In 2017, the city of Santa Maria filed suit against a local landlord, Dario Pini, over extreme violations of health and housing codes in hundreds of apartments in eight complexes. One of them was the North Broadway complex. According to Noozhawk, a Santa Barbara County newspaper, city inspectors cited Pini for “deteriorated concrete walkways, accumulated trash, abandoned inoperable vehicles, plumbing leaks, unpermitted construction work, bedbug infestation, cockroach infestation, lack of hot water, faulty and hazardous electrical systems and broken windows, and missing window screens.”

The violations of H-2A workers’ rights continue. One case, State of California vs. Alco Harvest, claims that thousands of workers were not legally paid. Alco is the largest H-2A employer in the two-county area. Alco did not respond to requests for comment.

Corrie Meals, an attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) in Santa Maria, a party to the Alco case, believes that the state’s enforcement of the labor rights of H-2A workers is weak. “We try to avoid the Department of Labor,” she says, describing CRLA’s efforts on behalf of workers, “and there is little effective enforcement from the state housing and employment departments as well.”

Weak Federal Support for Local Farmworkers

The state Employment Development Department and DOL are jointly responsible for verifying that employers have made a good-faith effort to recruit local workers, but attorney Meals says they are allowed to simply post jobs on a website.

That lack of enforcement is likely to get worse. Over 2,700 DOL employees, or 20 percent of its workforce, have left the department in the wake of Trump executive orders and job cutting by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

“God only knows how much smaller it will be when the RIFs [reductions in force] are announced,” one anonymous agency worker told The Guardian. DOL’s new chief of staff, Jihum Han, has threatened criminal charges against any department worker who speaks to the press.

Meanwhile, the California Department of Housing and Community Development has only three inspectors for all employer-provided housing in the state, including that for H-2A workers. In 2022, it failed to issue a single citation for illegal conditions and issued permits without making inspections.

In response to an investigation by CalMatters, department spokesperson Pablo Espinoza blamed budget shortfalls for lack of staffing. Nevertheless, he said, “the system seems to be working . . . Nothing is ever perfect.”

Karen Ross, Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, was the keynote speaker at the Santa Maria Strawberry Industry Recognition Dinner this year, held at the Fairpark in April and sponsored by the Santa Maria Valley Chamber of Commerce. Driscolls, the largest strawberry company in the world, received the Industry Partner of the Year.

Ross expressed concern about federal immigration enforcement policies, and told the grower audience, “We’re very hopeful that there will be bipartisan efforts to really focus on making the H-2A program work better.”

In many ways, Santa Maria’s farmworkers, both local and H-2A, seem to be on their own. Yet despite the fear generated by immigration detentions, the labor violations, and, for local workers, the lack of work, Martinez believes that this spring’s marches have had an impact.

“They’re the way to empower our community and make people feel they’re not alone,” he explains. “We have to encourage them, wherever they are, to continue organizing, to take collective action to protect each other and to stand together. That’s how changes are made. It is the only way.”

Vasquez also thinks the community’s young people are ready. “A lot more kids are rising up to the occasion,” he says. “Some never spoke to a politician before, but now they’re losing their fear.”

The post Farmworker Youth Take to the Streets as Deportations and Displacement Threaten Their Parents 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/2025/03/31/farmworker-unions-on-the-rise-in-new-york-joined-by-the-united-farm-workers/ Mon, 31 Mar 2025 09:00:51 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=62847 Meanwhile, at an apple orchard in upstate New York, immigrant farmworkers signed the first United Farm Workers (UFW) union contract in the state, joining the legendary California-based union founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Most of the orchard workers were Jamaicans who are granted entry to the country through the government’s H-2A […]

The post Farmworker Unions on the Rise in New York, Joined by the United Farm Workers appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

On January 30, President Trump’s announcement that his administration would begin deporting immigrants to Guantánamo Bay prison made big news.

Meanwhile, at an apple orchard in upstate New York, immigrant farmworkers signed the first United Farm Workers (UFW) union contract in the state, joining the legendary California-based union founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Most of the orchard workers were Jamaicans who are granted entry to the country through the government’s H-2A visa program for just a few months each year during harvest season. But going forward, the new contract will offer protections for all of the orchard’s approximately 150 workers, regardless of where they come from or what their legal status might be.

“There is a lot of fear. There is a lot of worry. There are also conversations happening around, ‘How do we build solidarity?’”

“It doesn’t matter if they crossed through the desert or if they came through a [guestworker] program,” said UFW organizer Gabriella Szpunt, who helped organize the workers. “At the end of the day, they’re all looking for the same thing: something better for their families.”

UFW leaders say the contract is significant for several reasons. First, during the process, farm groups in New York filed a lawsuit challenging the right of guestworkers to unionize. But the court affirmed that right, creating a precedent at a time when the number of workers coming to farms on H-2A visas has grown exponentially. While the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) first organized H-2A workers in North Carolina in the 1990s, very few guestworkers to date have union protection.

It also marks the historic farmworker union’s first of many steps toward expanding its reach beyond its headquarters in California: UFW already has eight additional New York contracts in the pipeline.

A worker at an apple orchard in New York. (Photo credit: United Farm Workers)

And it’s part of a broader organizing push that involves other unions and worker groups, still moving forward in the face of an aggressively anti-immigrant administration in Washington, D.C. For instance, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem recently launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in which she tells immigrants, “We will hunt you down.” Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested and detained farmworker and activist Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, who helped create an independent farmworker union in Washington state about 10 years ago.

“There is a lot of fear. There is a lot of worry,” said Fabiola Ortiz Valdez, the director of organizing at Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition of labor groups across the food system. Valdez said that while she doesn’t want to minimize the impact the immigration crackdown is having on food and farmworkers, moments of crisis can also provide opportunities. “There are also conversations happening around, ‘How do we build solidarity?’” she said.

The Rise, Decline, and Return of Farmworker Unions 

Today, to mark Cesar Chavez Day, more than 5,000 UFW workers, allies, and supporters will march in Delano, California to call attention to the role immigrants play in putting food on American tables. They’ll end at the UFW union hall at 40 Acres, where grape growers gathered in 1970 to sign their first UFW contracts.

In those early days, UFW founders Chavez, Huerta, and Larry Itliong built a movement that at its peak saw 60,000 unionized farmworkers planting and harvesting across California’s abundant fields and orchards.

A march to Sacramento in 1966 from Delano, California. (Photo credit: Harvey Richards)

Over the last several decades, their numbers have dwindled, alongside a much larger decline in unionization across all industries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1983, the first year similar data was available, the union membership rate in the U.S. was 20 percent. By 2024, it had been cut in half to less than 10 percent. Compared to other industries, agriculture had one of the lowest rates of all, at 1.4 percent.

Immigration status is one reason farmworkers have lagged behind other workers in organizing unions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that about half of farmworkers lack legal authorization to work in the U.S, while temporary H-2A workers depend on their employers for legal status. Fear of deportation, or of not being called back the following year, is a constant.

In addition, federal laws that prohibit employers from firing or retaliating against workers for joining a union exclude farmworkers. Since 1975, California has extended those protections to farmworkers.

New York has only recently followed suit. In May 2019, farmworkers backed by the Workers’ Center of Central New York (WCCNY) and the Worker Justice Center of New York (WJCNY) won a court case in which they argued that New York’s state constitution guarantees farmworkers the right to organize. Two months later, former Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill into law that prohibited employers from firing or retaliating against farmworkers who organize; the bill also granted farmworkers overtime pay, one day of rest each week, and other protections.

That prompted a surge in organizing, although the pandemic initially created a delay. In September 2021, Local 338 RWDSU/UFCW, a union that represents workers in grocery stores and other industries, certified the first union contract for New York farmworkers. Twelve workers at Pindar Vineyards on Long Island were the first, and Local 338 has since organized workers at two additional Long Island vineyards.

Organizing in New York’s Apple Orchards

Armando Elenes, the secretary treasurer of UFW, told Civil Eats that when the union began looking at New York, the team decided to focus on the western part of the state because of the density of larger farms, primarily apple orchards. After the pandemic delay, they began reaching out to hundreds of workers and educating them about the protections the new state law afforded them.

In spring of 2022, Szpunt, the UFW organizer, started meeting with workers at Cahoon Farms, an apple orchard that also does its own processing to sell, fresh, frozen, and dried apples in addition to apple juice. “When I first related this possibility to these workers, they were just in shock that anybody cared and that anybody had a mechanism for them to advocate for themselves,” she said. That changed quickly once they understood the opportunity, she said.

“I was excited, because it’s a chance for us to get some fair treatment.”

Martin Griffiths is from Jamaica and started coming to the U.S. in 2018, as he puts it, “bottom line, to make things better for yourself.” Griffiths ended up at Cahoon through the H-2A program, where he climbed ladders of various heights with a picking bag to harvest apples. Depending on whether the apples would be sold fresh or processed, he said, he’d have to work carefully, to avoid bruising, or faster, to prioritize volume.

Management counted the bins of apples filled at the end of a shift to make sure workers met productivity standards. He said the hours were long, usually 7 a.m. until 5 p.m., and the work was hard. Primarily, he said, he felt like he and his fellow workers had a hard time standing up for themselves with management. When UFW showed up and proposed organizing a union, “I was excited, because it’s a chance for us to get some fair treatment,” he said.

The process of organizing was slow, partially because workers like Griffiths go home to Jamaica in the off-season, so meetings had to be arranged remotely, over WhatsApp and Zoom. Then, organizers hit another snag, when Cahoon, a few other allied farms, and the New York State Vegetable Growers Association filed a lawsuit that claimed the new union protections should not apply to guestworkers.

“We weren’t expecting them to challenge the right of H-2A workers to organize, but they did,” Elenes said. The farmers’ lawsuit put a freeze on the efforts for about six months, but the state ultimately prevailed with its argument that the law applies to guestworkers as well.

“That was important, because we believe that every worker, no matter what your status is, should have the right to organize,” Elenes said. “We don’t want to be in the game of playing undocumented workers against citizens or undocumented workers against H-2A workers.”

When the UFW contract was finally officially certified in January of this year, it included wage increases and bonuses, a retirement plan, nine paid holidays, and several other provisions. One provision that is especially important to Griffiths requires Cahoon to recall guestworkers each year based on seniority, so they can return season after season, which will provide some job security he and others previously lacked. Also, receiving 401(k) benefits is key, Elenes said, since guestworkers are not eligible to receive Social Security benefits when they retire.

But Griffiths kept coming back to something less tangible the union gave him: a sense of empowerment. “Now, since the contract, we feel a little more safe,” he said. “It’s never been about the money. It’s about respect.”

Cahoon Farms did not respond to a request for comment.

The Future of Farmworker Organizing

With that momentum, Elenes and Szpunt are now organizing farmworkers at eight other New York farms, primarily apple orchards, but also vegetable farms. Things have certainly gotten harder since Trump’s election, Szpunt said. “Just a simple act of visiting a worker at their home: They’re more afraid to even just open a door,” she said.

But UFW also points to recent successes in California, including a new contract at a sweet-potato farm in Merced that covers 1,200 workers. Today’s march in Delano also signals a network of support for the union.

Valdez, at Food Chain Workers Alliance, said that while the new legal protection from retaliation is critical, immigrant farmworkers in New York have been organizing in other ways for many years. In early 2019, for example, a coalition was able to get a law passed allowing undocumented workers to get drivers’ licenses, giving more agency to farmworkers who were once isolated on farms. Farmworkers have also organized for their rights through worker centers and committees and tribunals.

“Unions are such a key part of the labor movement, but they’re not the only piece,” Valdez said.

“I think the best thing is for farmworkers to decide what model and what structure works for them.”

Griffiths, who will return to Cahoon to start the apple harvest in August, feels confident about his decision to become a member of the UFW. “It was definitely worth it,” he said, even though during the organizing process, he lost out on work before the union was able to prove he was retaliated against for organizing.

“Basically, I say the contract is definitely a good thing, and I would encourage any worker not to be afraid to do it,” he said.

The post Farmworker Unions on the Rise in New York, Joined by the United Farm Workers appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/03/21/federal-cuts-and-funding-pauses-add-to-farmers-labor-woes/ Fri, 21 Mar 2025 22:30:03 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=62566 March 31, 2025: The influential National Council of Agricultural Employers sent Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins a letter asking her to investigate the status of Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Grant Program payments and “thaw” any funds that are frozen. So, in 2016, he started bringing in help through the federal government’s farm guestworker […]

The post H-2A Guestworker Program Impacted by Stalled USDA Payments, Cuts to USAID appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> March 31, 2025: The influential National Council of Agricultural Employers sent Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins a letter asking her to investigate the status of Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Grant Program payments and “thaw” any funds that are frozen.

It’s early March in eastern Pennsylvania, a time when George Brittenburg describes work on the farm as akin to “trying to wake up a big giant.” Brittenburg grows organic vegetables and raises livestock across 200 acres, and he needs help to shake off the winter and get things moving again. Like many farmers, in past years, he struggled to find people to do that.

So, in 2016, he started bringing in help through the federal government’s farm guestworker program, called H-2A. He’s not alone: In the past decade, the number of H-2A workers hired by American farmers has tripled. Many see it as the best pathway to hire immigrant workers legally, but workers can also face exploitation, since their legal status, housing, and often transportation are all linked to their employers.

In 2023, Brittenburg took time out of the growing season and invested resources into applying for a new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant opportunity he thought might help even further. Biden’s USDA pitched the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Program (FLSP) as a pilot project to improve conditions for workers while easing the strain some farmers experience paying and housing guestworkers. Brittenburg was looking forward to financial assistance that would allow him to bring in additional help and offer employees benefits like paid sick days.

Now, grant funding has been paused. With no clear answers as to when that might change, he’s not sure what to do.

“At this point, I feel pretty uncertain about the future and how to forecast. For our farm and for us, it is a big deal.”

Brittenburg and other grantees told Civil Eats that since Trump took office, the program has been frozen. They received emails from their contacts at the USDA saying office hours were canceled until further notice. They have asked questions about whether the program will be canceled and say they have not been given clear answers as to whether or when the funding might resume. Some have submitted requests for reimbursements and have not been paid. Others are reluctant to spend the money because they’re unsure if they’ll be paid back.

“At this point, I feel pretty uncertain about the future and how to forecast, and I don’t really want to be focused on that while I’m getting ready to plant,” Brittenburg said. “I know a lot of people are going through a lot right now and this isn’t the biggest deal, but for our farm and for us, it is a big deal.”

At the same time, some farmers have encountered challenges bringing their workers in because of ripple effects from the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID had been supporting the recruitment of guestworkers from countries in northern Central America and partnered with the USDA to help farmers bring in workers.

USAID and the H-2A Worker Pool

While most agricultural guestworkers come from Mexico, USAID began working to expand recruitment from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in 2019, during President Trump’s first term, according to a former USAID official, who agreed to speak to Civil Eats as long as he could remain anonymous.

But it didn’t pick up steam until the Biden administration made it a priority, he said. At an event in September 2022, USAID Administrator Samantha Power said the agency’s involvement was meant to meet the labor needs of American farmers, improve labor protections for workers coming to the U.S., and “alleviate the conditions that may spur someone to resort to dangerous, irregular migration.”

A screenshot of a USAID fact sheet summarizing the work they were doing to improve H-2A and H-2B recruitment in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

To that end, USAID provided funding and support to those Central American governments to try to make them the go-to resource for American farmers, at no cost. USAID partnered with the USDA to require some farmers, like those in the FLSP program, to begin recruiting from those countries as one way to boost the effort. However, according to the former USAID official, the goal was much more broad: To create a new worker pipeline for all farmers.

“What USAID was really focused on was how to have the labor ministries of these countries be able to facilitate that recruitment,” explained Joe Martinez, the CEO of Cierto Global, a farm labor contractor. Martinez co-founded Cierto to improve practices within H-2 program recruitment, which notoriously can involve unscrupulous actors and little oversight, and worked closely with USAID and individuals on the ground in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala who were involved in these projects.

In February, President Trump slashed staff at USAID and moved what was left of the agency into the Department of State. He said his administration would eliminate 90 percent of USAID’s foreign contracts.

Multiple sources with close knowledge of the programs said that included guestworker recruitment contracts in those three countries, but Civil Eats was unable to verify whether all USAID contracts for H-2 recruitment have been canceled. A spokesperson at the Department of State referred Civil Eats to the USDA. The USDA did not respond to emailed questions.

However, the former USAID official and Martinez both said that if the funding to those ministries is gone, it could lead to fewer guestworkers coming in from those countries to work on American farms, more individuals attempting to enter the U.S. illegally to find work, and recruiters who use illegal and unsafe practices stepping in to fill the gap. As to improving safe, efficient recruitment from those countries, “What ends up happening is you pretty much cut everyone off at their knees and there’s no way to facilitate this work,” Martinez said.

Farmers in Limbo

Matthew Fitzgerald grows corn, soybeans, wheat, and beans on 3,000 acres in McLeod County, Minnesota. “My first choice is to have domestic folks, but unemployment is less than 4 percent in our county. There just aren’t people that want to do this work,” he said. He started hiring H-2A workers in 2021 and thought the FLSP program might help him use the guestworker program more effectively, to “be a better employer and then find better workers.”

Matthew Fitzgerald in his fields in Minnesota. (Photo courtesy of Matthew Fitzgerald)

In response to the funding freeze, Fitzgerald compiled a list of the 60 farmers across the country who received FLSP grants in 2024 and sent out an email. On Wednesday, March 16, they gathered on a call to discuss their experiences and what could be done. More than half of the grantees participated, calling in from greenhouses, living rooms, and pickup trucks, he said.

“There’s folks that are really contemplating bankruptcy if they don’t get these funds. There are very serious situations,” he said. “Somebody messaged me and said they spent $400,000 on improving their housing for their workers and were expecting all the funds to go towards that.”

“There’s folks that are really contemplating bankruptcy if they don’t get these funds. There are very serious situations.”

Several other farmers in the program have already spent money, submitted for reimbursements, and are now waiting for payments ranging from $50,000 to $600,000. While Fitzgerald hasn’t requested a reimbursement yet, he said he planned his financial obligations for the upcoming season based on the expected cashflow. The way the program was designed, when farmers hit certain milestones, they’re eligible for payments. But he and several other farmers who spoke to Civil Eats said they’re not sure if they should invest time and resources into reaching those milestones if the payments might never arrive.

The biggest issue, he said, is what might happen if the USDA decides to cancel the program altogether. Enrolling in the program required the farmers to add the steps they were taking to improve labor practices on their farms into their legal contracts with the Department of Labor. So, for instance, if a farmer included housing upgrades, overtime, or paid sick days, it’s now in the contract, regardless of whether they receive the promised funding in the future. “Everyone who received this grant has made legal commitments to the Department of Labor, and so those are non-negotiable,” he said. “Those aren’t things we can cancel, so we’re going to be up a creek if they say, ‘Well, we’re not paying.’”

Broader Farm Labor Impacts

Eve Kaplan-Walbrecht has been growing vegetables, berries, and flowers on the east end of Long Island for almost 25 years. About five years ago, she began bringing in help from Mexico through the H-2A program. When she signed her FLSP contract last year, she committed to hiring two new guestworkers from Central America. During the process of recruiting workers from El Salvador, she worked directly with the labor ministry there, and officials assigned her a lead to help her through the process.

In February, when she reached out to check in on the status of her workers, the individual informed her in an email that the program that employed him was funded by USAID “and has been suspended until further notice.” Then he stopped replying.

“We’re basically under a contractual agreement to hire them through the ministry, but the ministry is not active, which basically leaves us just having no idea what we’re supposed to do, and our people are supposed to be here in two weeks,” she said in early March.

March 15, the day the workers were supposed to arrive, came and went. She has since been able to get in touch with the workers and believes they’re waiting for interview dates and approval. But everything is murky—and even if they arrive soon, the delay will impact the upcoming season.

Other farmers in the program who recruited from Guatemala have not had the same issues getting their workers into the country, and it’s unclear how significantly USAID cuts might impact H-2A recruitment more broadly.

Between 2021 and 2023, according to USAID records, the number of H-2 visas issued to workers from the three Central American countries nearly quadrupled, from 5,000 to 28,000. Most of those workers were on H-2B visas, which cover some food-system jobs but primarily focus on other kinds of work, including landscaping and construction.

The numbers of H-2A workers coming in to work on American farms were still extremely small, but they did tick up. According to Department of Labor records, for example, about 1,200 additional H-2A workers were recruited from Guatemala in 2023 compared to 2021.

The Benefits of Recruiting in Central America

The former USAID official said while the numbers were (and still are) small, the intention was to systemically diversify where agricultural workers come from so that over time, if fewer workers come from Mexico, the farm labor shortage won’t get worse.

“Everyone who received this grant has made legal commitments to the Department of Labor, and so those are non-negotiable. We’re going to be up a creek if they say, ‘Well, we’re not paying.’”

USAID also saw the programs as important economic development work, since guestworkers bring money back to their home countries, potentially decreasing the need for foreign aid and the number of migrants attempting to leave their countries to enter the U.S. without legal authorization.

Martinez at Cierto Global partnered with USAID on recruitment work in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala because he started his company with a similar ethos. “One of the areas that folks decided to home in on was, ‘How can we create legal migration pathways that might prevent this [irregular] type of migration and that would encourage folks to be able to come back and create rural economic opportunities?’” he said.

He thought improving recruitment, where the whole process starts, could lead to better conditions for workers and better outcomes for farmers. To do that, Cierto partners with community organizations in the countries workers are coming from, does risk assessments, and hosts worker interviews and trainings. But Cierto is the exception, he said.

One of the big issues with H-2A and H-2B programs is that some recruiters use illegal practices and there is little oversight. “In those northern Central American countries before USAID was helping facilitate this, it was common practice to charge workers, and so now those are the only actors left to conduct this work,” Martinez said. Now that the USAID program is gone, he said, “I would say that it’s going to prevent the growth of interest [in recruiting] from these countries, in large part because there’s no trusted framework or partners that can kind of facilitate and have eyes on the ground.”

A screenshot of DOGE’s record of the State Department contract, meant to fight H-2A fraud, that DOGE says it cancelled.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a special commission created by President Trump purporting to cut federal spending, also reports that it canceled a Department of State contract with a marketing company in El Salvador to prevent H-2A fraud perpetrated by, as the report put it, “transnational criminal organizations and/or gangs.” The information DOGE provides on contract cancellations is incomplete, so it’s unclear whether the work had already been finished or was still in progress. The marketing company did not respond to requests for comment.Ffor Farmers

For Farmers, an Uncertain Future

Martinez was expecting USAID grant funding to help facilitate his H-2A work this year but said he was informed the funding was canceled. “Luckily, I had not incorporated that into my budget. It would have been devastating,” he said. “But I know at least a dozen organizations that have had to lay off workers on the U.S. side as well as in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.”

The long-term impacts of the shuttering of USAID support for guest farmworker programs will become apparent in the months and years to come. Meanwhile, back on Long Island, as temperatures rise and signs of spring appear, Kaplan-Walbrecht is focused only on when her workers will arrive and whether the financial assistance her FLSP contract with USDA will ever materialize. If it doesn’t, she said the farm will take a hit.

“We won’t be able to afford other things, whether it’s making repairs to equipment or other things,” she said. As to her future in farming, “We’re not going do it if we can’t be profitable. It’s too much work.”

Brittenburg in Pennsylvania and Fitzgerald in Minnesota are feeling similar pressure. “Farming is so uncertain already,” Fitzgerald said. “We need workers. The crop goes in the ground in a month.”

The post H-2A Guestworker Program Impacted by Stalled USDA Payments, Cuts to USAID appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/01/15/how-four-years-of-biden-reshaped-food-and-farming/ Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:08 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=60535 Despite no big changes to agricultural policy as a result of a farm bill still stalled in Congress, President Joe Biden’s governing of the food system looked very different. Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s priorities have centered on spending billions of dollars on food and farm infrastructure, paying farmers to implement climate-smart […]

The post How Four Years of Biden Reshaped Food and Farming appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

During his first presidential term, Donald Trump attempted to cut funding to hunger programs, implemented agricultural tariffs, tax cuts, and record-setting payments to commodity farmers, and rolled back regulations impacting environmental pollution, labor standards, food safety, and nutrition.

Despite no big changes to agricultural policy as a result of a farm bill still stalled in Congress, President Joe Biden’s governing of the food system looked very different.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s priorities have centered on spending billions of dollars on food and farm infrastructure, paying farmers to implement climate-smart practices, finalizing new regulations related to the environment, labor, food safety, and nutrition, and distributing more dollars to food insecure families.

On December 29, 2024, during the final monthly meeting to track the progress of efforts launched after the 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack made the case that those efforts had paid off.

“Folks from across the country have pulled together towards our common goal of ending hunger, improving nutrition, and supporting the farmers, ranchers, farm workers, and food workers who grow and produce our food,” he said. “And through that work, we have collectively made progress in transforming the food system from farm to fork.”

Some food and farm advocates have told Civil Eats they agree with that sentiment and point to major accomplishments. Others see a long list of lost opportunities that ultimately resulted in business as usual, a feeling conservatives were able to harness during the election through Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s promises to “Make America Healthy Again” under Trump.

It will be many years before the ultimate impacts—good, bad, or neutral—of the Biden administration’s many investments and regulatory changes become clear. To maintain a record as we head into the second Trump administration, we’ve produced an accounting of Biden’s most significant actions impacting food and farming during his tenure.

Taking on Consolidation and Corporate Power, and Supporting Farmer Livelihood

Six months after his inauguration, Biden issued an executive order that included 72 actions to tackle corporate consolidation across all sectors. Agriculture was the first industry mentioned, and the ways in which consolidation was driving the loss of small family farms became one of Vilsack’s most-cited talking points throughout the administration.

Under his tenure, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) restarted progress on the 100-year-delayed Packers & Stockyards Act rules meant to protect farmers from meatpacker abuses. Under President Obama, Vilsack had made some progress on those rules—only to have the work thrown out by President Trump. This time, the USDA made real strides and finalized three major rules.

Vilsack pushed the third and potentially most significant over the finish line just yesterday, making substantive changes to the poultry industry’s notorious “tournament system.” Chicken companies will no longer be able to drop base pay based on competitive metrics, for example, and will have to provide more details in grower contracts about required investments for barn and equipment upgrades, among other standard practices. Some farm groups have criticized the agency for taking too long, as it will now be easier for Republicans to withdraw the rule if they choose to. But during a press conference Monday, Vilsack defended the process. “We’ve taken this opportunity to listen to producers about what would create a fairer system,” he said. USDA withdrew a fourth rule that would have changed the definition of “unfair practices” because the agency ran out of time to finalize it. A fifth rule related to creating fairer cattle markets is still in its early stages.

Biden’s Department of Justice also obtained consent decrees in two Packers & Stockyards cases brought against poultry companies Koch Foods and Cargill, Sanderson Farms, and Wayne Farms (with the help of USDA). Those resulted in payments to growers to make up for unfair compensation policies and Sanderson and Wayne Farms agreeing to alter their practices going forward. Vilsack’s USDA was actively investigating abuses reported by contract growers for Tyson as well, although nothing had come of that investigation by election time.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a virtual meeting about reducing the costs of meat through increased competition in the meat processing industry in the South Court Auditorium at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on January 3, 2022 in Washington, DC. President Biden heard from Attorney General Merrick Garland, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and independent farmers. (Photo credit: Sarah Silbiger, Getty Images)

Vilsack also delivered on another change long pushed for by farmer advocates: meat labeled “Product of USA” must now come from animals born and raised in the U.S., whereas before, meat packaged in the country could carry the label even if the animal had been imported. He did not reinstate Country of Origin Labeling, the next step on that continuum that many groups are still fighting for.

Investment was also central to the USDA’s approach to consolidation in meat. The agency worked to distribute $500 million in grants to small and mid-size meatpacking plants to give them a leg up against the highly consolidated big players. The USDA also invested in local and regional food systems beyond meat, pumping extra funding into popular local food system programs, launching Regional Food Business Centers, and making it easier for schools to purchase local foods for kids’ meals.

While Biden’s USDA took a lot of action on corporate consolidation, some experts question whether the steps will add up to anything more than feel-good spending, since concentration in meat and other markets doesn’t seem to be slowing down. (The USDA says it is too soon to assess the impacts.) Plus, Vilsack and the USDA sided with meatpackers on other fronts, such as backing the repeal of California’s animal welfare law, Proposition 12, and distributing funds to big meat companies through the Climate Smart Commodities program (more on that later).

At the same time, Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under Lina Khan spearheaded a revival of antitrust enforcement with profound implications for the food system and farmers. Khan’s FTC issued new merger guidelines and was successful in blocking Kroger’s takeover of Albertson’s, which would have increased consolidation in the grocery industry.

Biden’s USDA also provided loan forgiveness and direct payments to many farmers. The American Rescue Plan’s (ARP) provision to pay Black farmers for past discrimination was initially blocked in court after Texas Republican Ag Commissioner Sid Miller led a lawsuit alleging racism against white farmers. Then, Democrats in Congress created a new “race neutral” program through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). That resulted in the USDA distributing $2.5 billion in loan forgiveness to 47,800 farmers labeled “distressed borrowers” and $2 billion in payments to 43,000 farmers who experienced any past discrimination in USDA loan programs, based on race, gender, or other factors.

Tackling the Climate Crisis

The Biden administration also pumped significant funds into efforts to bolster climate-smart practices on farms. The USDA’s marquee project on this front was the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program, which invested just over $3 billion of IRA money into 135 projects across the country. According to the USDA, more than 21,000 farms and 5.2 million acres of farmland are involved as of January 2025. Some of the funding went to nonprofits, states, tribes, and universities, but the biggest chunk went to businesses. Some went to giant agricultural corporations like Tyson and Land O’Lakes, which led to criticism of the program.

The IRA also added $19.5 billion in additional climate-specific funding for oversubscribed conservation programs like the Environmental Quality Improvement Project (EQIP) and Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) to be distributed over several years. So far, the USDA has allocated about $2 billion to farmers who are using the funds to pay for practices such as agroforestry and prescribed grazing. Some experts have questioned how big of an impact some of these efforts will have, though, because how much carbon gets put into the ground and how long it stays there is still a matter of debate, especially for two of the most popular practices—no-till and cover crops.

So far, the USDA has allocated about $2 billion to farmers who are using conservation funds to pay for practices such as agroforestry and prescribed grazing.

On the global stage, the USDA created another farm-and-climate initiative, AIM for Climate, in partnership with the United Arab Emirates. That project is even more reliant on collaboration with big corporate players including Bayer, Syngenta, ADM, and PepsiCo.

But while most don’t directly touch farms, the IRA’s investments in renewable energy and Biden’s other actions to shift away from fossil fuels (such as rejoining the Paris Agreement and pausing development of new LNG terminals) might have the longest lasting impact on the food system. Experts agree that phasing out fossil fuels is the number one non-negotiable step toward securing a livable planet, and any incremental progress on that front could save farms from droughts, flooding, extreme heat, and other weather events that threaten their operations. Biden’s USDA also invested $2.2 billion in 7,200 on-farm renewable energy projects, including installing manure digesters and solar panels and $6 billion in rural electric coops.

In October, the administration unveiled a national strategy to reduce food waste, which is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It’s unclear if that strategy will remain in place under Trump.

Regulating Pesticides and Other Chemicals

Ongoing pesticide approvals and regulations generally chug along without much disruption even as administrations change. That was true under Biden, barring a few exceptions.

The most significant: After five decades of ignoring its pesticide obligations under the Endangered Species Act and several lawsuits, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took several huge steps to begin evaluating pesticides’ risks to endangered species. It finalized an herbicide strategy that will direct farmers to mitigate risks to threatened species when using weedkillers and released a draft of a similar plan for insecticides. And it began tackling a long backlog of chemicals currently in use that haven’t been properly assessed for their risks to endangered species.

After five decades of ignoring its pesticide obligations under the Endangered Species Act and several lawsuits, Biden’s EPA took several huge steps to begin evaluating pesticides’ risks to endangered species.

The EPA also finished the process of ending the use of chlorpyrifos, an insecticide linked to neurodevelopmental effects in children. A court later ordered them to reinstate its use on 11 crops, which the agency did. Even so, the EPA said that chlorpyrifos use in the U.S. will be reduced by 70 percent.

In addition, the agency restored a rule that provides farmworkers and farm neighbors with more protection from in-field pesticide applications and introduced guidance on enforcing the rule—in direct response to the previous administration’s weakening of the rule. After Congress added a provision to the country’s law that governs pesticide regulation, requiring labels to include health and safety information in Spanish, the EPA introduced a guide for Spanish labeling and a plan to track whether labels are meeting the requirement.

While those actions added restrictions, Biden’s USDA also waged an all-out battle against Mexico’s attempt to eliminate genetically modified corn, which is sprayed with the pesticide glyphosate, from its food supply. Because most GMO corn exported from the U.S. to Mexico is for animal feed and the policy only applied to corn used in human foods such as tortillas, the policy would have had a minimal economic impact, according to some analyses. Still, the USDA spent several years engaged in the dispute and ultimately prevailed, forcing Mexico to drop the policy in order to remain a trading partner in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

On PFAS or “forever chemicals,” Biden’s EPA was the first to take significant action, laying out a roadmap in 2021. In 2024, it set the first legal drinking water limits for six common PFAS with known health risks. However, the agency set a definition for the entire class of PFAS that many experts believe is too narrow and therefore fails to regulate what many call “shorter-chain PFAS,” which are increasingly present in pesticides and therefore could have food system implications.

At the FDA, the agency banned the use of long-controversial brominated vegetable oil (BVO) as a food additive, and banned the dye Red No. 3, which is used in candy and other processed foods, based on animal studies that have shown links to cancer. It also issued new guidance on lead limits in baby food, which many experts have said are positive but still not restrictive enough to protect kids.

Focusing on Food Safety

During Biden’s presidency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) technically completed the “single largest reorganization” in the agency’s history, primarily to move all of its food responsibilities (as opposed to drug) into one place. However, the move didn’t make much of a splash. Agency officials say that it will allow for greater coordination of the agency’s food system efforts, which were previously spread out across departments, including more food safety enforcement.

Food recalls were up in 2024, and a few, like the Boar’s Head plant shutdown and McDonald’s onion contamination, made national news. But experts said the uptick in recalls may actually be a sign of better monitoring and enforcement rather than a failure of the regulatory system.

The single biggest change to food safety standards, however, came out of the USDA, which oversees meatpacking plants. For the first time, the USDA proposed enforceable limits on the amount of salmonella in chicken. Salmonella is prevalent in chicken and is the leading cause of foodborne illness in the country.

For the first time, the USDA proposed enforceable limits on the amount of salmonella in chicken. The administration was slower to act on has been slower to act on bird flu, however: The disease continues to spread and has wiped out more than 130 million chickens and turkeys since 2022.

Previously, the federal government could alert citizens to contamination and issue recalls, but it couldn’t mandate that the chicken be pulled from shelves. The USDA finalized the standard for some frozen products but only proposed the limits for raw chicken, so it will be up to the incoming Trump administration to decide whether or not to finish the process. After the announcement, Sarah Sorscher, Director of Regulatory Affairs at the Center for Safety in the Public Interest, called the move “one of the greatest advances in food safety in a generation” in a press release.

Biden’s government has been slower to act on another challenge facing chickens (and ultimately, humans)—bird flu. The deadly strain of avian influenza has continued to spread and has wiped out more than 130 million chickens and turkeys since it resurfaced in 2022. Over the past year, regulators discovered the virus in dairy cattle. In humans, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have recorded 66 mostly mild cases and one death so far, and the virus is not spreading between people. The agency is tracking those cases. Meanwhile, the USDA has implemented testing of milk cattle being transported across state lines. The USDA also began stockpiling vaccines for poultry. But many experts and observers say the agency’s unwillingness to compel farms to take action across the board has led to a response that has been too slow and scattered.

Over the last four years, the FDA has also done little to curb the threat of antibiotic resistance, another major public health threat connected to the food supply. Antibiotic use in pork and beef production continued to tick up (since a historic drop in 2016–17). Instead of heeding expert calls to collect better data on use, the agency started a process to partner with industry on voluntary data reporting.

The FDA also backpedaled on earlier guidance around how long medically important drugs should be used on farms, and in 2024, representatives of the U.S. government helped weaken a global commitment to reduce the use of antibiotics in agriculture by stripping it of a numerical target.

Linking Hunger, Nutrition, and Health

Early in Biden’s presidency, a confluence of factors including pandemic supply-chain disruptions, climate change, and corporate price gouging caused food prices to soar around the globe, including in the U.S.

Biden’s approach to addressing the problem was to strengthen the country’s safety net.

From the beginning, the administration announced it would attempt to modernize and increase enrollment in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides food aid and formula to new moms and babies. The USDA made changes to make enrollment easier, added flexibility to the food packages, and fought for adequate funding from Congress, including extensions to pandemic-era bonuses that allowed families to purchase more fruits and vegetables.

On the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the USDA conducted the first review in 50 years of a framework called the Thrifty Food Plan, which determines how much SNAP benefits should be to adequately support food insecure families. After looking at factors including changes in food prices, the typical American diet, and modern nutrition guidance, it determined benefits were too low and the resulting update led to an increase of about $1 per day for participants.

Biden’s USDA also worked to expand access to free school meals. The agency expanded the number of schools that can serve all students free of charge, which meant 3.8 million additional children now attend a school with universal free meals.

Biden’s USDA also worked to expand access to free school meals. During the first two years, when the pandemic was still causing major disruptions to meal programs, agency officials worked with Congress to get waivers extended several times. The waivers allowed the agency to send higher reimbursements to schools for meals, for example, and to send meals home with students. As the movement for universal school meals grew, Congress seemed unlikely to support it, so the USDA finalized a rule that expanded the number of districts and schools that qualify for a program that allows them to serve all students free of charge. Last week, new data revealed that the change contributed to a 20 percent increase in the number of districts using the program, and 3.8 million additional children attending a school with free meals.

Then, as a result of authorization from Congress, the USDA created and began implementing two permanent programs intended to feed students from low-income families during the summer months, when school is out. Each summer, SUN Bucks now provides $120 per child to qualifying families for extra groceries, while SUN Meals To-Go allows schools to pack and deliver meals to children at home or at designated drop-off locations.

Nutrition standards for those meals also improved under Biden. Earlier, under the Obama administration, Vilsack had led the charge in implementing strict new nutrition standards for school meals. That continued under Biden, but with less speed and more flexibility granted to schools due to challenges they were facing during the pandemic. Stricter rules on added sugar will start in the fall of 2025 but not fully take effect until 2027, when sodium reductions will also kick in. Another tweak to the standards will make it much easier for districts to connect to and purchase foods directly from local farmers.

The one-two punch of access and nutrition in school meals is illustrative of a broader Biden administration approach that encouraged different agencies to work together to draw connections between hunger, nutrition, and health policy. Vilsack described the USDA’s focus, for example, as “nutrition security” as opposed to just food security.

In September 2022, the administration hosted the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. Biden spoke at the conference in front of an audience of government employees, nonprofit professionals, and private businesses across the grocery, nutrition, and health sectors and officially launched a National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. After the conference, the White House then held monthly calls with agency, nonprofit, and private-sector representatives to track progress on implementing the strategy.

One notable change the FDA made that had been laid out in the strategy was a final update to the agency’s definition of “healthy” for labeling purposes. A previous definition was long under fire, since the way it was written excluded many nutritious whole foods such as nuts. The new definition combines nutrient accounting with ingredient considerations and will now dictate when food manufacturers can use the term “healthy” on product labels. This week, the FDA also proposed a rule that would require “front-of-pack” nutrition labels, which has been a long-time priority of public health and nutrition advocacy groups.

At the end of Biden’s term, White House officials announced the conference-sparked efforts would continue after being transferred to the CDC Foundation as the “Hunger, Nutrition & Health Action Collaborative.”

Supporting Food and Farm Workers

President Biden has pitched himself as the most pro-union and pro-labor president in decades, and in 2023, he became the first president to join striking workers on a picket line. His presidency did coincide with a surge in unionizing among food workers—from farm fields to Starbucks—although it’s hard to say how much the administration had to do with that.

His National Labor Relations Board investigated union-busting at companies like Starbucks. The Department of Labor (DOL) introduced a rule preventing farm employers from retaliating against farmworkers on H-2A guestworker visas who try to unionize, but a court later blocked the rule.

Farmworkers harvest zucchini in Florida. (Photo credit: Joe Raedle, Getty Images)

The USDA tried to improve the H-2A program in other ways. In 2024, the agency awarded $50 million to 141 farm employers as part of a pilot program called the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program. The grants were essentially given to farms to help defray the cost of recruiting and paying H-2A workers. In exchange, farms committed to improving conditions for workers via different pathways like providing additional benefits, upgrading living conditions on farms, and participating in the Fair Food Program.

The DOL and the Department of Homeland Security also worked together to implement a policy that allowed undocumented immigrants who witness or experience labor violations to stay in the country temporarily. Many of the people impacted worked in meat and food processing. While the Biden administration also supported a much broader legislative package on immigration reform that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for many farmworkers while cracking down on immigration enforcement in other areas, the bill stalled in Congress.

Finally, President Biden last summer announced new actions to protect workers from extreme weather. Those included the first heat standard ever proposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which would require shade and water breaks and could make a major difference for farmworker well-being.

Advancing Equity

Hours after his inauguration, Biden directed all of his agencies to complete equity assessments, and equity became a thread that ran through many of his food and farm policy programs. He launched the Justice40 Initiative with a goal of sending 40 percent of the “overall benefits” of climate, environmental, and other investments across agencies to disadvantaged communities. The administration’s scorecard cites $613 billion invested in programs that are covered by Justice40, but it’s hard to know what impact that commitment has had.

At the USDA, Vilsack launched an equity commission that held regular meetings and delivered a final report with recommendations for the agency.

One place where the agency did take a lot of action was in supporting tribes and tribal food sovereignty in new ways. At President Biden’s direction, the USDA partnered with the Department of Interior to launch co-stewardship of federal lands and waters. It has also launched and Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative that includes seed-saving hubs and invested $25 million in IRA funds into the Bison Restoration Initiative.

It’s the perfect example of how the Biden administration spent the last four years: putting money into efforts the president and his team believed would shore up a food system reeling from the pandemic and climate change, while building greater equity into the nation’s safety net.

The impacts of many of those efforts will take years to reveal themselves, while other actions may be more quickly sustained or reversed in the second Trump administration. We will continue to report on the actions Washington is taking on all aspects of food and farming, so stay tuned.

The post How Four Years of Biden Reshaped Food and Farming appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/12/27/our-best-community-food-solutions-stories-of-2024/ https://civileats.com/2024/12/27/our-best-community-food-solutions-stories-of-2024/#comments Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:00:56 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=60248 Climate change, environmental health issues, and food access are foremost among those challenges. The people and projects we drew inspiration from this year provided creative, community-appropriate improvements to disaster relief, wildfire prevention, living wages, and food access, among other pressing issues. Here are our best community food solutions stories of 2024. The Farmers Leaning On […]

The post Our Best Community Food Solutions Stories of 2024 appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

Over our nearly 16 years of covering the U.S. food system, we’ve seen firsthand how complex, often sobering stories about challenges in food and farming come to life when they include real people trying to fix problems at the local level.

Climate change, environmental health issues, and food access are foremost among those challenges. The people and projects we drew inspiration from this year provided creative, community-appropriate improvements to disaster relief, wildfire prevention, living wages, and food access, among other pressing issues.

Here are our best community food solutions stories of 2024.

The Farmers Leaning On Each Other’s Tools
The cost of specialized farm equipment is one of the biggest barriers for small-scale and beginning farmers. Cooperatives are springing up around the nation to help bridge the gap.

This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades
California’s farmworkers face untold barriers accessing the land, capital, and training needed to strike out on their own. For 20 years, ALBA has been slowly changing the landscape for this important group of aspiring growers.

Can Prescriptions for Produce-Focused Meal Kits Fight Diabetes?
Over half of the population of Stockton, California, is diabetic or pre-diabetic. A prescribed meal kit program helps some residents manage the disease and may provide a model for other communities.

A participant in the Healthy Food Rx program gets ready to prepare a recipe with the fresh produce she received in one of its meal kits. (Photo credit: Abbott Fund)

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.

Native Youth Learn to Heal Their Communities Through Mycelium
Spirit of the Sun is using traditional ecological knowledge to help address food insecurity and connection to culture.

How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm
A Q&A with Maximina Hernández Reyes, who credits her success to a Portland, Oregon, food network called Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative.

A Community of Growers
How East New York Farms builds food security and provides jobs for its neighborhood.

Farm Stops Create New Markets for Small Farms
These brick-and-mortar consignment businesses support farmers and bring fresh, locally grown food to their communities.

Kim Bayer, owner of Slow Farm, in Ann Arbor, MI, with farm managers Zach Goodman and Magda Nawrocka-Weekes. Slow Farm sells its organic produce at Argus, a local farm stop. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive
By paying top dollar for milk and sourcing within 15 miles of its creamery, Jasper Hill supports an entire community.

Good Goats Make Good Neighbors
A California nonprofit builds community through goat grazing to reduce wildfire risk, farm-to-school programs, and more.

After Hurricane Helene, Local Farmers and Chefs Pivot to Disaster Relief
Western North Carolina farms, restaurants, and even a festival quickly switched gears to get fresh food and water to neighbors devastated by the worst storm in more than a century.

Restoring a Cornerstone of the Local Grain Economy
A new community of millers joins the revival of America’s regional grain heritage, connecting farmers with a market eager for fresh, local flour.

The post Our Best Community Food Solutions Stories of 2024 appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/12/27/our-best-community-food-solutions-stories-of-2024/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/12/17/farmers-sow-rice-and-reconciliation/ Tue, 17 Dec 2024 09:00:35 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=59738 “Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.” Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps […]

The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

In the heart of Louisiana, about 100 miles north of Baton Rouge, lies the rain-soaked farm that lured Konda Mason away from California in 2020. Reflecting on her journey to the South, the entrepreneur and spiritual teacher has no regrets about relocating from Oakland to the small city of Alexandria to start growing rice. She chuckles while explaining how she got there: in an RV with two loved ones and two dogs. But a hint of frustration creeps into her voice when she talks about the weather.

Planting the Seeds of Justice

This article is part of our ongoing series, Planting the Seeds of Justice, in which we focus on the connections between climate, health, soil health, and equity for farmers of color.

Read all the stories in this series:

• A Black-Led Agricultural Community Takes Shape in Maryland
  An urban farm trailblazer begins building a Black agrarian corridor in rural Maryland, fostering community and climate resilience. Land access was the first step.
• Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation
  Jubilee Justice grows rice regeneratively while reclaiming the past.
• Op-ed: Black Producers Have Farmed Sustainably in Kansas for Generations. Let’s Not Erase Our Progress.
  Increased support for Black farmers from Congress—not less—will help US agriculture become more resilient as our climate changes.

“Right now, it’s too wet for us to get into the field with a tractor,” she explained the night after a thunderstorm this summer. “We’ve had very few days where we can go into the field so far this year, and that is problematic.”

Mason is the founder of Jubilee Justice, a nonprofit that helps small-holder Black farmers in the South grow specialty rice with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), a “dry-land” method developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of growing rice in flooded paddies to prevent weeds from overtaking the crop, SRI farmers treat rice like a vegetable, irrigating it as needed and using other weed control methods.

Created on Madagascar and practiced in about 60 countries today, SRI has been shown to increase grain yields, sometimes twofold. The method also tackles the significant climate impact of conventional rice production. Methane emissions created by flooded rice paddies account for about 10 percent of global agricultural emissions. That’s because so much rice is grown around the world: Roughly 11 percent of all arable land is devoted to this crop, a daily staple for half the people on Earth.

“What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.”

Per calorie, though, rice produces fewer emissions than most staple foods, including meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and even other grains like wheat and corn. And growing rice with SRI can cut those emissions nearly in half. (Rice has other issues, namely that it can contain high amounts of arsenic, depending on the variety and where it’s grown; however, SRI likely reduces arsenic uptake.)

Despite all the advantages of SRI, it’s scarcely practiced in the U.S. because it requires specialized equipment, involves a lot more labor, and is extremely difficult to pull off. “That’s why people think we’re crazy,” Mason said.

But she has powerful reasons to focus on rice despite the challenges. For Mason, rice represents a way to transform lives and reclaim the past, offering a path toward racial, economic, and climate justice.

A Flow of Knowledge

Jubilee Justice’s rice program, called the Black Farmers Cohort, currently consists of 10 farmers from Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Collectively, they cultivate seven different varieties, including the organization’s signatures: “Black Joy,” “Creole Country Red,” “Black Belt Sticky,” and “Jubilee Justice Jasmine.” The team in Alexandria is testing 20 more varieties at their 17-acre farm, located on a former cotton plantation that serves as the central research hub for crop and equipment trials. Mason notes that knowledge flows out as much as it flows in, because everyone is learning.

At the Jubilee Justice farm in Alexandria, Louisiana, rice is farmed with a “dry-land” method called System of Rice Intensification (SRI). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)

“We are basically figuring it out year by year,” explained Erika Styger, director of the Climate-Resilient Farming Systems Program at Cornell University. A leading provider of SRI technical assistance to small-holder farmers worldwide, Styger has been a Jubilee Justice advisor since the Black Farmers Cohort began in 2019.

Jublilee Justice is the only organization in the U.S. “actively implementing and systematically researching the [SRI] method organically, regeneratively, and in collaboration with multiple farmers,” she said. Essentially, these farmers are the vanguards of a grand Southern experiment—part of what makes their work so challenging.

SRI can take years to adjust to a single farming operation and microclimate, Styger said, and having farmers around who have already done it successfully and can share their wisdom minimizes a “difficult” and “fragile” learning period. Being the first ones to pursue SRI on U.S. soil, Jubilee Justice doesn’t have this option.

“It takes a lot of knowledge and fine-tuning, and you need to be ready to adapt to different situations,” she added. Styger thinks the growing pains are worth it, though: “In the long run, of course, you’re building a much-improved system that will be able to withstand climate change much better.”

With SRI, farmers can cut by half the typical 800 to 5,000 liters of water used to grow one kilogram of rice, resulting in a 43 percent reduction in methane emissions, according to a brief by Styger and her Cornell colleague Norman Uphoff. While SRI may slightly increase nitrous oxide emissions, Styger and Uphoff found its advantages outweigh the potential downsides: SRI has been shown to lower the global warming potential of rice production by 25 percent on average.

Caryl Levine, co-founder of Lotus Foods, a California-based company specializing in SRI with farmers in Asia and Southeast Asia, says dryland rice farming is gaining popularity because “it’s much more regenerative” than conventional flooding. Still, it’s taken decades for the practice to spread.

Lotus Foods primarily works with farmers overseas, but teamed up with Mason to work on bringing Jubilee Justice rice to market. “It was a long-term goal of Lotus Foods to work with domestic farmers who are willing to use SRI practices,” Levine has said. With as many challenges as successes these past four years, the Black Farmers Cohort has yet to meet the volume threshold for Lotus to put their rice on grocery store shelves. Mason remains optimistic, though, saying, “We’re getting there.” In November, her farm in Alexandria achieved a milestone by harvesting its first full acre of rice after three years of smaller trials, marking their best harvest yet.

Jubilee Justice supplies farmers who are a part of the Black Farmers Cohort with everything they need to get started with SRI, including seeds, equipment, minerals, fertilizers, labor support, and technical assistance. In addition to funding from small family foundations, the organization received a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2021.

MacArthur described the organization as “transformative,” providing support to “Black farming communities through new models of regenerative farming, cooperative ownership, and access to new markets by restoring and accelerating Black land ownership to create generational wealth.”

Honoring Their Ancestors

Mason started forming the Black Farmers Cohort and bringing in a network of experts to ensure their success about eight months before she left California. She’d already had multiple careers, managing a Grammy-nominated musician, producing an Academy Award-nominated film, and founding a co-working space in downtown Oakland, Impact Hub, an incubator for entrepreneurs, creatives, and environmentally conscious organizations.

Jubilee Justice Specialty Foods co-op members. Top row, left to right: James Coleman, Roy Mosley, Hilery Gobert, Collie Graddick, and CJ Fields. Bottom row, left to right: Jose Gonzalez, Konda Mason, Bernard Singleton, and visiting farmer Rodney Mason (not a member of the co-op). (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)

Mason’s choice to focus on rice was an intentional nod to America’s intertwined racial, economic, and environmental histories: Around the end of the 17th century, before “king cotton” blanketed Southern fields, American colonists in the South Carolina Lowcountry recognized the potential to profit from cultivating rice along coastal waterways.

“But the American colonists had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop,” writes anthropologist Joseph A. Opala. The colonists set their sights on the peoples of Africa’s “Rice Coast,” from present-day Senegal down to Liberia, who had developed sophisticated rice cultivation systems.

Opala says plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for dragging these expert farmers across the Atlantic into North American slavery. Over two centuries, hundreds of thousands of acres were cleared to establish rice plantations, shaping the Southern economy and landscape.

“After emancipation, Black folks left and walked away from our birthright to be rice farmers,” said Mason. “What we’re doing [at Jubilee Justice] is reclaiming rice and rice farming as our foodways, as our birthright—and in that is nothing but the spirit of the ancestors.”

Even the name Jubilee Justice suggests reclamation and restoration. Mason was inspired by the “Jubilee Year,” referenced in the Bible, signifying a cycle that occurred every 50 years when “land that was taken goes back to its original owner, debts are forgiven, and people who have been enslaved are set free,” said Mason. “It’s a year of reboot and equity and justice.”

Challenges of a Changing Climate

Louisiana is known for being a wet state, but this year’s unusually long and rainy spring prevented Mason’s team from planting rice until summer, putting their young crops at risk of wilting in the field. Across the Black Farmers Cohort, many attribute their climate challenges to relentless rains and intense heat. In 2023, Louisiana got so hot that its governor declared a state of emergency.

“It’s like the spigot turned off, which was the rain, and the heat turned up,” said Donna Isaacs, who runs Campti Field of Dreams, a nonprofit with a 43-acre organic farm in Campti, Louisiana. “You would walk on what was supposed to be grass and you heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. That’s how bad it was last year.”

Most of Campti’s land is dedicated to livestock, including sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, while 2.5 acres are reserved for vegetables. (The farm is working toward organic certification.) Only a fraction of the land, around a quarter acre, is devoted to rice. Isaacs had never grown rice before meeting Mason and thought the crop was a money suck. “My understanding of rice at the time was, you were only getting a few cents per pound, so growing it was not cost-effective,” Isaacs explained in her Jamaican accent.

When Mason told Isaacs there was no financial outlay to join the Black Farmers Cohort, it was easier for her to take a chance on rice. Isaacs’ face lit up as she reminisced about their “amazing” first harvest of four varieties. Last year was different, though: Campti lost most of its rice crops to drought and heat. Half their livestock died, too. This spring, they encountered the opposite problem, facing the same cold and wet conditions as Mason’s team, which left them unable to plant rice at all.

In Richmond, Kentucky, near the foothills of Appalachia, cohort member Brian Chadwell had no trouble planting rice this year. But he’s been battling heat and weeds ever since. Chadwell lost about half of his rice crops to weeds last year, which was Kentucky’s fourth warmest on record. State climatologist Jerry Brotzge told Civil Eats that Kentucky is on track to surpass that record this year.

Chadwell dreams of establishing a wholly organic SRI operation. For now, he’s reluctantly laying plastic mulch and spraying Roundup to suppress weeds. He’s learned how to make gradual shifts in his operation with guidance from Jubilee Justice and his idol, Nazirahk Amen of Purple Mountain Organics, a Louisiana-born farmer and naturopathic doctor living in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Amen isn’t part of the Black Farmers Cohort because he’d been growing rice regeneratively for years by the time Jubilee Justice got started. Still, he faces some of the same challenges. He anticipates that of the 1.5 acres he devoted to growing rice this year, approximately 80 percent of his red rice and 20 percent of another variety will be lost to blast, a fungal disease he says is worsened by the drought conditions his region experienced this summer.

“Like, why do I farm?” Amen said, laughing. “At some point, I was telling people that I feel like [the biblical character] Job. Like, I don’t know what else could go wrong.”

Driven by the healing power of nutritious food for his family and patients, Amen continues doing what farmers do best: adapting. “We’re not doing true SRI,” Amen said about Purple Mountain Organics. “We’re doing practical SRI.” He’s adjusted some of the principles to make the system work for him.

At one point, he imported two combines from Japan specifically designed for rice. “They have a system of production that we don’t have [in the U.S.],” he noted, pointing out that their combines are well-suited to SRI because their plant spacing is similar to the 25-x-25-centimeter spacing that SRI recommends, giving plants more space to grow. When Mason visited Amen in 2021 to learn about his operation, he sold her one of his combines and delivered it personally. “I’m so grateful,” Mason said. “He saved my life.”

Experience has taught Amen that it’s advantageous to diversify his crops so that if one fails, another might thrive. (He was pleased to hear that the Black Farmers Cohort is doing the same; they’re currently experimenting with red wheat, black corn, indigo, and more.) But given the overall risks involved in specialty rice farming, he believes the only way to survive is to account for losses by raising consumer pricing. “I don’t think it’s possible for farmers to do this below $6 or $8 or $10 a pound—even in the South,” he said.

Drying rice at the Jubilee Justice mill, November 2024. (Photo courtesy of Jubilee Justice)

Despite the losses Isaacs experienced, she estimates that her farm in Campti could save $10,000 a month by growing SRI rice and other grains they can use in livestock feed. Building up soil health and improving its water-holding capacity to better withstand climate events will be an added benefit. “What started out as a quarter of an acre of rice may end up becoming 10 acres twice a year,” Isaacs said. To avoid potential barriers to planting next year, the Campti team is planting cover crops early and building new infrastructure—investments that she estimates will cost over $20,000 and incalculable sweat equity.

Rice, Racism, and Repair

Many Black farmers face challenges in securing the credit essential for operating their farms, let alone preparing for climate-related disasters. Barriers to owning, operating, and modernizing farmland date back over a century.

In 1910, Black farmers were 14 percent of the U.S. farming population but account for only 1.4 percent today. Black farmers lost 90 percent of their land between 1910 and 1997, due to a combination of racial terrorism, forced property sales, and discriminatory USDA policies that the agency has said were “designed to benefit those with access, education, assets, [and] privilege rather than for those without.” All that acreage, most of which was in the South, is worth roughly $326 billion today, according to a 2022 study.

Recent federal efforts to repair this history of anti-Black harm have faced backlash, with claims of discrimination against white farmers. In response, Congress opened discrimination payments to farmers of all racial backgrounds. In July, the USDA announced it had distributed about $2 billion to more than 40,000 farmers who endured past discrimination. To date, the agency has not shared what percentage of these payments went to Black farmers, although more than half of the recipients were in Mississippi and Alabama, states that boast the largest populations of Black agricultural producers.

In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations.

Recognizing that Black farmers are often under-resourced and need forms of capital beyond what Jubilee Justice provides, Mason and Mark Watson, former managing director of the Fair Food Fund, co-founded a sister organization called Potlikker Capital in 2020. Potlikker Capital provides grants and loans meant to “nourish farmers, not to be extractive,” as Mason put it. (A potlikker recipe in a cookbook by her friend, the renowned chef Bryant Terry, inspired the name.)

According to Watson, Potlikker invests in rural Black, Indigenous, and farmers of color through a mix of grants, loans, and equity. Instead of making decisions based on credit scores or tax returns, Potlikker takes a “relational” and “holistic” approach to funding by visiting farmers regularly and building relationships with them, reviewing their business plans, and making introductions to distributors and lawyers “to create more supportive ecosystems for BIPOC farmers to thrive,” Watson said.

In many ways, the Black Farmers Cohort became a reality through an act of reparations. During an earlier Jubilee Justice program called “Our Ancestral Journey,” Mason crossed paths with Elisabeth Keller, whose family owns the former plantation in Alexandria that now serves as the Jubilee Justice headquarters. Their relationship deepened over the course of the two-year program, which brought together people from different backgrounds to delve into their genealogical roots and reimagine capitalism, “healing backwards in order to heal forward,” as noted in an annual report.

Mason and Keller found an affinity in the work they wanted to do: Keller had transformed part of the plantation into an organic farm but hadn’t figured out how to “heal the land” from the trauma inflicted on the enslaved peoples and sharecroppers who’d labored there. When Mason came up with the idea for the Black Farmers Cohort and was still looking for a place to begin, she remembers Keller saying, “Konda, bring Jubilee Justice here to this land.”

Farmer Donna Isaacs, part of Jubilee Justice’s Black Farmers Cohort, with harvested rice at her farm in Campti, Louisiana, August 2021. (Photo courtesy of Donna Isaacs)

Jubilee Justice recently expanded its initial lease from 5 acres to 17, which now includes Elisabeth Keller’s organic farm. In 2022, the Keller family gave the organization the deed to a piece of land with a building that now houses the first cooperatively Black-owned rice mill in the U.S., enabling Black farmers to cut out middlemen and own their means of production.

Mason’s journey bears a striking resemblance to that of Charley Bordelone West, the mill founder in the television series Queen Sugar, though the show predates Jubilee Justice. (It’s worth noting that Natalie Baszile, who wrote Queen Sugar, is now on Mason’s board of directors.) Like Bordelone, Mason is out to build a durable model of Black self-determination.

Taking a break at the mill during the busy November harvest, Mason voiced her fatigue after an equipment failure left her team to manually process 3,000 pounds of rice by spreading it out on tarps and using fans and rakes to dry it. It was the fourth day of grueling shifts, and her weary eyes reflected both exhaustion and pride in the farmers’ accomplishments.

The cohort was scheduled to arrive the following week to decide on their path forward. Despite the rollercoaster nature of their startup journey, Mason felt invigorated by their progress. “There’s so many people waiting for the rice—and nobody more so than me,” said Mason. “I’m hoping that we’ll get all the channels that are available to us.”

Mason stressed that Jubilee Justice is not a project but a legacy, meant to live beyond her. “This is not about me. It’s not about condemnation . . . This is justice work and healing work.”

For Mason, producing rice organically and regeneratively, with Black farmers in the South, goes beyond climate action. Rice is a conduit for honoring ancestral practices and the long-existing bond Black people have with “the land and earth and interconnectedness of all life,” she said. “Nobody can take that away.”

The post Southern Black Farmers Sow Rice and Reconciliation appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/10/29/how-food-and-ag-businesses-pivoted-to-disaster-relief-after-hurricane-helene/ Tue, 29 Oct 2024 09:00:54 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=58742 But as the company’s co-founders made calls to farming contacts beyond their home of Forest City, about 60 miles southeast of Asheville, Beam and Green learned that potable water was much harder to come by elsewhere in the region, especially in rural areas with challenging logistics. So, they sprang into action, bottling and shipping water […]

The post After Hurricane Helene, Local Farmers and Chefs Pivot to Disaster Relief appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

A few days after Helene hit Western North Carolina, Stuart Beam and Preston Green of Big Bottom Milk Company took stock of their situation. Their creamery’s infrastructure—including its 70-year-old bottle filler—was intact. They had generator power, clean municipal water, and an ample supply of plastic milk packaging, including gallon jugs.

But as the company’s co-founders made calls to farming contacts beyond their home of Forest City, about 60 miles southeast of Asheville, Beam and Green learned that potable water was much harder to come by elsewhere in the region, especially in rural areas with challenging logistics. So, they sprang into action, bottling and shipping water directly to places in need, all while keeping up their usual milk production.

“We’ve kind of been helping everybody else so we didn’t have to think about our problems. It’s a lot more fun.”

Food and agriculture businesses across Western North Carolina are telling similar stories amid the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Although Helene had weakened into a tropical storm by the time it reached the area, it was still the region’s worst storm since 1916.

Helene killed at least 98 residents in Western North Carolina, knocked out power and water for hundreds of thousands of people, and destroyed countless buildings. Many farmers, occupying low-lying valleys and riversides in the Appalachian Mountains, were especially vulnerable to record levels of flooding.

And yet those same farmers, as well as people farther up the supply chain in the Asheville area’s vaunted food scene, have been working to support their communities, even as they deal with the fallout themselves. By repurposing equipment, opening space to relief efforts, and organizing donations, they’re helping meet the region’s most important needs. Tested by the storm, the tight-knit community has responded with food, water, and hope that Western North Carolina will pull through together.

Bottling Hope

Green and Beam had expected a normal, albeit rainy, day on the farm when they went to bed the night of September 26. When the two got up the next morning, it became clear the day would be anything but.

Green had to walk each of Big Bottom’s 65 Jersey cows from their pasture to the milking parlor across a road flooded with eight inches of water. Beam’s truck got stuck on his way from the dairy to the creamery; after Green rescued him, he tried again in a tractor, taking over 2 hours to navigate roughly 2 miles amid lashing rain and storm-toppled trees. Once Beam started the facility’s generator, he set out again, struggling for hours to clear side roads in rural Rutherford County.

“There was several times where I was scared of my life,” Beam recalls. “I was shoving trees, trying to hook to somebody’s car and get them out of the ditch to where they could get out of there. And you’re just thinking, ‘The next tree’s going to fall on me.’”

Once the storm had subsided and the worst of the wreckage had been cleared, the two launched into their water bottling effort. Word of mouth and social media posts brought a steady stream of helpers, from children assembling cardboard boxes to an 81-year-old man with a walker feeding the machinery with empty jugs. On the first night of the operation, creamery staff and volunteers stayed up until 3 a.m., packing 40 pallets of water, with each pallet holding 100 to 140 gallons depending on bottle size.

“We’ve kind of been helping everybody else so we didn’t have to think about our problems,” Beam says with a modest smile. He and Green both lost power at their homes for several days, and he had to clear a tree that had fallen on his own house. “It’s a lot more fun.”

The effort grew as Big Bottom’s web of connections sprang into action. Sofia Lilly, a friend at nearby Overmountain Vineyards, spearheaded nearly $50,000 of fundraising to keep the creamery humming. Green tapped his contacts in the packaging world, temporarily buying his suppliers out of gallon and half-gallon jugs. Beam, who co-chairs a Farm Bureau committee for young farmers and ranchers in the region, talked with colleagues across the state to identify the most critical needs and supplement water deliveries with other essentials.

Among those beneficiaries was the Buladean Volunteer Fire Department, roughly 100 miles northwest in Mitchell County. Fire Captain Jeremiah Swann and his crew had spent days cutting fallen trees, clearing the route to the nearby Tennessee border before unblocking residents’ driveways and conducting wellness checks. They were running low on supplies when a truck from Big Bottom showed up, bearing three pallets of water, over 300 gallons of fuel, and a healthy amount of milk.

“It blesses all of us up here to know that people are rallying around, willing to help us and bring us stuff to get us through a hard time like this,” Swann says. “I would travel 2.5 hours to go get their milk—one, because it’s some of the best milk I’ve ever drank, and two, they’re willing to chip in and help us up here.”

Cooking Out of a Storm

“We thought it was going to be more on a vacation basis,” quips Collis, WCK’s chief relief officer.

Instead, McDonald and Bear’s co-owner Cheryl Antoncic partnered with Collis’s team to transform their restaurant into the command center of WCK’s Helene response. Bear’s is closed to the public, but on a sunny Monday morning, its courtyard buzzes with food deliveries, a meal-packing assembly line, and several giant stainless-steel skillets stir-frying vegetables and chicken.

The Bear’s interior is a logistical war room, complete with a massive map outlining deliveries of roughly 30,000 meals per day to more than 160 distribution points. Collis says needs are constantly shifting, but he expects WCK to remain in the region until widespread potable water returns, which could be many weeks away.

The majority of the meals are cooked on site, but many have come from other Asheville restaurants that have shifted operations toward relief, such as Chai Pani, Curate, and Rocky’s Hot Chicken Shack. (WCK pays local restaurants per meal, allowing them to retain staff and be better prepared to serve the public when conditions allow.)

Antoncic is proud of her restaurant’s flexibility and use of local connections in the face of the unexpected. She points to how its freezer capacity saved 1,000 pounds of meat from storm-damaged purveyor Hickory Nut Gap Farms that was distributed through WCK meals.

Just as importantly, Antoncic continues, Bear’s has catalyzed relationships beyond the meals themselves. Through Linked4Life, a mental health nonprofit supported by the restaurant, she’s helped local counselors reach impacted communities at food distribution sites. And she recently held an event where people wrote messages of hope, attached to carabiners symbolizing connection, that will be sent out into the community in the days to come.

“As much as food and water are basic human needs, I really do believe that connection is a basic human need as well,” Antoncic says. “If you do have a crisis, whether it’s in your own personal life or in a community at large, having those support networks is what’s going to get you through it.”

Spreading the Support

Some regular festival vendors lost everything in the storm. The building that housed Asheville Tea Company floated down the Swannanoa River in a video featured on Fox News. Others, including Chamberlain’s own fermented food company, Fermenti, which sells kimchi and sauerkrauts, have been unable to reopen or manufacture products due to the area’s ongoing water problems. All face greatly reduced sales during the normally thriving fall tourist season.

In response, Chamberlain is using the November 3 festival to raise support for both small-scale food businesses and Western North Carolina residents in need. The in-person event is still happening, with its footprint slightly adjusted due to water damage at its location; only one of roughly 40 planned vendors dropped out, even though some have little to sell.

“It’s important right now to anchor a sense of normalcy in the community, because we have been lacking that,” she says. “For our mental health moving forward, it’s going to be important to help create those connections before we’re shuttered away in the winter.”

The festival is also now tied to an online fundraising campaign, which will go toward purchasing products from the festival’s roughly 40 vendors and donating them directly to local food banks. Chamberlain flags Beacon of Hope Services, a food bank in Marshall, as one recipient, noting that this community was hit particularly hard.

Chamberlain notes that while a lot of food, water, and other goods are arriving at distribution centers right now, “a lot of it’s not going to be here in a couple weeks. I’m not a first-wave responder, but I’m a second-wave responder, and I can be here to help do this.”

This kind of locally based effort is crucial for small food businesses, Chamberlain argues, because they’re likely to fall through the cracks of federal and state assistance. On Oct. 15, for example, the federal Small Business Administration announced that its disaster loan program had run out of money, and Republican leaders in Congress have refused to consider further aid until their regularly scheduled return to Washington November 12.

“I would challenge people to make relationships with food producers that they can connect with and look at eye to eye,” she says. “Now is the time.”

The post After Hurricane Helene, Local Farmers and Chefs Pivot to Disaster Relief appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/10/17/how-to-help-farmworkers-impacted-by-hurricane-helene/ Thu, 17 Oct 2024 09:00:38 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=58423 While farmworkers experienced loss as well, their stories have been largely absent from the headlines. Because these workers are isolated in rural areas and often lack immigration papers, English language skills, and full control over their housing, transportation, and food supply—they are particularly vulnerable in times of crisis. Helene was no exception, compounded by the […]

The post How to Help Farmworkers Impacted by Hurricane Helene appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

Hurricane Helene triggered massive flooding and landslides when it barreled through Western North Carolina in late September, wiping out homes, businesses, roads, bridges, and farms—and claiming nearly 100 lives in the state alone.

While farmworkers experienced loss as well, their stories have been largely absent from the headlines. Because these workers are isolated in rural areas and often lack immigration papers, English language skills, and full control over their housing, transportation, and food supply—they are particularly vulnerable in times of crisis. Helene was no exception, compounded by the fact that disaster aid has been slow to reach Latinx communities.

Leticia Zavala outside the convention center in Toledo, Ohio.

In Western North Carolina, farmworkers tend and harvest berries, cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers, pumpkins, and Christmas trees, among other crops. While some live full-time in their communities and work whatever is in season, others migrate from farm to farm following the work, often from Florida to Georgia to western North Carolina. A good portion are in the country on temporary H-2A visas, which tie them to a specific employer who is responsible for providing housing.

Because of ongoing connectivity issues, communicating with farmworker advocates in the most severely impacted areas of the state, particularly surrounding Asheville, proved difficult.

“A lot of the Christmas tree harvest was not damaged, so even though some workers still don’t have electricity, the growers are wanting them to stay to get the crop out.”

Civil Eats spoke with Leticia Zavala, a coordinator with El Futuro Es Nuestro (It’s Our Future), a farmworker-led human rights organization that took root in opposition to the leadership of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) after a contentious union election in 2022.

Zavala has been in touch with organizers in the most impacted region—and has been providing support to workers further north. In a brief pause from her aid work, she discussed how farmworkers are faring after the storm, the type of aid available to them, and what the public can do to help.

Where are you now, and how are you spending your time in these post-hurricane days?

I am in Goldsboro [east of Raleigh], but we work with workers all over the state. We had actually been affected by [Tropical Storm] Debby first. We had a lot of rain, which flooded the tobacco fields, and a lot of the tobacco and sweet potato harvest went bad. So we were in crisis mode already, because some workers come here on an H-2A visa, and if the crop goes bad, they get sent home early or spend a lot of time without work.

Then there was an issue with food access. We ended up refocusing that to the urgent needs of Helene. This week, we spent time at the Christmas tree farms [in the northern counties of western North Carolina] taking food to workers as well as gas burners and gas tanks. We took a generator out. We spent some time around Mouth of Wilson, on the border of Virginia and North Carolina, and Newland, North Carolina. We were in Boone and Jefferson and West Jefferson. We‘ve been visiting those workers.

We haven‘t been able to get to the workers near Asheville. We‘ve been talking to some of them and working with donation centers, but we haven‘t been able to get to them personally, because of the chaos and the accessibly to roads. We worked with an agency called Tierra Fértile, which had better access to workers we couldn’t get to. And other collection centers have been helping us, sending things to labor camps.

What is the current situation like for the farmworkers you work with?

Most of the workers we’ve worked with say it was a pretty scary situation. [Because they were not warned], it was something that caught them off guard. Most of them hadn’t been in a hurricane before, so it was very scary.

Some workers still don’t have electricity, and the growers are wanting them to stay, to help get the crop. They were expecting there to be damage to the crop and maybe being sent home early, but it’s actually reversed—a lot of the Christmas tree harvest was not damaged, so even though some workers still don’t have electricity, the growers are wanting them to stay to get the crop out.

What have you heard about the experience of farmworkers in the harder hit areas around Asheville?

That’s a scary part—we haven’t been able to connect with people in that area, so we don’t know. What I’ve heard from agencies [helping Latinx communities] is they’re just really overwhelmed. This is the time of year we normally get a lot of calls from workers in that area, because workers are being transferred out of tobacco to the Christmas trees. But we haven’t heard from them.

What type of aid is reaching farmworker communities from your organization and others like it? And what limitations do you run up against in trying to provide help?

The urgent need for water and food and things like that is being met [in the northern counties, by organizations that support farmworkers]. But we’re concerned about the long-term healing of the communities. There are people who have lost their jobs, and they can receive water and food for now, but what about being able to rebuild their homes?

We know that a lot of mobile homes were destroyed. What we’ve seen in the past is that in North Carolina, if you don’t have a driver’s license, you cannot own mobile homes. You cannot own vehicles. A lot of these mobile homes are still in the names of either the owner of the lot or somebody else. Getting access to FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Association] and explaining those kinds of things to agencies becomes difficult. There are issues with language.

There are also issues with transportation. Even if the roads aren’t blocked off, people lost their cars and so that is hard and complicated. We’re concerned about that.

As another example, it wasn’t like a big loss, but some of these H-2A workers had just bought a satellite so they could have internet access. Between the whole crew of 20 workers, it cost them like $600. It was knocked down and damaged by the hurricane. Where can they look to get that kind of like support and get that back?

H-2A workers do not qualify for FEMA disaster assistance. Undocumented workers don’t either. Can undocumented workers receive any type of help from the agency?

If they are undocumented, they may still be eligible for certain assistance. Like if there’s a family with mixed immigration status, even though you may not qualify, your children may, and that qualifies the family.

To receive assistance, people have to fill out a form. There are a couple agencies that serve farmworkers that have been helping them do it in Spanish. They can go to one of those places [for help]. They have to be able to document what was theirs. They can do that with photos or lists of things they lost.

Is government assistance effectively reaching farmworker communities?

We need more. It’s easy for government assistance to access people in the city or where a lot of people are congregated, but in the rural parts, it’s more difficult to get the news and information out. There’s more information needed out in the rural areas of North Carolina. 

One issue [that is arising] is if farmworkers don’t have papers, they’re less likely to seek out help they may be eligible for.

Also we heard from an organization that they were trying to recruit people who were affected by the hurricane to fill out FEMA applications so they could have a source of income and cover some of the needs. But the organization wasn’t getting the resources to be able to pay staff to help [with the forms], therefore farmworkers were not able to fill out the applications.

What would you advise a farmworker who needs help to do?

The first thing is make a list of the things you have lost and the things you need—analyze your situation, so you know when you knock on the doors of churches, immigrant organizations, and government agencies, you can ask for everything. If they have a good list of the things that they lost and the things that they need, then it makes it easier for organizations to work together and refer to each other.

The second is keep knocking on doors. There’s gonna be people that say, “No, you don’t qualify,” or, “We can’t do this for you.” Sometimes it’s because even FEMA staff isn’t trained adequately. So the first time somebody says, “No”—don’t accept that. Keep asking and keep knocking on doors.

The Farmworker Health Program has been active. They can call us [El Futuro Es Nuestro] and we can refer people, depending on where they are located, to different spaces. There’s a lot of immigrant organizations that are also working to provide help.

One thing to remember is there are always changes. There may be some services that open up within a couple weeks that are not available now. So be persistent.

What are the biggest needs in farmworker communities in the wake of the storm, and what can the public do to support them?

Right now, people are sending money, but after things kind of calm down, it stops. And what does that mean for families?

I feel like there’s going to be a big need for cash assistance for transition, like people who need to move or be relocated [to farms in different areas]. That’s where I’ve seen a lot of gaps with FEMA and other responses. El Futuro Es Nuestro is assessing those needs right now. It would require growers and us to work together. We are hoping if the need arises, we can help.

Farmworkers are often overlooked, especially at times of crisis. What do you wish that the public better understood, and how can the public best support them?

Farmworkers are hit first and most with natural disasters. I haven’t heard people talk about Debby and the impact it had. It flooded areas, and workers were going hungry. And nobody really found out about that. Another issue is the heat and how it affects us.

It’s really important to recognize that [farmworkers are] the ones that get hit the most, and it’s longer-term than other people. People who work in factories, they may be back to work a week or two after. But farmworkers, if the harvest was damaged, the harvest was damaged, and they don’t get to work until the next harvest comes.

We have a collective responsibility towards farmworkers, because we all depend on them on a daily basis. And it’s important that everybody learn what the conditions of farmworkers are in their communities and that they support the struggles that they workers are pushing. 

Is there anything else you’d like to add about how these workers are doing or feeling right now?

I did hear a nice positive story. We had one worker who said, “You know, we’ve been here together for seven or eight months, and by now we’re usually kind of tired [of each other]. But when the hurricane hit, we had to come together. And we ended up dividing up our chores. Some people went and collected firewood, and some people would bring water from the stream, and some people would prepare the meal. We kind of became a little united group again.”

(But) workers are being asked to stay despite not having electricity because of the need to meet the [H-2A] contracts. They have contracts that they need to meet, and if they don’t meet them, then they could not have a contract next year. They are essential workers. Even Christmas trees are considered essential. But how do you feel about workers having to stay without electricity so you can have a Christmas tree?

It’s a tough decision for workers to make: “Do I want to go back to Mexico empty handed, or risk it and stay?” It’s also tough for the growers. One grower I talked to really tried. She’s like, “Tell me what I need to do to get water and food to the guys, and I’ll do it.”

This is about balancing the needs of the business and industry but also the needs of the humans doing the work.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post How to Help Farmworkers Impacted by Hurricane Helene appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/10/02/immigrant-workers-are-the-backbone-of-our-food-system/ Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:03:32 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=58028 In fact, immigrants form the backbone of the U.S. food and agricultural industries, which would face unimaginable strain without their human labor. They also demonstrate remarkable resilience and creative ingenuity in their own cooking and farming, introducing us to their cultural traditions and enriching us as a society. To counter the negative narratives currently rampant […]

The post Immigrant Workers Are the Backbone of Our Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

As part of our mission, Civil Eats reports on the U.S. food system’s disproportionate impact on immigrants and communities of color. Immigrant food system workers toil in the nation’s restaurants, farms, and food processing facilities, and have some of the least visible but most strenuous and dangerous jobs in the country. Many are underpaid and vulnerable to food insecurity and workplace abuses. They were also subjected to unprecedented risks during the early days of the pandemic. Despite this, their contributions to the food system are overwhelmingly positive.

In fact, immigrants form the backbone of the U.S. food and agricultural industries, which would face unimaginable strain without their human labor. They also demonstrate remarkable resilience and creative ingenuity in their own cooking and farming, introducing us to their cultural traditions and enriching us as a society.

To counter the negative narratives currently rampant in this country, we selected just a few of our many stories from the recent past that demonstrate how immigrants play an important, outsize role in planting, picking, and processing the food on our plates. They also make up the very fabric of our culture and make us what we are as a nation.

We will continue to tell their stories.

How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm
A Q&A with Maximina Hernández Reyes, who credits her success to a Portland, Oregon, food network called Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative.

A Community of Growers
How East New York Farms builds food security and provides jobs for its neighborhood.

Photo courtesy of ALBA

This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades
California’s farmworkers face untold barriers accessing the land, capital, and training needed to strike out on their own. For 20 years, ALBA has been slowly changing the landscape for this important group of aspiring growers.

The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Immokalee, Florida
The majority of migrant farmworkers live below the federal poverty line, without easy access to healthy foods or affordable housing. To survive, many in this tight-knit community have found strategies for mutual aid and collaborative resilience.

This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction.
The members of Tierras Milperas in Watsonville, Calif. are struggling to maintain access to their garden. Similar stories are unfolding across the country.

A New Film Documents the Immigrant Farmworker Journey
‘First Time Home,’ a short film created by American children of Triqui farmworkers, offers an unscripted, authentic glimpse into life for farmworker families—and why people choose to sacrifice their lives in Mexico for opportunities up North.

On the Rural Immigrant Experience: ‘We Come With a Culture, Our Own History, and We’re Here to Help’
Organizer Gladys Godinez on the way immigrants change, and are changed by, rural America.

The Fight for L.A.’s Street Food Vendors
Getting a permit is difficult and expensive, and the state food code is prohibitively complex for small-scale vendors. A coalition is working to help protect this important economic and cultural tradition.

Photo by Sarah Sax

A Vietnamese Farmers’ Cooperative in New Orleans Offers a Lesson in Resilience
VEGGI Co-op has weathered Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. Now, it’s facing the twin threats of the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

Immigrants Lift Up a Food System in Need of Reform
Farmworker advocates argue that if we want to revitalize the food economy, we must embrace—and not criminalize—immigrants.

The Halal Restaurant Helping Build Community in Suburban Detroit
Bismallah Kabob has become a gathering hotspot for Detroit’s Bangladeshi community—and is building bridges between immigrants and longtime residents.

A New American Dream: The Rise of Immigrants in Rural America
The upsurge of immigration has inarguably helped revitalize dying towns, especially in farm country.

Immigrant Farmers Help Grow Organic Ag in Wisconsin and Beyond
Hmong farmers Blia and Phua Thao put their 40-plus years of experience to work in Spring Valley, where they grow organic produce entirely by hand.

Immigrant Women are Providing a Taste of Oaxaca in California’s Central Valley
Diverse immigrant communities are forging new paths and bringing traditional culture to rural America.

A Cookbook Highlights the Power of Immigrants to Make Positive Change
Leyla Moushabeck, editor of The Immigrant Cookbook, talks about the power of food, and immigrants, in shaping this country.

On Cleveland’s Largest Urban Farm, Refugees Gain Language and Job Skills
The Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program expects to harvest 22,000 pounds of produce this year, while helping refugees find a community.

Refugee Farmers are Putting Down Roots in North Carolina
Transplanting Traditions Community Farm is helping Burmese farmers create new community.

The post Immigrant Workers Are the Backbone of Our Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/09/23/beyond-farm-to-table-how-chefs-can-support-climate-friendly-food-systems/ https://civileats.com/2024/09/23/beyond-farm-to-table-how-chefs-can-support-climate-friendly-food-systems/#comments Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:00:35 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57712 This is the first article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration with Eater. This may seem like an antiquated concern for chefs in an era of global food distribution systems, but it’s an all-consuming preoccupation for Oyster Oyster, a restaurant named after two ingredients—a bivalve and a mushroom—known for […]

The post Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

This is the first article in a five-part series about restaurants and climate-change solutions, produced in collaboration with Eater.

At the height of summer, chef Rob Rubba and his team at Oyster Oyster, a vegetable-first restaurant in Washington, D.C., are preparing for the dwindling of food in the coming winter. It’s a tedious but worthwhile process: drying mushrooms, vegetables, and herbs, making pickles and slaw, and preserving garlic blossoms and coriander seeds in airtight jars before these ingredients vanish with the end of the season.

This may seem like an antiquated concern for chefs in an era of global food distribution systems, but it’s an all-consuming preoccupation for Oyster Oyster, a restaurant named after two ingredients—a bivalve and a mushroom—known for their ecosystem benefits. This radically seasonal, regional restaurant sources its ingredients exclusively from the ocean, climate-adapted farms, and wild plants of the Mid-Atlantic.

Climate on the Menu

Read the stories in our series with Eater:

• Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems As global warming bears down, some restaurants are forging stronger bonds with regional food systems and regenerative farms.
• Weathering Climate Shocks: How Restaurants Survive Supply Disruptions To overcome ingredient shortages and high food costs, some restaurateurs are rethinking their staple ingredients and strengthening their relationships with suppliers.
• Battling Meltdown: If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Work for Change in the Kitchen As climate change drives temperatures up, restaurant staff face uncomfortable, even unsafe conditions with no heat regulations to protect them. Some workers are taking matters into their own hands.
• ‘Invisible’ Waste: For Restaurants, Composting Food Scraps Is Just the Beginning Cooking, refrigeration, air conditioning, water use, and packaging contribute to greenhouse gas emissions too. These restaurants try to tackle them all.
• Table to Farm: Can Restaurants Serve Climate Education? For climate-conscious restaurants, helping customers understand the benefits of sustainably sourced food (and why it costs more) is key. But is tableside storytelling the way to go?

“Toward the end of winter, it gets a little . . . . scary and sparse,” admits Rubba. “Come February, we have this very short farm list. It’s just cellared roots and some kales. Making that creative takes a lot of mental energy.” That’s when Oyster Oyster draws heavily from its pantry of foraged wild plants and ingredients preserved from nearby climate-friendly farms. They lend the food “bright, salty, acidic flavor pops throughout the winter” that wouldn’t otherwise be available, and give his food a joyful exuberance that one critic described as “a garden of good eating.”

Rubba, who won the Outstanding Chef award from the James Beard Foundation in 2023, is one of many chefs reinvisioning the farm-to-table movement in the clarifying, urgent light of climate change. At a time when storms, fires, and droughts are lashing the planet with increasing severity, restaurants like Oyster Oyster source ingredients with a heightened due diligence around their climate and environmental impacts. In doing so, they’re also recognizing that chefs can play a larger role in building food systems able to survive long into the future.

When Ingredients Do Harm—or Good

Oyster Oyster’s approach to regional sourcing comes from Rubba’s stark realization that many staples sold in grocery stores and used in most restaurants have wreaked havoc on the ecosystems and livelihoods of people in other countries. Many of the staple “commodities” imported from overseas come from regions once covered by rainforests and other critical ecosystems that stabilize the climate.

Take chocolate, for instance. The majority of the world’s cocoa is sourced from West Africa, often harvested by children on vast plantations linked to widespread deforestation. Sugar comes with its problems, too. Even when grown in the U.S., the burning of sugar cane emits large amounts of earth-warming carbon dioxide, while dusting communities with toxic ash. Also, these foods require fossil fuels to transport them across the ocean and then throughout the U.S. to warehouses, grocery stores, and restaurants. Rubba also avoids domestic foods that have a large environmental toll. This includes meat, a major driver of earth-warming methane pollution, accounting for 60 percent of food-related emissions.

With a bit of due diligence, Rubba has found local substitutes for all these ingredients. “We don’t use a lot of sweeteners in our food, but we source a really good maple syrup from Pennsylvania that is sometimes reduced down to a maple sugar,” he says.

He and his team use alternatives to other staples, too: They source vinegars from Keepwell Vinegar in Pennsylvania, which relies on sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, fruit, and sorghum from nearby farms to prepare vinegar from scratch. They get their salt from Henlopen, a flaky sea salt from the Delaware coast. They source sunflower and canola oil from Pennsylvania farms. For spices, they work with foragers to gather and preserve Northern spicebush, a shrub native to the eastern U.S. with a delightfully versatile flavor, both fruity and peppery at once. They use a dash of this spice instead of pepper, mixing it with ginger and chiles for a hit of complexity and warmth.

And, just because food is raised locally doesn’t mean it’s grown with climate-friendly practices. “[The farmer] could be spraying with every insecticide, pesticide, fertilizer, and drive a big, stinky diesel truck into my city and sit outside idling for 20 minutes while he unloads all his plastic containers into my restaurant, right?” says Rubba.

This has prompted Rubba to develop deeper relationships with the farms in his network, including an interview process to understand how the food is produced before he buys from a particular farm. Although he sources organic produce, USDA organic certification isn’t his biggest requirement—he’s more interested in the actual farming methods. Certain farming practices and crop varieties can help farms adapt to the erratic, intensified weather patterns and disasters shaking the foundation of U.S. agriculture. Healthy soil can act like a sponge, easily absorbing water during intense flooding and retaining water during times of drought. Some approaches, like agroforestry, can directly fight climate change by drawing down planet-warming carbon.

Rubba visits all the farms that supply the restaurant, asking about their crop rotations, soil health practices, and how the farmworkers are treated. “I love to see the operation, how they do things, what it’s like, and who works there,” he said. “I don’t want to serve food that someone labored over and wasn’t paid correctly for.”

Origins to Table

“We’re in it for the relationships,” said Dana Honn. “The whole idea of farm-to-table has always been so important, but what I realized is that we’re trying to do origins-to-table–we’re trying to tell the story of where our food came from.”

Chefs can be part of the next chapter of this story, not only by telling the history of a food but also by helping build a sustainable market for its future. This is part of the inspiration behind the Honn’s project Origins: Amazonia, the result of a decades-long relationship formed with Juruna Indigenous communities in the state of Pará, Brazil, whose livelihoods and traditional food systems were upended by a megadam. The project is an ambitious, multidimensional effort to tell the story of the violent destruction of biodiversity and Indigenous land, while also helping support a market for traditional Juruna foods like cassava, which allows the communities to cultivate them once more. By focusing on the richest source of biodiversity in the world—one that affects the entire planet, where  deforestation has eradicated at least 20 percent of the rainforest—the Honns hope to help their customers understand what’s at stake there, and by extension, everywhere.

“If there are more people engaged in production of ancestral foods, they actually begin to consume those foods again,” said Honn about the Juruna communities. Many of their traditional plants, like manioc, are also highly adapted to the environment and climate, cultivated over thousands of years. Carmo has been supporting the renewal of these foodways, in part, through a dinner series partly sourced from the Juruna (along with fresh ingredients from the New Orleans area) that also functions as a fundraiser. The money is returned to the Juruna peoples to help restore the agroforestry systems that have long sustained them.

Honn has developed a similar approach to supporting a more sustainable market for Louisiana’s shrinking fishing industry, which has been eroding for decades. The local industry is struggling to compete with cheap imported seafood, which currently accounts for the majority of seafood sold in the U.S. Many New Orleans chefs find it easier to rely on cheaper, imported seafood, readily available through major restaurant distributors like Sysco or Restaurant Depot that source from around the globe. Yet the reliance on imported seafood—at the expense of local seafood—can come with steep consequences.

For instance, shrimp farms in other countries are routinely linked to labor abuses and the destruction of mangroves—a coastal ecosystem critical for adapting to climate change by building carbon-rich soil and buffering against sea-level rise. To address this, Honn has been working with a group of chefs, fishers, and other experts to build back Louisiana’s seafood economy, including shrimp, by developing a more sustainable, local supply chain. They’re developing a program called Full Catch, a set of protocols for harvesting, transporting, and distributing fish from the Gulf of Mexico, including cutting down on food waste by selling and marketing the whole fish.

“When you go to seafood processing houses, they just cut the filet off and throw the carcass in the bin. You have the collars and the cheeks and the pectoral fins and the ribs and everything else that could . . . literally just be cooked and put on a plate,” said Honn. “We sell it every night at Carmo and run out of it every night. Really, people love it.”

Supporting Climate-Conscious Farms

Many farmers don’t grow a fixed amount of each crop every year; instead, they experiment and innovate with different crop plans, the varieties of crops grown, methods of building soil health and minimizing fertilizer use, and other variables. In other words, climate-friendly farming can be a bit messy and unpredictable–a system that is designed to be more responsive to climate disruptions and ecosystem fluctuations, building long-term stability, resilience, and high yields.

The restaurants that support these kinds of  farms also tend to be highly adaptable, adjusting their menu to reflect the needs of farmers. They source according to the schedule of the crops growing nearby, the waning and waxing seasons. For some chefs, this means keeping in constant touch with farms to know when their crops will be ready, and then adjusting their menu accordingly–rather than relying on a predictable production schedule.

Isaiah Martinez, the chef and owner of Yardy Rum Bar, a Caribbean restaurant in Eugene, Oregon, says he keeps close tabs on local farms. “I’m asking them, ‘When are your peppers going to be in season? When are melons going to be in season? When are you going to have different cucumber varieties? When will you have stone fruit?’” He admits that he’s a bit competitive about this, too; he wants to be the first chef that farmers call when a new crop is ready to be delivered, so he builds strong relationships with them.

“I create a relationship where [farmers] feel like they have to tell me first,” he said. “They’re giving me the first handful of perfect peaches, and I’m putting it on my menu.” This approach is also good for farmers: The peach grows according to its own timeline, and the chef is enthusiastically waiting for it as soon as it is ready. He changes his menu usually every three to four weeks, while making smaller tweaks on a daily basis. “When carrots are not very good, we can do beets, and when beets are not very good, we can do collards.”

For peppers, herbs, lettuces and gem beets, Martinez goes to Red Tail Organics, a certified organic vegetable farm along Oregon’s Mohawk River that focuses on the often overlooked edges of the farm. Red Tail  plants hedgerows of elderberries, Oregon Grape trees, and  Cascara trees, native plants that serve as a habitat for wildlife while helping sequester carbon in the soil. They’ve also planted Pacific willow, California incense-cedar, Western red cedar, Ash trees, and Alders along the river that cuts through the farm. Known as a riparian buffer, this prevents erosion, stabilizes the soil, and can absorb storm water, helping the farm adapt to more erratic weather.

Martinez also sources some ingredients from Hummingbird Wholesale, a local distributor in Oregon focused on building a market for regional organic farms that are sustainable in the truest sense of the word. “We have a big, audacious goal that organic becomes the norm in agriculture, as opposed to the 2.5 percent [of U.S. food sales] that it is currently,” said Stacy Kraker, the company’s director of marketing. Hummingbird does this by acting as the missing link between the area’s organic farms, retailers, and restaurants, building a regional supply chain that chefs that quickly tap into. In pursuing what it calls “distributor supported agriculture,” Hummingbird—and chefs like Martinez, who support it—are helping create a local foodshed that nourishes all the life that depends on it, from humans to soil microbes and pollinators.

Hummingbird’s sourcing team considers some of the regional climate stressors, such as prolonged periods of drought, when seeking out farmers. “Some of the farmers we work with are, in fact, dry-land farming, which means that they rely on rain to give them as much moisture as they’re ever going to use,” said Kraker. “So, they’re intentionally choosing to grow crops in the regions that can handle long periods without any rain.”

While Martinez deeply values building direct relationships with farmers, Hummingbird Wholesale allows him to confidently source from nearby organic farms for some ingredients, sparing him a bit of time and research in what can be a lengthy process.

A chef’s vigilant, knowledgeable sourcing can lead to cherishing certain ingredients—and using less of them. Oyster Oyster’s Rob Rubba thinks some foods are best reserved for special occasions, including his restaurant’s namesake bivalve.

His oysters come from Chesapeake Bay, which has lost nearly all of its once-abundant oyster population due to reckless harvesting techniques like dredging. Although Rubba buys from farmers dedicated to sustainably raising Bay oysters, he still sources them in moderation. Part of the idea is simply not taking too much from the earth, especially for ingredients that have historically been extracted like they are an infinite resource.

“I think we have to look at [these oysters] as a luxury,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that they should be limited out of a sense of elitism. I just think in how we consume them—we should just be a little more grateful for them when we do get them.”

The post Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems appeared first on Civil Eats.

“We knew OSHA was going to show up; we knew a lot of different law enforcement agencies were going to show up; and we knew that the workers were going to be undocumented, intimidated, and terrified,” she said.

Sur Legal hosted a Facebook Live gathering to educate workers on their rights and began talking directly to individuals who worked at the plant, many of whom had witnessed the incident and were now traumatized. Ultimately, Anand and her colleagues were able to help about two dozen workers from the plant access what she calls a “life-changing” pathway: they were temporarily granted protected status so that they could help federal investigators identify conditions that might have contributed to the incident—which ultimately represented violations of the law.

In the past, federal agencies have occasionally granted what they call “deferred action for labor disputes” at their own discretion. However, in January 2023, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) formalized the process for the first time to encourage undocumented workers, who might otherwise stay silent due to fear of deportation, to report violations of labor laws on the job.

“It came out of DHS, but we look at it as a labor and a worker-rights policy,” said Jessie Hahn, a senior labor and employment policy attorney at the National Immigration Law Center (NILC). “It’s very much based on the perspective that the Biden administration has, about how best to enforce labor and employment laws and what is going to facilitate that.”

Between January 2023 and August 2024, according to DHS, more than 6,000 workers—many working in the food system—have been granted this temporary protection, which can last up to four years. They include the Georgia poultry workers, guest workers picking strawberries in Florida fields, and tortilla factory workers in Chicago, among others.

However, as the presidential election approaches, it’s one of several immigration policies that are at risk—and that would reshape the legal landscape for food and farm workers.

Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have used strong rhetoric about stemming the influx of new immigrants at the U.S.–Mexico border. But how they might treat the immigrant workforce that powers America’s fruit and vegetable harvests, meatpacking and food processing plants, and restaurant kitchens—a large percentage of which is undocumented—is more complicated.

Harris is currently serving in what some experts say has been the most hardline Democratic administration on border policy in modern history, especially since President Joe Biden’s June executive order limiting asylum claims. As vice president, she was specifically tasked with addressing the root causes of migration in origin countries.

During her years as a district attorney and then as the attorney general of California, her record was nuanced. She was tough on immigrants when they committed crimes, but expressed support for those who did not. Throughout, she has specifically defended the labor rights of immigrant workers, including introducing pro-farmworker legislation, and has been endorsed by multiple labor groups.

The Trump administration—and the 2024 Trump campaign—have taken a harder line on immigration and immigrants living in the U.S. In 2017, Trump implemented a “zero tolerance” border policy for families at the border and ended the deferred action policy, which previously gave the children of immigrants, called “Dreamers,” a path to citizenship. (Harris, a senator at the time, supported the Dreamers.) In addition, the second bullet point in the 2024 Republican Party Platform is to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history,” with a goal of expelling millions of immigrants. During the recent debate, Trump repeatedly demonized immigrants using sweeping generalizations filled with misinformation about crime. ( Research shows immigrants do not commit crimes at higher rates than U.S.-born Americans.) “We have to get ’em out,” he said. “We have to get ’em out fast.”

People close to the issue told Civil Eats that, given the unspoken reality of how deeply farms and food businesses rely on undocumented workers, they’re more worried about worker abuse increasing under Trump’s leadership than about mass deportations.

“I think they want people to be scared,” Antonio De Loera-Brust, communications director for the United Farm Workers (UFW), said of the deportation threats. “They’re going to push [undocumented workers] more into the shadows, where they’re more vulnerable and exploitable.”

Empowering Immigrants to Report Labor Abuses

Deferred action is one piece of that work UFW has embraced; its organizers have been assisting farmworkers with applications, while the UFW Foundation has been working with the state of California to inform farmworkers about the option. To date, De Loera-Brust said UFW has helped more than 100 fieldworkers apply.

To be eligible, workers must get a letter called a “statement of interest” from a labor or employment agency. For example, if fieldworkers have reported safety violations to Cal/OSHA, California’s worker safety and health agency, Cal/OSHA must then send a letter to DHS indicating interest in launching an investigation before DHS will grant deferred action status. Groups like UFW often help facilitate that process.

Once they are granted the status, workers may be asked to provide information on labor violations they’ve experienced or witnessed. In Gainesville, for example, the nitrogen leak resulted in two federal investigations into what caused the incident and its fatalities.

“Several of these workers came forward to the Department of Justice, which has never been an immigrant-friendly agency, so that was 10 times scarier for them,” Anand said. “But they want to do everything they can to hold folks accountable for those deaths.”

As a result, OSHA investigators concluded Foundation Food Group and three affiliated companies “failed to implement any of the safety procedures necessary to prevent the nitrogen leak, or to equip workers responding to it with the knowledge and equipment that could have saved their lives.” The agency cited the companies for nearly $1 million in fines and a total of 59 violations. Foundation Food Group was acquired by another chicken processor, Gold Creek Foods, in September 2021.

In a later, more detailed report produced by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board that workers also helped with, investigators again found the deaths had been “completely preventable.”

While it was too late to save the workers who died, one of the affiliated companies that leased the faulty equipment said it developed new safety protocols as a result of the report, and the investigators recommended OSHA issue a new national standard to address the hazards of liquid nitrogen, with specific emphasis on poultry processing and food manufacturing.

It’s an example of how the deferred action policy’s impact extends far beyond the individuals who receive the status, Hahn said. “We are trying to address the chilling effect that occurs in a workplace when people are too afraid to speak up about labor violations,” she said. “When those workers feel protected because they’ve received deferred action, then everyone in the workplace benefits.” In other words, supporters believe the policy makes workplaces safer for all Americans, immigrant or otherwise.

At Centro de Los Derechos del Migrante (CDM), which has headquarters in both Maryland and Mexico, staff members have been documenting the abuse of migrants who come to the U.S. through guestworker programs to work in agriculture and food processing for nearly two decades. Lucy Thames, CDM’s outreach project manager, said the deferred action process has also benefited those workers over the past year.

One challenge for workers in the H-2A program, which is for farms, and the H-2B program, which is for food processing, is that their legal status in the country is tied to their employer, making it difficult for them to report or escape abusive situations. But when guestworkers are granted deferred action, Thames explained, they are able to seek employment with any U.S. employer. “They’re able to leave a situation in which their rights aren’t being respected and identify an employer who might be a better fit for them,”she said.

That’s significant because in recent years, as farms have struggled to find enough workers to plant carrots and harvest tomatoes, the H2-A program especially has ballooned in size. CDM has been particularly focused on helping shape a recent Biden administration rule to expand protections for workers in that program.

Thames said the new rule contains many provisions CDM has advocated for, including allowing protection from being fired without cause, banning retaliation against workers who engage in union organizing, establishing transportation safety requirements, and ensuring support and advocacy organizations are able to visit workers in employer-provided housing.

The Post-Election View

On the other side, while Trump has not mentioned this H-2A rule since it was proposed, Republican lawmakers have been pushing back on many of its provisions. At the end of August, a federal judge sided with 17 Republican-led states in a lawsuit brought against the Department of Labor, blocking the Biden administration from implementing the provisions.

And at the end of Trump’s presidency, his administration published a different H-2A rule, which drew strong opposition from farm labor groups because it weakened worker protections. At the time, his Department of Labor said the rule would “streamline and simplify the H-2A application process, strengthen protections for U.S. and foreign workers, and ease unnecessary burdens on employers.”

The political ping-pong over the H-2A rules shows how, since immigration is so politicized, even small changes to labor policies that primarily impact immigrant workers are often the result of years of back-and-forth that span multiple presidential administrations.

“A lot of the developments that we’re seeing are many, many years in the making,” Thames said. “I think that’s often what we’ve seen in the farmworker movement.It’s decades of work done by advocates and workers themselves.”

Throughout that time, regardless of who’s in charge in D.C., U.S. food production has depended on immigrant workers. Multiple farmers who spoke to Civil Eats laughed at the idea of finding enough U.S. citizens to harvest kale and squash.

One organic vegetable farmer said she pays nearly $17 an hour to her H-2A workers but has still never had a domestic worker apply. (The law requires farmers to post the jobs for U.S. workers before bringing in guestworkers.) Originally, she relied on mostly undocumented workers living in the U.S., but recently has had to bring in more temporary guestworkers on H-2A visas. She’s hoping for a more long-term solution that recognizes the contributions of the immigrants who have powered her farm—some for more than a decade—and that would allow them to live and work without fear.

But with election rhetoric focused on border security and the recent failure of even the most middle-of-the-road legislation, unions and immigrant rights groups are zeroing in on the things that make a difference day-to-day.

Deferred action is “a Band-Aid on a big problem,” said Sur Legal’s Anand, since it doesn’t do anything to resolve longstanding questions around whether the country’s millions of immigrant food workers should be granted long-term legal status. But it has had a real impact on the Gainesville workers’ lives. “Some of these workers have left the poultry industry and found better paying, safer jobs, and they feel really empowered,” Anand said. “Now, they’re speaking up.”

“We don’t know what’s going to happen with this program,” she added, “but by and large, most of our folks that we’ve worked with are like, ‘If it gives me a few years of peace, of being able to be safe and to live my life without fear, I’ll do it.’”

The post Labor Protections for Immigrant Food Workers Are at Stake in the 2024 Election appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/08/14/a-new-book-dives-deep-into-the-climate-and-health-impacts-of-gas-stoves/ Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:00:09 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57241 “That’s 10 million senseless deaths [due to fossil fuels] when we have cleaner fuels available,” Jackson explained to Civil Eats as he prepped for the launch of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. “One reason I push the intersection between health and climate is because it reaches […]

The post A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

Each year, 100,000 Americans die from coal and car pollution. And each year, 20 percent of deaths worldwide are attributable to fossil fuel use. Rob Jackson, Stanford climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project, keeps a long list of statistics like these—on the devastating health impacts of fossil fuels—ready to share.

“That’s 10 million senseless deaths [due to fossil fuels] when we have cleaner fuels available,” Jackson explained to Civil Eats as he prepped for the launch of his new book, Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere. “One reason I push the intersection between health and climate is because it reaches people who won’t otherwise pay attention to climate.”

That intersection hits home in about 40 percent of U.S. kitchens, where Americans still cook over flames powered by natural gas. The week of Jackson’s book launch, many of those cooks were probably drenched in sweat, too: July 22 was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.

In the book, Jackson tells stories of measuring both the staggering greenhouse gas emissions gas stoves produce and the dangerous levels of air pollutants home cooks breathe in as they sauté and roast (even long after the burners are off).

Last year, some of those measurements, published in research studies, contributed to public awareness that quickly spiraled into what multiple media outlets branded “gas stove culture wars.” (Just last week, Senator JD Vance told his supporters Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to take away your gas stoves,” which is entirely false.) But Into the Clear Blue Sky  is a solutions book written by a scientist, and Jackson approaches the phaseout of gas-powered home appliances with the same steady, measured urgency he applies to exploring decarbonizing steel and electrifying vehicles—two other important solutions in his book. Also, early on, he establishes a throughline: that the impacts of the climate crisis are unequally felt, and solutions need to be accessible and applicable to all.

Jackson spoke to Civil Eats about his groundbreaking research, the pushback against policies that could speed electrification, and how writing about climate solutions—gas stove phaseouts and otherwise—has left him angry and afraid, but also hopeful.

You set out to write about climate solutions, and you allotted two chapters to the food system—one on gas stoves, one on beef. Considering all the ways that climate change intersects with the food system, why those two?

For a couple of reasons. In the book, I highlight the opportunities for reducing methane concentrations in the atmosphere as probably our best short-term goal for climate action. And the two largest sources of methane in the world are food: primarily cows and rice paddies, and gas appliances in our homes and buildings.

We did the first studies looking at emissions from water heaters and have spent the last five years studying gas stoves—initially, purely for their greenhouse gas emissions, to see how much methane leaks into the air. We found that the leaks from gas stoves alone in the U.S. were responsible for pollution equivalent to half a million U.S. cars.

But as we were going into hundreds of homes measuring methane, we started measuring indoor air pollutants like NOx [nitrogen oxide] gasses, which triggers asthma, and benzene, which is carcinogenic. That opened a whole new field of study for me, because I realized every time I turned on a burner on a gas stove or started the oven, pollution levels shot up above health benchmarks, even when I had the ventilation hood on in my house.

You wrote that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t include methane leakage from gas appliances in their greenhouse gas emissions estimates. Is that still true, or has your research changed things?

It’s still mostly true. They do now include some emissions from gas stoves, but they don’t include the full set of emissions, including leakage. I began measuring methane from appliances in homes and buildings because it was the least-studied part of the gas supply chain, and I wanted to fill a fill a research gap there. Our research has drawn a lot of attention to the issue of gas appliances in our homes.

The largest source of emissions indoors is the furnace, because it burns so much more gas. But the furnace and the water heater are required to vent directly outdoors through a chimney or a pipe. I focus a lot on gas stoves because there’s no vent. Or there’s a hood that most people don’t use—and that surveys show often isn’t effective.

The levels of air pollutants you’ve measured in people’s homes are unbelievably high. In the book, you talk about how the industry knew about the health concerns more than 100 years ago, to the extent that their own experts said gas shouldn’t be used in homes without requiring hoods that vented to the outside, which didn’t happen. How much of this evidence on indoor air pollutants and the health implications is just emerging now and how much is new?

It’s a fascinating question. For example, there’s 50 years of measurements on NOx pollution indoors. There were meta-analyses done in the 1990s showing that stoves increased indoor NOx levels and that the likelihood of asthma and wheezing and different health outcomes increased if you lived in a home with a gas stove. So, that knowledge was well known 30 years before I ever thought about measuring gas stoves.

I think our instruments are better now, and we have a finer-scale resolution. And until we did it, no one had measured benzene emissions indoors from gas stoves. So, we’re still learning about the full set of pollutants that are generated indoors.

And I think we’re learning more now about not just the emission rates but the concentrations that people actually breathe. That’s the tricky part, because what you need to know for predicting health outcomes is how high the levels are—not just in the kitchen but in the bedrooms down the hall where people spend their time and sleep.

That was the biggest surprise of our studies for me—the fact that concentrations of pollutants rose so quickly in bedrooms down the hall and stayed above health benchmarks for hours after the stove was off. When you think about cooking meal after meal, day after day, month after month and these concentrations just recurring all the time in our homes . . . sometimes I think we would never willingly stand over the tailpipe of a car breathing in the exhaust, but we willingly stand over a gas stove and breathe the same pollutants.

Have you done any of this research in restaurants?

We are doing that right now, literally. I have a part of my lab up in Pittsburgh doing measurements. We’ve done some in the Bay Area. We’re doing some in the Midwest, and we’re going to go to Washington, D.C. this summer and do some more.

Generally, [commercial] kitchens have industrial hoods, which are much better. However, they also have many more burners. And they have pilot lights, which are the most inefficient way that we burn. So, I worry about exposures where the concentration is building up at night after the restaurant closes and the hoods are off and these pilot lights are burning. I worry more about small kitchens . . . somewhere where maybe the ventilation is not so good.

We’re really trying to understand the risks in kitchens and, frankly, to do it more positively. We’re trying to work with chefs to promote the benefits of electrification. There’s an increasing number of chefs willing to speak out and say, “Yes, I can cook with electricity and there’s no reason not to switch now.”

In terms of electrification, you talk a lot in the book about how climate solutions need to be accessible to everyone. Switching to induction from gas can be really costly. How do you see the transition becoming possible for people at all income levels?

I do think the cost will come down over time. But I think of climate solutions [as having] two flavors: One is to use less of whatever it is that emits fossil fuels. The other is to decarbonize whatever infrastructure is left. And we can’t really cook less, so that’s not a realistic solution set for our homes.

So, I think we need to favor reach codes that require future construction to be all electric.

Governor [Kathy] Hochul and the Assembly and Senate in New York passed the country’s first state-level bill requiring new homes and buildings be all-electric by 2026. Those bills make sense to me, because every time we plumb a new house or new building with gas infrastructure or fossil fuel infrastructure, we lock in greenhouse gases for decades to come.

I don’t suggest that we need to go into every home and rip people’s stoves off the walls. We need an orderly transition, and the place to do that is when our stoves reach the end of their lifetime, to switch them out. Since I am fortunate and relatively wealthy, I chose to replace my gas stove with an induction stove before the end of its lifetime because I could. But the hundreds of homeowners we sample in Bakersfield and lower-income neighborhoods, they don’t have that option, and even if they can afford it, they rent. So, I worry the most about people in lower-income communities.

There’s also been a lot of pushback. Are you optimistic about these electrification laws moving forward?

The industry is powerful. The reach codes that Berkeley passed have been overturned. There were 100 cities and counties in California that had passed similar reach codes, and most of those are now moot. States like New York have taken a different approach, and I’m optimistic that states that want to act will find a way to incentivize the transition to electric appliances. But there have now been a couple of dozen states that have passed preemption laws to make such codes illegal. Though there’s tremendous pushback, I think induction stoves will win eventually, because they’re a better product. They’re more efficient. A child can’t burn their hand. But [with climate], winning slowly is the same as losing, as Bill McKibben likes to say.

On that note, my editor suggested I ask you about what gives you hope, and I felt myself having an emotional reaction. Like, “I don’t care about hope! I care about what’s possible. Brass tacks. What can be done—or not—to move the needle?” But you use the word hope a lot in the book, so I thought I should ask: Why?

I would say that hope and optimism are muscles that we need to exercise. My first homework assignment in any class is for students to go home and research things in the environment that are better today than they were 50 years ago. That list is long. It’s lifespan and childhood mortality. It’s water and air quality. It’s a decline in global poverty, despite the injustices that remain. Then there’s a long list of targeted regulations that have saved us money and made us healthier.

The phaseout of leaded gasoline has literally made us smarter and made lead levels in our kids’ blood drop 95 percent. There’s the Montreal Protocol that saved billions of cases of skin cancers and cataracts. And there’s my favorite example—the Clean Air Act—that saves 100,000 American lives a year, a bipartisan bill at a 30-fold return on investment.

So, I think by acknowledging past successes we make future successes in climate more likely, because we can see a path to a better future. And I guess I believe strongly that it’s very easy in my world to sink only into the latest statistics of drought and disasters—but it doesn’t seem to motivate people.

So, it’s a sort of hope grounded in facts and history.

Yes, but the undercurrent is there, which is, you know, I’m afraid and angry, because we’ve wasted decades. We’ve sprinted right to 1.5°C—something that people thought was unfathomable 20 years ago—and we seem to be sprinting towards 2°C. So yes, I’m hopeful, but I’m also angry and afraid for all of us.

Given the urgency, do you think that this upcoming election could partially determine whether catastrophic outcomes are locked in?

I’m an environmental scientist, and at this point in my life, there’s only one party that seems to take climate and the environment seriously. It wasn’t always that way. My biggest regret is how politicized and polarized the environment has become. Republican administrations created the EPA and signed the Montreal Protocol. Even Margaret Thatcher, she once said something like, “We have treated the atmosphere like a dust bin.” She of course backtracked later in her career, but she was a chemist and scientist, and she understood.

I regret the fact that we are in a place where a Republican who mentions climate gets defeated in a primary by someone farther to the right. I don’t want to pick parties, but I’m deeply concerned about this election. We can’t afford another administration undoing climate rules. It isn’t just for the climate. It’s killing millions of people around the world and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Let’s be frank about it.

Read More:
The IPCC’s Latest Climate Report Is a Final Alarm for Food Systems, Too
Methane From Agriculture Is a Big Problem. We Explain Why.
Are Dairy Digesters the Renewable Energy Answer or a ‘False Solution’ to Climate Change?

$2 Billion for Farmer Discrimination. On July 31, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had successfully distributed more than $2 billion to 43,000 farmers who had experienced discrimination while attempting to secure USDA loans.

The announcement marked a historic moment in a long saga. Farmers have alleged discrimination in the agency’s loan programs for decades, and multiple lawsuits have been filed over the years by women, Indigenous, and Black farmers who said they were treated differently when applying for loans, driving many out of business.

In 2020, lawmakers set aside $4 billion specifically to compensate Black farmers for race-based discrimination, but the program was thrown out in the wake of lawsuits, many of which were filed by Republican officials who alleged discrimination against white farmers. So when Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, they authorized a new, race-neutral fund that would compensate any farmer who alleged discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors.

During a press call announcing the news, Vilsack said the agency received 58,000 applications and ultimately approved 43,000. While the agency could not compensate farmers for losses or pain endured, he said, “I think it represents USDA acknowledging and responding to reported discrimination.”

Vilsack could not provide statistics on how many of the individuals who received funding were Black farmers, but said that analysis may become available in the future. He also pointed out that the states with the most farmers awarded funding were Mississippi and Alabama.

In addition to the payments, he said the agency has been working to root out and prevent future discrimination and break down barriers to access within its loan programs with, for example, “new processes that reduce the need for human discretion in loan decision-making.”

Many Democrats in Congress and advocacy organizations released statements applauding the USDA’s progress on the issue. “Today marks an important milestone for USDA and for our collective efforts to hold the Department accountable in addressing a history of acts of discrimination against perpetually marginalized agricultural producers and their communities,” said Michelle Hughes, Co-Executive Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, in a press release. The coalition was one of the cooperating organizations, along with others like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, that helped the USDA get the word out to farmers about the application process.

Read More:
How the Long Shadow of Racism at USDA Impacts Black Farmers in Arkansas—and Beyond
Black Farmers in Arkansas Still Seek Justice a Century After the Elaine Massacre
Black Farmers Await Debt Relief as Lawmakers Resolve Racist Lawsuits

Dangerous Drift. According to a report published last week by the Midwestern Prairie Rivers Network (PRN), herbicides sprayed primarily on row crops in Illinois are drifting far from targeted fields, damaging trees and other plant life. Researchers at PRN monitored symptoms of pesticide drift—such as curled leaves—and collected tissue samples from plants over six years. They found symptoms of drift during 677 out of 679 total visits to nearly 300 sites. Of 127 tissue samples taken from trees and other plants, 90 percent contained herbicide residues. Herbicides detected included 2,4-D, atrazine, dicamba, glyphosate, and seven others.

Many of the sites where researchers documented incidents of drift were more than 500 feet from the likely source of exposure, suggesting the chemicals are drifting significant distances. “Our monitoring and tissue sampling program indicates that current legal safeguards/protections and regulatory efforts are inadequate at protecting people and the environment from herbicide drift,” the researchers wrote.

At a press conference for the release of the report, co-author Kim Erndt-Pitcher said the results pointed to the fact that herbicides are playing a significant role in the decline of tree health across the state, and residents and farmers expressed concerns about potential risks to animals and their families’ health.

Patsy Hopper, an organic farmer and landowner south of Urbana, Illinois, said her land long produced a bounty of fruits and vegetables. At one point in time, she remembered harvesting 50 gallons of cherries in a season. “In the past few years, we’ve hardly had a harvest because of pesticide drift. The trees are dying,” she said. “This year, we had enough cherries for one pie.”

Read More:
Beyond Damaging Crops, Dicamba Is Dividing Communities
EPA Weakens Safeguards for Weed Killer Atrazine, Linked to Birth Defects

Farm-State Veep. On August 6, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz as her running mate, catapulting agriculture and other food issues into the 2024 presidential election in a new way.

As a member of the House of Representatives, Walz served on the Agriculture Committee. There, he played a role in three farm bill cycles, sponsoring various proposals focused on expanding on-farm conservation efforts and supporting beginning farmers and ranchers.

As Governor of Minnesota, Walz has advocated for biofuels, a key priority of commodity ag groups, and local advocates for small farms say he fought consolidation to keep more farmers on the land. He also championed and ultimately signed into law a universal school meals program in the state.

Read more:
States Are Fighting to Bring Back Free School Meals
This Farm Bill Really Matters. We Explain Why.

The post A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/08/12/farm-stops-create-new-markets-for-small-farms/ https://civileats.com/2024/08/12/farm-stops-create-new-markets-for-small-farms/#comments Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:00:35 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57188 And when these same farmers make a delivery to Argus Farm Stop, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the staff treat them like minor celebrities: free coffee, shout-outs from the owners, the works. “They are like rock stars,” says Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus’ co-owner, a tall, friendly businessman with a passion for local food. “It’s like, ‘Farmer John […]

The post Farm Stops Create New Markets for Small Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

At Argus Farm Stop, the shelves are full of locally raised vegetables and fruit, herbs, beef, chicken, fish, and more. Beets from one local farm snuggle up against sunchokes from another, across eggs from yet another. Above many of the market’s displays hang smiling pictures of farmers alongside their produce.

And when these same farmers make a delivery to Argus Farm Stop, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the staff treat them like minor celebrities: free coffee, shout-outs from the owners, the works. “They are like rock stars,” says Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus’ co-owner, a tall, friendly businessman with a passion for local food. “It’s like, ‘Farmer John is in the house!’”

Argus represents an emerging business model, the farm stop, which connects consumers and farmers in a local food web. A farm stop sells food on consignment from nearby small and medium farms, landing it somewhere between a grocery store, a farmers’ market, and a food hub. Here, farmers deliver freshly harvested produce to a brick-and-mortar retail shop with a full staff. The farmers set their own prices and keep the bulk of the revenue.

Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus Farm Stop co-owner. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Farm stops operate quite differently from typical mainstream grocery stores like Kroger or Albertson’s, which rely on industrialized food systems and complex supply chains. They are also distinct from a farmers’ market, which requires farmers to either be there for sales or hire someone to sell for them. With farm stops, retail consumers have better access to local food, and farmers can spend more time farming.

It’s a small but expanding niche. At least six farm stops operate in the Midwest, and many of them opened over the past decade, including Bloomington Farm Stop Collective, in Indiana, and the Lakeshore Depot, in Marquette, Michigan.

At Argus, the hope is to make life easier for farmers. Too many small farmers quit, Brinkerhoff says, because “there is not enough money and it’s too hard. We are trying to change that narrative: to make it sustainable, economically, to be a small farmer.”

A Niche for Smaller Farms

Smaller farms in the U.S. are buckling under the weight of financial, legal, and logistical challenges. A farm could try to supply a grocery store, but the major chains don’t pay enough to cover the higher costs of independently grown produce. Even if a store did pay adequately, a small farm might struggle to meet licensing and regulation requirements designed with industrial farming in mind. 

“We have to trust that they are going to supply us, and they have to trust that we are going to take good care of their products.”

As a result, smaller farms are disappearing. From 2012 to 2022, the number of farms in the U.S. decreased by almost 10 percent, according to the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, while the average farm size increased 6.7 percent, from 434 acres to 463 acres. That has created a food system that may be more efficient, but is also less resilient. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the complex supply chains of large-scale systems proved vulnerable to shock, while smaller-scale operations were able to adapt and pivot. Such adaptability will prove essential as climate change continues.

In the meantime, the current industrial system is hard on smaller farm operators, who are forced “to be price takers instead of price makers,” says Kim Bayer, the owner of Slow Farm, which sells organic produce at Argus.

Farm stops can change the equation. Slow Farm, based on the north side of Ann Arbor, typically makes two deliveries a week to Argus from May to October: a small run on Wednesday, directly to the market, and a larger one on Sunday, for Argus’ community-supported agriculture program (CSA), with customers picking up their weekly boxes at the store. And, like all of Argus’ farm suppliers, Slow Farm earns 70 percent of the retail price for their food, at prices Bayer herself sets. That’s a significant difference compared to the average of 15 percent of retail going to growers who sell to supermarkets.

Kim Bayer, owner of Slow Farm, with farm managers Zach Goodman and Magda Nawrocka-Weekes. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

The model relies on a “mutual trust relationship” between the food stop and the farmers, Brinkerhoff says. “We have to trust that they are going to supply us, and they have to trust that we are going to take good care of their products.”  

Better Food, Better Access

For customers, meanwhile, farm stops supply ultra-fresh goods that are otherwise hard to come by.

In Michigan, corn and soy farming dominate the agricultural economy, and smaller vegetable farms are less common, says Jazmin Bolan-Williamson, the farm business coordinator at the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems. So large grocery chains in the region often fill their shelves with heavily processed foods that are transported from thousands of miles away.

Farms supplying Argus, by contrast, produce a wide range of crops, including heirloom varieties. All of it travels only a few miles to arrive on the shelf. The food is not only fresher, but its carbon footprint is lighter, another boon.

The benefits of farm stops extend to larger groups, too. Argus hopes to become as a single point of contact for school kitchens in the community, making it easier for them to source locally grown food. This creates a network of support for a resilient local food system. And not just in farm country. The model can also help create those networks in cities, too.

In Rock Hill, South Carolina, for example, FARMacy Community Farmstop provides quality food to the city’s lower-income residents. A farm stop’s flexibility, size, and community-centered focus are uniquely suited to help, FARMacy’s founder, Jonathan Nazeer, says.

FARMacy employs a pay-what-you-will system, where lower-income customers pay what they can and others pay above sticker price to compensate. The farm stop has received funding from the South Carolina Dept of Local Food Purchasing Assistant for produce at the market and in weekly boxes.

FARMacy also cultivates learning and gathering around food, Nazeer says. In the seating area outside the store, FARMacy hosts concerts, workshops, and cooking classes. Here, people connect more deeply with what they’re eating, while they create community. When people value and understand their food, he says, “we empower them to take charge of their health and feel good about how they are participating in this system.”

Paving a Path for Farm Stops

Creating alternative food systems comes with its own set of obstacles, some of which are regulatory.

Farmers’ markets typically work under cottage food laws, which allow farmers to sell unregulated food as long as they are present for the sale. Farm stops, however, operate outside of this regulatory system, which can create some unusual challenges—and ad hoc solutions.

For example, in 2016, after receiving a complaint, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) cited Argus for selling eggs from small farms that hadn’t processed their eggs in a licensed facility. Under Michigan law, unlicensed egg producers can only sell their eggs directly to consumers. An inspector visited the farm stop and seized 90 dozen eggs, according to the MDARD.

Over the following weeks, Argus worked with the department, local farms and experts, and elected state officials to find a way for the unlicensed farms to sell directly to customers. Now, Argus merely holds the eggs (in a distinct refrigerator) but takes no money; customers pick up the eggs they’ve purchased from farmers.

“MDARD has been working in collaboration and partnership with Argus Farm Stop for many years,” says Jennifer Holton, a spokesperson for the department. “It is a success story in Michigan from a farmer perspective, in that they provide a way for farmers to get their products to an enthusiastic, supportive customer base in an economically viable way that respects the limited time farmers have for selling their products away from the farm.”

Eggs from Shady Glade on display at Argus Farm Stop. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Other challenges are financial and practical.

Establishing and maintaining a farm stop takes a lot of time and money, says Michigan State University’s Bolan-Williamson. It can be tricky to find the right building for a market, and it can cost millions to build a grocery-ready facility from the ground up, she says.

Getting a bank loan could prove difficult, too. It’s likely a bank would want to see local interest in a farm stop before lending funds, Bolan-Williamson says. She suggests that farm stops hold town meetings, gather signatures or even seek donations as proof of that interest.

Despite these challenges, Brinkerhoff says, if you find the right niche, a farm stop can be entirely supported by consumer demand. He and his partners founded Argus roughly 10 years ago with $180,000. Argus now operates two markets and two cafés, employs 65 people, and partners with roughly 200 local farmers, food producers, and artisans. In 2023, the store made $6.5 million in sales.

Argus is now taking a leading role in expanding the movement. Its success, and its galvanizing effect on local farms, provide a beacon: In the past decade, the acres of farmland in Washtenaw County—where Argus is located — actually grew, according to the USDA census of agriculture.

In March, Argus held the first-annual National Farm Stop Conference in Ann Arbor. The conference hosted roughly 120 participants from across the country, including existing farm stops, representatives from communities looking to adopt the model, and policymakers hoping to understand more about it.

They’re learning from each other. Nazeer, who attended the conference on behalf of FARMacy, says different cities can adapt the model to their needs, and each has unique strategies to share. In fact, after the conference, Argus visited FARMacy to learn more about its approach.

Senior representatives from the USDA were also at the conference; they connected with Argus and expressed interest in using the model to grow local food systems.

Employee Tess Rian checks new herbs on display at Argus Farm Stop. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

Rebecca Gray, director of The Wild Ramp farmers’ market in Huntington, West Virginia, felt energized by the event. She says she recognized the chance to learn from successful, long-running farm stops, and appreciated how a span of a few days helped bridge the gap between politicians and small farmers. “It was a really great opportunity for these two groups of people to connect and learn about each other’s operations,” she says, and “for policymakers to see what their policy is actually doing.”

Besides hosting the farm stop conference, Argus also offers monthly hour-long webinars and sells three-day online courses for anyone interested in starting their own farm stop, plus private consulting.

Brinkerhoff is not looking to open more farm stops, but he remains committed to helping other communities do so. Farm stops are “efficient, effective, enjoyable, and affordable,” he says. “Any town that has a farmers’ market can do one.”

This article was updated to correct one of the sources of FARMacy’s funding.

The post Farm Stops Create New Markets for Small Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/08/12/farm-stops-create-new-markets-for-small-farms/feed/ 1