to the pandemic, affected access to food?
The PAN benefit card [system] depends on electricity. If there is no electricity, you cannot buy anything. And that affected us a lot when Hurricane María hit. If the electricity was out, the system was completely down. Useless. Also, if for any reason the port of Puerto Rico is affected, there is no [way to get food onto the island, which imports about 85 percent of what it consumes].
What can our readers do to better support and help people in your position?
Any organizations or individuals that are able to send funds to Puerto Rico could partner with local organizations and individuals in order to recuperate some of the abandoned schools (of which there are many) and turn them into community kitchens.
These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post How the Jackson Water Crisis Is Hurting Its Restaurants appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When historic flooding caused the pumps to fail at a water treatment plant in Jackson, Mississippi, last August, leaving the city without running water for about a week, restaurateur Jeff Good had to close all three of his establishments.
Even when water finally did return to the tap, it was unsafe to drink. In order to operate under the nine-week boil-water notice, Good had to buy bottled water for baking, washing vegetables, and filling customers’ glasses. He also had to turn off his ice machines and soda fountain and serve commercial ice and canned sodas.
“It’s $2,000 per restaurant per week in extra expenses,” said the owner of BRAVO! Italian restaurant, the Broad Street bakery and café, and Sal & Mookie’s pizza and ice cream joint. “So that’s $18,000 over nine weeks for three restaurants. And we never get that money back.”
“If we can fix this water system and start a different narrative, investment can come back and the city can rebirth, and we can be a great story.”
Other restaurateurs also reported damage. At Johnny T’s Bistro and Blues in the Farish Street Historic District, John Tierre bought the same extra supplies—and paid his staff to come in one to two hours early each day to unpack and distribute them and boil dishwater, Tierre said.
At Lou’s Full-Serv, owner Louis LaRose said, “We went from having a good summer and a little bit of cash flow to basically zero cash flow. We were so slow that it literally almost bankrupted us.”
The August water crisis resolved, at least for the short term, after Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency and brought in the Mississippi National Guard to distribute safe water and oversee emergency repairs, and after President Joe Biden declared Jackson a disaster area and sent in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with resources and assistance.
While the city’s water shutdown made national news, it wasn’t the first time water issues have plagued the Mississippi capital. Decades of deferred maintenance to the crumbling water system—some parts of which are more than 100 years old—coupled with recent extreme weather events like freezes and flooding have brought the system to its breaking point.
Some see mismanagement and poor planning at the local level at the root of the water crisis. Others see racism as the cause; as a progressive city that is 84 percent Black in a conservative, white-led state, the city for years has not often received the state support it has requested to address its challenges.
But now, for the first time, the federal government has stepped in in a major way. In November 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice appointed a third-party manager—water systems expert Ted Henifin—to fix the drinking water and the associated billing system, allocating $600 million for that job exclusively.
With the repair process underway, many hope this can be a turning point—for the city’s residents and also for the restaurants and other businesses that keep the city’s economy afloat and its identity intact.
Good says repairing the infrastructure is a crucial first step. “If we can fix this water system and start a different narrative, investment can come back and the city can rebirth, and we can be a great story,” he said.
Ramon Davis stocks bagged ice at Babalu in Jackson during the September 2022 water crisis. (Photo © Rory Doyle)
A Long-Failing Water System
Jackson has faced population decline and severe economic challenges over the last few decades. The city shrunk from around 203,000 residents in 1980 to around 150,000 residents in 2021 as many white people fled the city limits, taking their wealth—and tax dollars—with them.
While the suburbs surrounding Jackson—nonexistent in the ’80s—are growing and thriving, the city’s 26 percent poverty rate is more than twice the national rate of 11.6 percent.
“Our city has been tanking year after year,” said Good, who in addition to owning three restaurants is past president of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce. “Every system we have—social, educational, economic, public safety, public works—is strained and failing. And that’s led to the outflow of care and economics. We have hit rock bottom.”
Without a solid revenue stream over the last few decades—and with problems including residents altering their meters to avoid paying for water and the 2012 installation of a faulty water meter and billing system by the German technology company Siemens—city leaders have not had the money necessary to maintain the water system. And with severe worker shortages and high turnover, the water department does not have enough operators on staff to conduct preventative maintenance.
Amidst this dysfunction and neglect, Jackson residents and businesses became accustomed to regular service shut offs, line breaks, boil-water notices, low pressure, and exposure to lead and harmful bacteria like E. coli. In March 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an emergency administrative order for the Jackson water system—one of many official warnings about the city’s water—saying it put consumers’ health at risk.
Then in February 2021, when the winter freeze took out the Texas power grid, old pipes in Jackson froze and burst, leaving the city without clean water for more than a month.
“A two- to three-day boil notice poses challenges for restaurants,” said LaRose of Lou’s Full-Serv. “You multiply that by 50 days, and you can’t wash lettuce, you can’t wash fruits and vegetables, you’ve got to boil water and cool it or buy distilled water. Your costs go through the roof.”
“My mom and my aunt say, ‘You’ve got this big fancy restaurant in Jackson, but y’all don’t have running water.’ It’s kind of embarrassing that in 2023 a city doesn’t have running water.”
Tensions between the city and state leaders have been running high, including a particularly hostile relationship between Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Jackson’s progressive mayor, and Reeves, Mississippi’s conservative governor. Reeves has described the water situation as “a crisis of incompetence,” implicating Lumumba, and Lumumba has characterized the state’s dealings with Jackson as “racist” and “paternalistic.” When Jackson asked for $47 million from the state to fix the pipes after the big freeze to try to get ahead of the problem, for instance, it received $3 million, 6 percent of the requested amount.
Though the city’s water system has stabilized since the August crisis, there have been a number of boil-water notices issued, and people generally don’t trust Jackson water, which makes them wary of eating out, restaurant owners say.
“My mom and my aunt say, ‘You’ve got this big fancy restaurant in Jackson, but y’all don’t have running water,’” Tierre said. “It’s kind of embarrassing that in 2023 a city doesn’t have running water.”
Good sees water as vital to restaurants’ success—and restaurants as vital to the city’s success. “I hire 210 people—they’re all Jacksonians,” he said. In his 30 years in business, he estimates he has hired between 10,000 and 20,000 people. “I am a major job provider here, and a major quality-of-life provider, and an economic engine,” he said.
After the August outage, Good organized a coalition of 46 Jackson restaurateurs, including Tierre and LaRose, asking city, county, and state representatives to cooperate to solve the problems. Without a solid fix, he said, “we’re going to become a burned-out donut—we will be the hole and around us will be great wealth and prosperity.”
Brent’s Drugs manager Sarah Donald pours bottled water into a coffee pot during the September 2022 water crisis. (Photo © Rory Doyle)
Neglect, Bad Planning, Racism—or All Three?
Some Jacksonians blame local lawmakers. “There has been mismanagement through local government and leaders for so long,” said LaRose. “I don’t care if they’re blue or red, it has been mismanaged. People choose not to work with one another, and nothing gets done.”
Tierre of Johnny T’s sees the issue as primarily about money. “You can shake it how you want to, but the bottom line is, it’s economics, it’s funding,” he said.
Others, however, see racism at the root. In September 2022, the NAACP filed a complaint with the EPA under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing a history of discrimination through the repeated rejection of requests for federal funds to address the problem.
“The water crisis in Jackson is just the latest example of a negligent—if not racist—pattern of underfunding basic water services for Black communities,” added Abre’ Conner, NAACP’s Director of Environmental and Climate Justice. “Our country has a longstanding history of mistreating and neglecting Black communities, putting the lives of men, women, and children at risk.”
Cindy Ayers Elliott, owner of the 68-acre Foot Print Farms, which sits within the Jackson city limits, sees the disinvestment as an intentional move on the part of conservative state leaders to disempower the Black city and take control, as has happened in other parts of the U.S.
“The policies that they are pushing and the legislation that they have been passing, without a doubt, brings you back into the ’40s or ’50s,” she said. “They keep this state depressed, deprived of resources that [should be] available to the people . . . It’s just a different way they’re lynching now. And it’s with the dollar, and with something as basic as water.”’
Indeed, in recent years, the state has repeatedly attempted to gain control of the city’s spending, services, and infrastructure. State leaders have tried to take over the Jackson airport and expand the jurisdiction of the Capitol police. Then, in January, Republican state legislators introduced a bill that would place Jackson’s water systems under state control, giving the state access to the $600 million designated by the federal government for the repairs.
Notices posted on the social media pages of Broad Street Baking Company & Cafe and Lou’s Full-Serve during the 2022 water crisis.
‘I Believe in the City; I Fight for the Underdog’
Since he started, Henifin, the third-party manager, has set to work on 13 main priorities. To rebuild trust, he has created a water bill debt-relief program for residents who were unfairly overcharged.
Additionally, Henifin’s team is identifying leaks in the system and creating plans to replace small-diameter water lines with larger ones. They have also lined up systems for corrosion control and identifying lead.
The restaurateurs Civil Eats spoke to expressed confidence in Henifin’s leadership, and a sense of relief that the water system is in the hands of a competent federal appointee with the money to complete the work. And many are committed to sticking with the city through what they expect to be a long process.
“I understand it won’t get fixed overnight. It’ll probably take 10 to 15 years,” said Tierre. “But I think the people of Jackson are strong. So, we’ll get through it, and we’ll continue to thrive.”
Good is aware he could move across the Pearl River into Rankin County and earn more in sales—without the water issues. “But I believe in the city, and I fight for the underdog. I have a deep-seated belief that business has a responsibility to the community,” he said. “And I tend to believe that we’re going to rebirth, and this is going to be the phoenix from the ashes.”
“I have high hopes,” said LaRose. “If nothing else, I’ve got hope.”
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]]>The post Perennial Crops Boost Biodiversity Both On and Off Farms. Researchers Explain How. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>We have long reported on the many climate and food security benefits of perennial crops, whose roots stay in the soil year-round. But research also shows that perennial agriculture, which includes orchards, agroforestry, silvopasture, and row crops, also helps increase biodiversity—both on the farm and off.
“From an observational standpoint, having more perennials in a system makes sense,” said Ebony Murrell, a lead scientist at The Land Institute, a Kansas-based nonprofit that conducts research to help develop diverse, perennial, and regenerative agricultural systems at scale. “We’re trying to better mimic ecological processes to produce a system that can better provide ecosystem services.”
On farms, perennial crops provide year-round homes for a number of species, from insects to mammals to soil microbes. For instance, a 2022 study that Murrell helped conduct found that flowering perennial border crops support particularly robust pollinator communities. That’s in part because most bees native to the U.S.—like sweat bees and long-horn bees—are solitary and live underground, and they require undisturbed habitat.
A flowering grain legume called sanfoin is good at attracting honeybees and native leafcutting bees, Murrell said, and a sunflower-like native prairie plant called silflower, which is being developed as an oilseed crop, is popular among native bees. “We have so far found over 35 species of bees visiting that one plant,” Murrell said. “We are interested in trying to get it planted in more places to help serve that purpose.”
Additionally, perennial crops like Kernza, the grain developed by The Land Institute, provide habitat for ground-nesting birds and other animals. “A vegetated landscape is going to accommodate species that a tilled, denuded landscape as far as the eye can see does not,” said Tim Crews, chief scientist at The Land Institute and director of its international program. “There are going to be a lot of species that take advantage of it.”
A mallard takes flight from its nest in a Kernza field. (Photo courtesy of courtesy of the University of Manitoba)
Perennials’ long-lived and deeper root systems build more biodiversity underground as well. A study published in January 2020 found the fungal microbiome in the soil of a single stand of Kernza closely overlapped with the soil microbiome of native restored prairie—and was quite distinct from the microbiome of a field planted in a tilled rotation of three annual crops—suggesting that Kernza cropping systems “have the potential to mimic reconstructed natural systems.”
While the microbial community overlap was high across the board, it was particularly high for mutualists, or beneficial fungi that consume organic matter and release nitrogen for the plants, as well as saprophites, or decomposers.
“If you add carbon to soils, you almost always get a pretty big response in terms of the microbial community growing to consume that carbon,” said Crews, one of the study’s authors. “And there’s zero question that the amount of available carbon that gets added to the topsoil of an agricultural field is far greater—many-fold greater—in Kernza compared to annual wheat or any of the annual grains. I mean, there’s so much more root system, and those roots turn over, they die back some every year, and there’s a huge amount of carbon that goes into the soil.” And, he added, higher-functioning beneficial mycorrhizal fungi tend to develop in the undisturbed soil of perennials.
Researchers point out that perennial crops also benefit off-farm biodiversity, because they reduce the negative impacts of traditional agriculture on the environment. “The Mississippi Basin’s annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is from nitrogen leaching out when there are no roots in the soil and there’s no activity,” said Crews. With perennial covers like Kernza, he continues, “the vast, vast majority of nitrate leaching stops.”
Additionally, he said, “There’s increasing evidence that you lose less in nitrous oxide fluxes as a greenhouse gas, because these crops take up the nitrogen so quickly, and year-round—you don’t have times of the year when there are no plants to take up nitrogen.”
Prairie chicks wait for food in their nest in a Kernza field. (Photo credit: Patrick LeHeiget, University of Manitoba)
To make the most of perennials’ ability to produce both on- and off-farm biodiversity, some researchers and farmers are following the example of Indigenous people, who have thoughtfully stewarded landscapes for millennia.
While farmers often rotate their annual crops or plant cover crops during the off season, “the idea with perennial crops is that you want them to stay in the ground for many years, which means you’re not rotating anymore. So how do you take that diversity in time and move it to diversity in space?” Murrell asked. The answer: strategically planting different perennials together to benefit one another.
A few examples: planting silflower with a perennial groundcover like turf grass, which provides a natural weed barrier. Alternating rows of Kernza with rows of alfalfa to provide Kernza with nitrogen and prevent the grain from clumping together, competing with itself, and becoming less productive, which it tends to do after a few years when planted alone. Growing two flowering species that bloom at slightly different times together to support pollinators. Or practicing agroforestry by incorporating trees or shrubs into farming systems, while producing additional forest products like fruit, nuts, or mushrooms.
“The real powerhouse of our agriculture is based on grain crops and grazing crops, but trees are an amazing addition to the toolkit,” said Fred Iutzi, director of research and commercialization with the Savanna Institute. Because they’re perennial and tall in stature, they help create an important year-round diversity of ecosystems in the farm landscape, in addition to supporting a diversity of species, Iutzi said.
“The real powerhouse of our agriculture is based on grain crops and grazing crops, but trees are an amazing addition to the toolkit.”
Several efforts to promote perennial agriculture have received influxes of funding in recent years. As part of last year’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funding program within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the agency dedicated $60 million to agroforestry, for instance.
The Savanna Institute plans to scale up its agroforestry work as a result, said Iutzi. “And that will work hand in glove with the money that’s available for farmer incentives, as farmers will receive free technical assistance here and in making agroforestry a reality on their farms.”
The Savanna Institute also plans to use some of the new funding to measure and document indicators like how agroforestry practices mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and to develop relationships with processors and buyers that might be interested in expanding their Midwest sourcing of perennials like tree fruit and nut crops.
In 2020, the USDA also awarded $10 million to a coalition of farmers, scientists, educators, policymakers, and food industry players to help scale up Kernza production. The five-year Kernza CAP initiative, spearheaded by The Land Institute and the University of Minnesota, recently released its year-two annual report outlining its progress on efforts like creating recommendations for optimizing yield, profitability, and environmental quality and developing supply chains and products.
Iutzi believes that perennials can help solve many of the problems facing the world—and that we need to think of agricultural productivity in a more holistic way that includes factors like biodiversity. “One of the biggest challenges in front of humanity is how we get both ample food while providing a stable climate, healthy soil, clean water, and biodiversity,” he said. “We have to expect both from our agricultural landscapes.”
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]]>The post Young People Working for Food Justice in North Carolina appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>A version of this article originally appeared in the October issue of the Deep Dish, our monthly newsletter for members. Become a member today to receive the next issue.
Over a few weeks this fall, the youth involved in the Growing Change program have adopted two orphaned cows: One was born in the driving rain of Hurricane Ian and got so wet her mother did not recognize her scent; the other was a rejected twin. The young men, who are part of a project to flip a decommissioned North Carolina prison into a sustainable farm, are bottle-feeding the two animals and plan to introduce them into the farm’s multi-species grazing system soon.
“There should be a term beyond humanely raised,” says Noran Sanford, Growing Change’s founder and executive director, for the love and care the boys are giving the animals.
Seven 14- and 15-year-olds, all on the edge of the criminal justice system, comprise the current group helping convert the Scotland Correctional Facility, abandoned since 2001, into a working farm and education center. (We first reported on the effort in 2020.)
Growing Change is one of seven youth-led food justice organizations across North Carolina that make up the Food Youth Initiative (FYI), a project of NC State University. Other FYI groups include Transplanting Traditions, a community farm led by Karen refugees from Myanmar, PJC Poder Juvenile Campesino, a farmworker youth council affiliated with NC FIELD, and Pupusas for Education, a nonprofit that provides higher education scholarships to undocumented and DACAmented students.
“Youth are going up against the tide all the time,” says FYI’s youth food systems coordinator Bevelyn Ukah. “On the other hand, youth are the best, the most provocative storytellers in the world. In that sense, they’re well positioned and our greatest hope. Not because, ‘Oh my gosh, youth are the future,’ but because of their levels of willingness and courage to push against the status quo.”
The pandemic presented FYI with great challenges: For a couple years, the organization was not able to carry out its central work of convening youth to learn, share ideas, and build off each other’s energy. But the group is finding its footing once again, Ukah says.
“[Young people are] well-positioned and our greatest hope. Not because, ‘Oh my gosh, youth are the future,’ but because of their levels of willingness and courage to push against the status quo.”
Significantly, FYI recently received a $1.7 million grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield to fund racial equity work in food systems. And the organization is once again bringing young people together. In its first in-person effort since the pandemic, about 18 participants and their adult allies painted a food-justice mural on the side of a community food truck that will be used to help prospective chefs and young people launch food businesses and navigate the systemic barriers that often stand in the way. After an eight-month process, they unveiled the completed truck at the Transplanting Traditions farm in June.
“It’s really important to create the space where youth have roots,” said Cecilia Polanco, the director of development of Pupusas for Education, who is also helping lead FYI’s racial equity work. “If they see an injustice or need support, they’ve got supportive adult relationships they can call on. We’re also creating a standard they take into the world with them [where they can say], ‘Actually, this is not right. We can do better.’”
In addition to caring for the baby cows and carrying out other elements of the program’s master plan, the young men at Growing Change are establishing a vermicomposting business using food waste they collect from local residents and businesses. They are also expanding a project they developed during the pandemic to distribute boxes of food to people in need. To stock the boxes, they collect overflow food from the local food bank and partner with local churches to help them establish gardens.
“They’re feeding hungry neighbors,” says Sanford, “but deeper than that, they’re demonstrating that despite their challenges, they can be part of the solution, not the focus of the problem.”
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]]>The post Absent Federal Oversight of Animal Agriculture Safety, States and Others Step Up for Change appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When he arrived in the United States from Guatemala in 2012, Efrain got a job at a dairy farm in Vermont. There, he slept on a wooden pallet on the floor of the calf barn because his employer didn’t provide housing. Two years later, when he slipped and injured his back on the icy steps at another dairy, he worked the remaining six hours of his shift, afraid of what would happen if he stopped.
During his first few years in the country, Efrain, who has asked that we not use his last name for fear of retaliation from immigration authorities, never felt completely safe or secure in his job. That changed in 2018 when his current employer, a medium-sized Vermont dairy, joined Milk with Dignity, a program that sets worker-developed standards for wages, safety, housing, and scheduling, among other things.
Now, the 30-year-old works alongside a few other hired workers. He is paid more, his schedule is stable, he has a full day off every week, and he can take paid time off when he’s sick. The whole feeling of work is different now, he said. He feels safe, comfortable, and supported.
“Beforehand, they didn’t care about the conditions; you just had to get the work done however you could. There was nobody checking to see if you could do it safely,” Efrain said through a translator. “Now, it’s very different. They have to give you protective equipment, and if there’s not, you speak up and they provide it. They take measures to make sure we can work safely.”
“I think the COVID crisis exposed the intense fragility of this industry. It started people asking how efficient is too efficient? At what point does efficiency become violence?”
This is a bright spot. In animal agriculture, where a budget rider exempts 96 percent of the operations that hire workers from federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protections, innovative programs like Milk with Dignity—as well as a few states’ efforts to pass worker-centered legislation—are signaling that change is possible. They’re also proving it can be affordable for farms, too.
While advocates have pushed to improve federal protections for years with only limited success, those worker-driven programs, as well as state-level innovations, have blanketed the nation in a patchwork of fixes. Even as federal changes lag behind, smaller-scale efforts are gaining momentum.
“I think the COVID crisis exposed the intense fragility of this industry,” said Alex Blanchette, a professor of anthropology at Tufts University who worked in pork production to write the book Porkopolis. “It started people asking how efficient is too efficient? At what point does efficiency become violence?”
A Worker-Developed Standard
After years of pursuing protections for dairy workers in Vermont and New York, the immigrant-led organization Migrant Justice created Milk with Dignity, taking inspiration from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), the tomato pickers from south-central Florida who developed the worker-driven Fair Food Program.
Through Milk with Dignity, dairy farms can receive a premium for milk in exchange for complying with a code of conduct developed by workers. The Milk with Dignity Standards Council (MDSC) monitors compliance, audits dairies annually, and leads corrective action when needed. If working conditions aren’t up to standard—workers can report concerns without fear of retaliation.
“This really takes that extreme power imbalance, upends it, and says to corporations, ‘The workers in your supply chain are now your business partners.’”
Ben & Jerry’s became the first buyer to sign on to Milk with Dignity in 2014 after three years of negotiation and campaigning by workers, signaling the impact that corporate buy-in to worker initiatives can have. By last year, 51 dairy farms in Vermont and New York employed more than 200 workers to cover 100 percent of Ben & Jerry’s northeast dairy supply chain—all protected by Milk with Dignity standards.
Participating farms are required to collaborate with workers on developing site-specific health and safety processes. Those include practices around maintaining and operating heavy machinery, avoiding repetitive stress and musculoskeletal disorders, handling needles and chemicals, managing animals, ensuring proper ventilation, weathering extreme temperatures, communicating during emergencies, and accessing safety data sheets. Additionally, farms are required to offer new employees paid training and provide them with personal protective equipment.
“This really takes that extreme power imbalance, upends it, and says to corporations, ‘The workers in your supply chain are now your business partners—you’re signing a contract with them, where in essence, you are ceding power to them to determine the conditions in the supply chain,’” said Will Lambek of Migrant Justice.
A farmworker education session led by Migrant Justice. (Photo courtesy of Migrant Justice)
Tom Fritzsche, the MDSC executive director, noted that almost none of the farmers in the program had ever had their working conditions monitored before. “It can be uncomfortable to welcome an inspection and interviews with employees when that type of thing hasn’t happened before,” he said.
The result has been big improvements. Since 2019, the program has conducted hundreds of education sessions and farm audits and developed 1,340 corrective action plans—all of which were agreed to by farmers. The 24/7 worker support line has also received more than a thousand inquiries from farmers and workers.
Efrain feels fortunate to have landed at a farm where the human rights-focused program sets the standard. He no longer works 16-hour shifts, sleeps on the floor, or works for a supervisor who drinks and is difficult, like one of his first jobs. Now he is paid $875 a week, about double a prior wage. And where before, “There was no rest,” he’s now guaranteed a full day off every week.
State-Level Innovation
Many experts see the removal of the OSHA budget rider as key to protecting workers in animal agriculture from both short- and long-term dangers. But they aren’t optimistic its elimination will come soon.
“You have to have the political will to bring these CAFOs [Confined Animal Feeding Operations] under regulatory oversight,” said Robert Martin of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.
In the absence of federal change, it isn’t just programs like Milk with Dignity that serve as models for innovation. Some states are also testing ideas and retooling worker safety protections—and showing what is possible. “Federal labor standards are abysmal in a lot of ways, but we do see more promise with states kind of leading the charge to improve conditions for workers,” said Jessica Maxwell, the executive director of the Workers’ Center of New York.
“You have to have the political will to bring these CAFOs under regulatory oversight.”
States can choose to adopt stricter standards than those set by the federal government, and some do.
Thirteen of the 22 states and territories that run their own State Plan OSHA offices—including California, Washington, Oregon, Kentucky, Maryland, and Puerto Rico—do not observe the federal “small farm” exemption created by the OSHA budget rider. Because they allow OSHA oversight of farm operations that employ 10 or fewer non-family employees, they’re able to more closely supervise animal-ag workers.
Additionally, 14 states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin—have passed legislation guaranteeing collective bargaining rights for farmworkers.
And some states—including California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, and Washington—have passed laws that give agricultural workers more protections than federal standards, addressing issues such as overtime pay, minimum wage, meal breaks, and rest periods.
In 2019, for example, New York passed the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act, which took effect in January 2020. It grants farm workers overtime pay after 60 hours, a full day of rest each week, and disability and Paid Family Leave coverage, as well as unemployment benefits and other labor protections.
“We hear from workers all the time who used to work seven days a week who now do get that day off, that day of rest,” Maxwell said. And while the Workers’ Center still hears about workarounds—like farmers paying their workers in cash once they get over 60 hours to avoid the increased wage—she said, “in general, it’s had a big impact in terms of starting a shift. And that speaks again to why we need regulation, because that does start to create change on a bigger level.”
Photo credit: Vera Chang
Two states have also expanded OSHA’s powers through Local Emphasis Programs that extend OSHA’s authority in industry-specific ways. The programs began addressing worker safety in dairies beyond the federal standard in Wisconsin in 2011 and in New York in 2014. Both allow the agency to make random, unannounced compliance inspections. A study found they raised producers’ awareness of the workplace hazards and ways to mitigate them.
“We certainly heard from workers at the time that they were getting training that they’ve never gotten before, that they were getting equipment that they’ve never had before—whether it was more appropriate length gloves, or boots, or even something as simple as an eye washing station in case of exposure to chemicals,” said Maggie Gray, a political science professor at Adelphi University in New York who studies low-wage, immigrant agriculture workers. To increase worker safety, she said, “Other states could also push for Local Emphasis Programs.”
A Culture of Safety—What Farmers Say Has Worked
As individual states enact worker protections, industry pushback often follows. “What you hear all the time is ‘You can’t do it, you’re going to kill the industry,’” said Maxwell of increased worker protections. But that isn’t true, she said.
For example, while the U.S. Farm Bureau Federation and other industry players said lowering the overtime threshold in New York to 40 hours would devastate the industry, California’s success in implementing a similar threshold reduction proved the opposite.
In a round of hearings in New York in January, California’s success “allowed us to make the argument of, ‘Look, the agricultural industry did not collapse. We don’t see a huge shuttering of farms; we haven’t seen a big layoff of workers,’” she said. “States moving on worker protection allows other states to show proof that the industry will not collapse when you provide worker protection like the ag lobby says it will.”
Farmers and workers inside the Milk with Dignity program provide key insights into why worker-centered changes have worked.
Matt Maxwell, who operates Maxwell’s Neighborhood Farm, a third-generation dairy in Newport, Vermont, enrolled his operation in the Milk with Dignity program as soon as it was offered in 2018.
Before joining, the farm treated its workers well, he said. But he reported in the program’s first biennial report in 2020 that in adhering to the industry standard, the farm had unintentionally paid low wages and offered substandard housing. Milk with Dignity positioned the farm to increase its wages—and improved “both the business and employee sides of the operation,” he said.
“Since joining Milk with Dignity, our farm has maintained an 85 percent employee retention rate,” Maxwell noted in the report. “Less turnover has led to higher morale and greater workplace continuity.”
Photo courtesy of Migrant Justice.
He said the program also enabled his farm to make huge strides in communication with its employees. “Where before we may have had a company-wide meeting once a month, now they are held weekly,” Maxwell said. “The increased interaction has been a benefit to us both. Problems are identified earlier and corrections made where necessary.” In addition to more open lines of communication, “everyone has a job description and has been trained on safety and procedural protocols.”
Clement Gervais of the large, three-generation Gervais Family Farm in Franklin County, Vermont said the program helped his farm respond to COVID and better address safety issues, according to the 2022 Milk with Dignity report. In addition to coordinating employee vaccinations during the COVID outbreak, Milk with Dignity also helped create safety protocols, bilingual safety posters, and pamphlets for new employees.
Like the Maxwell farm, the Gervais farm credits Milk with Dignity for improving its communication with workers. “That can be bridging the language barrier, or helping both sides negotiate conflicts if they arise,” Gervais said in the report. Overall, “Milk with Dignity has been a very positive program helping immigrant workers on my farm.”
For workers, the energy at dairies just feels different in the Milk with Dignity program.
“The bosses have more trust in our work; they aren’t always looking over our shoulders,” Efrain said. “I don’t know exactly what the Milk with Dignity people told them, but it’s really changed their mindset, whatever it is,” he said. “Now, I feel freer, I feel calmer, I feel safer at work.”
Efrain explained the improved safety response. On a snowy morning before the Milk with Dignity program existed, he was leading cows in from a corral to be milked when he slipped on the icy steps of the milking parlor. “I didn’t feel anything other than the pain when I landed, just excruciating pain on my left side,” he said. He let his bosses know about his fall, he said, “but they didn’t really care.”
Because there was no one else to fill in for him, Efrain felt he had no other option but to continue milking the cows. “To be honest, at that time, we all worked with the fear that if you couldn’t do your work, you would just get fired,” he said.
“I couldn’t bend over, and I couldn’t turn to one side or the other,” he said. For the next month, he worked in a back brace—and finally started feeling some relief when a man came to his house to adjust his spine.
When a broken metal gate fell on his foot at his current workplace, however, he was able to tend to his injury. His employer provided a first aid kit—and then paid time off to recover.
“The protocols farms follow aren’t not cheap or easy, but farms are able to afford the changes through premiums paid on the milk.”
Still, getting animal-agriculture companies to sign onto worker-safety programs has proven difficult, because human rights often fall at the bottom of companies’ priority lists. “We see focus on organic and environmental practices,” Jessica Maxwell said, “and workers’ rights have really lagged in terms of getting the attention that it deserves in sustainable agriculture.
“Even Ben and Jerry’s, which is a progressive company, it’s not like they went out and created or supported a version of this program—workers did it,” she said. “We see it over and over again, that corporations consistently resist this sort of change.”
Milk with Dignity is currently applying similar pressure to Hannaford Supermarkets to get the New England and New York grocery chain to sign onto the program for its store-brand milk. Although companies resist, the program has proven that farms are capable of complying with regulations when forced to, said Fritzsche of the MDSC.
“The protocols that farms follow as a consumer protection measure are strict. They’re not cheap or easy to follow,” he said, adding the premiums farms receive through the program help them afford the changes.
Changes at the Federal Level
A concern among worker advocates about the state-centered approach is that it doesn’t reach workers in less progressive states. “At some point, we need that to shift to a federal level,” Jessica Maxwell said.
Though most experts are also not optimistic that federal change will come soon, Martin of the Center for a Livable Future said the Biden administration’s approach to monopolies—including those that control the meat and poultry industries and promote an anti-regulatory agenda—is encouraging.
“The source of most of the dysfunction in the animal ag industry is the concentrated economic and political power of the companies,” he said. “So, when Joe Biden says he’s going to look at antitrust and price fixing of the companies, that’s a good thing to do.”
Martin believes there OSHA should meanwhile step up inspections and enforcement to make sure existing rules are followed until additional legislation to protect workers can be passed. This includes providing training and instructions for personal protective equipment in the languages that workers actually speak, not just in English, he said.
“I don’t think any state is allocating enough financial and human resources to CAFO oversight,” Martin said. “It’s an across-the-board lack of oversight of these operations . . . [resulting in] a mistreatment of workers and the broader community.”
A 2020 report on the agency in the American Journal of Public Health suggested OSHA can also benefit from more standards-writing staff and a nimbler process by which to update its health and safety standards. Many OSHA safety standards, created in the 1970s, don’t reflect the present, industrial conditions of animal agriculture. For example, 90 percent of the chemical exposure limits don’t account for the majority of the chemicals in the present-day workplace.
Building Momentum, Pushing Forward
Jessica Maxwell stressed that for improved regulations to be meaningful, however, the animal-agriculture industry needs to overhaul—and slow down—the way it operates, putting less emphasis on peak speed and efficiency. “Some of the ways we do our agriculture have become so unsustainable that it’s like we’re putting Band-Aids on,” she said. “We need more systemic change.”
Dr. Athena Ramos, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and principal author of a 2018 study of swine confinement workers in Missouri, hopes that as systemic changes take hold, researchers can collaborate with willing producers to fine-tune solutions to safety issues, including workers’ chronic respiratory problems.
Ramos and her collaborators recommend baseline health screening to assess respiratory health as people are hired, for example, so that workers could be assigned to job sites that don’t exacerbate preexisting health conditions, she said. Follow-up screenings throughout a worker’s tenure can help detect changes in health and further inform assignments.
At right, Efrain, with his brother Ervin (at left), who works at the same dairy. Also pictured are Ervin’s wife and daughter.
She also proposed farms conduct regular safety audits to check whether workers are using available personal protective equipment and donning it properly. And safety training—or safety messaging—should be offered throughout a worker’s tenure, in their primary language, by a qualified and trained professional—not just someone who happens to speak the language.
“It’s about developing a culture of safety where worker health is prioritized at the same level as the animal health and well-being,” Ramos said. “Contract growers face tremendous pressures. But we’ve got to find a way that we can balance the productivity and the bottom line with worker health and safety.”
For now, workers like Efrain take solace in their gains. Since the Milk with Dignity program increased his pay and days off, Efrain has been able to start enjoying his life more. His brother Ervin got a job at the same dairy a few years after he did, and Ervin’s wife was able to join him. The two recently had their first child.
“Vermont has been a beautiful place to live, and every year has been different and new,” Efrain said. In the spring, “all the wildflowers come out, and you’re surrounded by flowers. It’s a very happy and pleasant area.”
He recently bought a car and can now leave the farm with friends to play soccer. “I feel comfortable here,” he said. “I feel comfortable with the changes that have happened.”
As workers realize success—at the state and local levels, and through industry-focused programs—momentum builds. “Workers see that they’re able to make changes, and then able to benefit from those changes,” Maxwell said. “And that creates momentum and empowerment to continue pushing forward and doing more.”
“I feel comfortable here,” he said. “I feel comfortable with the changes that have happened.”
Such worker empowerment is one of the most important levers for creating change, she said. “The most protected worker is an informed and educated worker who feels like they have the support to speak out and advocate for themselves,” said Maxwell.
Another key is educating lawmakers—and consumers—about the conditions under which animal agriculture workers work. Changes come from people caring about the treatment of the workers behind their food and applying pressure to elected officials, according to Martin.
“Politicians see the light when they begin to feel the heat,” he said, and, in this case, “the heat comes from political activity and organization.”
Read the entire series here, our methodology here, and check back here for our follow-up reporting.
Gosia Wozniacka contributed reporting to this story.
The post Absent Federal Oversight of Animal Agriculture Safety, States and Others Step Up for Change appeared first on Civil Eats.
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]]>On a rainy morning in September 2013, Lazaro Alvarez Andrade greeted the cows at the small dairy where he worked in rural New York. He was preparing to lead them six at a time into the milking parlor when he heard the thunder of hooves behind him. Before he could run, a young bull—which had been brought to the farm without his knowledge—rammed into him from behind, slamming him to the ground. As he fell, his face struck a metal rail separating two cow stalls. He felt intense pain, and he could not see out of his right eye. Blood gushed from his face, soaking his short-sleeved shirt and denim pants and running over his oilcloth boots.
The owner of the farm, an older white man, pulled the bull off. He led Andrade to a chair outside the milking parlor and told him to sit; he’d take him to the hospital once he had milked the cows—around 80 total—he said. For at least two hours, Andrade sat bleeding outside the milking parlor while the farmer finished the morning’s chores.
Even more present than the intense pain, Andrade said later in Spanish, was his worry that he would lose his eye. “It’s not like losing a foot or a hand—vision is the most important thing,” he said. “I would have been totally useless.”
Originally from Mexico City, Andrade had been in the United States for only five months. Prior to his arrival, he had worked in transportation logistics for the pharmaceutical industry for 40 years before his employer automated operations and laid him off. In search of work to put his son and daughter through college and support his wife and elderly parents, he emigrated to the U.S. at 55 years old. In his new country, he did not have family, he did not speak English, and he had no one—except his employer—to turn to for support.
Outside the milking parlor, he did the only thing he could think of to help himself: he found a bottle of iodine used to disinfect the cows’ teats, applied some to a towel, and held it to his face to control the bleeding. “I felt really vulnerable,” he said.
Lazaro Alvarez Andrade days after he was attacked by a bull and almost lost his eye. (Photo by Rebecca Fuentes.)
The bull attack nearly cost Andrade his vision, in addition to breaking two of his teeth, fracturing bones in his face and cracking two of his ribs. It also triggered a chain of events that revealed just how precarious his position was, working in the U.S. in an industry with few protections for workers like him.
Even though agriculture is one of the most dangerous occupations in the country, ranking third among all occupations in fatal injuries, workers in the U.S. dairy, poultry, and livestock industries lack the basic protections that workers in most every other industry take for granted. While the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), created in 1970 to oversee worker safety, has hundreds of standards to protect workers in industries like construction, it has only a handful protecting workers in agriculture.
And workers like Andrade are often exempt from the labor protections it does offer. That’s because a rider attached to OSHA’s budget in 1976 aiming at protecting small farms from onerous government oversight prohibits the agency from using federal funds to investigate injuries and deaths on farms with 10 or fewer non-family employees. Exceptions are only made for farms that maintain labor camps.
Today, in the increasingly industrialized and automated U.S. dairy, poultry, and livestock industries, where a single worker can tend thousands of animals and a staff of fewer than 10 is the norm, the rider leaves the vast majority of animal agriculture workers without oversight or recourse when they get hurt. Even when a worker is severely injured or killed on a farm with 10 or fewer workers, OSHA is prohibited from investigating.
Despite research, news reports, and articles about worker injuries and deaths, a Civil Eats investigation has found that because of the exemption, workers are unprotected by federal OSHA labor laws at 96 percent of the operations that hire people to produce pork, eggs, beef, poultry, and milk in America. And federal OSHA sees only a sliver of the total fatalities associated with that work. Over the decade between 2011 and 2020, for instance, 85 percent of the deaths related to animal agriculture were not reported to the agency.
It is impossible to know how many worker deaths OSHA’s limited authority obscures. What is clear, however, is that the federal government lacks a true picture of the dangers of animal agriculture.
OSHA confirmed that the rider handicaps its ability to address the safety of animal agriculture.
“The rider places limitations on OSHA’s ability to intervene, but that does not diminish our concern for worker safety,” said Doug Parker, OSHA’s assistant secretary of labor. Parker did not respond to more detailed questions about the high percentage of fatalities falling outside the agency’s jurisdiction or OSHA’s inability to investigate worker deaths.
It is impossible to know how many worker deaths this limited authority obscures. No other federal agency routinely gathers data that is specific to injuries and deaths among farm employees, making it tough to parse them from overall farm fatalities. What is clear, however, is that the federal government lacks a true picture of the dangers of animal agriculture, and though a small number of states can investigate small-farm incidents using state funds, federal OSHA legally cannot investigate or sanction employers in what may be a significant number of worker deaths.
“Agriculture is dangerous, animals are dangerous, and really, the government’s hands are tied to help workers. And a lot of these are immigrant workers who are very scared to complain and speak up,” said Deborah Berkowitz, who spent six years as chief of staff and then a senior policy adviser for OSHA during President Obama’s administration.
The lack of safeguards is especially alarming, given the factory-like state of animal agriculture today. More than 90 percent of agricultural animals in the U.S. are raised mostly indoors in facilities called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which typically house at least 1,000 “animal units”—equal to about 1,000 beef cows, 2,500 hogs, or 125,000 broiler chickens—on site.
What OSHA reports do exist paint an ugly picture. Thirteen people have drowned or asphyxiated in manure pits at dairies since 2003; others have died after being attacked, gored, or trampled by cows or bulls, entangled in rotating equipment, crushed or run over by heavy machinery, and suffocated in piles of hay, grain bins, and silos.
In dairies and hog and poultry barns, a number of workers have accidentally injected themselves with vaccines intended for the animals, resulting in poisoning or wounds. Dairy workers have been hospitalized after drinking chemicals they mistook for water. Exposure to manure infected at least one hog barn worker with E-coli, and others have lacerated their feet with the power washers required to clean the floors. And workers across most animal-agriculture industries are frequent victims of amputations caused by oft-present heavy machinery that catches clothes and body parts, or by crushing injuries sustained while moving animals.
These incidents are in addition to the innumerable broken bones, sprains, and head injuries normally associated with manual labor and animal contact. And though identified as “accidents,” many of them would be preventable through training, safety equipment, and more standardized protocols.
Despite the dangers inherent in the work, the agricultural lobby, led by organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, opposes regulation and worker protection with arguments that hearken back to the idea of farming as a natural, wholesome occupation and farmers as self-reliant people who do not need government bureaucracy in their way.
Members including the Farm Bureau, as well as poultry, meat, and dairy companies and trade groups, declined to comment on their anti-regulatory agenda or respond to detailed questions from Civil Eats about the OSHA exemption and its impact on the safety of animal agriculture workers. However, a few—namely the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), and Smithfield—pointed to voluntary industry safety programs as evidence of their concern for worker safety.
“Smithfield Foods supports sensible government regulations that protect the health and safety of our workers,” said Ray Atkinson, Smithfield’s director of external communications, in a statement. “Worker safety and health is a key pillar of Smithfield’s industry-leading philosophy.”
Still, critics say the industry’s exemptions from worker protections should be re-examined. “There’s always been this myth of the Yeoman farmer out there,” said Robert Martin, director of the food system policy program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. “‘We don’t need to regulate agriculture; it’s an individualized industry.’ There’s been this agricultural exceptionalism in policy, regulation, and legislation, and it’s really just not the way things are anymore.”
Lazaro Alvarez Andrade is among those most impacted. After two hours outside the milking parlor, the farmer’s wife drove him to the hospital in the farm’s pickup truck, stopping by the house the farmer provided about five minutes down the road so he could put on a clean shirt. Because she spoke only English and he spoke only Spanish, they were quiet during the near half-hour drive from there to the hospital.
Around 1 p.m., three hours after the incident, Andrade finally saw a medical team. The doctor was surprised, he remembered. “They said, ‘What happened to you? What happened to you?’” Andrade said. “I had a lot of blood on me, and it was continuing to bleed.”
The doctor gave Andrade five stiches from the middle of his right cheek up to his right eye. He wanted to put in a sixth stitch as well, but it may have damaged his eyeball, so he refrained. The doctor told Andrade that given the seriousness of his injuries, he was lucky to have emerged with his vision—and his life.
Minimizing Risk and Externalizing Impacts
This country is dotted with CAFOs. From Washington to Iowa to North Carolina and across great swaths of the Southwest, barn after windowless barn holds cows, hogs, and chickens being milked, fed, and watered by the thousands, sometimes the tens or hundreds of thousands.
A tiny handful of companies reap the largest share of profits from these operations. In pursuit of efficiency and revenue, animal agriculture has become extremely consolidated over the last few decades. Now, the top four companies in each industry control the majority of the market share—54 percent of the poultry industry, 70 percent of the pork industry, and 85 percent of the beef industry. They make billions—in fiscal year 2021, for example, the top processor Tyson Foods reported sales of $47.05 billion.
Meat and poultry companies—including Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield—are practiced at diffusing risk, minimizing liability, and externalizing the negative impacts of their operations through contracting and byzantine corporate structures. For instance, as vertically integrated corporations, or “integrators,” they contract with independent farmers to grow their animals, and those farmers then hire the laborers needed to manage the animals, a setup that distances the corporation from the people doing the work—and often allows the workforce to fall below the threshold for OSHA oversight.
The companies named and their trade group affiliates did not respond to detailed questions from Civil Eats about their use of these techniques.
Aaron Johnson, who manages the Challenging Corporate Power program with Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI) and works most closely with the poultry industry, said the tactics externalize labor risks. “They have got more than 10 growers in a region, but because those are each independent entities, then none of those growers and whoever else is working on those farms would be under OSHA scrutiny,” he said. “Perdue’s overall labor pool is definitely above that OSHA exemption, but because they’ve externalized that out into the contract structure, they don’t have to worry about it.”
In the hog industry, larger companies have also found a way to divide up the workforce and avoid liabilities, potentially also avoiding OSHA oversight. Take the Illinois-based Carthage System, for example. A top pork producer in the U.S., Carthage exemplifies a growing model of hog farming that brings management and service firms together with investors to cooperatively fund CAFOs that purport to be family farms.
Hogs inside a finishing barn in Iowa.
The CAFOs are registered as subsidiary LLCs and run by management firms, not by farmers. Other LLCs in the system are set up to site the CAFOs, train and manage employees, run labor camps that house workers, conduct animal research, and provide veterinary services. In the Carthage system, the CAFOs breed and then wean a supply of feeder piglets for more than 300 farmers in six states who have invested in the system. Those farmers then grow the pigs to market weight and send them to processors for meat.
The network is specifically designed to protect corporate assets, shield the identities of investors and protect them from liability in the case of lawsuits, said Loka Ashwood, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky. Ashwood and her colleagues published a study about Carthage System and its network, which described how it allows one LLC to easily fold when faced with a pollution lawsuit or bankruptcy without impacting the assets of all the others.
The same structure can also shield the CAFOs from liability connected to labor issues, said Ashwood. And it provides little incentive to improve working conditions. Within Carthage, an LLC called Professional Swine Management hires and manages the laborers for all the CAFOs, shielding investors from any disputes or investigations arising over worker health and safety. It’s nearly impossible to decipher who the investors are, she said, so workers can’t directly pressure or sue them.
OSHA said that each CAFO registered as an LLC is liable as a separate entity. “Evaluation of corporate structure is assessed on a case-by-case basis,” the agency told Civil Eats. The scenario allows corporate networks to divvy up a large number of workers among dozens of CAFOs, potentially pushing some below the threshold for OSHA enforcement and keeping workers outside the reach of federal OSHA protections.
“If something egregious does happen, they’re incredibly isolated,” Ashwood said. “It’s hard on the people, and I think [the CAFOs] are made that way by design.”
Carthage isn’t unique in using the model, she said. Other pork powerhouses use a similar model, running a network of specialized LLCs to organize shareholder investments, deflect lawsuits, and minimize financial risks for investors, including for labor, Ashwood said.
Carthage System’s founders, Joe Connor and Bill Hollis, did not respond to phone calls or to detailed questions from Civil Eats about the ownership and structure of the organization.
A Compromised Mission
As an employee at a small New York dairy, Andrade was also working in a consolidated industry bent on efficiency and profit, often at the expense of other values. Following his third doctor’s appointment, nine days after his accident, he struggled to talk because of his facial fractures and damaged teeth, and his broken ribs made bending and climbing stairs painful.
He was eating a traditional Mexican breakfast in the two-story house he shared with a man named Salvador, a dairy worker at another operation in the area, when the farmer appeared in the doorway. With Salvador as translator, the farmer told Andrade that he was no longer going to be useful on the farm and had no more work there. He handed him $500 in cash owed for the previous week’s work and told him to leave.
While the farmer had been kind to Andrade before the accident—even taking him to the store to buy groceries a few days prior—he approached Andrade in its aftermath with aggression, speaking harshly, and opening and closing his fists, Andrade said. “He was trying to scare me, to cause me to be fearful, saying I wasn’t going to be able to work there anymore,” he said.
“The first thing that came into my head is, ‘Where am I going to go? I have nowhere to go if the house and the work go together,’” Andrade said. Given the farmer’s behavior, he sensed he needed to be out soon.
To help Andrade have a place to live while he healed, Salvador quit his job to head south for different work. The two left that night.
Especially at operations not under OSHA’s jurisdiction, workers like Andrade are at the mercy of their employers—the conditions they set, the rules they create.
“Congress passed this law with a lot of promise, and then Republicans and big business have tried to weaken and even kill the law ever since.”
“In essence, there is no oversight for labor and housing conditions for immigrant farmworkers,” said Will Lambek of Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based nonprofit that helps farmworkers attain economic justice and human rights. For foreign workers especially, he said, there are no effective ways to protect their rights through litigation and no practicable means for workers to win rights through collective bargaining. “There is no effective regulatory apparatus,” he said. “What employers say goes, and workers have very little recourse.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. President Richard Nixon created OSHA in 1970 to require that American employers provide their employees with safe work environments. But almost immediately, corporate forces began efforts to restrict or abolish it, citing what they viewed as its unnecessary and costly bureaucracy.
“Congress passed this law with a lot of promise, and then Republicans and big business have tried to weaken and even kill the law ever since,” Berkowitz said. “I started in the field in 1978, and there were all these bills to get rid of OSHA enforcement. There are still bills coming now to get rid of OSHA. Even though it’s such a weak and small agency. . . . It’s always been a target of big business.”
OSHA’s budget is consequently anemic. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had an $8 billion budget in 2020, OSHA’s budget was a mere $600 million that year, according to a report on the agency. And while OSHA oversees between 7 and 8 million workplaces employing around 130 million workers, federal and state OSHAs combined have only around 2,000 inspectors—and about 5.6 federal inspectors for every 1 million workers. That means that if OSHA inspectors were to visit each workplace once, it would take 165 years.
“All that power [the agricultural lobby has] is because of dollars given to politicians, spent on campaigns, or spent influencing state and local politics at every stage,” Berkowitz said. “The lobby is huge, and it’s powerful, and politicians get scared.”
Once the rider intended to relieve small farmers of the burdens of excessive bureaucracy passed in 1976, farms with 10 or fewer non-family employees and no temporary labor camp slipped out from under federal OSHA oversight. In addition to being prohibited from investigating worker injuries and deaths, OSHA also cannot conduct programmed safety or health inspections in these workplaces or respond to employee complaints.
Thirteen states and territories that run their own OSHA programs—including California, Washington, Oregon, and Virginia, as well as Puerto Rico—do allow oversight of small livestock operations using state funds and they have lower fatality rates than other states.
Andrade wasn’t living in one of those states. Wounded, and now unemployed and homeless, he was in an especially vulnerable position. He connected with Rebecca Fuentes at the Workers’ Center of Central New York, who he’d met at a health and safety outreach session she’d conducted at a large dairy where he’d worked.
While advocating on Andrade’s behalf, Fuentes soon collided with the small farm exemption. She filed a complaint with OSHA detailing Andrade’s accident, but the federal agency responded that because the dairy had fewer than 11 hired employees (just two, Andrade said), it was not within OSHA’s jurisdiction. The agency said it was prohibited from conducting an investigation.
“OSHA gave us a paper that said they couldn’t go there,” Fuentes said. “No matter if a worker dies, they cannot go there. They cannot do an inspection, they cannot fine them, they cannot spend one penny on a farm with 11 or less workers,” she said. “This is what the lobby is doing—they found this loophole, and they’re advising all the small farms not to be bothered.”
In places where OSHA does have oversight, it can and has made a difference: while an average of 38 people were killed at work each day nationwide back when the agency was first created, as of 2015, only about 13 people were killed at work each day, even with a workforce almost twice as big.
“At the end of the day, it has to come from regulation setting a playing field,” said Jessica Maxwell, the executive director of the Workers’ Center of Central New York, of improved conditions for workers. “Otherwise, that competition—that race to the bottom of cutting labor costs and increasing production to maximize profits—that’s always a losing game for workers.”
An Unseen, Unsupported Workforce
Though it was against the rules, Salvador snuck Andrade into the on-farm housing of the new dairy where he worked and let him sleep on a broken-down couch in the living room while he recuperated out of sight. “Salvador means ‘savior,’” Andrade noted, telling the story later.
In the months that followed, standing and talking were still painful and difficult, so he spent most of his time on the couch. But when Salvador would bring home groceries after his shift at the dairy—tortillas, rice, beans, meat, potatoes—Andrade would cook them into meals to show his appreciation. “I couldn’t exert myself too much, so I made simple things,” he said.
The absence of protection and support for animal-agriculture workers like Andrade has deep roots in history. They are not—and never have been—subject to the same protections as workers in other industries. The National Labor Relations Act, a federal law enacted in 1935 as part of the New Deal, enables workers to collectively bargain—and specifically excludes most farmworkers. And the Fair Labor Standards Act, enacted in 1938, created a minimum wage, established overtime pay, and put child labor protections in place—and purposefully exempted most farmworkers as well. Its protections for agricultural workers have improved only slightly since.
Aerial view of a North Carolina hog farm. (Photo CC-licensed by Waterkeeper Alliance, Inc.)
“In the creation of modern labor law regime in the U.S., two sectors were categorically excluded . . . agricultural workers and domestic workers,” said Lambek of Migrant Justice. “You don't need to be a history professor to guess who was performing agricultural and domestic work primarily in the United States in the 1930s. That is, of course, Black people—the descendants of slaves,” he said. “This was a legislative bargain that was deemed necessary to win the support of Southern Democratic senators to pass the landmark labor legislation.” And, he said, it forms the legislative basis for the conditions that we have today, nearly a century later.
The structure of the animal-agriculture industry reinforces workers’ invisibility and inability to access help and support, says Alex Blanchette, a professor of anthropology at Tufts University who worked in pork CAFOs to write the book Porkopolis, about how the standardization and industrialization of factory farms affects the rural communities that house them.
“A 20,000-head-a-day slaughterhouse for hogs might employ 1,000 to 2,000 different people on a single site. People are in constant contact with each other, and unions can form under those conditions,” he said. “But with CAFOs, with industrial animal production, we're talking companies that are splitting production across 500 different barn sites or something like that, spread across a 100-mile-radius region.”
Organizing workers is especially challenging when dealing with a group of workers, “that do not know each other, they all have different formal bosses and a subcontracting relationship, and in turn have minimal legal federal rights to unionize or organize,” Blanchette said.
And without the safeguard of formal OSHA oversight, workers at small livestock operations are at an extreme disadvantage if and when they try to access basic compensation and care for injuries.
That was the case for Andrade, who, in the aftermath of the bull attack, was told he needed to see eye and bone specialists, care he was not able to afford without a job. The Workers’ Center of Central New York put him in touch with immigration and workers’ compensation attorney Jose Perez, who manages about 30 workers’ comp cases per week for farm and animal agriculture workers in central and western New York.
According to Perez, the owner of the dairy farm where Andrade was hurt didn’t carry workers’ compensation insurance because he believed he did not employ enough workers to need it. And according to legal records, he disputed the claim that Andrade was an employee, saying he only hired him for temporary work. The farmer also denied witnessing the injury, according to the records. It was basically one person’s word against another’s, Perez said. “The farmer played dumb—‘I don’t know what happened; I was not there; I didn’t see anything,’” he said.
Perez litigated the case. “They made many claims,” he said about the farmer. “What really saved us, to be honest, was when we went to get the medical records . . . Lazaro talked to one nurse and explained how the injury happened.” The medical record corroborated Andrade’s account.
Andrade chose to settle in 2016, three years after the injury, for $10,000. When he saw specialists soon after, they advised recasting his broken ribs, which had healed out of alignment, to avoid lifelong pain.
That outcome would likely have been different if OSHA had been allowed to investigate and document what happened after Andrade’s attack, Perez said. “It would have made my case right away.”
In addition to resolving Andrade’s case and getting him the money he needed to see medical specialists sooner, an OSHA investigation may also have resulted in safer conditions on the dairy, Andrade said. “I believe OSHA would have given recommendations to make it safer for the workers, because bulls are big and always aggressive.”
In a Consolidated Industry, Corporations Create the Rules
Even in circumstances where OSHA can intercede, penalties for lives lost and lifelong, debilitating injuries sustained in animal agriculture are often nominal and can vary widely.
For example, in Parks, Nebraska, when an employee at a cattle feedlot became engulfed in grain and suffocated in 2011, OSHA fined the operation $64,000. Minnesota OSHA fined an egg-production facility in Mapleton, Minnesota, $32,350 after an employee became entangled in the rotating shaft of the conveyor system and died in 2018. But the agency in Virginia requested no apparent penalties from a dairy farm in Bridgewater, Virginia, after five people were asphyxiated by gasses in a liquid cow manure pit in 2007. Nor did it assign penalties after an employee was killed by a charging steer at a cattle ranch in Bland, Virginia in 2020.
Still, OSHA did record violations in two of those cases and required that the operations abate health and safety issues. That’s much more accountability than in incidents like Andrade’s, which fall outside the agency’s purview.
Some see farmers as caught in the fray between their workers and the industry. Because the meat and dairy industries are built on efficiency and profit margins are slim, those growers often focus on survival—and simply being able to pay their workers—rather than improving workplace safety.
Lazaro Alvarez Andrade at work at a dairy years after his injury. (Photo courtesy of Lazaro Alvarez Andrade)
“On small farms, it’s not like people are saying, ‘I want to create an unsafe environment.’ It’s not like they’re saying, ‘I don’t care about my workers,’” said Maggie Gray, a professor of political science at Adelphi University in New York who studies low-wage, non-citizen workers in the food and agriculture industry. “A lot of these smaller farmers, they're trying to do the best they can. And because of the economics of farming, it's really hard for them to have safe workplaces.”
Over the years, Congressional leaders have made attempts to remove the appropriations rider, though all have failed. In 1999, Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) proposed an amendment to give OSHA permission to investigate deaths on small farms if the victims were children. Reed emphasized that the agency would be restricted to determining the cause of the accident and would have no power to impose penalties. The proposal failed in a committee vote.
“A lot of these smaller farmers, they’re trying to do the best they can. And because of the economics of farming, it’s really hard for them to have safe workplaces.”
In recent years, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee and the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations subcommittee, has repeatedly tried to remove the rider from the bill that funds OSHA. “The implications this language has on worker health and safety and racial equity give it no place in our federal spending bill,” she said via email.
While the House labor appropriations committee for fiscal years 2020, 2021, and 2022 removed the provision, she said Republicans refused to remove it from funding legislation, and the rider has gone through each time. “The meat industry continues to push back against sensible protection measures for their workers, prioritizing production and profits over health, safety, and equity,” she wrote.
About a dozen meat, dairy, and poultry trade associations and companies contacted by Civil Eats declined to comment on this characterization or answer detailed questions regarding the industry’s lobbying expenditures and reliance on family farm narratives to discourage regulation.
Dairy cows gather at a farm in Visalia, California. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
A few did, however, pointed to voluntary industry safety programs. The North American Meat Institute, which represents the companies that process 95 percent of the pork, beef, and veal in the U.S., said its partners’ Protein PACT aims to reduce 2019 workplace injury levels by 50 percent by 2030.
Smithfield described its Smithfield Injury Prevention System (SIPS) program, a worker-safety program implemented in 2018 that involves annual audits of all facilities, including farms.
“These initiatives, among others, are responsible for Smithfield’s safety record that not only exceeds our industry peers, but also tracks better than a broad range of non-manufacturing-industry sectors,” said Atkinson, Smithfield’s director of communications, in a statement.
The National Pork Producers Council similarly stressed “agriculture’s proven track record” of developing health and safety management plans and worker safety training programs. “While OSHA regulations cover all farms, pig farmers go beyond regulatory compliance to protect the health and well-being of their employees,” a council representative said in a statement, describing the industry’s investments in on-farm certification and auditing programs and training to support worker safety.
Berkowitz, however, describes the agricultural lobby as "incredibly powerful" and bent on fighting government regulation.
In 2021, for example, the National Pork Producers Council alone spent $2.2 million lobbying at the federal level, and Dairy Farmers of America spent $1.3 million. Individual companies spent nearly as much or more. Tyson Foods spent almost $2 million in 2021; the China-based WH Group, the largest pork company in the world and owner of Smithfield Foods, spent $920,000; and the Brazil-based JBS, the largest meatpacking company in the world, spent $794,000.
The lobby relies on a number of techniques to sway legislation and public opinion, using campaign contributions to influence politicians toward their causes, employing ag gag laws to silence critics, and relying on philanthropic arms that fund things like community centers and child nutrition programs to build goodwill—and distract from the harm they cause.
The meat industry’s arguments against regulation and worker protection are often most strident when they center on the idea of “family farms”—of small, independent, mom-and-pop operations just scraping by, according to numerous interviews, as well as industry statements on proposed legislation. They emphasize that these homespun establishments are the American way and that requiring them to abide by government health and safety standards, like other workplaces, could put them out of business.
In one 2012 example, when the Obama administration tried to pass agricultural child labor laws to protect children from dying on farms (which was happening for teens at a rate more than four times that of those working in non-agriculture industries), the agricultural lobby and its representatives rallied government leaders and the general public the against it.
Though the proposal exempted children who worked on their parents’ farms, it drew vehement criticism from the Farm Bureau as well as Republican lawmakers and a few Democrats, too—all centered on the idea that the protections would prevent farm children from being able to do chores, destroying family farms. More than 70 House lawmakers, led by Representative Denny Rehberg (R-Montana), wrote the Labor Department a letter saying the rule challenged “the conventional wisdom of what defines a family farm in the United States.”
“Even though they specifically exempted any relative,” said Berkowitz, who was leading OSHA at the time, “the farm lobby screamed and yelled at the top of their lungs and got ginned up that this would be the ‘end of the family farms.’” In response, the Labor Department withdrew the proposal.
Hard Realities on the Ground
After a couple months on his friend’s couch, Andrade eventually felt well enough to take a job at another dairy, and he has continued to work at dairies ever since, about 20 in all, ranging in size from small to huge. The largest CAFO he worked for employed about 50 people, all Latino, in demanding 12-hour shifts; he and five others were responsible for milking the operation’s 15,000 cows two to three times a day.
“It’s really work under pressure. You have to finish milking all the cows you’re supposed to,” he said. “You can’t let them go un-milked.”
Absent new legislation and increased scrutiny of animal agriculture, challenges for workers like Andrade continue. Over his near decade in the industry, he said he has never received training from his employers in any language and he has relied instead on word-of-mouth instruction from his colleagues to learn the ropes. Because of this, he has witnessed accidents in addition to his own.
In 2015, a coworker found an unmarked bottle containing a mixture of bleach and acid and, thinking it was liquid soap, applied it to his skin. When he inhaled the fumes, he began to have trouble breathing and talking. Hearing his screams, his coworkers, including Andrade, almost called an ambulance, but the man was able to recover his breath after a few hours without a trip to the hospital. And a few months ago, a near 1,500-pound dairy cow stepped on the foot of a woman he works with, putting her in the hospital and out of work for three months.
Additionally, through the Workers’ Center, Andrade knew a 31-year-old Guatemalan dairy worker named Marco Antonio who was killed in 2014 at a family-owned organic dairy farm in Penn Yan, New York. He had been cleaning an auger in the grain silo—a task he had never been trained to do—when his body got caught and mangled in the rotating machinery.
The lack of training and protocols in the dairy industry—on top of the long hours and demanding work—puts workers at a disadvantage when trying to stay safe. “If there were protocols in place, they would be followed,” said Andrade, who, through his affiliation with the Workers’ Center, has begun speaking out for other workers. “In the pharmaceutical industry where I worked for 40 years, we had written protocols.”
Photo credit: Vera Chang
Recounting his experience with his own injury, and OSHA’s limited jurisdiction and ability to help him, Andrade said he believes the agency should play a greater role in protecting the people who produce America’s meat, eggs, and milk.
“The economy in agriculture in the U.S. is based on Latino labor,” Andrade said. “The work is dirty, risky, and poorly paid.” In addition to investigating small farms, the federal agency should be stricter with all farms, he said. “There would be better supervision that way, and better work, and there wouldn’t be as many accidents.”
Gosia Wozniacka contributed reporting to this article.
Next: Workers face long-term respiratory disease inside CAFOs, but protective equipment is scarce and accountability for employers is scarcer. New risk management models shield corporations from liability. Read the full series here.
The post Animal Agriculture Is Dangerous Work. The People Who Do It Have Few Protections. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Co-Op Grocery Stores Expand Their Mission to Equity and Food Justice appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On a corner lot in the North End of Detroit, the the framing is underway for a Black-led, community-owned grocery cooperative, the first of its type in the city in recent times. Set to open in August 2023, the Detroit People’s Food Co-op will provide the neighborhood’s residents—who are predominantly low- and middle-income African Americans and have long lacked a high-quality, nearby grocery store—an easy source for healthy food.
Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, the organization behind the co-op, says the grocery store will address food security, but its mission is bigger than that.
“We’ve heard from people from all communities that this moment had given them the pause to discover cooperation.”
“You can have a Walmart move into a neighborhood and they can provide plenty of food and address food insecurity, but all the profits are extracted from the community,” he explains. “What we’re trying to do is activate the agency within our community so that people see themselves as having the ability to shape not only the food system but also the other systems that have influence over our lives.”
Rather than being owned by a corporation, family, or individual, modern-day grocery co-ops are owned and managed by the community members who shop there. When people buy in and become member-owners, they gain access to financial rewards as well as the right to weigh in on how the co-op is run. Non-owners can shop at most co-ops as well.
There is a long, often hidden history of Black Americans using the co-op model to thrive in the face of systemic racism. Even so, many of the grocery co-ops in the U.S. today were founded in the 1970s and ’80s by educated, affluent white people to provide natural and organic food they couldn’t easily find elsewhere, and they’ve largely served that demographic ever since.
Over the last decade, however, more co-ops rooted in the Black community have taken shape, and the co-op movement as a whole has increasingly shifted its focus from providing natural and organic foods to addressing a different need—the lack of racial equity and food justice. Since 2016, the Food Co-op Initiative (FCI), a Minnesota-based organization that advises and supports startup food co-ops, has seen the number of BIPOC-led co-ops it supports more than double, from seven to 17. The overall number of co-ops FCI works with has also grown, from 62 to 93—and many establishments not explicitly led by people of color are taking seriously the quest for racial equity.
A number of factors have driven the co-op movement’s new focus on food justice. Because mainstream establishments like Whole Foods and Walmart now make organics more readily available, co-ops are no longer required for that purpose alone and are well-positioned to solve a different problem. In addition, the pandemic revealed the brittleness of the supply chain, and the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 prompted a wider recognition of the racial inequity in America inside many white-led institutions.
“When we’re in crisis, we notice what’s inequitable; we notice what’s not working,” says JQ Hannah, FCI’s assistant director. “We’ve heard from people from all communities that this moment had given them the pause to discover cooperation. And they’re like, ‘Oh, we need a different way to do this.’ Also, the people whose communities were hit hardest were done with trusting the system to solve it.”
A rainbow flag to commemorate Pride Month hangs at the Durham Co-op Market, a member of the NCG network. (Photo credit: Durham Co-op Market)
C.E. Pugh, the CEO of co-op member association National Co+op Grocers (NCG), says there has been “a lot of soul searching and reflection” among leaders of the grocery co-op movement in recent years. “I would say the movement as a whole is really taking seriously and putting their money where their heart is and working at least within our organization and with each other to serve a more diverse community,” he says.
Serving More of the Community
While the shift to serving non-white and disadvantaged communities has been happening for years, the national traumas of 2020 really sped things up, says Hannah. “The funding rightly shifted very quickly to putting the money back in the hands of Black organizers to address food sovereignty,” they say. “Those communities were already doing the work, so they were ready for that influx of resources, and it has really exploded things.”
Black-led Gem City Market launched early in the pandemic in Dayton, Ohio, and a number of other Black-led cooperatives are in the process of opening, including the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, the North Flint Food Market, Little Africa Food Co-op in Cleveland, Fertile Ground in Raleigh, and the SoLA Food Co-op in South Los Angeles. The National Black Food & Justice Alliance (NBFJA) has been a big supporter of these organizations, convening regular meetings among more than a dozen Black-led groups in the process of starting cooperatives, Yakini says.
Black co-op operators from around the U.S. at Black-led Co-op Day at the Up and Coming Food Co-op Conference held in Madison, Wisconsin in May. (Photo credit: Malik Yakini)
In addition, existing co-ops are also looking to broaden their customer bases to better reflect their communities. Every neighborhood that NCG markets serve is becoming more diverse, says Pugh. “We’ve done a great job of serving a narrow slice of our communities,” he says. “But how can we serve the better serve the entire community?”
One challenge in serving lower-income customers, Pugh continues, is figuring out how to lower the price point without compromising too much on other values. Many co-ops in the NCG network are trying to offer more non-organic food options, which tend to be less expensive. “We do a lot of volume of natural and organic, and we have good buying power on that side,” Pugh says. “We have not developed that on the non-organic side of the supply chain, but that’s a work in progress.”
Hannah notes, however, that some BIPOC communities are not interested in conventional food. “It’s a moment to think very carefully about throwing food values under the bus in in the pursuit of being affordable,” they say.
In Detroit, the new co-op plans to offer 80 percent natural and organic foods and 20 percent conventional foods in an effort to strike a balance between making food financially accessible to shoppers and paying a respectable wage to grocery store employees, as well as the workers further up the supply chain. “We’re trying to create the most fair situation we can create,” Yakini says.
Weathering the Pandemic and Workforce Shakeups
Over the last few years, co-op leaders have had to continuously adjust how they operate to survive constantly changing conditions. In the early days of the pandemic, co-ops’ tight connections to their local communities enabled them to step in and help farmers get their food to local markets when national supply chains broke down, and many experienced their largest-ever sales days.
“Those co-ops that have a really strong cooperative culture, and the feeling that the work you do is for a higher purpose—a lot of those co-ops found that actually it was a good hiring moment.”
Although in June Pugh said NCG co-op operations had basically returned to normal, staff turnover continued to be somewhat of an issue, as it was across the service sector. In 2021, the turnover rate among NCG general managers nearly doubled from the normal 10-15 percent per year to 30 percent, Pugh says. And stores struggled to keep frontline positions filled: many delis and hot bars shuttered for weeks at a time, and some stores had to reduce their hours.
“There’s been a lot of sporadic disruption of operations because they just didn’t have enough people,” Pugh says.
However, with their embrace of community-centered values, including democracy, fairness, equality, and social responsibility, many cooperatives have found that they can attract values-driven employees. “Those co-ops that have a really strong cooperative culture, and the feeling that the work you do is for a higher purpose—a lot of those co-ops found that actually it was a good hiring moment,” they say. Many co-ops also found ways to offer hazard pay during the pandemic, and many have made those increases permanent, they say. And the fact that there are no executives at the top of the corporate ladder making astronomically more than the workers on the ground probably helps too.
Though COVID shook up the co-op world for a while, Hannah has been surprised at the lack of consumer appetite for big changes. “It’s fascinating to see people go back to business as usual,” they say, pointing to things like the current lack of online grocery ordering and the return of salad bars. “We were prepared for change, but the customers didn’t drive it.”
Overall, Pugh feels optimistic that grocery co-ops have learned a lot over the last few years and are in a stronger place as a result.
“Those people went through this pandemic together. They went through the absolute hell of trying to serve the public in extremely uncertain time with changing rules and regulations and thoughts and ideas from week to week,” he said. “They learned to collaborate better with one another and to depend on one another better than ever before—and that’s still in place today.”
The 25,000 square-foot Detroit Food Commons, which will house the Detroit People’s Food Co-op, broke ground in April. (Photo credit: Malik Yakini)
Building Self-Determination in Detroit
Although it’s not slated to open for nearly a year, the Detroit People’s Food Co-op has already attracted almost 1,500 of its 2,000-member goal. The cooperative model is the ideal choice for the Detroit store because it positions people to work collectively for the common good, unlike a traditional for-profit establishment, Yakini says.
“Let me start by saying we are an anti-capitalist organization,” he says. “We think capitalism is a terrible economic system for human beings as well as the planet.” When the systems of capitalism and white supremacy intersect, he continues, the ownership of land and concentration of capital falls into the hands of the few “who tend to be wealthy white men.”
Angela Lugo Thomas has served on the Detroit People’s Food Co-op board since 2019. (Photo credit: Malik Yakini)
On top of being disempowered by an exploitive, extractive system, the people of Detroit have further been disenfranchised over the last two decades by the frequent imposition of emergency managers, whose power has superseded that of elected officials, to oversee both the city and its school system, Yakini says. “Within the context of a city that has been intentionally disempowered by the imposition of emergency managers,” he says, “it’s extremely important to have community-based projects that reignite the agency of people and get them acting in a democratic manner on their own behalf.”
Still, getting the co-op off the ground has been an arduous, nearly 13-year process that has involved feasibility studies, focus groups, a lengthy hunt for adequate land, and the securing of adequate funding.
“Anything Black people do that is related to building power and self-determination is a challenge,” Yakini says. For example, many of the tools necessary in the process are biased against people of color, he says. “Market research studies, which are a necessary prerequisite for getting funding, are often culturally insensitive, culturally biased, full of all kinds of assumptions about deficiencies in African American communities. In order to get financers to move, we have to also shift the tools they’re looking at.”
Another challenge has been educating the Black community about co-ops, which have been an overwhelmingly white phenomenon in recent decades. “You have a whole generation of folks who grew up in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, who have never seen a food co-op, who don’t even know what it is,” Yakini says. “When you’re trying to recruit people, if you have to start with giving people a basic education . . . that makes the task much more difficult.”
“Food inequity has gotten so intense, and the food system issues have gotten so bad, that I just don’t see the passion for the movement fading.”
The Way Forward
As the co-op movement advances, figuring its way through deep shifts in identity, it faces added challenges brought on by the economy.
Pugh worries about the effect of inflation on customer support. Of all the items in a household’s budget—housing, healthcare, gas—“the food budget represents probably the largest potential to flex, because I can exit the co-op and head to Aldi anytime,” he says. “I’m worried about that.”
Hannah is concerned because they have recently heard of a number of long-established, beloved farms ceasing their operations. “Small, local farms were hit very hard [by the pandemic], and despite all the work co-ops have done to carry their products and keep them going, they are closing at a rate we have not seen before,” they say. “Food co-ops need to start talking about what is going to happen with the local food movement.”
Despite the challenges, however, Hannah believes today’s co-ops are in a good position to persist. “Food co-ops are in an unprecedented time,” they say. “Never have we had so many ongoing decades of success. Food inequity has gotten so intense, and the food system issues have gotten so bad, that I just don’t see the passion for the movement fading.”
For these reasons and more, Yakini is optimistic about the People’s Co-op opening. He hopes it will serve as a catalyst for the strong urban agriculture movement in Detroit and that the store, located on a main thoroughfare, will encourage the development of businesses in the city’s north end that are “also rooted in justice, equity, and a holistic view of the world.”
In addition, he thinks the co-op can affect the vision leaders have for the city. “We’re hoping to impact the thinking of city appointed and elected leadership, about how we can do development in a way that centers equity and justice—and centers Black folks.”
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]]>The post Fighting Voter Suppression, Environmental Racism, and Corporate Agriculture in Hog Country appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>With almost two million swine within its borders, Herring’s native Duplin County in eastern North Carolina is the top hog-producing county in the United States. And because many residents have pre-existing health conditions, in part from living alongside the waste produced by so many animals, many are choosing to mail their ballots in this year rather than venture to the polls, where COVID-19 presents an additional threat.
But, in a part of the state home to many people of color, Herring worries about reports of minority ballot rejection rates. In North Carolina, the ballots of white voters are being rejected at a rate of .5 percent, while Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 1.8 percent rate and Native American voters’ ballots are being rejected at a 4 percent rate (eight times more than white voters’), according to October 21 data from the U.S. Elections Project.
“They’re disproportionate, and right there, that tells me they’re trying to suppress the Black votes,” Herring says. “That has always been their focus, to suppress our vote and not allow us the right.”
And so, she carefully walks her neighbors through the mail-in voting process: “We’re telling them to be careful and aware of what they’re writing and not writing on their ballots. The witness name has to be printed, and you have to have their signature and address. If that’s not there, they kick it out.”
Herring’s fears about the suppression of minority votes are not ill-founded, given recent and long-term efforts in North Carolina. Over the last decade, the state’s General Assembly, which the Republican party has controlled since 2010, has gerrymandered voting district maps along racial lines and passed numerous laws aimed at making it harder for minorities to vote (though many of the measures have not held up in court and are no longer in place).
In the midst of these ongoing efforts, many Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the eastern part of the state say they’ve repeatedly watched as their elected officials promote the interests of hog and poultry companies over their safety and well-being—as evidenced by the number and density of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) permitted in their communities and the ineffectiveness of the facilities’ waste-disposal systems.
In addition to enabling the industry to concentrate around low-income communities of color, residents say state lawmakers have limited the tools those communities once had at their disposal to protest the resulting pollution.
Voter suppression and environmental injustice often perpetuate and compound each other: Without people in office to protect their interests, polluting industries such as the state’s industrial hog and poultry operations proliferate and remain largely unchecked, Herring says. And when industries pollute with little consequence, damaging the health and quality of life of the people around them, people are less likely to prioritize getting to the polls, especially given the fact that many are already dealing with myriad other issues, including poverty, food and housing insecurity, and lack of quality education and access to healthcare.
Voters wait in line to vote at a polling place in Black Mountain, North Carolina, on October 15, 2020. (Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images)
“It’s particularly troubling that when someone who is harmed by all these cumulative impacts seeks to remedy that . . . they find [that] the legislature in recent years has taken very intentional steps to deprive them of long-available remedies,” says Will Hendrick, staff attorney and manager of the Waterkeeper Alliance’s North Carolina Pure Farms, Pure Waters campaign.
Sherri White-Williamson, who worked for years in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office for Environmental Justice before returning two years ago to her hometown in Sampson County, says she has tried to encourage young people in her town to vote. “The reaction is, ‘Why should I? My vote won’t matter—they [corporations] control everything, and that won’t change,’” says White-Williamson, who now works as the NC Conservation Network’s environmental justice policy director. “People who live in communities and get stuff dumped on them feel less empowered to be able to effect any change.”
As a swing state that voted for Barack Obama in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016, North Carolina will be pivotal in this election. The U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Thom Tillis and his Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham could affect which party controls Congress as well. And while there are many conservative parts of the state, the demographics are changing as metropolitan areas continue to grow and more Latinx and young people register to vote.
Despite the factors stacked against them—made worse by the pandemic—Herring says many people in eastern North Carolina are still determined to make their voices heard. This year, groups like the one she’s involved with are working to educate voters and ensure they have transportation to the polls. And while Herring’s biggest concern is that her community’s votes will be under attack, she asks: “What can we do to combat that? I don’t know, other than just showing up at the polls to bring about a change.”
Suppressing the Vote
In 2011, Republicans gained control of both of North Carolina’s Congressional houses and redrew the legislative district maps in the once-a-decade redistricting process to favor their party. In 2017, a district court and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the maps were illegally racially gerrymandered, meant to dilute the voice of Black voters. Two years after lawmakers submitted new maps, federal judges struck down the voting districts again, this time as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders, saying they had been drawn with “surgical precision”—and were among the most manipulated in the nation. Lawmakers were ordered a second time to redraw the maps, which will be redone yet again in 2021, based on the 2020 Census.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in the state have made two other attempts at passing voter suppression laws. HB 589, one of the most dramatic voting rights rollbacks in the U.S., was overturned in federal court after it had been in effect for several years, and the voter ID requirement HB 1092 was blocked by a federal judge.
“There are a lot of different ways people are trying to cut back who is eligible to vote, whose votes count after they are cast, and who is going to feel comfortable voting,” says Kat Roblez, staff attorney with Forward Justice, a nonpartisan organization advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the South. In the Old North State—and nationwide—these tactics commonly include in-person voter intimidation at the polls, periodic purges of voter rolls, the spread of misinformation, voter ID requirements, and felony disenfranchisement laws, she says.
This year, the pandemic and the divisive nature of politics bring additional concerns. While in 2016, about 25 percent of total votes were cast by mail, this year that portion will be almost twice that, according to the Pew Research Center—and voting in a new way comes with its own complications. “It doesn’t have to be active voter misinformation as much as confusion,” says Roblez. At the same time, many residents have concerns about the effectiveness of the postal service itself, prompted by budget cuts and policy changes put in place over the summer.
The increased number of demonstrations by white supremacist and neo-Confederate groups is also worrisome, Roblez says. “What we’re most concerned about in some of the more rural areas is . . . Confederate parades coming to the polls,” she says, recalling how last February, demonstrators hung Confederate flags at a polling site in Alamance County, North Carolina.
Social distancing requirements will also necessitate larger polling places, which can put rural precincts, with less infrastructure available, at a disadvantage. “In an instance where a bigger polling location is needed, they might close two others that are smaller, but that [new] location may not be as accessible,” explains Joselle Torres of Democracy NC.
Voters line up at Charlotte Mecklenburg University City Library on October 24, 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images)
White-Williamson remembers seeing voter suppression growing up in Sampson County—a particular business owner showing up at the polls to confuse and discourage Black voters, for example—but she hasn’t been aware of polling-place suppression efforts in recent years.
Still, she could see it happening this year. George Floyd was originally from Clinton, the town where she lives, and after his murder at the hands of a white police officer in May, someone pulled down the Confederate statue in front of the Sampson County courthouse, sparking heated public debates.
“There are a lot of things fresh on people’s minds,” she says. “As a Republican county, I see the potential for there to be efforts at polling places to discourage voting, like what we’re seeing around the country.”
Jeff Currie, a member of the Lumbee Tribe who works as a riverkeeper protecting the Lumber River watershed, believes the poor education system in low-income parts of the state also has a role to play in the area’s disenfranchisement.
“If the education system is not saying ‘vote,’ people don’t understand what voting is—they lack civics training and education and the cultural sense that that’s what you do,” he says.
As Election Day approaches, Democracy NC and Forward Justice are placing volunteer vote protectors at polling places across the state who “are ready and trained to sound the alarm” if they see signs of suppression, adds Torres.
Corporations Over Constituents
While legislators have tried to limit voting, the hog and chicken industries in eastern North Carolina have grown exponentially in ways that damage their surroundings, residents say. In the 1970s, family farmers in North Carolina raised an average of 60 pigs per farm, and the animals were free to roam around outside. That began to change in the 1980s and ’90s, however, as state lawmakers like teacher and farmer Wendell Murphy sponsored and helped pass bills that shielded large-scale hog farms from local zoning regulations and gave the industry subsidies and tax exemptions.
Now, North Carolina ranks second in the country for the number of hogs it produces, and the state’s average hog farm houses more than 4,000 animals. The 4.5 million hogs in Duplin and Sampson counties—the top two hog-producing counties in the country—produce 4 billion gallons of wet waste a year, making up 40 percent of the North Carolina’s total. The waste is stored in open-air pits and periodically sprayed on nearby fields.
Industrial swine farms periodically apply hog waste to “sprayfields” of feed crops with high-pressure guns to prevent the waste lagoons from overflowing. (Photo credit: Waterkeeper Alliance)
The foul-smelling chemicals the facilities release—ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, in particular—have been associated with difficulty breathing, blood pressure spikes, increased stress and anxiety, and decreased quality of life. Additionally, a 2018 study found higher death rates of all studied diseases—including infant mortality, mortality due to anemia, kidney disease, tuberculosis, septicemia—among communities located near hog CAFOs.
For years, residents have spoken out about their suffering. They’ve told their representatives that the odor from the facilities forces them indoors all the time; they can’t sit on their porches, play in their yards, open their windows, or hang their laundry on the line; they have to buy bottled water rather than drinking from their wells; and “dead boxes” containing pig carcasses line the roads, and buzzards, flies, gnats fill the air.
And yet, says Naeema Muhammad, organizing co-director of the NC EJN, the state legislators and regulatory agencies don’t listen—and repeatedly prioritize large corporations as they make decisions about the permitting and regulation of these facilities. Time after time, she says, “legislators pass bills unmistakably against their constituents, in favor of the industry.”
In 2013, 500 residents of eastern North Carolina filed nuisance suits against the Chinese-owned Smithfield subsidiary Murphy-Brown, LLC, which owns the majority of the hogs in the state, complaining of the health problems and unpleasant ills the company subjected them to. In a victory for the hog-farm neighbors, juries ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the first five of the more than 20 cases to be tried, awarding the 10 plaintiffs in the first lawsuit more than $50 million in damages. (This number was reduced to a total of $3.25 million due to the state’s punitive-damages cap.) The industry is currently appealing the ruling.
As these lawsuits worked their way through the justice system, though, Herring watched in horror as her county’s representative in the state legislature, Jimmy Dixon, sponsored a bill that tied the hands of disadvantaged people looking for protection from factory farm pollution. The bill, passed in 2017, limits the compensation plaintiffs can receive in civil suits like the Smithfield case to a sum related to the diminished value of their property, and prevents them from receiving damages related to health, quality of life, and lost income.
Dixon, who did not respond to a request for comment in this story, said the bill was designed to protect farmers from the “greedy” lawyers who would sue them. “This bill is designed to protect 50,000 hardworking North Carolina farmers who are feeding a hungry world,” Dixon wrote in a 2017 op-ed in The Raleigh News & Observer.
In 2018, Senator and farmer Brent Jackson sponsored a similar bill that practically eliminates the right of residents to sue industrial hog operations by declaring that agricultural operations cannot be considered nuisances if they employ practices generally accepted in the region (like spraying hog waste on fields, for example). “With Senate Bill 711 on the books, we don’t have a leg to stand on,” Herring says. “We have to take what they give us, and [we don’t] have an avenue for recourse.”
Though legislators say they have the interests of farmers and consumers in mind, Muhammad thinks it’s more about campaign contributions. “You have people in power that are owned by the corporations—they’ve taken so much money from them, even if they wanted to do better, the industries would go after them,” she says.
Disproportionately Polluting Poor and Minority Communities
Those most affected by CAFO pollution are people of color. Duplin and Sampson counties have the highest share of Latinx residents in the state, with 23 and almost 21 percent, respectively. The residents of these two counties are also about 25 and 26 percent Black, as compared with the statewide average of 22 percent.
In 2014, NC EJN, Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help (REACH), and Waterkeeper Alliance filed a Title VI Civil Rights complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. EPA claiming the North Carolina environmental regulatory agency allowed industrial swine facilities in the state to operate “with grossly inadequate and outdated systems of controlling animal waste and little provision for government oversight”—and that they had an “unjustified disproportionate impact on the basis of race” against Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.
Swine houses and a waste pit at a North Carolina factory farm. (Photo credit: Waterkeeper Alliance)
In 2018, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) settled the complaint, and this year, they put measures in place including a program of air and water monitoring near hog operations and involving impacted community members in permitting decisions. “I believe there’s a group of people [at the DEQ] who are trying to do the right thing,” says Muhammad. “With more collaboration with communities, we’ve seen some change. But you have a body of people who want to hold onto those old ways.”
Another complicating factor is the fact that the state has cut the regulatory agency’s budget year after year. “If you don’t have the budget to hire the staff to do the inspections, that’s a problem,” White-Williamson says.
While the size of pork industry has stabilized since a moratorium on new facilities with the lagoon-and-sprayfield system went into effect in 1997, no such limit was put in place on chicken operations, and as a result, the size of the poultry industry has tripled since then.
According to a report released this summer by the Waterkeeper Alliance and Environmental Working Group, between 2012 and 2019, the estimated number of chickens and turkeys in Duplin, Sampson, and Robeson counties increased by 36 percent to 113 million, compared to only 17 percent in the rest of the state. The racial disparities continue as well: In Robeson County, 42 percent of residents identify as Native American—compared to 1.6 in the state as a whole, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The concentration of chicken CAFOs worries environmental advocates, because rather than being kept in pits, the drier chicken feces is stored in large, uncovered piles and runs off into waterways when it rains. North Carolina chickens produce three times more nitrogen and six times more phosphorous than its hogs, causing environmental damage like toxic algal blooms and fish kills.
Unlike with hogs, the chicken industry does not have to notify the government when it opens a new facility, even if it is in an area prone to floods. As a result, the state environmental regulation agency often does not even know where chicken CAFOs are located, and inspections occur only when a complaint arises.
Lumber Riverkeeper Jeff Currie, who can smell poultry CAFOs from his house, says in the two years that have passed since Hurricane Florence, he’s documented 17 new operations consisting of 320 new barns in the watersheds he watches over.
North Carolina swine facilities flooded during Hurricane Matthew. (Photo credit: Rick Dove, Waterkeeper Alliance)
Currie points out that, in the name of “creating jobs,” governing bodies allow all sorts of polluting industries to cluster in communities of color. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and a controversial wood pellet plant were both slated to be built in low-income communities of color in the area this year. While the pipeline was cancelled in July, the pellet plant is on its way to completion. If you don’t have the money to hire a private attorney and exert influence, Currie says, “you get dumped on.”
The Effects of Disenfranchisement
The environmental injustices piled onto low-income communities of color stem in part from their lack of political influence; disenfranchisement efforts on the part of politicians and parties who’d like to stay in power only make it worse.
Eastern North Carolina residents say that even without the state’s attempts to make voting difficult for them, the democratic process is frustrating, because when it comes to protecting them from agricultural pollution, there are no candidates who actually represent their interests.
“You get to the point where you’re like, what’s the point?” Currie says. “It’s not party-based—they all took the money. So who do you go to to try to get a bill introduced to end poultry operations in the 100-year floodplain?”
White-Williamson believes even if solid state- and federal-level lawmakers were elected in 2020, it would take decades to recover from the damage that has resulted from the regulatory rollbacks, budgetary priorities, and culture of hatred that elected officials have promoted over the last few years. “It’s going to be hard to reverse a lot of the environmental damage that has been done, as well as the cultural and racial damage,” she says. “I feel like this is going to [take] almost a generation to straighten out.”
Muhammad is similarly concerned. “I’ve looked at everybody running from the federal level down to the local level, and I don’t hold out hope it’ll be a process that’ll bring about a lot of change,” she says.
And yet, despite the lack of strong local representation on CAFOs, many eastern North Carolina residents are still motivated by a desire to see change at the top, and they’re mobilizing to help each other get out the vote. Because, despite the roadblocks placed in their way and their lack of expectation for change, they have hope that things can get better—they offer as examples the victory in the Smithfield nuisance cases and the collapse of the oil pipeline project. Though the overall system is structured against them, they’ve seen small successes, and they plan to keep at it.
“If we have to continue to fight for the right to vote, so be it,” Herring says. “Whatever the issue is in our communities that is keeping us from living the best lives we can for our families and children, we have to organize, stay informed, hold meetings, make trips, write letters, make phone calls—do whatever we have to do to keep the issue on the forefront until we bring about change. We can’t give up.”
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]]>The post Youth Are Flipping an Abandoned North Carolina Prison into a Sustainable Farm appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Garcia-Lopez isn’t on a typical farm. Surrounded by tall fences and razor wire, he and the group of high-school-aged young men affiliated with the nonprofit Growing Change are farming in an abandoned prison in rural Wagram, North Carolina. Since 2011, this group has been working to flip the Scotland Correctional Center—a facility decommissioned in 2001 and subsequently left to decay—into a sustainable farm and education center. They’re leasing the property at no cost from the state’s Department of Public Safety.
The Scotland Correctional Facility, abandoned since 2001, sits on 67 acres outside of Wagram, North Carolina.
During its first several years in existence, Growing Change engaged young men who were on intensive juvenile probation and had been kicked out of their schools and homes. But after 2016, the young people involved decided to change the eligibility requirements for future participants. Now, they welcome their peers facing chaos at home, failure at school, trouble with mental health or substance abuse, and involvement with the criminal justice system. Many are also minorities or possess multiple ethnic identities in a country where racism and xenophobia are rampant.
Designed to help teens avoid the criminal justice system, which disproportionately imprisons people of color, the program provides the young men with mental health treatment and the chance to develop workplace skills and a sense of self-efficacy, or the idea they can get from one point to another if they have a plan.
“These are the young men on which we build our adult prisons,” says Growing Change Founder and Executive Director Noran Sanford. Being locked up as a kid is one of the most damaging, opportunity-stripping experiences a person can have, he says. “As a clinician, as a social worker, as a mental health therapist, [I can tell you] it is one of the greatest risk factors in nearly every problem we’re dealing with today in our adult population.”
In his prison-flip work, Sanford has his sights set on a number of problems at once: the high number of young people entering the criminal justice system; the absence of job opportunities for veterans; the decline in small, independent farmers in the area; residents’ lack of access to local, sustainable food; and the health disparities between urban and rural areas.
Scotland County Commissioner Carol McCall, a Growing Change board member and retired social worker, appreciates the intersectionality of the project. “The vision to take something discarded, unsightly, and unproductive and turn it into a working organization that serves a variety of purposes is unprecedented,” she says. “I’m really proud it’s happening right here in my own county.”
A Wakeup Call at a Funeral
Growing Change serves three counties near the southern border of North Carolina in the eastern part of the state. The area is extremely diverse, home to equal parts Native American (primarily members of the Lumbee Tribe), Black, and white residents.
It is also extremely poor: More than a third of the people in the city of Lumberton, located in Robeson County, live below the poverty line; the county’s median household income is $33,700; and approximately 36 percent of the population is on Medicaid, compared with 18 percent nationally. Additionally, 21 percent of the people in Robeson County and 25 percent of the people in Scotland County experience food insecurity.
Compounding matters, these two counties had the worst health rankings in the state in 2019, making residents especially vulnerable to COVID-19. While Scotland County has not been too heavily hit by the virus yet, as of press time Robeson ranks among the top 10 counties in the state for infections, with case numbers on the rise. Because several of the Growing Change youth have underlying respiratory conditions, the group is careful to observe safety protocols—like working in small groups and pausing operations if someone close to them is tested for the virus (which has happened four times so far).
A tall, thin white man in his early 50s with a long, graying ponytail, Sanford grew up in the area and was working as a social worker and mental health therapist for youth and families in the juvenile justice system when he received an unexpected wakeup call in 2009. A middle-schooler he’d been working with—who was smart, good with people, and one of the best running backs Sanford had ever seen—was killed in a gang-related incident.
Noran Sanford founded Growing Change in 2011 to help the youth he was working with as a mental-health therapist and social worker avoid the criminal justice system.
“I had to be honest with myself that the system had not done everything it could do, that I had not done everything I could do,” says Sanford. As a person of faith, he began to pray and spend structured time thinking about what he and the system could do differently.
At the same time, the old Scotland Correctional Center in Wagram, which he’d driven by dozens of times without considering, began to rise in his awareness. He learned that, up until the 1970s, North Carolina had made heavy use of inmates sentenced to chain gangs, including those housed at the Wagram prison, to build the state’s highways. Most of these prisoners were Black, and many had only been convicted of minor crimes. In 1979, North Carolina had more prisons and the highest incarceration rate of any state in the country.
When Sanford presented his idea of reclaiming the abandoned property, many of the young people he worked with thought he was “kind of kooky,” remembers Terrence Smith, who was part of the first cohort of 12 and is now the other salaried employee of Growing Change.
But once Sanford walked the young men through the property, handed them the keys, and asked them, “What do we do with this?” they grew excited about the possibilities, Smith says.
Instilling Hope in People and Place
In addition to providing off-site therapy, Growing Change puts youth in charge of creating and carrying out a collective vision for the former prison, situated on a 67-acre parcel a couple miles outside Wagram’s tiny downtown.
Although the master plan will take years to achieve, a number of elements are already in place: The current nine participants are keeping bees, rotationally grazing a herd of sheep they will use for wool and meat, caring for a flock of laying hens, composting food waste, tending a garden with organic methods, and managing vermiculture and soldier fly operations.
Down the road, they hope to create aquaponic tanks and cultivate mushrooms (in former prison cells) and introduce a certified community kitchen (in the galley), a prison history museum (in the barracks), a climbing wall (up a guard tower), a recording studio (in the freestanding hot box building), and staff quarters and office space.
A central focus of their efforts is giving back to their community. During the first few years, participants tended a garden and distributed free boxes of produce and flowers to their food-insecure neighbors. And when the pandemic hit in March, the youth partnered with various agencies including Carolina Farm Stewardship to distribute boxes of food to people in need, including restaurant workers and furloughed hospital staff. They also planted a new garden on the former prison softball field that they will harvest in late summer and donate.
Robin Patel exits the former guard tower the youth plan to flip into a community climbing wall.
This direct service allows outsiders to begin seeing the young men differently, Sanford explains. He also arranges opportunities for them to present the prison-flip model they’re developing to university and government leaders across North Carolina, as well as at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“What traditional therapy often doesn’t touch is … the community,” Sanford says. “There has to be some kind of social efficacy developed, that [community members] can have confidence that these young people can change. They have to make a place for them at the table.”
Admittedly, Growing Change is ambitious. But it all fits in to how Sanford—who has won multiple awards and fellowships over the years, including the Soros Justice Fellowship in 2015 and the Ashoka Fellowship in 2016—sets out to solve problems. “This is a systems approach,” he says. “I’m a systems practitioner, really.”
Davon Goodwin, an Army-veteran-turned-farmer who became involved with Growing Change after getting injured in Afghanistan in 2010, sees agriculture as a perfect fit for the youth, many of whom suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) like he does. Farming can provide a refuge and sense of purpose for people who are struggling with trauma, he says.
“I don’t know what it is about soil, but it changes you—it humbles you, and it brings a sense of calm that the youth need,” says Goodwin, who sits on the Growing Change board, runs the Sandhills AGInnovation Center, and credits farming for setting him on a good path during a dark time. “When you’re growing food, there’s fellowship that happens that doesn’t happen anywhere else.”
In addition to rehabilitating the youth and transforming the dark, oppressive space in Scotland County into something beneficial, Sanford hopes to provide a model for other places looking to do the same. Across the U.S., more than 300 prisons have been decommissioned, including 62 in North Carolina alone. Most are in poor, rural areas and have closed because of the declining number of inmates in the U.S., the consolidation of many smaller prisons into fewer larger ones, and, at least in North Carolina, Sanford says, a number of reforms affecting when people are sent to prison.
“At the core level, we are instilling hope,” Sanford continues. “When hope is gone, it creates a pretty vicious void that a lot of other grimmer things can get pulled into. And as low-wealth rural America is left further behind, then that vacuum is stronger. We’re breaking that stream.”
At Work on the Farm
After the released sheep settle into grazing, Garcia-Lopez heads back into the prison yard to start on another project, tying the chain-link gate shut behind him with a thick rope. A rooster crows.
“I’ve been here almost a year, and I’ve seen so much progress,” says the 17-year-old, wearing a black fleece jacket and blue jeans. “It’s neat seeing stuff coming together, even the small things.”
The teens, who are paid hourly, spend one dedicated day a week, plus additional work periods, on the farm. On this Saturday morning, multiple projects unfold across the flat yard and inside the brick barracks building full of steel-barred cells.
Over the past few weeks, the youth have built a minivan-sized chicken tractor out of wire and PVC pipe they salvaged from the prison drain field. Today, a few of them are reinforcing the joints with metal brackets so they can contain the chickens as they start grazing them behind the sheep. In a different corner of the yard, another group patches gaps in the chain-link fence so the roosters, who’ve been antagonizing the hens, can be put in their own “bachelor pad.” And inside the barracks, a third group modifies the aeration system they’ve built for the compost pile housed in a cell formerly used for solitary confinement.
The local cooperative extension and experts at the state’s two land-grant universities, N.C. State University (NCSU) and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, have provided guidance and support through the entire project. Students at the NCSU School of Design helped craft the property’s master plan, and experts in topics like rotational grazing, mycology, and vermiculture also guide the youth.
Inside the barracks, Terrence Smith leans over the deep freezer that has been repurposed as a worm bin for a vermicomposting project. Smith uses a hand rake to stir the dark soil, exposing a number of wriggling worms. “I put five pounds of bananas in here a few days ago, and they’ve eaten the crap out of them—there’s only the skins left!” he says, impressed.
Terrence Smith checks on the worms in the vermiculture operation he’s helping get off the ground with the guidance of an expert at NC State University.
As the youth put the various elements of the massive project in place, Growing Change engages in a constant give-and-take with those around them. They receive around 600 pounds of discarded produce from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP) each week; they redistribute the edible portions of that food to food banks, feed other scraps to the chickens, and give the spoiled pieces to either the compost pile or the soldier flies, whose larvae they’re raising to help feed the animals.
In all they do, Sanford looks for ways to create revenue streams to help compensate the youth and pay for the program. The farm sells eggs and salad greens to a nearby university, and it plans to sell meat and wool from the sheep as well. Though the garden they’re tending this spring will supply free food to the community, they eventually plan to grow the ingredients for chowchow—a recipe that honors the various backgrounds of program participants: collards for the Black youth, tomatoes for the Native Americans, cabbage for the Scotch-Irish, and jalapeños for the Latinxs—and offer the product for sale.
“Our county has many challenges,” Dr. Debby Hanmer, Growing Change board chair and founder of the sustainable agriculture program at the nearby UNCP. “I want us to be an example of what sustainable can look like, not just in agriculture, but in all things.”
‘They Bring Out A Better Side of Me’
While large commodity farms dominate much of the landscape in this part of North Carolina, Garcia-Lopez, like most of the other teens involved, didn’t know much about farming when he became involved a year ago. “My first day, they were like, ‘What do you know about bees?’ and I was like, ‘Absolutely nothing!’” he says. He now helps oversee the beekeeping operation.
Michael “Fluffy” Adyson Strickland became involved two years ago and has also learned many new skills, but his primary charge is to tame the guard donkey, Miss Easter, who was unhandled and extremely skittish when she arrived in 2018.
“I saw her, and I clicked with her—I was one of the only people who could touch her at one point in time,” says the 16-year-old, who wears a hoody and rubber boots and has his thick hair tied up in a knot. “Once I started rubbing her back, Noran was like, ‘Do you want to start taming her?’” Eventually, the program hopes to be able to allow children in the community to pet the donkey.
“When I got here, it opened my eyes,” says Strickland. He might like to pursue environmental science, with the aim of being able to help other people care for the environment, he says.
The most powerful aspect of the program for Ryan Morin, a 15-year-old with side-swept hair and a tie-dye T-shirt, has been the relationships he’s developed with the other participants. “We were all in a compromised position [when we arrived], which left us vulnerable,” he says. “The first people we encountered, we found a special bond with them. They bring out a better side of me; they have shown me who I really am and what I can become.”
So far, the program has proven effective at its central goal of keeping young men out of prison—for the 24 youth involved over the five-year period from 2011 to 2016, an internal study found it was 92 percent effective at preventing recidivism and adult incarceration.
Some say that the ultimate impact can’t be determined until years from now, once the “troubled” youth have grown up more and charted their own paths. But Sanford says he has seen noteworthy changes. “You see youth who are learning how to work successfully; they are being able to get control of substance abuse patterns; they are working through and stabilizing some of their interpersonal relationships … And you see some healing within some family systems.” Additionally, Sanford says, participants have gone on to attend college, join the military, and secure steady employment.
Michael Adyson Strickland, Logan Stern, and Robin Patel (left to right) transfer roosters to a different part of the prison yard at the end of a work day.
A decade after getting involved at the age of 14, Smith is a shining example. He grew up in an abusive household and, after being put on probation in seventh grade, was ordered to work with a Sanford as a therapist.
The program “helped me stay grounded enough to complete high school—and look forward to something afterward,” Smith says. It also taught him to carry himself in a way that people respect and respond to.
Creating a Model to Share
In hopes of helping others replicate the model, Sanford is in the process of creating an open-source prison-flipping model with step-by-step instructions and online resources. He is planning to distribute it to each of the 300 communities with a closed prison later this year via the national cooperative extension system.
Sanford hopes to help others in rural America convert spaces meant to confine and punish into spaces that nourish and rehabilitate. “If you look at a lot of these issues, especially around incarceration, it’s [been] a 90 percent urban conversation,” says Sanford. He wants to see that change.
At end of the day, the young people wrap up their projects and gather in the area being secured for the roosters. Strickland and two other young men retrieve the orange birds from their pens and set them down; two immediately begin to fight, fluffing their feathers and jumping toward each other. The young men hover, tempted to intervene. “Let ’em go,” Sanford says. “They’ve got to work this out.”
Photos by Christina Cooke.
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]]>The post For Farmworkers Facing Debilitating Depression, Is Teletherapy a Solution? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>“I would think, ‘What am I doing in this world?’” said the 57-year-old last summer. “I would get to a point where I would rather die. I felt like I was [of] no use.”
When a health worker at North Carolina Farmworker Health Program (NCFHP), the organization that had helped Garcia access medical treatment for his leg, offered him the opportunity to speak with a bilingual mental-health therapist by videoconference, he acquiesced, though he had never seen a therapist before and felt nervous and uncomfortable about it.
Garcia pinpoints his second session with a therapist, conducted with the help of the outreach worker via iPad in his living room, as a turning point—and he has since pulled out of his deep depression. The conversation turned to religion, and as a believer in God, that resonated with him. “I started thinking about my life and what I was going through and realized I had faith,” said Garcia, wheelchair bound at the time. “It gave me a lot of strength.”
Many of the 2 to 3 million farmworkers who plant, pick, and process food in the U.S. experience mental health issues. They are isolated on farms, often separated from their families by thousands of miles, living and working under difficult conditions, and facing discrimination and fear due to their undocumented status—situations and stressors that often lead to anxiety, depression, and/or alcohol abuse.
At the same time, farmworkers face many barriers to getting the help they need, including the fact they often live and work far from urban centers and the associated healthcare facilities. In the U.S., in fact, more than 90 percent of psychologists and psychiatrists work exclusively in metropolitan areas, and about 60 percent of rural Americans live in areas with a mental health professional shortage, according to numbers from the Center for Rural Mental Health Research, part of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). In addition to the physical distance from providers, farmworkers are also often on the move and lack the time off work, transportation, and health insurance coverage that make pursuing treatment possible.
The new NCFHP farmworker teletherapy program, which provides mental health treatment to agricultural workers in rural reaches of North Carolina, is one of the first of its kind in the U.S.—and its creators are hoping it can become a model for others. Using iPads and hotspots, farmworkers can tele-connect with bilingual therapists at El Futuro, a Durham-based nonprofit clinic that provides mental health services for Latinx families. In the first year, 82 farmworkers took advantage of the program.
Marco Garcia found teletherapy while living with a disabling illness last summer.
The North Carolina effort is part of a larger move toward this new approach. Community health organizations across America are increasingly turning to telehealth as a strategy to serve people in areas that lack providers. According to an analysis of 25 billion privately billed claim records by the nonprofit FAIR Health, the use of telehealth services increased by 643 percent nationally between 2011 and 2016—and 960 percent in rural areas. Mental health services accounted for the top portion, 31 percent, of the telehealth claims in 2016.
NCFHP leaders say the tele-element of their program enables them to reach underserved people in hard-to-reach areas. “Most highly qualified [healthcare] professionals don’t want to live in these small towns,” says Karla Siu, the former clinical director of El Futuro, who helped write the grants to establish the program and worked as a teletherapist for a year. Using virtual therapy, she says, “we can provide the clinical resource without asking the clinician to [move or] travel.”
Laborers in Farm Country
The mental health of farmers has received a lot of attention in recent years—due, at least in part, to incorrect numbers put out (and then retracted) by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Media reports in The Guardian, the The New York Times, Newsweek, and NPR called attention to the issue of farmer suicide, and U.S. Senators Jon Tester (D-Montana) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) introduced the Seeding Rural Resilience Act to help cut down on the number of farmers taking their own lives.
Though their mental-health plight receives far less attention, farmworkers face a greater suicide risk higher than farmers do, and rank third among occupational groups in the revised CDC study. Various other studies corroborate the fact that agricultural workers—83 percent of whom are Hispanic, 33 percent of whom live below the poverty level—often struggle with depression and anxiety.
One study of Latinx farmworkers in North Carolina found that 52 percent experience depression and 16.5 percent experience anxiety. Another study of 248 women in Latinx farmworker families also in North Carolina, revealed that 31 percent—almost a third—exhibited significant signs of depression, compared to the 11 percent depression rate among Hispanic women more generally in the U.S. A third study found that 80 percent of women farmworkers in California faced on-the-job sexual harassment, including 24 percent reporting sexual coercion or on-the-job blackmail that affected their physical and psychological health.
“Despite the fact that there is not a lot of data, the data that’s there is very compelling,” says Carlos Ugarte, director of health programs for Farmworker Justice, a national nonprofit that has advocated for farmworker rights since 1981. “It doesn’t take a lot to start putting the pieces together and say, ‘Yeah, this is something we really need to look at.’”
Ugarte says that because farmworkers do not have political or economic clout, unlike some of the other segments of the Latinx population, it can be hard to motivate decision makers to put money toward programs that benefit them. Farmworker mental health, he says, “is not getting enough attention in the national conversation, and it’s not getting enough attention in terms of the investment on the part of agencies, especially within the federal government.”
Trying to Survive, Nothing More
Many farmworkers have faced triple trauma, says Mary Johnson Rockers, who worked more than 10 years as a health operations specialist with NCFHP before becoming the teletherapy program lead for El Futuro, and a tele-mental health provider herself. First, there’s the trauma of corruption, violence, or war in their home country that motivates them to leave; second, there’s the trauma that occurs during migration, as families are separated or people die or fall ill en route; and third, there’s the trauma of arriving in a new country, having to adjust to unfamiliar language and culture and facing hostile, anti-immigrant sentiments.
Sisters Ana Delarosa Castillo, 41, and Reyna Delarosa Castillo, 38, came to the U.S. from Guatemala in 1994 and 1997, respectively, to escape a crushing poverty. They’ve worked in the fields in western North Carolina for the last two decades, for the last four years at a farm owned by a kind woman who treats them well. But that is not the norm.
Sitting on a leather couch of Ana’s home, as Reyna’s two-year-old daughter arranges pieces of orange peel on the tan shag carpet covering a linoleum floor, they describe, in Spanish, their typical work experience.
Ana and Reyna have planted and harvested fruits and vegetables in the fields of North Carolina for the last two decades, working under tough conditions.
As farmworkers, they usually work 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the sun, sometimes in oppressive, 90-plus-degree heat, says Reyna, wearing distressed jeans and small silver hoops in her ears. Most farms haven’t provided them with water to drink or bathroom facilities, forcing women to relieve themselves in the presence of their male counterparts, which they say robs them of their dignity.
The sisters describe having to plant tomatoes at breakneck pace on their hands and knees, chasing the tractor carrying the seeds for hours at a time. “The machine doesn’t get tired; it never stops to let us rest our backs,” says Ana, who wears a turquoise tank top and a gold pendant around her neck. “In the moment, you’re trying to survive, nothing more.”
The lack of job security is also a stressor. As year-round residents in their community, the sisters have had trouble securing enough agricultural work because farms in their area have begun to rely more heavily on workers brought to the county on H-2A temporary agricultural work visas. “The work is hard, but we used to be okay with it, because we felt secure in our jobs,” Reyna says. “We don’t have that anymore.”
(H-2A workers face their own set of problems. Because they are tied to a single employer and live in farm-supplied housing, they can’t leave if living or working conditions are bad, and they often grow depressed from the extreme isolation and separation from their families.)
The hostile nature of the current political climate also causes the sisters stress. In August, Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested five workers at the local Case Farms chicken processing plant, and Reyna says she is afraid to leave the house to go grocery shopping or take her children to school. “I feel like I’m in a jail,” she says tearfully.
While an outreach worker visiting a farm Ana was working on recommended that she speak with a therapist during a rough patch she went through a few months ago—and Ana was interested—she hasn’t managed to line up treatment yet. She would like to if things get hard again, and Reyna agrees. “It would be nice for someone to listen,” Reyna says. “You’re working a hard job, you’re going through a lot. To have someone listen and guide you to the right thing would be good.”
Creating a Model and Fighting a Stigma
For the last 26 years, NCFHP has worked with local agencies and health centers across the state to connect farmworkers and their families with medical and dental care. In addition to seeing farmworkers in 10 designated brick-and-mortar clinics, NCFHP sends outreach workers and doctors in medically equipped mobile units to visit farmworker camps in rural areas.
The program has historically mainly focused on physical ailments, but after farmworkers indicated a desire for mental health services in feedback surveys, NCFHP teamed up with El Futuro. With the help of funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), they began offering teletherapy in January 2019. While they started out of the Good Samaritan Clinic, a NCFHP-associated clinic in the western part of the state, they have since expanded to a second, larger clinic in the east. “We saw mental health as whole-person health, a very important part of someone’s well-being,” Rockers says.
The Good Samaritan Clinic’s mobile unit, which visits farmworker camps in rural areas and provides medical services and teletherapy.
Now, the NCFHP outreach workers incorporate mental health questions into their health assessments. If the patient appears to be experiencing anxiety or depression, they are typically set up with a teletherapy appointment the as soon as possible. To give a picture, when the mobile medical unit pulls into a farmworker camp 40 minutes from its home base on a given Tuesday evening, six or seven of the 150 workers there might receive a private, iPad-enabled therapy session as part of their treatment plan.
NCFHP leaders have had to overcome some cultural barriers—namely, the stigma associated with therapy—in getting the teletherapy program off the ground. “In my country, usually you don’t see a psychiatrist unless you are a little off,” said Christian Ramazzini, who is from Guatemala and worked as the NCFHP outreach coordinator based out of the Good Samaritan Clinic for seven years until last summer, helping get the clinic’s teletherapy program off the ground. “We’re trying to fight that cultural piece and convince people you don’t have to be crazy to seek services.”
The program has a couple factors working in its favor, however. First, integrating mental health into primary care makes it feel like less of a leap, Ramazzini says. And second, the trust the outreach workers have built up with the farmworkers they serve makes the workers more accepting of their offerings. “We have great relationships with most of our patients,” Ramazzini says. “They’re pretty open to telling us what’s going on in their lives.”
Telehealth as a Tool
Mary Johnson Rockers, the teletherapy program lead for El Futuro, who currently works as a full-time teletherapist for the nonprofit.
While most farmworkers trust the caseworkers they have grown to know, teletherapy enables them to share their issues and feelings with someone they are assured not to encounter on a day-to-day basis. “Most of the mental health issues they’re having, they can’t share with their sons or cousins or moms or whoever is close to them,” Ramazzini says. “Even sometimes in the clinic, they might feel a little funky, because the community is so small.”
Still, despite its benefits, teletherapy as a method hasn’t made headway in all organizations serving farmworkers. While Finger Lakes Community Health in New York offers the farmworkers it serves the option to see specialists through its telehealth program, others, like Farmworker Justice, are slower to jump on the digital bandwagon because they lack the funds, and because they want to better understand the approach.
“I feel there [are questions to be answered] as to what is the best way to apply this fantastic, cutting-edge technology in farmworker communities,” says Farmworker Justice’s Ugarte. He wants to be sure any telehealth programs the organization supports are culturally sensitive and designed to be impactful, sustainable, and scalable. “The work going on in North Carolina and other places is going to help inform that,” he says.
In an effort to address mental health concerns in farming communities, many of whom are facing tough economic times and the stress that comes from extreme weather and natural disasters, the 2018 Farm Bill authorized the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN), a bipartisan program that will create a national network of stress-assistance services—things like farm hotlines, support groups, workshops, and in-home assistance—for people working in agriculture.
Matt Perdue, who worked on farmer mental health with the National Farmers Union, which pushed the network, before taking a job with the North Dakota Farmers Union in November, says the Farmers Union wants to support the mental health of everyone in agricultural communities, including farmworkers. As the agricultural mental health network gets built over the next few years, Perdue says, “We see telehealth as being a very important part of the puzzle.” At the same time, he added, “We need to maintain—and probably sharpen—the focus on the farmworker community.”
Sometimes, You Just Need Help
Most of the farmworkers in the North Carolina program are dealing with issues related to anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. While the traditional psychotherapy model consists of repeated sessions that dig into root causes, the mental health providers serving farmworkers rely on a targeted approach, seeing each farmworker an average of three times.
“Quite frankly, we never know when we’re going to see our patient next,” El Futuro’s Siu says. Rather than establishing a relationship over the standard eight to 12-sessions, she and her colleagues focus only on the complaint the patient comes in with. “It’s been really empowering for all of us, because we have these really productive 30- to 45-minute conversations,” she says.
Luke Smith, executive director of El Futuro, also sees the power of the interactions, despite their limited nature. “Even one conversation can be affirming, validating, and supportive in a time when that’s just what you need,” he says. “You’re providing a space and humanity for someone who hasn’t felt that very much. That can bring somebody out of that pit of despair.”
One woman Siu worked with, she recalls, had experienced a traumatic incident and came to her first session feeling depressed, anxious, and immobilized—terrified to leave her house. “After five sessions, she was excited to tell me that she’s recovered functioning, and she was serving and volunteering again in her church and her community,” Siu said. “Honestly, I wasn’t expecting we could accomplish that in such a short time.”
The majority of patients seen through the Good Samaritan Clinic have been women, Ramazzini says. “I’m not saying that women have more mental health issues,” he says. “I’m saying men are not likely to have appointments in general; that’s the same for diabetes and every chronic disease we treat—men don’t come to the doctor until they have to go to the hospital. There’s a culture behind that.”
So far, Ramazzini has seen teletherapy be transformative for many of the farmworkers he works with. “A guy I spoke with yesterday said, ‘I had a knot in my chest when I came in to receive services, and I don’t feel it anymore,’” the former outreach worker said last summer.
In fact, he goes so far as to say fewer patients would be alive today without the teletherapy service. One farmworker he worked with had been raped and wanted to take his own life, Ramazzini remembers, and he was able to connect the man with a therapist and alter his course. His staff have also spoken to several farmworkers at moments they were considering committing suicide. “If there are 10 patients in the last three or four months that want to commit suicide, it’s very likely one of them would have if we were not providing these services,” says Ramazzini.
After his second therapy session, Marco Garcia started praying more. He began to watch religious DVDs—Ten Commandments, The Bible by Charlton Heston, La Fé de Jesus—on the Panasonic television at the end of his couch, and they fortify him. Garcia credits the therapy session he received at his lowest point for his renewed inner strength and sense of hope. “I didn’t want to look for help, but at the same time, I was desperate,” he said. “Sometimes you just need help to get pointed in the right direction.”
Siu said she’s constantly inspired by her farmworker patients, who she describes as driven, hard-working, humble, and grounded. “This is valuable and important work, strengthening this community that serves our larger society in such a core and central way, by providing our food,” she said. “It’s the least we could do.”
The farmworkers names have been changed.
Photos by Christina Cooke.
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]]>The post Biodiversity and Animal Welfare are Paramount for These Second-Generation North Carolina Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>“They’ll be back—it’s their routine to run away and slowly return,” says her husband Worth Kimmel. “They’re both skittish and curious,” adds Hillary.
Since 2014, Worth and Hillary have run Pine Trough Branch Farm (PTB) in rural Rockingham County, North Carolina on 118 acres of pasture and forest land that Worth’s family has owned since the 1950s. The farm draws its name from Pine Trough Branch Creek, which runs along the property and flows into the headwaters of the nearby Haw River. In addition to hogs, they raise sheep and cows, as well as vegetables, shiitake mushrooms, and a variety of flowers—with a focus on building healthy soil and raising animals by the highest standards of animal welfare.
Harvested fall flowers. (Photo courtesy of Hillary Kimmel / Pine Trough Branch Farm.)
“Diversity is important on our farm,” says Hillary, wearing a denim button-up shirt and her hair in two long braids. In addition to enabling them to offer customers a variety of plant and animal products, she says, “we want to mimic the natural systems, and in natural systems, there’s biodiversity.”
While they’re not certified organic, the Kimmels describe their approach as “beyond organic.” They use ecologically centered practices—including composting, cover cropping, and natural mulching—which require minimal external inputs, including no synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides, even those permissible in certified organic production. “We’re all about working with the resources we have here on the farm,” says Worth, his voice quiet and steady. “We have grass and shade and water—and all the things our animals need. We’re just trying to manage those things in a sensible and productive way.”
Hillary Kimmel harvesting garlic. (Photo courtesy of Pine Trough Branch Farm.)
The hogs and sheep at PTB Farm are Certified Animal Welfare Approved by the nonprofit A Greener World (AGW), and audited annually. (Their production system for cattle would also meet the criteria, Worth says, but because they purchase weaned calves from a nearby farmer who is not AWA certified, the cows do not hold certification.)
Emily Moose, director of communications and outreach for AGW, has been following PTB for years and admires the farm’s approach. “As second-generation farmers, [the Kimmels] have a very holistic perspective of how farming impacts communities and is impacted by communities,” Moose says.
As someone who happens to live downstream from them in a town that draws its water from the Haw River, Moose appreciates their stewardship on a personal level, too. “They’re farming in ways that consider the water, land, people, animals, and overall environment for future generations,” she says.
Two Paths Converge
Both Hillary and Worth, who are now 35 and 32, respectively, were raised on working farms and felt drawn back to the land after they graduated from college.
Worth’s grandfather, Owen Lindley, purchased the PTB property in the early 1950s, and Worth and his two sisters grew up on the land after their mother took over the operation in the 1970s. For three decades, they leased some of the land to a neighboring farmer who grew hay.
Worth Kimmel harvesting salad greens. (Photo courtesy of Hillary Kimmel / Pine Trough Branch Farm.)
“My dad grew most of our vegetables, and my mom canned tomatoes,” Worth says. Between chain-sawing trees into firewood, operating the tractor, and other farm tasks, he says, “I got a basic skillset from as far back as I can remember.”
Meanwhile, the daughter of 1970s back-to-the-landers, Hillary grew up on a farm in the North Carolina mountains, where her mother taught school and her father raised salad greens for restaurants.
Both studied at Warren Wilson College, and graduated two years apart—Hillary in 2007 and Worth in 2009. By the time they met at a winter solstice bonfire party in 2011, Worth had moved back to his family’s land and was raising animals and doing carpentry work on the side, and Hillary had moved back to her family’s land and was growing vegetables and waiting tables on the side.
The two fell in love, and three years later, they joined forces on Worth’s family land, which they opted for because of its close proximity to several farmers’ markets and the surrounding community supportive of local food. While both make long-term decisions on the farm today, Worth oversees the animals and mushrooms and Hillary tends the vegetables and flowers.
PTB Farm sells weekly at farmers’ markets in Greensboro and Winston Salem, to area chefs and butcher shops, and to members of its co-op, who buy farm credit early in the year and then spend it on whatever they want from the weekly market stands.
Freshly harvested salad turnips. (Photo courtesy of Hillary Kimmel / Pine Trough Branch Farm.)
Managing Animals to Benefit the Soil
As predicted, the young hogs change their minds and come rustling through the woods toward Hillary and Worth to accept the cucumbers. Their reddish coats match the clay soil, and they sniff and snort as they devour the treats.
A mix of the Tamworth and Duroc breeds, with long heads and efficient snouts ideal for foraging acorns, hickory nuts, black walnuts, earthworms, grubs, and grass (supplemented by local, non-GMO grains), the pigs are integral players on the diversified farm. “The hogs’ [manure] is a real fertility input,” Worth says.
A sow looking after her piglets in a farrowing hut in the pasture. (Photo courtesy of Hillary Kimmel / Pine Trough Branch Farm.)
Because the farm grew tobacco and hay for much of the last century, the soil was worn out and eroded when Worth and Hillary took over. By carefully managing the pigs—as well as the sheep and cows—moving them between pasture and forest paddocks daily or more using portable electric fencing, the couple has slowly rebuilt the soil’s health.
Unlike unmanaged grazing systems, which give animals access to all the land all the time, management-intensive grazing more closely mimics natural systems in which cattle, for example, storm onto a piece of land, eat all the grass, and then move on, returning perhaps once more in the growing season, once the forage has regrown, Hillary says.
Paddock-moving equipment on Pine Trough Branch Farm. (Photo courtesy of Hillary Kimmel / Pine Trough Branch Farm.)
“There are massive benefits to multispecies grazing, for animal health and land productivity,” Worth says. “Cattle, sheep, and hogs graze different strata of the pasture,” eating different levels, amounts, and types of forage, and they each offer specific benefits. “A 1,200-pound cow hoof has a different impact on the pasture than a 60-pound lamb hoof,” Hillary explains, and their manure isn’t the same either. “It’s up to us to try to be quality managers and use their impact to a benefit,” Worth says.
Sheep grazing. (Photo courtesy of Hillary Kimmel / Pine Trough Branch Farm.)
While the animals serve the land and ecosystem, they spend their time engaging in natural behaviors—and they have favorite sleeping spots and daily routines.
Five years of rotating animals over a field that at first had thin, weak soil has transformed it, they say. The soil now holds moisture, and it has “some of the best grass on the farm, for sure,” says Worth.
A Minimalist Ethic
In all they do, Hillary and Worth try to avoid consuming more resources than they need. Right now, they’re standing in a field with the cow herd, the early evening sun casting a glow on the animals’ red and black coats. “One of my guiding philosophies is working with what you have,” Worth says. “Sometimes that’s fixing something out here on the farm with a piece of twine or a stick that I pull out of the woods rather than driving back to the top of the farm to get exactly the right thing.”
He and Hillary live in one of the original structures on the farm, a near-century-old log cabin built as a hunting lodge in the 1920s; all of the farm’s fenceposts come from black locusts, red cedars, and other trees that grew on the property; the pair stockpiles grass from their pastures rather than bringing in hay to supplement the cows’ diets; and rather than maintaining their fence lines with Roundup or some other synthetic herbicides, they spray them with vinegar and keep them mowed.
Inside the century-old log cabin where Hillary and Worth live.
In the minimalist spirit, one of Worth’s first tasks when he took over the farm was build a low-input water system that’s both solar-powered and gravity-fed to distribute water from the well out into the fields for the animals—something he was able to do with the help of an $8,500 grant from the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI).
To create the system, which he designed himself, Worth elevated an empty 1,000-gallon stainless steel milk tank onto a pedestal inside the former corn crib on the highest point of the property. A solar-powered pump fills the tank from the nearby well, and from there, gravity carries it through about 4,000 feet of buried pipe to about 20 different distribution points out in the pastures.
“We’re trying to make use of as much solar energy as possible,” Worth said. “The pasture itself is solar powered; that’s where all the energy for the grass production comes from. We’re taking that one step further with the water system.”
The Kimmels’ outdoor kitchen and corn crib, which houses the low-input water distribution system that Worth designed and built.
AGW’s Emily Moose points to the low-input water system as a sign of Worth and Hillary’s innovation—and forward thinking. “They’re thinking about not just in how to get from this week to next, but how to make sure they’re setting up systems that are going to thrive in a world in which climate change is increasingly impacting agriculture,” she says. “They’re creating a resilient system.”
Sunrise to Sunset
Hillary and Worth work sunrise to sunset nearly every day except, checking on all the animals at least once, moving them between paddocks, feeding them supplemental grains or grasses, managing irrigation when it hasn’t rained, watering seedlings in the propagation house, harvesting vegetables from the gardens and tunnels houses and mushrooms from the logs down by the pond, and working the markets every Saturday. Aside from a part-time helper in the garden, the pair works the farm pretty much by themselves.
They acknowledge they’re in a privileged position in that they own the land they’re farming and have close access to a supportive community. But it sometimes feels exhausting. “It takes all of our time and then some,” Worth says. “There’s almost always something going undone, which can be a little bit mentally taxing when you’re trying to be finished a workday.”
Additionally, the couple live on below-poverty wages, do not have any long-term savings, and rely on the Affordable Care Act for healthcare—“basic things like that that weren’t as big of a deal when we were 25,” Hillary says. “There’s a financial sustainability element we haven’t exactly worked out.”
Nevertheless, they plan to keep going: “We can exist on very low wages,” she says. “We’re only exploiting ourselves.”
Worth and Hillary Kimmel outside the corn crib after a long day of work.
Another difficulty the pair faces is the processing part of raising animals. “We put so much care and effort into raising the animals really well, and the slaughterhouses do a really good job, but it’s out of our control for that short amount of time,” Hillary says. Occasionally, the facilities do not cut the meat exactly like she requests on behalf of certain customers, for example. “For me, it’s one of the most challenging parts of the business.”
Part of the Conversation
Kau, a restaurant, bar, and butcher shop stationed in a former mill in the nearby city of Greensboro, began sourcing meat from PTB after its butcher, Taylor Armstrong, met the Kimmels at the Farmers Market and later took them up on their offer of a farm tour.
He appreciates the thought Hillary and Worth put into the animals’ well-being. “I’ve been cutting meat for 16 years now, and it’s the best pork I’ve ever tasted,” he said. “Happy pigs are important to them, and it’s reflected in the quality.”
He also appreciates the nature of his relationship with Hillary and Worth. “I talk to them on the phone directly when I order, and Worth delivers everything himself,” he says. “It’s as personal as it gets.”
The pair enjoy being a meaningful part of their customers’ diets and spend a lot of time talking with customers about their practices, in addition to offering recipes. “We’re increasing consumer education and being a part of a nuanced conversation about ecological, sustainable, organic farming,” Hillary says.
The mushroom logs at Pine Trough Branch Farm.
Like Armstrong, Greensboro resident Christi Helms first encountered the Kimmels at the weekly market and soon began volunteering out at the farm. As a co-op member, Helms buys most of her meat and veggies through PTB—and gets especially excited when she sees shiitake mushrooms, padrone peppers, and their green salad mix on the table, as well as their pork sausage and ribeye steak.
A big fan of Joel Salatin, Helms says the Kimmels approach farming in a similar way, by creating a continuous cycle of reaping and restoration: “They’re farming basically like he does, rotating the animals on a daily basis and making sure the impact on the land is minimal and the animals are very, very happy,” she says. “They’re an excellent example of the way farming is meant to be.”
As the sun drops lower in the sky, a red steer tagged E1 approaches Hillary and Worth, likely hoping for a treat. “This is a beautiful bovine animal,” Worth observes of the steer, who truly is quite handsome. “He’s not bothered by flies or the temperature. And he’s got quite a sheen to him.”
With their chores complete, the pair jumps in the golf cart to return to the top of the farm, leaving E1 and his companions to continue munching the grass and enriching the soil. They’ll be back tomorrow, to lead them to fresh ground.
Except where noted, all photos © Christina Cooke
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]]>The post Once on the Sidelines of Farming, Women Landowners Find Their Voices appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>But she soon began to realize how much she didn’t know about overseeing an active farm. When she first assumed responsibility in 2012, Maffitt was unaware how the rural roads around her connected, couldn’t name many of the tools in the farm’s machine shop, didn’t know much about managing livestock—and most importantly, didn’t have the language to communicate effectively with the father and son tenants who managed the cattle and crops on the property.
“I was constantly having these wearying interior battles,” she says. “I was learning a new vocabulary and desperately looking to find confidence when I was talking with other farmers.”
Soon, however, she began to get to know her surroundings, research various farming methods, and hone in on her own goals for the land.
While she respects her tenants, who her father brought onto the land as his health began to decline, “They’re not really gung-ho grazers,” Maffitt says. “They rotate the [cattle] every seven to 10 days; I wish they would open those gates and move them every three to four days. And I think multispecies grazing might be the best thing if I can find enough management help.”
Eventually, Maffitt would like to find tenants who embrace her grazing goals—and she would like to break up the corn and soybean rotation. “I’m quietly looking at some specialty crops of some sort,” she says—perhaps nut trees or rye to supply a young man producing whiskey in the area. She’d also like to create a riparian border to protect a creek that runs through the land and implement a new management plan for the wooded part of the property that will involve eliminating invasive species and setting aside a portion for wildlife habitat. “I’ve got a lot of dreams,” she says.
As the current generation of farmers retire or pass away, women like Maffitt increasingly find themselves inheriting farmland and being tasked with making decisions about how they want it managed. While more than 1 million U.S. women are operating farms themselves, an additional half million own farmland they don’t farm. Predominantly over the age of 65, many of these inheritors have spent their adult lives in non-farming careers, and rather than switching gears, they choose to rent the land out or maintain the rental agreements already in place.
In the U.S., about 40 percent of all farmland is rented. And a good portion of farmland landlords—37 percent—are women. Women, in fact, own almost half of the rented farmland in the country. Moving forward, experts say, that number is only likely to increase: the American Farmland Trust (AFT) predicts 370 million acres of farmland, or 40 percent, will change hands over the next one to two decades as farmers retire or pass on—and because women tend to outlive men, they will likely inherit a great portion of these acres.
As their presence in the agricultural scene grows, some farmland conservationists have realized that partnering with women landowners is vital to achieving the dual goals of protecting farmland from development and ensuring it is managed sustainably, in ways that improve the air, land, and water, such as reducing the size of the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico and sequestering carbon to curb climate change.
The problem? Because women have traditionally assumed support roles in agriculture and tend not to pick up farm publications or frequent educational events hosted by government ag agencies (which often target men), finding and connecting with women landowners often proves difficult for the conservation organizations looking to work with them.
“There’s this whole segment of the agricultural audience we’re not reaching,” says Jennifer Filipiak, the Midwest director of the AFT. “If we want to achieve conservation and water quality goals, the people who own the land need to be engaged, and half of them are not even in the room.”
In addition, being a landlord—rather than a farmer—removes some women even more from the conservation conversation. “Women in agriculture are almost invisible,” says Bridget Holcomb, executive director of the Iowa-based Women, Food and Agriculture Network (WFAN), a national organization that supports women in sustainable agriculture efforts. “When you add to that being a step removed from production, the invisibility just compounds.”
In recent years, groups like the AFT and WFAN have begun offering programs designed specifically to engage women, most notably in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Great Lakes regions. And they’ve found the audience extremely receptive to messages about sustainability.
“What is wonderful about working with women landowners is that … they inherently want to leave the land in as good or better condition than they got it,” Holcomb says. “They want the land to continue to feed or support their families—and they want to leave a legacy.”
Getting them to take steps to protect the land, she says, is often just a matter of showing them how.
Debbie Clay is a farmer in Stony Creek, Virginia. When her father died in 1998, Clay inherited 110 acres.
Power Dynamics in Farm Country
Growing up on the family farm, Maffitt helped with garden chores and helped her father feed the cattle from time to time, but she was more of a bystander to the operation than an active participant. “I was relegated to the house and gardens much more [than the fields],” she says.
As the wives and daughters of farmers, many of the women inheriting farmland have at least some knowledge about agriculture, says Rebecca Fletcher of the Indiana Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) agency that helps farmers and ranchers maintain healthy and productive lands. “What they may not have is the operating and business information and the important conservation information about sustainably caring for the land and improving the quality of its resources.”
In an agricultural scene dominated by men who have been farming for decades, this lack of information can put them at a disadvantage when trying to develop a vision for their land and advocate for it.
Texas native Marli Hickin, 45, took over her husband’s family’s farmland in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia after he died in a plane crash. The land was being rented out by a neighbor for his dairy cows, but Hickin decided to take the operation on herself, with the help of her five children. While the tenant farmer had continuously grazed cows across the property in conventional fashion, Hickin introduced sheep and goats and began to rotate them daily through different parts of the property to improve the soil quality.
“It’s been a difficult thing, being taken seriously,” she says. “I have no farming background, and some of the things I’ve done are a little on the strange side for local farmers.” As an outsider coming into it, she often experienced the farming community as a good ol‘ boys’ club. “If you went to agricultural school and do it all the regular way with the chemical fertilizers and all that stuff, you can be a farmer. But until then, you’re [seen as] a little strange,” adds Hickin.
In some cases, women new to farmland ownership suffer explicit discrimination. Filipiak and Holcomb have talked to women who have had to turn over their marriage certificates before government officials would supply them information about their land. They’ve spoken with others whose tenants have insisted on paying rents substantially below the going rate. WFAN was founded, in fact, in part to combat this type of discrimination: “As much progress as we have made toward equality, it seemed to our founder and others involved at the beginning that rural areas were behind the curve,” Holcomb says.
For Black women landowners, who have faced a long and painful history of discrimination and have unjustly lost countless acres of land, the problem is compounded. “There’s a lot of deliberate misinformation given to women and people of color,” says Ebonie Alexander, executive director of the Black Family Land Trust (BFLT), a North Carolina-based conservation land trust that preserves the land assets of African-Americans and other historically underserved people. “Information is power. [A person] can give you part of the information but not all of the information you need to make an informed decision. [They] can give you enough to make mistakes.”
Multiple times, Alexander has witnessed people try to convince Black women landowners that agricultural conservation easements, designed to protect land as farmland, will lead the USDA to seize their land. “That’s a big lie,” she says.
In some cases, the disadvantages women face are simply about a lack of insider vocabulary. Nancy Bolson and her two sisters inherited their grandparents’ farm in what she describes as “a real progressive little pocket of Iowa,” south of Decorah. While Bolson, who had previous experience co-farming with her husband, wasn’t discriminated against, she did feel overwhelmed when she first visited the Farm Service Agency (FSA) office. “The first couple times I went to FSA, there were so many acronyms thrown at me,” she says. “It wasn’t a gender issue—I’m sure any guy would have felt the same way; it was all those acronyms.”
On top of these hurdles, complex social dynamics often inhibit women from acting on their ideals. “If you own the land, legally you have the power; it’s your land, you can do whatever the heck you want with it,” Filipiak explains. “But socially, you don’t have that power. I could fire my farmer at any time, but I go to church with my farmer, and the whole community will think I’m a horrible person.”
While women might technically have the ultimate say over their property, she says, they also want to “keep community harmony; they want to keep family harmony. It’s [about] more than just legal control.” In some communities, in fact, women may feel alienated or even unsafe if others come to see them as causing problems.
Holcomb says building women’s confidence and sense of empowerment is one of her principal goals with WFAN. “It breaks my heart every time I hear of a woman who is watching her farmland degrade and doesn’t know how to stop it—she doesn’t feel she has the language or the respect or the knowledge to step in and change it. This is happening all over the country, and it’s happening to the detriment of our soil and water,” Holcomb says.
Her goal is to get women to realize that this is their land, and they get to call the shots.
Debbie Clay walks through a field of cotton on her farm.
Reaching Women on a Personal Level
WFAN first began developing its Women Caring for the Land program, which centers around a program of peer-to-peer learning circles, in Eastern Iowa in 2009. Since then, the organization has developed and expanded the model—and shared its methodology with organizations like the AFT, which since 2012 has offered similar workshops in numerous states through its Women for the Land program.
The sessions, which are led by trained facilitators and generally last a day, allow the landowners, with no men present, to share the story of their land and their goals for managing it and passing it along. Experts often provide them with information on specific land management topics, such as soil health, water quality, pollinator habitat, or timber management. And in the afternoon, the group heads out into the field to see conservation practices at work first-hand.
Filipiak and other circle leaders hope to inspire participants to try out techniques like introducing crop diversity, cover crops, and no-till farming on their land. They also hope the sessions will position women to improve their relationships—and establish respectful communication—with their tenants, many of whom have been working the land for decades and have their own goals for it.
“[The two sides] need to come together and figure out where there’s common ground,” Filipiak says.
Before landing on the learning circle model, Indiana’s NRCS found it very difficult to reach women, who they say do not tend to pick up publications or attend workshops. The group offered its first learning circle in 2013 and has developed a robust statewide program since.
“[The learning circles] are reaching women on a more personal level than sending out a news release or holding a field day where 100 farmers come and walk through a field,” says Fletcher, who spearheaded the effort that has served 400 women so far. “This is the way women prefer to learn—it’s not top-down; it’s more relation-based. It’s really intimate, and it’s something women really seem to enjoy.”
Debbie Clay inherited 110 acres of her family’s farm in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, after her father passed away in 1998. The 62-year-old attended three learning circles in her county, where she learned about pond irrigation, weed control, and how to manage the forested acres on her property.
“Going to these seminars and learning everything you can about your land helps you manage it,” Clay says. “Even if you’re renting out the land, you need to know to rotate the crops, to put heavier cover crops in, to not spray weeds when the wind is blowing. For some people, she says, “it’s all about the dollar—and you need to be educated so you won’t be taken advantage of” by tenants who would prioritize profit over treating the land well.
Over in Missouri, Holly Maffitt participated in several WFAN learning circles and took a number of other steps too to learn what she needed to know. She enlisted the help of local NRCS representatives, attended a seminar by Joel Salatin and Allan Nation, read grazing publications, and talked with neighbor farmers, who she has found very open to sharing. She also set up a Pinterest page that helped her learn the name of the tools on the farm, and, in winter, decided to don the “uniform” of the farmers in her area—muck boots, ear muffs, and coveralls, or “farmers onesies,” as she calls them.
Not all returning farm owners take the details quite so seriously, but WFAN reports that the women they work with own an average of 300 acres each, and more than half of them take a conservation step within six months of attending the group’s one-day trainings.
“We know we’re having a tremendous impact on increasing conservation across the U.S.,” Holcomb says.
Leaving Behind a Legacy
Between 1992 and 2012, about 31 million acres of farmland were lost—the equivalent of all the farmland in the state of Iowa—according to the AFT’s recently released report Farms Under Threat. That’s twice as much farmland lost than previously known. Much of the loss has come from low-density residential development, or the building of houses on one- to 20-acre parcels, as well as the shopping centers and soccer fields that quickly follow the new home construction.
To help combat this rapid loss, many learning circle sessions focus on teaching women how to handle estate planning and land transfer in a way that ensures their land continues to be farmed.
“Our abundant and productive farmland is one of our greatest natural resources in this country, and women need to know what their options are for passing that land down,” says Filipiak of AFT. Rather than willing it to non-farming heirs who might sell it to developers, they could pass it to their renting farmer or a young farming family. Or they could put conservation easements on it to ensure it stays in agriculture, she says. “These non-operating land owners, they have goals and values and a legacy they want to pass down, and if the land goes randomly up for auction, their values and all they put into the land may not be honored.”
On her acreage, Maffitt hopes to create a thriving, productive operation her family can pass on to someone interested in carrying on the legacy—someone who may or may not be a family member. In the meantime, the former nurse continues working out her own vision for the property—and learning a lot about herself in the process.
“I feel overwhelmed a lot of times,” she says. “But when I look and see the huge force that keeps life going and how small I am in it, I feel a great peacefulness; I don’t have to fix everything; I just need to apply what I can.”
Photos by Kate Medley.
This story is part of a year-long series about the underreported agriculture stories in our rural communities.
The post Once on the Sidelines of Farming, Women Landowners Find Their Voices appeared first on Civil Eats.
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