Schumann and Pesante harvest bluefish, dogfish, scup, and bonito using gillnets that they set daily at the mouth of the Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island Sound.

“Our income and catch have dropped about 30 percent over the last four years,” Pesante told Civil Eats. They’ve caught fewer bluefish in the summer season and found far fewer bluefish during the fall run out of the bay. “We didn’t even reach the quota with what we were landing,” he said.

There are multiple factors that likely contribute to the declining bluefish catch, including rapidly warming ocean waters, which affect fish migration and behavior; dredging to lay cables for offshore wind turbines, which disrupts fish habitat; and a reduced quota for fishers, which explains some but not all of the lowered catch.

For small commercial fishers like Pesante and Schumann, it’s become harder to make a living, and it could get a lot worse. Deep cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the sprawling federal agency charged with monitoring and conserving fish stocks, managing coastal waters, and predicting changes in climate, weather, and the oceans—which commercial fishers rely on for day-to-day as well as seasonal forecasts—threaten the long-term viability of America’s $183 billion commercial fishing industry and the 1.6 million jobs it supports.

Schumann, who founded the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign to give fishermen a voice in advocating climate solutions that work for them, spoke at a House Natural Resource Committee hearing in April about the NOAA cuts.

Though initially buoyed by the Trump administration’s pause on new leases for offshore wind, and its call for a more thorough review process that would heed community concerns, Schumann said she quickly became dismayed by the administration’s wrecking-ball approach to NOAA.

“These cuts will bog down the agency’s ability to serve the public and fishermen at a time when we desperately need—because of climate change—faster, more nimble, and more collaborative data collection and decision making,” she said.

Gutting an Expansive Government Agency

In a memo leaked in early April, the Trump administration laid out its plan for slashing NOAA’s overall budget by 27 percent and making other draconian changes to the sprawling agency, including cutting 20 percent of its 12,000-employee workforce.

NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) staff, who oversee commercial fishing and some recreational fisheries, is set to be slashed by nearly 30 percent.  The NMFS assesses and predicts the status of fish stocks, sets catch limits or quotas, and ensures compliance with fisheries regulations, working collaboratively with state environmental agencies, the fishing industry, and other federal agencies. It is vital for ensuring the sustainability of U.S. fisheries.

“We are looking at an effort to dismantle NOAA as it has functioned for the past few decades,” said Derek Brockbank, executive director at the Coastal States Organization, a nonprofit that coordinates the work of state coastal zone management offices.

NOAA’s National Ocean Service, which houses its Coastal Zone Management (CZM) program, would see a 50 percent cut if the administration’s plan is implemented. Such a deep cut, said Brockbank, means losing protections for coastal restoration and habitat conservation, which could have a long-term impact on fisheries.

These proposed budget cuts and layoffs follow resignations or layoffs of 1,300 NOAA employees in March, hobbling the agency’s ability to carry out its mandate. Though hundreds of NOAA employees were subsequently reinstated, the attrition continues. The Northeast Fisheries Science Center, for example, reported in early May that it has lost more than one-quarter of its staff.

The President’s May 2 proposed “Skinny Budget” for fiscal year 2026 calls for the same $1.3 billion cut to NOAA, but provides scant details on specific programs to cut. “The details are so confused, but the underlying thread is that they’re slashing these scientific agencies that provide critical services to the American people, and they don’t care what the impact is,” Andrew Rosenberg, a former deputy director of NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, told Civil Eats.

Budget negotiations are ongoing between Congress and the President, and however they resolve them, the administration’s April 17 executive order entitled “Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness” confirms its clear desire to upend the fishery management system that has not only kept American fisheries relatively healthy for decades, but has served as a model for fisheries management globally.

“The hard-won progress over the last 30 years to rebuild most of our fisheries—from in many cases severe depletion—could very quickly be reversed if we’re not going to enforce the rules or manage the fishery,” said Rosenberg.

When asked how NOAA will ensure the long-term sustainability of U.S. fisheries with a diminished staff, a spokesperson for the agency, James Miller, responded, “Per long-standing practice, we are not discussing internal personnel and management matters, nor do we do speculative interviews. NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience.”

Many in the industry were hoping for a more measured approach to reforming the lengthy process for setting fishing rules. “Everybody would agree, a lot of key reforms are needed within NOAA, but it’s a place to go with scalpel and intent,” said Ben Martens, executive director at Maine Coast Fisherman’s Association.

And while fishing groups generally support the president’s executive order, which seeks to increase domestic seafood production and “unburden our commercial fishermen from costly and inefficient regulation,” they say that any loosening of the rules must be done carefully to prevent a return to the Wild West days of overfishing.

“The devil is in the details, and that’s why it’s really important to have a funded and functioning NOAA and regional fishery management council system in place to implement the president’s vision,” said Eric Brazer, executive director of Gulf of America Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance, adding that fishermen must also be at the decision-making table.

The president’s budget proposals also call for eliminating NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) division, which collects vital, long-term temperature, carbon, and other data on our oceans and atmosphere, and abolishing all funding for climate-change-related data collection and research. Both of these functions are critical for understanding the health of the ecosystems that support U.S. fisheries.

Meanwhile, there’s greater need for research than ever, as warming ocean temperatures, driven by climate change, are shifting fish migration patterns and spawning behaviors. Warmer waters are also causing more violent and unpredictable weather that makes fishing riskier and damages critical coastal infrastructure such as wharves and piers.

Altogether, the staff firings, likely elimination of climate research, and NOAA’s compromised ability to forecast weather will fall especially hard on fishermen and coastal communities whose economies and cultural heritage are tied to healthy fisheries.  Already, the impacts are beginning to play out.

Overfishing and Fishery Delays

Bluefin tuna was overfished by 125 percent in the mid-Atlantic region, because staff were unable to close the fishery in January when fishermen reached their catch limits.

For many fisheries to open for the season, NOAA’s NMFS must issue a rule with catch limits based on a “stock assessment,” an evaluation of the fishery’s health. A stock assessment can take one to three years to complete. NOAA fish biologists run surveys and models, collaborating closely with regional fishery management councils, state environmental agencies, other federal agencies, and sometimes international entities to conduct the assessments, a complex, data-driven system.

Sarah Schumann aboard Oceana. She and Dean Pesante fish out of Point Judith’s Port of Galilee in Rhode Island. (Photo credit: Dean Pesante)

John Hare, science and research director at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NFSC), which covers North Carolina through Maine, acknowledged at an April regional council meeting that staff losses were impeding their ability to complete all 23 of its stock assessments scheduled for 2025. “It’s clear that we’re not going to be able to complete all of those,” he said, adding that his office intends to work with its partners “to come up with something that works for everybody.”

Indeed, New England’s lucrative scallop fishery—valued at $360 million in 2023—shut down midseason for a few weeks because NOAA wasn’t able to approve the rule proposed for 2025 on time. New England’s groundfish fishery (cod, haddock, and other species), valued at $42 million in 2023, was opened by an emergency action on May 1 while staff continued to finalize the rule.

On May 9, the NFSC and its partners announced that five fish stocks would not have full assessments this year as planned, and that it would pause research on two species, including winter flounder, which has been declining in New England partially due to warming waters.

“We’ve got fishing businesses that are relying on the passing of regulations, and if we don’t have the manpower to make those things happen, that can be really problematic,” said Martens.

Similarly in Alaska this spring, Linda Behnken, a fisherman and executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, said “it was a huge scramble to get the fishery opened on time, with people not getting their permits until the day before, and the permits being issued wrong three times and having to be reissued.”

Senator Murkowski had to weigh in repeatedly with the secretaries of Commerce and State, according to Behnken, who added, “Things that used to just work are a mess.”

And in the Gulf region, Brazer said that his members are starting to see the impacts of a diminished NOAA. “Permit renewals are starting to take a lot longer,” Brazer said. “People aren’t there to pick up the phone when you call for support. We’ve seen our council meeting get rescheduled and shortened.”

Data Gaps 

Robert Foy, Alaska Fisheries Science Center director, said at a regional fisheries meeting in April that while his staff were making “heroic efforts” to fill the gaps from lost staff and reprioritize work, “extreme changes and differences in the science that we are going to be able to provide” were looming.

Moreover, the center is operating under “a heck of a lot of uncertainty,” Foy said, as it tries to forecast its 2025 budget. The stock assessment and research projects currently planned may look very different when the group meets next in June.

Brazer, from the Gulf Coast fishery group, worries that the consequences of cutting or reducing surveys, dockside monitoring, and other data collection activities today won’t show up for years to come—and by then it may be too late to prevent a fishery from crashing.

Conversely, data gaps can also “lead to precautionary measures, which equals lower quotas,” said Steve Scheiblauer, a consultant to California’s Alliance of Communities for Sustainable Fisheries, a retired Harbor Master, and former member of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council. “That’s the chain reaction that folks are worried about,” he said.

Across the country, the worry is the same. “If there’s more uncertainty in the stock assessment process, regulators add a buffer,” agreed Thomas Frazer, professor and dean of the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida and former chair of the Gulf Coast Fishery Management Council. “We don’t want to jeopardize the sustainability of the resource.”

Rosenberg, who helped rebuild New England’s scallop and groundfish fisheries in the 1990s, fears that the system may break down under such severe budget cuts. Rule setting will become slower and less comprehensive with fewer science staff, he said. A fishery may fail to open. Ultimately more fishermen may return to the old days of overfishing, especially if enforcement goes away.

“It’s not because [fishermen] are bad people,” he said. “They’re as profit motivated as anyone else. You could either fish hard or let somebody else fish hard. That’s why the rules are in place.”

National Weather Service Cuts  

Since 2021, nine federal disasters from severe storms and flooding have been declared in Maine. Rainfall events in the northeast have also intensified by 60 percent over the last 60 years, bringing flash flooding to coastal communities.

Staff firings are already harming the National Weather Service’s ability to forecast. Thirty of its offices are now without a chief meteorologist, which has current and former agency meteorologists warning that life-saving advisories may not be issued in time for this hurricane season.

But the administration’s proposal would go even further: It would terminate NOAA’s role in producing weather forecasts for the public. Weather forecasting would be privatized, and fishers and the public would have to pay for a service that is now free. Worse, weather forecasting in areas not deemed profitable may cease to exist, Rosenberg said.

Weakening the National Weather Service also threatens coastal infrastructure, said Hugh Cowperwaithe, senior program director of fisheries and aquaculture at Maine’s Coastal Enterprise Inc. He cited massive, back-to-back storms that hammered dozens of Maine’s waterfronts coast a year and half ago and caused $90 million in damages.

“With people knowing it was coming, they were able to, somewhat, prepare,” he said. “But if these forecasters aren’t in place, and the predictions aren’t as good, I think we’re in for some real destruction.”

Similarly in Rhode Island, where Schumann and Pesante fish, Point Judith’s Port of Galilee is vulnerable to rising sea level and storm surges from ever stronger hurricanes.

“We’re a major port. We have shipping channels,” said Caitlin Chaffee, chief of Narragansett Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, at the RI Department of Environmental Management. “That [weather] information all contributes to our port safety and helping those systems to run.” 

Elimination of OAR

NOAA’s OAR, however, is slated for elimination. Cooperative research institutions that help OAR collect climate and weather data, such as the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute in Narragansett, could also be shuttered. Removing climate data from stock assessments would hamstring scientists’ ability to understand and predict fish population dynamics as the ocean warms.

A fishing boat crashing through the ocean off the coast of South Carolina. (Photo credit: campbellphotostudio, Getty Images)

“Fish are highly responsive to thermal conditions. Everything that their physiology does is impacted by temperature and other environmental conditions,” said Halley Froehlich, associate professor of aquaculture and fishery sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  “If we don’t include those things, we’re not effectively managing [fishery] systems.”

Shutting down OAR’s collection of climate and weather data would make it harder to ascertain which factors most affect bluefish population dynamics in Rhode Island Sound, including warmer ocean temperatures, dredging to lay transmission cables for offshore wind turbines, water quality, and competition from other species.

It would also make it harder to model the dynamics of other species, such as lobster, fluke, summer flounder, and black sea bass, which are migrating north toward colder waters along the east coast, confounding fishery management decisions.

More broadly, OAR’s research is vital for understanding the many ways that climate change impacts both ocean and freshwater ecosystems. The division’s researchers, for instance, collect data that inform how warmer ocean temperatures and reduced snowmelt are shrinking the cold-water habitats that Pacific salmon need to thrive.

Their data sheds light on how warmer temperatures weaken the upwelling of nutrients deep in the ocean, reducing the abundance of the microscopic algae, or phytoplankton, that form the base of the marine food chain. And they trace how carbon dioxide, absorbed from the atmosphere, is acidifying the ocean, dissolving the shells of crabs and mollusks and decreasing the growth and overall health of juvenile salmon.

Weakening Protection for Oceans and Coasts

Also, Trump’s April 17 executive order calls for opening up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, the world’s largest ocean reserve and home to endangered sea turtles and whales, to commercial fishing. President George W. Bush established the monument, which lies 750 miles west of Hawaii, in 2009. President Barack Obama expanded it in 2014.

Without a strong NOAA, “you’re going to see a situation where the biggest money, the biggest power, talks,” said Brockbank of the Coastal States Organization. Similarly, for onshore development, with no funding or staff to support coastal zone management, “you’re going to allow for large industrial projects that have billion-dollar investments to be pushed through without local fishermen having an ability to influence that,” he said.

Moreover, he continued, “If you don’t have the funding to support . . . coastal zone management, you will lose some of the protections and some of the advances in restoration and habitat conservation, which could have longer-term impact on fisheries.” Coastal estuaries provide nurseries for fish and shellfish and habitat for other animals, while also filtering out water pollutants and buffering communities from storm surges and floods.

For coastal Rhode Island, the threat looms large. “It’s our tourism and recreation, our fisheries, our aquaculture. All these multi-million-dollar industries depend on a healthy estuary—and things that folks may not appreciate, like water-quality monitoring. [That data] helps us decide when it’s safe to eat shellfish,” said Chaffee, whose budget—for now—is 70 percent NOAA-funded.

While some may think that a weaker NOAA is better for fishermen, that’s not how Schumann sees it.

“I’ve always believed that earning the title of commercial fishermen means more than just fishing. It also means standing up for the ecosystems that support our fisheries and the communities who depend on them.”

The post What Deep Cuts to NOAA Mean for U.S. Fisheries appeared first on Civil Eats.

The union has been organizing demonstrations all week, following the arrests of 14 farmworkers in western New York last Friday. They are organizing at an ICE detention center in Batavia, New York, today to “demand the release of detained farmworker leaders,” according to calls to action from the UFW.

The UFW demonstrations come on the heels of another protest, this one in Washington state yesterday morning, where civil rights groups are also demanding the release of detained farmworkers, including a union organizer.

In both cases, unions say workers appear to have been targeted by agents for their organizing.

Across the country, federal agents for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have detained farmworkers and union organizers amid a wider immigration sweep, in line with President Donald Trump’s policy agenda. Nearly 50,000 were being held in CBP and ICE detention in April. It is unclear exactly how many are farmworkers or labor organizers, but such arrests have been confirmed in California, New York, Vermont, Washington.

In California, Border Patrol agents made 78 arrests in Kern County, targeting a Home Depot, a convenience store frequented by farmworkers on their way to work, and drivers on roads running between farms, CalMatters reported.

In Vermont, at least three dairy workers have already been deported to Mexico after nine arrests there in April. Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based human rights organization, says thousands of people marched against ICE detentions last week.

“ICE has deported three farmworkers without due process, in clear violation of their rights,” Brett Stokes, a professor at Vermont Law who leads the legal team representing eight of the farmworkers, said in a statement. “We will fight for justice for those unjustly deported and will continue to move for the release of those still in detention.”

Arbey Lopez-Lopez, who was detained separately from the other eight, has a hearing scheduled with an immigration judge May 15. “The remaining farmworkers in detention have yet to receive a hearing date,” Migrant Justice said.

In New York, on the morning of May 2, federal agents pulled over a bus full of farmworkers in Albion, west of Rochester, detaining 14 employees of Lynn-Ette & Sons Farms. The UFW says the agents had a list of names, including union leaders who had been organizing at the farm. Those were the workers detained, the union said.

“Our top priority right now is to get these workers out. We are doing everything we can think of to accomplish that,” UFW Secretary Treasurer Armando Elenes said. “In this case, some of the workers who were detained were actively involved in organizing their workplace. We still have more questions than answers on how they came to be targeted . . . but if any workers at any company are ever targeted for immigration enforcement because of their involvement in union organizing, that would be a violation of our Constitution’s first amendment: the right to freedom of association, including with your union.”

In Washington state this week, organizers are calling for the release of Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker and organizer for Familias Unidas Por La Justicia (FUJ), who is being held at a detention center in Tacoma. Family members say Juarez was violently detained by ICE agents, who smashed his car window prior to arresting him.

Edgar Franks, an organizer at FUJ, told Truthout that the union believes Juarez’s detention was “politically motivated.”

“We believe he was targeted,” Franks said. “The way that ICE detained him was meant to intimidate. They hardly gave him any chance to defend himself or explain. He wasn’t resisting, and he just asked to see the warrant. They asked to see his ID, and right when he was reaching for it, they broke his car window. The ICE agents escalated really fast.”

The manner of the arrest was not unique, Franks said. “In past years, we’ve seen people getting pulled over and asked for their documents, but now it’s becoming more aggressive. ICE is harassing and intimidating people and not even showing warrants. It’s free rein for ICE to do whatever they want.”

An ICE spokesperson told Civil Eats Juarez had been ordered removed to his home country by an immigration judge in 2018. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted a joint federal law enforcement arrest of Juarez in Sedro Woolley, Washington, March 25, where he refused to comply with lawful commands to exit the vehicle he was occupying at the time of the arrest.” Juarez will remain in ICE custody “pending removal proceedings,” the spokesperson said.

All of these arrests and protests come amid ongoing scrutiny of Trump’s immigration policies and widespread concern for farmworkers in agriculture.

Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins faced questions from the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, including questions about farmworkers and immigration crackdowns. Rollins told lawmakers she had had lengthy conversations with President Donald Trump about the issue and that the president understands the importance of immigrant farmworkers. “The larger effort to reform our immigration system to better serve our farmers and our ranchers is a priority,” Rollins said.

Labor organizers say the immigration crackdown is making their work harder—and more necessary. The New York arrests, for example, show “why workers who may be facing this more hostile anti-immigrant climate nationally can really benefit from having a union that’s able and willing to go to bat for them,” Elenes at UFW said. “We in the labor movement know all too well: an attack on the rights of any worker is an attack on the rights of every worker.”

The post Protests Mount Against ICE Detentions of Immigrant Farmworkers appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2025/05/06/opponents-of-prop-12-ask-congress-to-overturn-it-again/ https://civileats.com/2025/05/06/opponents-of-prop-12-ask-congress-to-overturn-it-again/#respond Tue, 06 May 2025 08:00:25 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=64111 Soon after, Gary Malenke’s phone started ringing. “There were a lot of customers looking for product and a lot of concern about, ‘Hey, where’s my supply gonna come from? Are my shelves gonna be empty?’” he said. As senior vice president of pork operations for Perdue Premium Meat Company, Malenke oversees a mid-size pork processing […]

The post The Pork Industry Asks Congress to Overturn Prop. 12, a Divisive Animal Welfare Law, Yet Again appeared first on Civil Eats.

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In May 2023, nearly eight months after hearing a case brought by the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), the Supreme Court upheld a California law that banned the sale of pork from systems that confine mother pigs in small crates.

Soon after, Gary Malenke’s phone started ringing. “There were a lot of customers looking for product and a lot of concern about, ‘Hey, where’s my supply gonna come from? Are my shelves gonna be empty?’” he said.

As senior vice president of pork operations for Perdue Premium Meat Company, Malenke oversees a mid-size pork processing plant in Iowa. The pork processed there—for brands including Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural Foods—already meets Prop. 12’s requirements, since gestation crates are not used in their systems. So, he was a logical contact for buyers suddenly concerned about finding pork to sell.

But, Malenke said, after about six months, the calls mostly stopped. On the ground, he’s heard little talk about the law, and from his vantage point, the market has met the moment. “California seems to have aligned with their suppliers in a way where the balance between what’s coming in the pipeline for Prop. 12 product seems to be aligning relatively well with what the demand is,” he said.

That’s not how the NPPC sees it.

The week of April 7, NPPC members, who represent the country’s biggest pork companies, arrived in Washington, D.C. to try once again to convince Congress to overturn Prop. 12. They started the week with an advertising takeover of Politico’s influential Weekly Agriculture newsletter, in which ads pleaded with lawmakers to correct Prop. 12’s “damaging consequences nationwide for both farmers and consumers.”

A screenshot of one of four advertisements from the National Pork Producers Council in the April 7 Weekly Agriculture email newsletter from Politico.

On April 8, Iowa’s Republican U.S. Senators, Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley, and Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), introduced the Food Security and Farm Protection Act, which, if incorporated into an upcoming farm bill, would overturn Prop. 12 and prevent other similar bills in the future.

The new act is essentially a renamed version of the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act, which was first introduced in 2023. The NPPC praised the senators’ “efforts to avert [a] pork industry crisis.”

While the battle over Prop. 12 has been raging for nearly a decade, this is the first time it’s possible to look at the impacts the law has had on farmers and the market for pork. The law’s requirements were phased in starting in July 2023, and were fully implemented in January 2024, a little over one year ago.

Looking for Signs of Crisis

More time is needed for price and farm data to catch up, so analysis is still limited. But based on Civil Eats’ reporting and research, it’s hard to find signs of the crisis NPPC describes, and some available evidence points the other way.

Experts say the premiums being paid to farmers who changed their systems more than cover the cost of the upgrades required. Brands like Niman Ranch, which supports a network of independent small farms, have increased their sales. Many of the country’s biggest corporations, which experts say shouldered more of the costs associated with the transition, increased the performance of their pork segments in 2024 compared to 2023.

Price data is harder to parse: the price of the pork covered by the law has increased in California, but economists say more and better data is needed to definitively say how much of the jump is attributable to the law (versus other factors that impact prices) and whether the initial disruption is starting to ease.

Many people also say the scrambled political landscape that exists around Prop. 12 seems to have shifted more toward support for keeping the law in place. While the Biden administration, Trump’s past and current U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and many farm-state lawmakers have all sided with the NPPC in favor of overturning Prop. 12, groups from across the political spectrum are dedicated to preserving it.

One coalition working to stop legislation that would nullify Prop. 12 includes diverse organizations concerned about a broad range of issues, from animal welfare and the environmental impacts of meat production to corporate consolidation and state’s rights.

“I think we have done a really good job making the case against the [former] EATS Act on so many different levels. We’ve got very far-right members of our coalition and we’ve got left members of our coalition,” said Christian Lovell, the senior director of programs at Farm Action Fund, a nonprofit focused on anti-monopoly policies and a leader of the effort to protect Prop. 12. “There’s also a lot of market opportunity for producers that do want to meet these standards. That to me is just incongruent with what the industry is describing.”

However, House Agriculture Committee staff said in an email to Civil Eats that they have heard from “over 900 federal, state, and county agricultural stakeholders” asking lawmakers to overturn Prop 12.

“There’s also a lot of market opportunity for producers that do want to meet these standards. That to me is just incongruent with what the industry is describing.”

As a result, Committee Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) plans to again include language that does so in the next draft of the farm bill, as he did in 2024. Thompson’s provision is narrower than the language in both the former EATS Act as well as the new bill introduced in April, and only applies to livestock (as opposed to nullifying state laws that regulate the production of all agricultural products).

“The threat to producers goes way beyond NPPC and the pork industry,” Thompson said in a statement provided to Civil Eats. “States like California must be held accountable. They cannot be allowed to enact mandates that dictate production standards to producers outside of their borders.”

The NPPC declined a request for an interview, and the organization’s spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions that Civil Eats sent asking for their perspective on multiple points laid out in this story.

More Data Needed on Price Increases

One of the messages the NPPC is featuring most prominently is how much more Californians are now paying for pork. Back in 2021, the industry created the “Food Equity Alliance” to push the message that the animal welfare law would hurt low-income Californians due to price increases. Then, they commissioned and publicized an analysis that said bacon prices would rise 60 percent in Los Angeles due to a 50 percent reduction in supply. That didn’t happen. (Longtime opponents of animal rights groups are also behind another new campaign Politico reported on yesterday that includes a website filled with misinformation on price increases in both pork and eggs.)

On its current website dedicated to the issue and in some of its ad campaigns, the NPPC has emphasized that Prop. 12 caused a 41 percent “surge in certain pork prices” and a 20 percent average increase.

Those numbers come from an analysis conducted by USDA economists and published by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California. Using proprietary retail data, researchers attributed a 20 percent average price increase in pork covered by the law in California to the implementation of Prop. 12. (Pork products covered by the law include fresh cuts and bacon; ground pork and cooked products like sausages and hot dogs are not covered. It’s unclear why the law was written to only cover certain products.) Price increases ranged depending on the cut, with pork loin (a category that is mostly pork chops) increasing the most, by that 41 percent. Those increases significantly outpaced average price increases across the country.

However, the analysis comes with many limitations. The data only applied to a seven-month period—the first six months of the law as it was being phased in, plus just one month where it was fully in effect.

It also was not a peer-reviewed study, and Daniel Sumner, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at U.C. Davis and the director of the Giannini Foundation, said that the data acted in a strange way that warranted additional scrutiny. He published it, he said, primarily “because it was the only data available.”

If the average 20 percent jump is accurate, the price disruption would also likely be higher at the start, since costs to upgrade housing for pigs, for instance, occur once at the beginning of the process and markets need time to adjust, said David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University. “You would expect the immediate shock and then a bit of a decay as things adjust and you spread costs over more product,” he explained.

But researchers have not yet analyzed more recent data on what has happened in the year and a half since Prop. 12’s full implementation. In response to an inquiry from Civil Eats, USDA Chief Economist Seth Meyer, who was involved in the original analysis, said there was no public data he could provide but that his team had since looked at “subsequent periods” and “the story remained consistent with the initial findings.”

Other numbers provided to Civil Eats that relied on the same source of retail price data between January 2024 (when the law went fully into effect) and December 2024 showed an average price increase for covered pork that would be closer to 10 percent higher than the rest of the country. But the data is limited in a way that doesn’t allow for a one-to-one comparison or more significant, definitive conclusions. It’s also hard to isolate Prop. 12’s effect from other factors, since California’s pork consumption is not identical to other states.

The retail data Sumner works with is on a two-year delay. “I’m anxious to see what actually happened,” he said.

Companies Take on Costs, But Still Post Profits

As of the end of April, 387 companies have chosen to distribute Prop. 12-compliant pork products in California, according to the California Department of Agriculture. Those include food-service distributors, like Sysco, and the country’s biggest pork processors, like Cargill.

One of the things Sumner emphasizes is that debates on Prop. 12 always focus on the cost of upgrading the barns that house mother pigs to comply with the law. However, he said, it turns out that the cost of separating Prop. 12-compliant pork from the other pork being produced accounts for much more of the price increases than those upgrades. “Most of it has to be traceability, because the costs at the farm level aren’t that high,” he said. “Everybody agrees on that.”

The bulk of the extra costs, then, fall on the pork processing and distribution companies, Sumner said.

Since the law went into effect, Smithfield, Tyson, and Seaboard, the three biggest public corporations that produce American pork and therefore provide detailed financial accounting, reported increasing profits in their pork segments. (Of course, there are many other pork companies that do not share financial data, and those could show different impacts.)

Since the law went into effect, Smithfield, Tyson, and Seaboard, the three biggest public corporations that produce American pork and therefore provide detailed financial accounting, reported increasing profits in their pork segments.

Tyson reported “significant improvement in profitability” across the company in 2024 compared to 2023. While its pork segment operated at a loss, it reduced its loss by about $100 million last year. Smithfield reported about a billion dollars in operating profits in 2024, nearly four times its 2023 profit.

“This strong rebound reflects our resilient business model, led by another year of record profits in our Packaged Meats segment, our third consecutive year of profit growth in our Fresh Pork segment and a more than $600 million increase in Hog Production segment profitability,” President and CEO Shane Smith said in a statement.

Some of those improvements could be attributed to the fact that the company had a very bad 2023, shuttering dozens of hog operations in Missouri and Utah. But the company attributed the closures to oversupply, not Prop 12. In one of its 2024 financial filings, the company mentioned being an “early industry mover” on Prop. 12-compliant pork.

Neither Tyson nor Smithfield responded to requests for interviews.

That aligns with Malenke’s observation that companies seemed to be catching up and even benefiting from the transition. “As you’ve seen some people convert facilities and supply and demand start falling into place, I’d say there’s not as much of a unified voice against [Prop. 12] maybe as there was two years ago,” he said. “It’s a little more mixed today, because there are people that have made investments, and they’re capitalizing on the market opportunity as well.”

In 2023, Seaboard said it would shift its sales away from California so it wouldn’t have to make changes to its housing for mother pigs. However, the company is now on the list of certified distributors. It reported an increase in operating income in 2024 attributable to “higher margins on pork products and market hogs sold, primarily due to higher sale prices and lower hog production costs.”

That supports Farm Action Fund’s Lovell’s argument around any industry-led effort to blame high food prices on a factor like Prop. 12. “Time and time again, these big corporations really take the opportunity, whenever there’s a ‘supply chain disruption’—whether that’s a change like Prop. 12 or that’s avian flu where yeah, prices go up a little bit—to tack on their own premium,” he said.

Seaboard did not respond to a request for an interview.

Farmers Get Paid a Premium

Aside from the prices Californians pay for bacon at the grocery store, the pork industry’s other main argument for overturning Prop. 12 is that “small family farmers will be crushed” by the law. On the website, NPPC displays a statistic: 5,000 hog farms lost in the U.S. from 2017 to 2022.

Those numbers are from the USDA Agricultural Census and show the tail end of a trend that started in the 1990s. At the same time the pork industry was shifting to a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) model and the companies raising and buying animals became more consolidated, farms began disappearing and the ones that remained got bigger to survive. Since the implementation of Prop. 12 began in July 2023, after the end of the available stats, it’s unclear what the numbers from 2017 to 2022 are intended to show.

Farm Action credits the industrialization and consolidation of industries like pork for much of the decline in farms and sees Prop. 12 as an opportunity for farmers that work within that system to get a higher price for their animals. “We’ve seen farmers either changing their operation or just flat-out getting into a new type of system where they’re raising pork that meets the standards.”

After Prop. 12 went into effect, the USDA began tracking the premium paid to farmers. It’s hovered around $5 per 100 pounds of pig, which Sumner says is enough to make the transition worth it. In October of 2023, a group of Missouri and Illinois farmers sent a letter to House and Senate agriculture leadership asking them to reject overturning Prop 12.

Sows at the Willis Free Range Pig Farm in Thornton, Iowa, which was operated by Paul Willis, founder and manager of the Niman Ranch network of 500 farmers. Gestation options for sows in the network include hoop barns, larger open-sided barns, and pastures with huts. (Photo courtesy of Niman Ranch).

“We have invested in substantial and profitable adjustments to our operations—from modifying our production methods, to expanding our supply chain reach, and spending resources to inform consumers about our product compliance,” they wrote. “As independent farmers, product differentiation is a crucial avenue for maintaining our ability to compete and remain in the marketplace against powerful multinational corporations that control the majority of the market.”

Companies like Niman Ranch, which buys from a network of about 500 family farmers that already raise pigs according to higher welfare standards, have also benefited. A spokesperson told Civil Eats the company landed a few big accounts due to Prop. 12, and thanks to increased demand from California (and elsewhere), the company increased its hog numbers 15 percent in 2024 and expects another 10-15 percent increase in pigs in 2025.

These are exactly the kind of small family farms the NPPC claims to care about, Lovell said.

“We know small farms are the most likely to be diversified. We know that small farms are the most likely to have high welfare standards, and we know that small farms are really the most likely to use more sustainable regenerative practices, right? So, I would take issue with the premise of Prop. 12 being incongruent with supporting small farmers,” he said.

Of the pork industry’s big push on Capitol Hill, he continued, “We think their policy is wrong. We think their tactics are wrong. We think that on the merits and on the data they’re wrong. Whether or not they changed the bill name, whatever they want to call it, our coalition will be there to oppose it.”

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Iowa Senator Joni Ernst.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/05/06/opponents-of-prop-12-ask-congress-to-overturn-it-again/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2025/04/16/usdas-regional-food-business-centers-caught-in-federal-funding-freeze/ https://civileats.com/2025/04/16/usdas-regional-food-business-centers-caught-in-federal-funding-freeze/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:28 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=63532 July 15, 2025 Update: The USDA announced today it has cancelled the Regional Food Business Centers program. However, processing the animals in order to sell the meat locally has been a challenge: The couple currently has to haul the animals to a slaughter facility about four hours away, which is both time-consuming and hard on […]

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]]> July 15, 2025 Update: The USDA announced today it has cancelled the Regional Food Business Centers program.

For the past five years, Patra and David Wise have been growing their farm business, Native Wise, to sell vegetables, wild rice, and honey to their local community in Northeastern Minnesota. In 2021, they added a herd of bison on family land they had acquired within the Fond du Lac Reservation, a step they were particularly excited about since it represented the first time bison were returned to the tribal lands in about 150 years.

However, processing the animals in order to sell the meat locally has been a challenge: The couple currently has to haul the animals to a slaughter facility about four hours away, which is both time-consuming and hard on the bison. So, they’ve been working toward setting up their own local processing.

Last year, they got a boost when the North Central USDA Regional Food Business Center awarded them a $50,000 Business Builder Grant to pay for crucial pieces of equipment. So far, they’ve purchased an industrial cooler-freezer combo that will allow them to store meat for customers until they come to the farm to pick it up.

“We wouldn’t be able to do the farm-to-consumer processing without that type of a freezer,” said Patra Wise, adding that it would have been nearly impossible for them to afford such an expensive piece of equipment without the grant.

“You sign a contract and then you’re trusting the government that they’re going to honor their end.”

Wise was about to purchase a few smaller pieces of equipment with the remaining grant funds, which farmers and entrepreneurs receive by requesting reimbursements, when she heard, at the end of January, that all payments were on hold. She was shocked, she said, because the grant had already been awarded.

“You sign a contract and then you’re trusting the government that they’re going to honor their end,” she said. “For a small farm, that’s life or death, basically, for the business.”

Like many other U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs that support local and regional farms, the Regional Food Business Centers have been put on ice since the Trump administration took office.

In May 2023, the USDA awarded grant funding to local organizations like nonprofits and universities to run the business centers. The centers use that funding to support the local food economy, including by issuing smaller sub-grants to farmers and food businesses like Native Wise.

With $360 million awarded, the Regional Food Business Centers program represents a small slice of USDA spending, so has attracted less attention than bigger projects like the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities. (USDA canceled that program this week, but is allowing some projects to continue if they meet new criteria.)

However, the 12 centers have a wide reach, since they were set up to be hubs of business development activity within rural communities across the country. With funding paused, partnerships they’ve formed to provide technical assistance to farms and food businesses have been disrupted, as have grant dollars promised to local farmers and food businesses like Native Wise.

Because the projects were intentionally crafted to build the connective tissue that local supply chains rely on, a break in the chain has larger ripple effects. For example, one of the North Central Regional Food Business Center’s other grants went to a kitchen facility in Fargo, North Dakota. Until payments were paused, the facility was using its grant funding to expand its kitchen space, which would have enabled more farms and small food businesses to cook and process there to bring products to market.

“So, it’s not just about the awardee, it’s about everyone around them, too,” said Candice Zimmerman, a regional development planner at Region Five Development Commission, an economic development organization that runs the North Central Center, which serves Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Last week, nine of the 12 organizations running the centers sent a letter to members of Congress highlighting the impact of the work they’re doing, explaining that they are not getting reimbursed for money already spent based on their USDA contracts, and pleading for help. The letter was shared with Civil Eats.

“If there ever is a program that really deserves bipartisan support across the spectrum, it’s this program,” Paul Freedman, the director of the Appalachia Regional Food Business Center, which supports food producers across seven states from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, told Civil Eats. “Our middle name is business. Our goal here is to help businesses bring food to market so that it’s available at a fair price and so that producers, processors, and farmers can actually make a living doing this.”

A Biden-Era Project

In response to increasing food-system consolidation and the supply chain shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Biden’s USDA created a suite of new programs with the intention of building back what policy wonks call the “mid-tier” of the food system. It’s the landscape of farms and food businesses that support regional wealth and that have been the most hollowed out over the past several decades as corporate consolidation has pushed for a “get big or get out” farm economy.

“If there ever is a program that really deserves bipartisan support across the spectrum, it’s this program.”

Biden’s USDA wanted to put some of the work of building back those regional markets onto local organizations that might better understand each region’s unique needs. A former USDA official who worked on the program—who did not want to be identified because of current policy work she is engaged with—used an analogy: Just like the local agents of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service helped growers understand their particular soil profiles, the Regional Food Business Centers would help farmers understand, access, and build local markets.

The USDA tasked the centers with coordinating regional food efforts, offering comprehensive technical support, and providing small financial grants to further build local food capacity. “Success will be if we’re able to create additional market opportunities so that mid- and small-sized operators still have a chance of staying in the business,” former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told Civil Eats at the time.

Five-year grant agreements to 12 centers were finalized in 2023. In an October 2024 progress report, the USDA reported that as a result, 2,800 individuals received technical assistance, 1,500 new partnerships were formed, and 287 businesses reported increased revenue.

In the letter to lawmakers, the Northwest and Rocky Mountain Regional Food Business Center—which serves Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Oregon—reported that in its first year, its technical assistance programs helped establish 30 new companies, and 50 farms and businesses that worked with the center reported increased sales. The center cited its support of the development of Wyoming’s Food Freedom Markets, which one dairy farm reported enabled it to increase sales four-fold.

Because the Northwest Center is run by Colorado State University, it is continuing its work and honoring contract payments despite the current lack of USDA reimbursement, with staff hoping funding will resume soon.

Impacts of the Freeze

When the Trump administration took office, the USDA stopped paying Regional Food Business Center grantees for any work done after January 20. For the North Central Center, the freeze has been devastating.

“We’re not getting paid, and we’re not being told when that review will be done,” said Cheryal Lee Hills, executive director of the Region Five Development Commission.

In addition to not being able to reimburse grantees like Native Wise for work done under already-signed grant contracts, Hills had to cancel 31 subcontracts to organizations working with the center to provide technical assistance across Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota. That assistance might look like helping farmers market their foods, meet food safety requirements, or access capital to grow.

Some of those organizations have had to lay off staff as a result, Hills said. Now, with more than three years left on their contract, the organization is essentially treading water and isn’t getting any information from the USDA as to what might happen.

The USDA did not respond to questions about the freeze, its impacts, or whether the Regional Food Business Center program might be cancelled.

“I don’t have a good answer of how long we can hold out,” Hills said. “I’m hoping that they just either pay us . . . or terminate the thing so that we can all move on with our lives, because right now, it’s like we’ve been cut by a knife, and we don’t know how bad we’re going to bleed or for how long.”

One of the explicit aims of the project was also for the USDA to reach farmers and food businesses that historically had trouble accessing its programs and services. That could mean small, diversified farms that don’t fit the commodity mold, or Black farmers who faced past discrimination. With the pause and confusion, Hills said, many of those who are new to working with USDA grants are now demoralized, and even for those who have long accessed USDA’s services, confidence in the agency is plummeting.

When the Trump administration took office, the USDA stopped paying Regional Food Business Center grantees for any work done after January 20.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to apply for another USDA grant,” she said.

The Appalachia Center was not as far along in its work. Last fall, it closed the first round of its Business Builder Grants, selected 62 as awardees, and then sent the list to the USDA early this year for approval. Among those on the list are grain farmers who want to sell more of their grains directly to their communities and a food business working to more effectively process pawpaws. Now, they’re all in limbo.

Since the grants hadn’t been finalized, none of the farmers have spent money yet, so are not waiting for payments. Still, Appalachia Center Director Paul Freedman said the grants are time sensitive. Many of the applications included detailed cost estimates that depend on equipment pricing that changes over time. And the farmers are starting the season without knowing, now, if they’ll be expected, later, to start the projects and honor the contracts. Freedman has also paused a second round of Business Builder Grant applications and has stopped paying the Center’s 17 partner organizations for technical assistance.

“The longer it goes, at some point, more and more staff and more and more [of those] partners fall off,” he said. In other words, the longer his center is unable to get reimbursed for its work, the harder it is to keep supporting local farms and food businesses—who may have to call it quits on working with the center. Freedman said that moment feels imminent.

It’s a shame, he said, because one of things he thinks makes the Regional Food Business Centers effective is that each region is able to come up with its own “unique solutions to unique problems.”

In Ohio, that might mean helping an orchard get into cider production to boost revenue. On tribal lands in Minnesota, it might mean building the infrastructure to process bison.

What the centers have in common, said Freedman, is that they’re all working to counter the extractive forces like corporate consolidation that have long pushed farmers to hang up their hoes. “[The Regional Food Business Centers help] to overcome that and make small farms viable, and by doing so you’re getting more local food, which makes us more resilient, whether there’s a natural disaster, another recession, another—heaven forbid—a pandemic. It isn’t a blue or red issue.”

April 17, 2025 Update: This story has been updated to include the status of the Northwest and Rocky Mountain Regional Food Business Center’s work.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/04/16/usdas-regional-food-business-centers-caught-in-federal-funding-freeze/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/04/08/bayers-effort-to-block-roundup-lawsuits-kicks-into-high-gear/ https://civileats.com/2025/04/08/bayers-effort-to-block-roundup-lawsuits-kicks-into-high-gear/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:00:50 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=63212 May 14, 2025 Update:Governor Brian Kemp signed Georgia’s bill into law. April 28, 2025 Update: North Dakota’s governor signed the first bill protecting pesticide companies from liability into law last week. In Georgia, the bill is still with the governor. It was one of about 177,000 lawsuits to date filed against Bayer, which acquired Monsanto, the […]

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]]> May 14, 2025 Update:Governor Brian Kemp signed Georgia’s bill into law.

April 28, 2025 Update: North Dakota’s governor signed the first bill protecting pesticide companies from liability into law last week. In Georgia, the bill is still with the governor.

On March 21, a jury in a Georgia courtroom awarded John Barnes $2.1 billion in damages, affirming his claim that using Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that the company that made the product should have warned him of the risk.

It was one of about 177,000 lawsuits to date filed against Bayer, which acquired Monsanto, the maker of the world’s most widely used weedkiller, in 2018. The company has set aside $16 billion to handle the litigation, and this case looked like another major loss.

On the contrary, it may be the last Roundup litigation case in the state.

The week prior, Georgia’s state lawmakers passed a bill that would protect pesticide manufacturers from the same kind of legal liability in the future. It is now awaiting Republican Governor Brian Kemp’s signature.

If the bill becomes law, it will mark a turning point in Bayer’s long search to find the right strategy to beat back the lawsuits claiming that Roundup causes cancer. Bayer maintains that Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe when used as directed, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repeatedly found it is not likely to cause cancer.

“The fact these chemical companies want immunity from the harm that their pesticides may have on an individual or many individuals, it’s just not fair.”

International health agencies and multiple juries, presented with scientific research and documents that show Monsanto worked to hide evidence of harm, have reached different conclusions, affirming its connection to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In addition to many other approaches to mitigate the cost of litigation, the agrichemical giant first began writing and lobbying for the passage of “pesticide immunity” laws in a handful of states last year.

The laws eliminate individuals’ ability to bring “failure-to-warn” claims, which most Roundup litigation has been based on to date. Essentially, these laws declare that if the EPA has approved a chemical as safe, companies cannot be held liable for failing to warn users of risks. Opponents point out that the EPA’s approvals do not always keep up with emerging risks. Chlorpyrifos and atrazine, for example, have remained in use with EPA approval despite known risks.

Last year, Bayer lobbied lawmakers in Iowa, Idaho, and Missouri to push immunity bills, but the bills failed to pass. The company then ramped up its campaign heading into 2025. It created the Modern Ag Alliance to promote farmer support for the bills and began a cross-country ad blitz. Since the beginning of this year, lawmakers have introduced similar immunity bills in about a dozen states. Bills were defeated in Montana, Mississippi, and Wyoming and are still pending in Idaho, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Missouri, Florida, Tennessee, and Iowa.

“People who know about the bill are opposed to the bill and really don’t want their rights curtailed. We don’t need to have the Iowa legislature making this decision on behalf of Bayer,” said Jennifer Breon, an organizer at advocacy group Food & Water Watch who has been coordinating opposition to the Iowa bill. “If they feel that their cancer or whatever illness has been caused by using a pesticide, people should have a chance to make that case in court.”

While action continues in the states, Bayer is  actively supporting two current pathways to federal law changes that could achieve a similar result: The first is a petition submitted by the attorneys general of 11 Republican-led states asking the EPA to initiate a rulemaking process that would further affirm the EPA’s authority on pesticide labeling. The second, a piece of legislation called the Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, could be attached to a future farm bill.

There is also a wild-card factor in the mix: While Republicans have mostly supported Bayer’s efforts in the past, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was one of the lawyers who won the first verdict against Monsanto (now Bayer) based on claims Roundup caused Dewayne “Lee” Johnson’s cancer. And some of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) followers have been speaking out against the bills.

Bayer did not respond to questions from Civil Eats by press time.*

State-Level Messaging and Momentum (or Lack Thereof)

On April 1, Iowans stood in front of their state capitol building in Des Moines holding letters that spelled out, “NO CANCER GAG ACT.” State Representative Megan Srinivas, a Democrat, who has been leading opposition to the bill in the legislature, stepped up to the podium.

“This bill only gives corporate profits a boost,” she said. “It tells Iowans, ‘Your lives don’t matter.’ ”

The bill, SF 394, passed in the Senate, although all Democrats and six Republicans voted against it. House lawmakers had an April 4 deadline to take it up in their chamber or it would be dead for the session, and the press conference at the state capitol was organized in support of that outcome. A coalition of 31 advocacy groups also sent a letter to House lawmakers, urging them to oppose the bill.

At the rally, Srinivas brought up Iowa’s high and rising cancer rates, a rallying cry from last year’s battle. Srinivas linked those rates to widespread use of agricultural chemicals in the state.

Getting to this current size wasn’t easy, however. In their first attempt to scale up and acquire 640 acres, the brothers turned to the Farm Service Agency (FSA), a loan-making entity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“When we got to the FSA, it was just bad,” says Nelson. “It seemed like they were looking for any reason not to give us a loan.” Nelson and his brothers were repeatedly told that the farm’s paperwork was incorrect and asked to produce what they say was an unnecessary amount of financial documentation.

“We couldn’t even get a guaranteed loan from other banks, because they kept saying we didn’t have enough cash flow,” says Nelson. This continued for four years until Nelson and his brothers were approached by First Southern Bank after their farm got a writeup in The Christian Science Monitor. The community-oriented bank gave the Nelson brothers their first loan to fully fund their farming venture.

A new effort seeks to jumpstart and sustain small farmers and other agricultural-based businesses in the southeastern United States. The Southern Farmers Financial Association (SFFA) is a cooperative, mission-driven bank designed to lower the barriers to accessing credit for small farmers, especially those in high-poverty and low-resource areas. Historically, limited-resource farmers, often Black farmers and farmers of color, have faced systemic barriers and discriminatory practices when seeking financial support from traditional lending institutions, including governmental agencies.

“This [bank] is about making sure that agriculture works for all and that our rural communities survive,” says Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports Black farmers, landowners, and cooperatives with various land retention and advocacy efforts across the South. As the leading partner of the SFFA, the Federation will help the new bank build upon its existing infrastructure across the region and support it with its outreach, education, and technical assistance.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided the SFFA effort with $20 million in initial funding to be dispersed through the USDA—and the bank has had plans to open its doors towards the end of the first quarter of 2025. However, with the Trump administration’s sweeping executive orders and recent crackdown on alleged “radical and wasteful programs,” as well as programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) and climate change, things are now uncertain.

“While we hadn’t used that language around the bank and don’t consider it to be DEIA, we’re in jeopardy for being labeled as such because of their way of looking at this,” Blanding says. Despite having a signed contract with the USDA and an agreed-upon work plan, the bank’s launch is now on pause alongside many other USDA programs as they each await review.

After review, the SFFA will either be modified to fit new guidelines or completely terminated.

“We’re hoping for the best case and that it will be some kind of modification,” says Blanding.

How the Green Bank Took Root

The concept of a mission-driven—or green—bank started over a decade ago after an informal convening of farmers in Atlanta, Georgia. “Many of the folks who were a part of that convening had been working on the Black farmer lawsuit since 1999, and it was the center of those conversations,” Blanding says.

Those involved in the convening realized that access to credit—which provides the startup capital that most farmers seek to purchase supplies, seeds, and technology—continued to be one of the most significant barriers to low-resource farmers in the region. As a result, they formed committees and dedicated working groups where, eventually, the idea of a cooperative green bank took root.

“When you look at the data, the majority of Black farmers, the majority of low-resource farmers, [and] a majority of farmers of color are located in the Southeast,” Blanding says. This disparity was a significant factor in the decision to base the SFFA in the Southeast region. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, the bank will serve Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas with virtual hubs.

What sets this bank—intended for farmers, landowners, and agriculture-based businesses—apart from a standard bank is its strict focus on agriculture and strengthening rural communities. In the eyes of many traditional lending institutions, a low-resource farm may not be bankable. The SFFA will have a different approach to collateral.

“It’s not about tying up the assets of a farmer or landowner to the point where they can’t survive or don’t have other options,” says Blanding. “It’s about getting to ‘yes’ and working with folks from where they are.”

In partnership with community-based organizations, the SFFA is designed to figure out alternative ways to get those who own land, farm, or run other ag-based enterprises to the point where they are financially viable. The bank is intended to serve as a revolving loan fund that offers reasonable interest rates—and will ideally grow to have assets, enabling it to continue providing financial resources to a farm long after its initial disbursement.

While it is not a grant-making institution, Blanding sees the cooperative green bank as having multiple arms that can have grant-type resources and provide gap financing—a short-term loan or credit line that covers the difference needed for an immediate financial obligation.

To help ensure it remains aligned with the needs and priorities of the farming communities it serves, the SFFA also plans to have various classes of membership for its borrowers. As in a traditional cooperative, members will get a share of earnings and will receive dividends.

Class A membership will give member-owners the highest voting power and the ability to invest more significant sums of money in the cooperative, explains Ben Burkett, longtime farm advocate and the Federation’s Mississippi state coordinator, who, alongside Blanding, was a part of the initial conversations that conceptualized the SFFA. Class B and C cooperative members can invest some capital but have limited to no voting rights.

For low-resource farmers and others in the Southeast, the SFFA would be a safety net that has never existed before. “There are many community-based organizations doing a lot of work with Black farmers and socially disadvantaged farmers,” Blanding says. “This [green bank] is not intended to replicate any of that, but to step in the middle and provide things there weren’t available until now.”

A History of Injustice

The Pigford lawsuit eventually led to the most robust civil rights settlement in U.S. history, totaling just over $1 billion. However, payouts did not begin for another 15 years, and were only partial. In 2023, the USDA launched the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program and a year later issued payouts to farmers, ranchers, and landowners who had experienced discrimination. “It doesn’t repair what happened historically, but it acknowledges it,” Blanding says.

Despite this progress, discrimination remains. Even as recently as 2022, Black farmers had the highest USDA loan rejection rate of any demographic group: 36 percent of Black farmers who applied were approved for direct loans, compared to 72 percent of white farmers, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.

And while Burkett has been a successful farmer for decades, he still experiences the bias that lending institutions hold toward Black farmers. Last year, for example, Burkett financed a tractor with a cooperative credit institution that Burkett has been a member of for over 30 years.

“They took that tractor for collateral, and then they took another one of my tractors and a piece of my equipment,” Burkett says.

The SFFA aims to address the patterns of injustice by, most importantly, acknowledging the historic hurdles low-resource farmers and farmers of color have faced. “No farmer would be discriminated against at this bank, no matter the situation he or she is coming from,” says Blanding. Secondly, farmers have faced injustices simply based on their lack of access to credit. That is the specific problem that the bank is trying to solve.

“We think we can reverse those patterns by addressing those two issues,” says Blanding.

Supporting Small and Mid-Size Farms Through Big Challenges

“I’ve been seeing with all the farmers that there is difficulty in making their cash flow,” says Nelson, who is also a current member of the Federation and a board member of the National Black Growers Council. “It’s been a rough four years for the Southeast.”

Considering the high cost of starting and scaling farming operations, many farmers never see investment returns, says Blanding. And farms that are smaller in acreage are more vulnerable to a number of issues that can quickly become financially burdensome.

Climate change—specifically extreme drought and floods—causes many issues for small farmers in particular. With the more intense heat, drought, and storms brought on by the changing climate, “It’s not the original growing seasons that we’re used to,” Nelson says. His farm has been working to keep its yields up and keep up with inflation.

Lenders often want to see the farm’s profitability alongside other factors such as income, credit score, and business plan. Because of the extreme weather, farmers with smaller operations suffer more substantial losses than larger farmers—making it more challenging to get the capital they need to stay afloat.

Alongside climate change, the changing demographics of the farming community creates another challenge. “Some of us [farmers of color] are still losing land,” Nelson says. Additionally, most land in the area is passed down through succession, from one generation to the next, but the youth no longer have as much interest in farming or they lack the resources to start. In many places, people have sold their land or private entities have taken it over. “It’s not family farming anymore,” Nelson says.

Burkett also sees medium-size farming operations, or those with gross sales between $100,000 and $400,000 annually, facing outsize problems. “Mid-size farmers—what I call true family farms—are totally being squeezed out” as many farms in the area have had to cease operations or downsize, he says. Farms can either get really big or stay small, says Burkett.

“It just costs so much to do business now with the cost of equipment, labor, industry requirements, safety, rules and regulations,” Burkett says. “You’ve got to have a full-time man or woman just to keep up with those targets.”

Nelson believes a cooperative green bank could help family farmers navigate challenges like these. On his farm, a bank loan would help him carry out certain upgrades, such as installing underground irrigation to prepare for drought.

In the absence of a bank like the SFFA, Nelson had to go through the USDA’s cost share program, known as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), to get the equipment he needed to drain the water from his land after a recent flood. The program covered 70 percent of the cost, but Nelson still had to put up 30 percent, impacting other farm needs. And while programs like EQIP are helpful, the funding is limited, not guaranteed, and can require a lengthy wait.

Additionally, some EQIP funding has been paused since the start of the new administration while the USDA conducts a review of grant contracts to determine if they align with President Trump’s executive orders rolling back climate projects and work that prioritizes equity or diversity. While a court ordered the funds to be unfrozen, the agency has only released small batches of that money.

EQIP was one of several programs that got a bump in funding from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act for farm projects that prioritized climate goals, so some farmers’ contracts may also be at risk of cancellation. As funding through EQIP and the vast suite of farm programs the USDA runs becomes more uncertain, SFFA could become an even more vital resource—assuming it continues.

Nelson sees the SFFA as a key to rebuilding the farming community from the ground up. With backing from the green bank, reinvestment can look like community-led gardens and agricultural programs that lower the entry point for new farmers. This could mean enabling new or existing small farms to acquire small amounts of acreage, helping them become financially viable and putting them in a position to scale up.

“We [farmers in the area] don’t have to have 1,000 acres to start [farming]—we can get back to the 40- or 100- acre farms, and the rest will follow,” Nelson says.

Growing Excitement

“I’m willing to give my time because we have to make something out of this,” Nelson says.

Late last year, the first portion of the IRA funds were released—just over a million dollars. These funds have already been used to hire a permanent CEO and set up the bank’s infrastructure. Now, the bank founders are waiting to hear from the USDA to learn if and when they will receive the rest of the funding needed to move forward and whether the program will be modified—or, worst case, terminated.

In the meantime, they have been in conversation with aligned organizations like the Native American Financial Services and entities that work with low-resource farmers, such as the Farm Credit System, to spread the word across the Southeast to make sure that farm-adjacent people fully understand what the cooperative green bank offers, and that they can trust it.

The response to the forthcoming cooperative green bank has been overwhelmingly positive. The main question that Blanding and SFFA leadership have heard over the past few months is, “When will it open?”

Since the SFFA’s initial conceptualization, the Federation for Southern Cooperatives has kept its membership abreast and in touch with people inside and outside their farming community.

“Agriculture is a huge and important part of what this country is,” Blanding says. “The more people who are part of it and succeeding in it, the better off we are as a nation.”

The post A New Path for Small Farmers in the Southeast? appeared first on Civil Eats.

While steam rises from the houses, spring snow settles among the groves. It is this forested serenity that Steve Wheeler, a fifth-generation sugarmaker, loves best. Wheeler runs the family’s certified organic maple farm, where, at the age of six, he first started helping his father and grandfather make syrup. Back then, they collected sap in galvanized buckets and hauled them back through the snowy woods. “I’ve spent 50 years making maple syrup,” Wheeler says, “and you’re still excited about next sugar season.”

Wheeler operates his sugarbush with his wife and two sons in the small agriculture-rich town of Derby, Vermont. He hopes to continue running the farm and shop well into the future, passing it on to his descendants if he can. But things have not been so clear cut for sugarmakers lately. A stiff tariff from the Trump administration on Canadian goods, including the equipment used to make syrup, has unsettled the industry and could drive up the price of U.S. syrup. This has coincided with a slow syrup run in February. Such short-term woes are combining with longer-term concerns, as a changing climate alters both production and the business model.

So the Wheelers and other sugarmakers are expanding into other tree syrups, to fortify their businesses in the face of changing weather (political and actual) and in hopes of keeping forests healthy. Researchers and farmers alike are investigating species like beech, sycamore, walnut, and even other species of maple.

“When all of a sudden you can tap a birch tree too, it’s almost magic to me,” Wheeler says. “It’s like one more thing I can do.”

A Short Tapping Season Is Now in Flux

“You’re really talking about a relatively small number of actual days that contribute the vast majority of sap for your whole crop,” Isselhardt says. “If it’s all condensed into this few number of days, if anything goes wrong, mechanically or climate-wise or weather-wise, that can have an impact on production.”

Maple syrup also depends on a freeze-thaw cycle: When temperatures are below freezing at night but above it in the day, the difference in air pressure helps push sap through the tree and out through the taps. The increase in unpredictability from both climate change and other risks, like invasive species and disease, present challenges to producers, creating uncertainty for the future.

Bigger swings in temperature, for instance, mean a much more variable tapping window than decades past. The Wheelers are now tapping maples about two months earlier, for example. Abnormally high temperatures could cause maples to bud too soon, impacting the grade of the syrup. On the other hand, warmer weather can also make the sap flow better in areas that have historically been too cold. Either way, sugarmakers foresee more adaptation ahead.

Building More Resilient Forests Through Multiple Species

The Sami people—Indigenous to northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia—tap birch trees, as do the Indigenous peoples of Alaska, where birch is abundant and winters are harsh. The addition of birch sap into diets in the spring has been an important infusion of nutrients after long, hard winters.

Today, researchers are looking to these different trees and their saps to help build both climate resilience and business strength.

Mike Farrell, co-founder of Forest Farmers, a syrup business based in Vermont and New York, says the impact of climate change on maple syrup has so far been a net positive, particularly as producers have been able to adapt with better technology and long-term forest management. Farrell has been studying and producing maple and other syrups since the early 2000s. Over the past decade, there’s been a marked uptick of interest in alternative syrups, he says.

At Forest Farmers, Farrell focuses on forest stewardship and sustainable food production. His business is one of the few food brands to have earned a gold level for Regenerative Organic Certification, the highest standard for organic food. Forest Farmers produces a line of certified organic tree syrups, currently sold wholesale, including birch, beech, and walnut syrups, in addition to maple.

Prior to founding Forest Farmers, Farrell was the director of Cornell University’s Uihlein Maple Research Forest, a living laboratory of more than 350 acres, aimed primarily at helping farmers manage their forests and businesses with research-proven practices. Though Uihlein historically focused on maple syrup, its purview now includes other species. The forest also offers a protective habitat for several songbirds whose numbers are in decline, and syrups produced there are certified as bird-friendly. Work at the forest taught Farrell the benefits of diversity.

 “You need to have a resilient, sustainable forest to have a resilient, sustainable business,” Farrell says. “It’s all based on a healthy forest. If your forest is not healthy, your business will not be either.”

This biodiversity is better for business, too. Young beech trees, which can compete with sugar maples, are often culled. If beech trees became a financial asset, though, sugarmakers could keep them along with the maples. As one of the few commercial producers of several different syrups, including birch, beech, and a walnut-maple blend, Forest Farmers provides a real-life case study. Per gallon, the researchers estimate, beech could sell for upward of $500, compared to $50 for maple and between $100-$170 for birch.

Different trees are also better suited to specific areas; birches like more light than maple, and sycamores grow near water. Maples wouldn’t necessarily grow in those areas, anyway. Why not use the trees that are already there?

The Wheelers first became interested in birch syrup after talking to other birch syrup producers, including some in Alaska, who taught them how to tap birch without harming the tree.

They had already put effort into diversifying their business beyond a single maple product by also selling condiments, maple sweets, and locally produced pancake mix. With birch syrup, they could go even further. The same equipment could be used for both maple and birch. And they were curious: Could a new kind of syrup business be tapped on their land? 

The Downsides of Alternative Syrups

A maple tree’s sap. (Photo courtesy of University of Vermont Extension)

That means alternative syrups inherently cost more to make, and the resulting syrup has to be priced to match. The market size of non-maple syrups is still quite small, partly because the flavors are still novel: alternative syrups are usually more acidic than maple. Birch leads the way after maple, with well-established markets in Canada and Alaska and a few new sellers in the northeast.

“Maple is always going to be dominant,” Farrell says. “All these things are always going to be small niches. They don’t compete with maple.”

Also, comparatively little research has been done on non-maple syrups. Making syrup from sap involves breaking the tree’s protective layer of bark. While the tapping of maple trees has been studied extensively, including an ongoing 11-year study into the effects of harvesting sap at the University of Vermont, researchers don’t know as much about the long-term impact of tapping non-maples. There also isn’t as much research on these syrups and human health, including the effects of heavy metals in the sap.

Then there’s the relative lack of regulation for alternative syrups. Maple syrup is classified according to specific grades standardized by the USDA; when consumers buy a certain grade, like amber, they know what they’re getting. But there is no such system with the newer syrups. Consumers could get two drastically different products from two different producers. Future regulation for alternative syrups, including both quality and methodology, will make these alternative syrups much easier to market.

The Future of Syrup

“Being a research forest, we’re trying to do this for landowners to be able to picture it, too, within their forest, so they cannot just rely on one individual species—and so that if there were some kind of event that would disrupt maple sap flow, or an invasive insect that would harm the maples, there’s more species out there as that kind of backup option,” Wild says.

Maples have been included in research grants under the Acer Access and Development Program (maples fall under the genus Acer), authorized by the 2018 Farm Bill and funded through annual appropriations. Through these grants, universities (including Cornell) have been able to provide vital research and development for maple syrup. With government funding getting slashed, the future of the farm bill—and the research it funds—remains to be seen.

For Wheeler, resources provided by northeastern universities have been pivotal for increasing yields and taking care of the forest. Even small tweaks to their methods, like replacing spouts and tap depth, have increased the outflow of sap dramatically.

“I’m very thankful that we have all of those research centers, and I am indebted to them all,” Wheeler says. “We are learning, and we are becoming bigger, better, faster, smarter in how we do things, and it’s vital to the future.”

Tree Syrups 101

Photo courtesy of Adam Wild, Cornell Maple Program

Any deciduous tree sap can make syrup. Not all sap is created equal; the sugars and other chemicals in each require different production methods and create different flavors. Birch is relatively easy to find online; beech, sycamore, and walnut take a little more work to track down.

Birch

Birch syrup, usually from paper birch trees, is typically darker and more acidic than maple. It is also the most developed market after maple, including both the syrup and the sap itself, which is sold as a drink. The sap is used for flavoring in soda and in breweries and is also becoming more popular on the natural drinks scene, offering minerals like calcium, potassium, manganese, and zinc. Birch sap runs when temperatures are above freezing, after maple season ends in the spring. Find online at Jed’s Maple Products, Forest Farmers, and the Uihlein Maple Research Forest.

Sycamore

When processed correctly, sycamore syrup has a light flavor often compared to butterscotch. As with birch sap, sycamore is high in fructose and glucose as well as acid, which calls for lower temperatures during processing. Sycamore sap is quite watery and requires more than 100 gallons to make one gallon of syrup. Sycamore syrup is quite hard to find commercially. One of the few producers is Hillsboro Maple Works in West Virginia, which also produces birch, beech, black walnut, and hickory syrups.

Beech

The syrup’s flavor is fruity and raisin-like. Like birch and sycamore, beech contains both fructose and glucose, and it takes well over 100 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup. It is also harder to harvest; the only way is to use vacuum pumps. Beech sap runs during both freeze/thaw cycles as well as into warmer temperatures, so beech tapping season falls between maple and birch in the spring. Forest Farmers, which only sells wholesale, is one of the few producers of beech syrup. So far, it’s not available for retail.

Walnut

Walnut syrup, also composed of sucrose, tastes quite similar to certain maple syrups, though it might register as a bit nuttier. Most producers of walnut syrup use sap from black walnuts, common in the eastern half of North America. Walnut sap doesn’t flow as abundantly as sugar maple, and it also contains pectin, making it more likely to clog filters (whether cloth or mesh) and reverse osmosis systems. Tapping walnut trees is a relatively new endeavor, so relatively little research has been done. Find walnut syrup at Tonoloway Farm in Virginia.

The post As Tariffs Slam Maple Syrup, Sugarmakers Branch Out appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2025/02/25/alien-land-laws-created-to-protect-us-farmland-may-be-harming-asian-americans/ https://civileats.com/2025/02/25/alien-land-laws-created-to-protect-us-farmland-may-be-harming-asian-americans/#comments Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:00:13 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=61628 White farmers and landowners identified an economic threat. In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, prohibiting ownership of agricultural land by people ineligible for citizenship. Given that Asian immigrants weren’t permitted to naturalize then, it was effectively the country’s first anti-Asian land law, says Robert Chang, a professor at the University of California, Irvine […]

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Alien land laws date to the early 20th century, when thousands of Japanese immigrants came to California to build a better life. They used their agricultural knowledge do to so, eventually producing most of the state’s strawberries, snap beans, and celery in addition to nearly half its onions, tomatoes, and green peas.

White farmers and landowners identified an economic threat. In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, prohibiting ownership of agricultural land by people ineligible for citizenship. Given that Asian immigrants weren’t permitted to naturalize then, it was effectively the country’s first anti-Asian land law, says Robert Chang, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, and the Sylvia Mendez Presidential Chair for Civil Rights.

The law was infrequently used by prosecutors until World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when a raft of cases targeted people of Japanese ancestry. Still, coupled with a surge in anti-Japanese activism, the law drastically reduced Japanese-owned acreage, which peaked at nearly 75,000 acres in 1920 before declining. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down portions of California’s law as it pertained to citizens, and it was repealed in 1956. The court didn’t rule on how the law applied to noncitizens.

In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Law, prohibiting ownership of agricultural land by people ineligible for citizenship.

Today, however, at least two dozen states—most recently Florida, Georgia, and Texas—restrict or forbid individuals, entities, and immigrants from “foreign countries of concern” from owning agricultural land, emphasizing national security. Brooke L. Rollins, the new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) secretary, said in a recent interview that the Trump administration is interested in federal policies that would block “the Chinese purchase of our farmland.”

Many laws emerged as U.S.-China tensions flared after a suspected Chinese spy balloon was spotted over Montana in February 2023 and following claims that Chinese investors were buying farmland near U.S. military installations. The laws often mention a list of countries that include Russia, North Korea, and Iran, but their political backers have explicitly targeted Chinese nationals. Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, said Florida was taking a stand against the Chinese Communist Party.

Foreign ownership of U.S. farmland has expanded in recent years, passing 45 million acres in 2023 and accounting for about 3 percent of all farmland. That has led some farm groups to support restrictions on foreign ownership to protect domestic farmers. But, as Chang points out, that pressure is coming primarily from Canada.

A USDA report on foreign holdings of U.S. agricultural land states that Canadian investors represent 33 percent of foreign-owned land, followed by the Netherlands (11 percent), Italy (6 percent), and the United Kingdom (6 percent). Chinese entities own 277,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land, according to the USDA, accounting for less than 1 percent of all foreign-owned land. Mexico’s share of the total is also less than 1 percent, roughly on par with Japan.

Rather than being legitimate attempts to protect U.S. farmers, Chang argues that alien land laws are “entry points for further discrimination” against Asians and Asian Americans, in keeping with their history. Chang is co-counsel in a federal lawsuit challenging a law in Arkansas, where his client, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was flagged by the state’s secretary of agriculture because his company, which operates a digital data center on agricultural land, “may have significant ties to China.”

As alien land laws spread, and with the legal future still to be determined, Civil Eats spoke with Chang about the nativist origins of alien land laws, why they are ineffective in protecting U.S. farmers, and what’s at stake for immigrants, farmers, and the food system, as they proliferate.

What is the history of the recent spate of alien land laws?  

There’s a long history regarding the power of either a nation or a state to restrict land ownership to citizens, with the idea that land ownership was tied to the security of a kingdom. When the United States inherited this tradition, some of the early Western territories began with a strict law that cove­­­­­­­­­­red all aliens.

But when tensions arose as immigration from China increased—and then immigration from Japan after Chinese exclusion was put into place in 1882—a number of politicians and landowners thought the security of the state was possibly being endangered if farmland could be held by Asian immigrants. And so, in 1913, California passed what is regarded as the first [specifically] anti-Asian alien land law.

Why are these laws resurfacing now?  

Robert Chang is a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, executive director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, and the Sylvia Mendez Presidential Chair for Civil Rights.

My quick answer is dog-whistle politics. We can go back and recast the reasons put forward when the U.S. Supreme Court said, in 1923, that these anti-Asian alien land laws were OK in the case Terrace v. Thompson, which challenged Washington State’s alien land law.

The court said the state had a legitimate concern that all of the farmland in Washington might come into the hands and control of aliens who had not declared in good faith their intention to become citizens. That becomes really critical in understanding how it’s articulated today. [Washington’s anti-Asian laws were eventually repealed in 1966.]

In terms of the Arkansas law specifically targeting ownership of agricultural land, there’s this idea that if some foreign entity gets control of the food supply, they might manipulate it in a way that harms people in Arkansas and all the markets that Arkansas farmland serves. There’s this stated notion of threat.

And you’re saying this is all a dog whistle—an effort to appeal to voters and stoke racial division?

That’s my opinion. If the concern really is about national and state security, how real is that concern versus being able to say that as a politician I’m taking a strong stance to protect you?

Why is agricultural land often a specific target?

“If we restrict pathways to belonging—to becoming full members of our society—based on connection to a so-called country of concern, I think that undercuts the great mission of our country of allowing people from different groups to become full members.”

The choice of agricultural land is strategic. You can imagine that if somebody really had the means and the will to disrupt our nation’s food supply, the impact of that is tremendous. It gets at our very survival. Agriculture lends itself very easily to this concern. If we accept that it’s plausible that an entity could purposely insert itself within our agricultural system and at some point manipulate it for their own advantage, the question is whether a blanket law like we’re seeing now is the best approach.

Who and what is at risk if these laws hold up in court?

The people who are at risk are non-U.S. citizens of Asian ancestry. But then, because of the imprecision and lack of knowledge that parties in commercial transactions might have, that can also include U.S. citizens of Asian ancestry.

The other concern I have is that the alien land laws were only the start of a lot of state and local discrimination against people of Asian ancestry in the early 1900s. States realized that the arguments they put forward were accepted. So, they began with the alien land laws, but then they also restricted access to certain occupations, including becoming a member of the bar [to practice law]. Once discrimination in one sphere is legitimated, history teaches us that it goes to other areas.

Land access is a major obstacle for beginning farmers and farmers of color, including Black and Latino farmers. How concerned are you about what the movement to pass these laws could mean for land access and rights in the coming years?  

If we restrict pathways to belonging—to becoming full members of our society—based on your connection to a so-called country of concern, I think that undercuts the great mission of our country of allowing people from different groups to become full members. It also can impede economic pathways for the affected individuals.

There’s also a real problem when the danger is cast as China, or people who might be controlled by China. That gets extended then to Chinese Americans or people who might be thought to be Chinese American. You can see how, when you have a law like this, it can lead to broader discrimination.

Some groups that represent farmers and work for a fairer agricultural system in the U.S. are in favor of laws that restrict foreign investment and ownership of farmland. They say the laws can prevent land from being bought up by foreign investors, thereby keeping land more affordable and available for new and beginning farmers. Could these laws actually support land access for a wider range of farmers?

“The other concern I have is that the alien land laws were only the start of a lot of state and local discrimination against people of Asian ancestry in the early 1900s.”

If the problem is that agricultural land is being bought up by foreign investors and global corporations, which makes it harder for new and beginning farmers to purchase land, then it would seem that a more general law targeting foreign investment and ownership would be more effective than the kind of laws that have passed in numerous states, where often the target appears to be companies and individuals who may be associated with the People’s Republic of China.

The largest foreign investors come from Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe. To the extent that foreign ownership is the problem, the new laws don’t address the countries that own the most agricultural land in the U.S.

Generally, lawmakers don’t present these laws as intending to prevent Asian Americans from owning land, but with the aim of stopping foreign governments and corporations from controlling farmland. Are these laws preventing citizens and their families from owning land and farming here?

Part of the problem with some of these laws is the way they define the banned category of owners. For example, the Florida law forbids ownership of certain lands by “foreign principals” from a “foreign country of concern.”

The majority of Asian American citizens in the U.S. are foreign-born. If a seller receives multiple offers for the purchase of land, and one of them appears to be of Asian ancestry and may not speak English fluently, that seller may choose not to sell to that person because of fear of becoming entangled in Florida’s alien land law. In instances where a seller doesn’t meet the person, the seller may make decisions based on Asian surnames.

Are farmers, landowners, and the other people who contribute to our food system unwittingly being used by the proponents of alien land laws to foster discrimination? 

They might be. If those in the agricultural industry don’t believe that these are legitimate concerns, it would be great if people started saying so. That might help counter the use of this idea of a threat to agriculture and the food system.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Alien Land Laws, Created to Protect US Farmland, May Be Harming Asian Americans appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/02/25/alien-land-laws-created-to-protect-us-farmland-may-be-harming-asian-americans/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/12/23/our-best-climate-reporting-of-2024/ Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:00:56 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=60262 Civil Eats has long been committed to covering the intersection of the food system and climate change. In addition to looking at the greenhouse gas impacts of growing, harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging, and distributing food, we also examine the ways food-system players are addressing climate change with strategies that sequester carbon, cut emissions, save water, […]

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Droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding brought on by climate change all have a massive impact on the food system. Farmers are having to adjust what they grow and how they grow it, and people all along the food chain—from the workers who harvest the crops to the consumers who eat them—feel the effects. At the same time, agriculture is a major contributor to the climate crisis, producing one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Civil Eats has long been committed to covering the intersection of the food system and climate change. In addition to looking at the greenhouse gas impacts of growing, harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging, and distributing food, we also examine the ways food-system players are addressing climate change with strategies that sequester carbon, cut emissions, save water, and establish new markets.

This year, for example, we looked at the meat industry’s influence on climate research and the presidential candidates’ stances on climate change. We also reported on farmers experimenting with the wild seed relatives of domestic crops, which may be better able to withstand extreme weather, and the underground fungal networks that trap carbon and support healthy plant life.

Additionally, we published a four-part series examining the challenges and potential of kelp as a regenerative crop, a four-part series on the power and impact of the pesticide industry, and a five-part series looking at how the climate crisis is affecting restaurants, asking ourselves: What is a climate-conscious restaurant, if that even exists?

Here are our best climate stories of 2024.

As Saltwater Encroaches on Farms, Solutions Emerge From the Marshes
In the Mid-Atlantic, sea level rise due to climate change is already altering what farmers can grow.

The USDA Updated Its Gardening Map, But Downplays Connection to Climate Change
The USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map has been updated after more than a decade. It confirms what anyone who’s planted seeds recently already knows.

Micro Solar Leases: A New Income Stream for Black Farmers in the South? EnerWealth Solutions wants to bring the benefits of renewable energy to Black farmers and landowners in the Carolinas.

Photo credit: dhughes9/Getty Images

New Research Shows How the Meat Industry Infiltrated Universities to Obstruct Climate Policy
We look at how Big Meat seeks to influence climate understanding, climate-friendly farming practices, and more.

Fungi Are Helping Farmers Unlock the Secrets of Soil Carbon
By tapping into underground fungal networks, farmers are learning how to build lush, spongy soil that supports healthy plants and stores carbon underground.

Seeds From Wild Crop Relatives Could Help Agriculture Weather Climate Change
The hardy wild cousins of domesticated crops can teach us how to adapt to a hotter, more unpredictable future.

Climate Solutions for the Future of Coffee
In the face of severe climate change, farmers, researchers, and coffee devotees are refocusing on agroforestry and developing hardier varieties and high-tech beanless brews to save our morning cup of Joe.

Kelp’s Tangled Lines: Charting the Future of Seaweed in the Face of Climate Change
This in-depth four-part series, produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center, looks at kelp as a valuable regenerative crop for both U.S. coasts, tracing the rise of the industry and the challenges it faces in fulfilling its potential.

(Illustration by Civil Eats)

Chemical Capture: The Power and Impact of the Pesticide Industry
In this investigative series, we examine whether consolidated corporate power may be contributing to the ubiquitous use of pesticides and other chemicals, and whether the influence that chemical companies wield in the halls of power make it difficult to sort facts from marketing or engage in rigorous cost-benefit analyses.

The Pawpaw, a Beloved Native Fruit, Could Seed a More Sustainable Future for Small Farms
As festivals celebrate the pawpaw for its tropical flavor and custardy texture, researchers explore its potential as a low-input, high-value crop that’s easy to grow organically.

Why Are US Agricultural Emissions Dropping?
The EPA’s annual emissions report points to declines in cattle numbers and fertilizer use, data that could inform major climate events this fall.

Climate on the Menu
In this five-part series, produced in partnership with Eater, we examine how climate change is driving a shift in farm relationships, supply chains, labor, waste disposal, and service, aiming to better understand the ongoing climate realities that restaurants face—and we ask ourselves: What is a climate-conscious restaurant, if it even exists?

Climate on the menu. (Illustration by Ellie Krupnik)

Where Do the Presidential Candidates Stand on Climate Change?
We examined their track records and party platforms to explore the approaches each might take if elected, and how those might impact food and agriculture.

Colorado’s Groundwater Experiment
Farmers in the San Luis Valley mount an all-hands effort to restore the shrinking aquifers that make agriculture possible here. Their tactic: groundwater conservation easements.

Utah Tries a New Water Strategy
Amid drought and demand, this state is trying to circumvent one of the oldest water rules of the West: ‘Use It or Lose It.’

Farm Runoff May Be Tied to Respiratory Illness Near the Salton Sea
New research on California’s largest landlocked lake suggests agricultural runoff in the water is feeding ‘extreme microbes’ that can emit harmful compounds into the air.

Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation
Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past.

The post Our Best Climate Reporting of 2024 appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/11/18/fighting-the-corporate-cafo-takeover-of-rural-america/ https://civileats.com/2024/11/18/fighting-the-corporate-cafo-takeover-of-rural-america/#comments Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:00:17 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=59111 The proposed CAFO would hold 2,400 pigs and produce as much manure equivalent as a town of nearly 7,000 people. “Enough,” Lowell said, “is enough.” The couple sued, assisted by their daughter, Sonja Trom Eayrs, a Minneapolis family law attorney who felt a deep sense of responsibility to help her elderly parents. Their legal battle […]

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In 2014, Lowell and Evelyn Trom learned that a farmer wanted to build a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) across the road from their family farm in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. By then, there were already 10 CAFOs within a 3-mile radius of their 760-acre farm, so they knew the stench the facility would bring.

The proposed CAFO would hold 2,400 pigs and produce as much manure equivalent as a town of nearly 7,000 people. “Enough,” Lowell said, “is enough.” The couple sued, assisted by their daughter, Sonja Trom Eayrs, a Minneapolis family law attorney who felt a deep sense of responsibility to help her elderly parents. Their legal battle took three years, and by the time they lost, nothing had changed—except a county ordinance had been created that made it easier to greenlight even more CAFOs. The CAFO they fought was built and is still operating across the road from their farm today.

The battle inspired Trom Eayrs to become a rural activist and help other communities fight what she calls a CAFO “takeover” of the Midwest. And it prompted her to write a book about her late parents’ experiences: Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America, published on November 1.

“It tears at the fabric that traditionally tied people together. The days of being a good neighbor and helping one another are gone. The factory farm fights have been so divisive, pitting neighbor against neighbor.”

In the book, Trom Eayrs argues that rural America is transforming into a corporate entity, one CAFO at a time. Since 1990, the number of U.S. hog farms has shrunk by more than 70 percent while individual farms have gotten bigger.

Trom Eayrs writes about the “Big Pig Pyramid,” a three-tiered, vertical integration model in which multinational meatpacking conglomerates sit at the top, followed by “integrators” in the middle tier that own the hogs and provide feed and veterinary services. At the bottom are the contract growers—a mix of fellow farmers or farmers from out of state—who raise the pigs in CAFOs, sometimes with the help of immigrant workers.

Besides causing air and water pollution, CAFOS can harm communities in other ways, Trom Eayres says. If you’re near a CAFO, being outside can be risky: Once, when her dad was harvesting the last of the corn, the CAFO across the road spread its manure on fields surrounding the Trom farm, and she says her dad became so dizzy he had to get off the combine to vomit.

Neighbors end up with an eroded quality of life, trapped inside their houses by the stench and dangerous emissions, she writes. And she describes how battles over CAFOs have led to what she characterizes as intimidation and suspicion, stifling those who would speak out against the feeding operations and creating a chilling effect in towns where mutual respect was once the norm.

Evelyn and Lowell Trom. (Photo credit: Alex Kolyer)

Using her hometown and family as the backdrop, Trom Eayrs details the influence of corporate interests and the Farm Bureau at all levels of government. For example, she describes how the agricultural industry backed state Right to Farm laws that limit residents’ ability to file nuisance actions against CAFOs once they’re up and running. The Farm Bureau and allied industrial agriculture interests wield incredible influence in Washington, D.C., regardless of who is in power. Trump is now vowing to eliminate corporate influence within federal food and agriculture agencies, but during his last administration, that influence increased significantly.

Civil Eats recently spoke to Trom Eayrs about her family’s battle against CAFOs, the ways these facilities hurt rural areas, and how communities are fighting back.

Could you describe the social impacts that communities face once these operations arrive?

I don’t think people realize how destructive the CAFO system is to rural communities. It tears at the fabric that traditionally tied people together. The days of being a good neighbor and helping one another are gone. The factory farm fights have been so divisive, pitting neighbor against neighbor. Eventually, we will learn that we need one another.

My family has faced harassment and intimidation for years. I’ve had to file several complaints with the Dodge County sheriff’s office and ask for extra patrols near our farm. Constant garbage [being dumped on our property], harassing telephone calls to my father in the middle of the night. One day, my brother and I were pulling weeds from the bean field, and a couple hours later, the stop sign maybe 100 to 200 feet away was sprayed with bullets.

I’m in a unique position because I don’t live in my home community. I don’t go to church there, and my children never went to school there, so I don’t have to see these people on a daily or weekly basis. But people [who live] in these small rural communities feel this tension.

For me, [the harassment] is confirmation to keep going. Don’t let them intimidate you. Keep digging for information. I know their playbook.

How would you describe the CAFO industry playbook?

It follows the classic teachings of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which is included in the curriculum in many business schools.

The corporate state has had its eyes on rural areas for years, adopting Right to Farm laws—which I frequently refer to as “Right to Harm” laws—placing the [agricultural] industry in a power position over farm families who have lived on the land for generations.

In repeated CAFO fights, the industry employs the classic sneak attack, laying plans weeks, months, and years ahead of construction. The multi-step process of siting, permitting, and construction occurs in secret, and neighbors are alerted at the last possible moment.

The industry sugarcoats the true impact of CAFOs on the environment, neighbors, and community. They dismiss the seriousness of the dangerous air emissions and often refer to it as the smell of money. Then why was my father vomiting?

This CAFO, located across the road from the Trom family farm, sparked multiple lawsuits. (Photo credit: Laurie Schneider)

It has created propaganda and indoctrination materials, including children’s coloring books. For example, I picked up a coloring book at the Minnesota State Fair that was produced by the National Pork Board and the Minnesota Pork Board. It’s another effort by the industry to polish its image.

Industry insiders repeatedly use harassment and intimidation tactics to silence opposition, including menacing phone calls threatening local businesses that oppose their plans. I also know of residents whose livelihoods were threatened when they showed support for laws that would limit the construction of CAFOs.

Although you wrote that “defeat was all but certain,” your family still decided to fight the CAFO across the road. Why?

My dad was a warrior. He would always say, “All we did was fight that goddamn Farm Bureau.” He was repeatedly asked to join the Farm Bureau, but he always declined. Other people wouldn’t take up the fight. They just allowed the big boys to roll right over them. My dad was sharp as a tack: He understood the seriousness of what was going on, and he could see the big picture.

Toward the end of his life, it started to take a toll on him, and I recall him saying, “I’m tired of being the goat.” In other words, he was tired of being the object of ridicule in the local community. I purposely went to church with my dad. I could see that he was essentially persona non grata in my home community. People wouldn’t speak to him.

These large industrial operations [still] impact my family and the daily use and enjoyment of our farm. The choking stench coats your nose and throat, and you have to immediately retreat indoors. I have a large family, and our farm has served as the central gathering destination for many gatherings over the years. [Now, there are] no more family reunions. No more picnics. No more weddings and wedding receptions.

What are the most effective tools rural residents can use to fight CAFOs in their communities?

Number one, education. People need to understand the big picture, that rural America is slowly, methodically, being corporatized, and that the industry is very good at operating under the radar. The corporations derive their strength in two ways. They’ve got market control, and they use their political ties and connections to force their corporate agenda onto the American public. They have a combination of market power and political power, and they will do anything to stay in power.

Number two, organization. Go door to door, talk to your neighbors. Reach out to state or national organizations for assistance. At the end of the day, it’s really a fight between community and corporations, which is why I call the book Dodge County, Incorporated: I want to drive home the fact that corporate governance has found its way into local governance. That’s happening at every level—at the township level, the county level, the state level, and the national level.

Dodge County citizens, joined by the Land Stewardship Project, are shown protesting the proposed Ripley Dairy on the county road bordering the Trom family farm. (Photo courtesy of the Land Stewardship Project)

In my book, I talk about the [successful] battle against the Ripley Dairy, which was going to be three or four miles north of our farm over 20 years ago. That fight, a citizen’s effort that included members of my family, went on for three or four years. That was successful because the neighbors worked cooperatively and with the assistance of the Land Stewardship Project, which had experience in these fights. They were a critical partner. It was an effective and organized protest.

There’s a group in western Wisconsin that has done phenomenal work. They had a bipartisan group in six towns and were able to adopt planning and zoning at the local level to limit the proliferation of CAFOs.

You write in the book that “this journey of heartache and sadness has turned to hope and determination to fight for Big Ag reform.” What did you mean by that?

When factory farm sites come up [in their towns], people feel very isolated. They don’t know where to turn for help. They don’t understand the enormity of the issue.

But for me, in the last 10 years, I started making connections with folks all over the Midwest and a number of different organizations like Farm Action and Food & Water Watch and realized that we were not alone. That’s empowering.

What do you hope your book will achieve?

People in these rural communities have a trail of abandoned schools and abandoned churches, and they are going to realize that they’ve been played, they’ve been rolled over by the big multinationals. I think [this book] is going to be eye-opening for some of these folks.

I’m hoping that the book will provide some historical context and a deeper level of understanding, and then help people understand what they can do in their own communities to move forward.

Not everyone lives near a CAFO. What can they do to help fight the “CAFO takeover”?

People need to be mindful of what they’re eating. What’s the source? Did this come from a corporate factory farm, or is it from a local, independent farmer who lovingly raised this animal?

Also, it’s not enough for people to sign a petition to fight a CAFO. We need to educate politicians. We need to roll back these Right to Farm laws that are designed to benefit corporations. And that’s going to take [effort from] everyone.

This interview, conducted via phone and email, was edited for length and clarity. This article has been updated to clarify CAFO ownership and workforce structures.

The post Fighting the Corporate CAFO ‘Takeover’ of Rural America appeared first on Civil Eats.

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