Gosia Wozniacka | Civil Eats

‘I Was Coughing So Hard I Would Throw Up’

Gosia Wozniacka — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:00:18 +0000

For hours every day, Angela Smith walked atop the concentrated excrement of thousands of pigs. As she tended to sows in the massive barns of an industrial hog facility north of her hometown of Canton, Missouri, the animals’ urine and feces continually fell through slatted floors into manure pits below her feet.

As government oversight lags, risks compound. Animal confinement workers are subject to long-term lung and acute respiratory injuries from their work environments, and are exposed to asphyxiating gasses from manure. As animal agriculture consolidates and more animals are crowded into CAFOs, these and other hazards become more dangerous.
CAFO owners, like the large meatpackers they serve, have begun to adopt risk management models that limit their exposure to risk and liability. The strategy pushes workers further from federal safety nets by breaking large corporations into smaller ones, which reduces the number of employees in each, potentially eliminating OSHA oversight in cases.
Read the full series here.

The smell of their excrement was often overwhelming. Fecal dust and ammonia—a hazardous gas produced from decomposing manure—burned her eyes and made them water. The dust and gas set her throat on fire, making it difficult to breathe.

After about a year of getting hired at Expedition Acres LLC, Smith developed a permanent cough. Her voice became raspy and laughing would throw her into coughing fits, even outside of work.

“My lungs couldn’t take it,” Smith told Civil Eats. “I was coughing so hard I would throw up.”

Smith—who asked that her real name not be used in this story to protect her privacy—started working at Expedition Acres just a few years after the facility opened its doors as a concentrated animal feeding operation or CAFO, a factory farm with thousands of animals densely packed in barns with little to no access to the outdoors. Though newly built, Expedition Acres’ three barns lacked proper ventilation, Smith said.

The company did not educate workers in the importance of using personal protective equipment and managers repeatedly ignored complaints about high ammonia levels. After two years, Smith’s cough got so bad that she gave notice.

“I stopped coughing after I quit,” she said. “I haven’t had an issue since.”

Expedition Acres did not respond to a phone call or detailed questions from Civil Eats about ammonia levels and ventilation at its facility or whether the company provides protective gear to workers. Smith’s story is meanwhile just one example of the severe respiratory health burdens animal agriculture workers face at the tens of thousands of hog, chicken, and cow CAFOs in the United States. The workers, many of them immigrants, are exposed to high concentrations of toxic fumes at levels that likely far exceed recommended health limits, impeding their ability to breathe and leading to illnesses and chronic conditions such as bronchitis, asthma, lung disorders, even death, according to numerous studies.

CAFO contract growers—the farmers contracted by large corporations to house and feed chickens and hogs in CAFOs on their land—face similar hazards, as do the family members they employ. Despite such dangers, the people toiling inside factory-scale animal farms often stay silent—they’re afraid, sometimes unaware of the dangers, and face insurmountable obstacles to better conditions within the meat production system.

“The children often have asthma, the adults, too, but they say they have a cold. They don’t put it together with their employment issues,” said Leila Borrero Krouse, a Maryland-based organizer for CATA—the Farmworkers Support Committee. Borrero Krouse works with chicken CAFO workers who, she says, often downplay their illnesses. “They don’t like to shake the boat. They want to have a job, free housing, and support their family here and abroad.”

Despite a significant body of research documenting CAFOs’ adverse health impacts on workers’ respiratory systems and the continued growth of animal factory farms across the country, the health of animal agriculture workers has been ignored for decades, though their problems are systemic. CAFOs get a free pass from air emission regulations. CAFO owners often fail to offer proper training or protective equipment to workers. And the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rarely investigates workers’ respiratory illnesses or deaths.

Moreover, an increasingly popular corporate structure that organizes networks of investor-funded CAFOs and CAFO service companies into limited liability companies (LLCs) is making it even more difficult for workers and their advocates to decipher CAFO ownership, file lawsuits, and demand action on health and safety issues.

“The workers, the farmers, we’re all just cogs in the machine. We’re expendable resources,” said Craig Watts, a former poultry contract grower turned whistleblower. “To the industry . . . it’s all about how cheap can we do it. They don’t care if we get sick or die, they’ll find somebody else.”

CAFO Pollution Leads to Worker Illnesses, Deaths

Intensive animal production inside CAFOs has become the norm in the U.S over the past six decades, thanks to a growing demand for meat here and globally. And many of the giant barns, sheds, and corrals are built in low-income, minority communities, raising social and environmental justice concerns.

While CAFOs efficiently and speedily churn out low-cost meat, they produce mountains of waste and pollution that can pose significant risks to the environment and human health, especially for CAFO workers. As much as 1.4 billion tons of manure is produced every year in the U.S. by the 9.8 billion heads of livestock, dairy cows, and poultry.

The gases and particle matter that emanate from CAFO facilities and their manure storage areas are highly toxic. They include ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter (PM 10 and PM 2.5 fine particle pollution), organic dust such as animal dander and feces, endotoxins, allergens, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Some workers are also exposed to the fumes of hazardous pesticides used to clean CAFO buildings. (In addition, CAFOs emit methane and nitrous oxide, which are linked to climate change and also indirectly impact human health.)

A significant, long-standing body of research has shown that people who work inside the giant enclosed barns and sheds and are regularly exposed to such gases face a bevy of impacts to their respiratory and neurological health. Those include respiratory diseases and syndromes like chronic bronchitis, mucous membrane inflammation syndrome, asthma-like syndrome, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and organic dust toxic syndrome and also accelerate yearly losses in lung function. Some of these conditions present themselves in newly employed workers like Smith, who develop occupational asthma after a relatively short-term exposure, while others intensify after long term exposure in CAFO work environments.

CAFO emissions also cause the early death of some workers. Scientists estimate that animal agriculture is now responsible for 12,720 annual air quality–related deaths from particulate matter (though the estimate doesn’t say how many are workers and how many other area residents).

OSHA’s small farms rider is “a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. Corporations take advantage of these loopholes.”

The problems are worsening as the number of CAFOs in the U.S. has increased over the past decade. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are currently more than 21,000 CAFOs, though that number is likely a severe undercount, which means that hundreds of thousands of CAFO workers, as well as CAFO owner-operators and their family members are impacted by hazardous emissions.

Automation of feed and water distribution and ventilation mean just a handful of workers often tend to thousands of hogs or tens of thousands of chickens, making them exempt from OSHA enforcement because a rider attached to OSHA’s budget in 1976 excludes farms that employ 10 or fewer workers. Historically, the rider aimed to protect small farms from onerous government oversight. But today, said Robert Martin, director of Food System Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, “It’s a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. Corporations take advantage of these loopholes.”

What the Worker Who Developed Asthma Didn’t Know

Local residents had opposed the permit required to build Expedition Acres for months, afraid that 8,500 pigs housed in three large barns would pollute the area’s air and water. When they lost, the factory farm became one of about 500 CAFOs operating in Missouri, according to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Angela Smith didn’t know about these health impacts when she took her job.

Smith also didn’t know that Expedition Acres wasn’t just an ordinary industrial-sized farm owned by a farmer on contract with a meat processing company. Instead, it was associated with nearly 30 other CAFOs in the Midwest. All were under the umbrella of Illinois-based Carthage System and its associated LLC, Professional Swine Management, both founded by local swine veterinarians. Carthage’s model of creating many legal entities that purport to be family farms but are run by a single corporate management firm may allow it to avoid OSHA oversight of some barns.

OSHA inspectors view Expedition Acres LLC as an individual entity, not part of a larger corporate structure, the agency’s spokesman for the region told Civil Eats, meaning the other branches of in the Carthage model would not bear any responsibility for worker injuries or deaths that take place there.

“Workers who are employed through this system . . . are the ones who are going to have to bear the brunt of the consequences when something goes wrong,” said Loka Ashwood, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky who has studied the Carthage model.

Smith didn’t know she was part of this system. She also wasn’t aware of how dangerous CAFO work could be for her respiratory health. She applied for the job of swine production technician in Expedition Acres’ breeding department, a short drive from her hometown, where nearly 20 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. At the CAFO, she did the breeding and tended to the sows in the “wean room.”

“It was dirty, hard work, and stressful, but I enjoyed it,” said Smith.

However, Smith was also never informed of another crucial piece of information: In 2018, another breeding room worker at Expedition Acres was hospitalized for a respiratory system burn due to elevated ammonia levels. Thirteen employees were exposed, and OSHA cited Expedition Acres at the time with eight serious violations, according to the agency’s records. The violations included failure to communicate to workers how the presence or release of hazardous chemicals in the work area is monitored and what employees can do to protect themselves.

The company was also cited for lacking a hazard communication program, failing to label hazardous chemicals and to provide safety data sheets for those chemicals, and failing to report the hospitalization to OSHA within 24 hours It reported the workers’ respiratory burn more than two weeks later. Expedition Acres paid a $30,000 penalty, reduced from $79,000 as part of a settlement.

Expedition Acres did not respond to detailed questions about what changes had been made in response to the OSHA violations.

Scott Allen, an OSHA spokesman, told Civil Eats that the penalty was reduced because Expedition Acres agreed to “a rapid abatement of all hazards and enhanced employee safety steps,” including hiring a full-time safety and health professional.

When Smith was hired, however, little seemed to have changed. Trainings were scant, she said. So was personal protective equipment and worker awareness of the risks. “They may have had masks of some sort somewhere around there, but I’ve never seen anyone wear anything,” Smith said. Managers also routinely ignored complaints from workers about high levels of ammonia, she said. And they didn’t believe that the ammonia had caused Smith’s breathing problems.

“Management would say, ‘It’s allergies,’” she said. “But I told them it’s not allergies . . . The ammonia. It was awful.”

Carthage System’s founders, Joe Connor and Bill Hollis (also partners in Professional Swine Management) were contacted on behalf of Expedition Acres because contact information for all three companies is identical in public documents. Neither responded to detailed questions from Civil Eats or to the allegation that the issues noted in the OSHA citations had not been addressed.

Documents filed with the Secretary of State’s office indicate the business registration for the Expedition Acres LLC has since been dissolved, though the facility itself still exists.

Air Quality Unchecked, Workers Unaware

When it comes to toxic emissions, CAFOs have been allowed to skirt regulations for decades. In 2005, the EPA made the lack of oversight official through a backroom agreement with the industry under which the agency agreed to refrain from enforcing key air pollution controls and public disclosure laws against CAFO owners who agreed to pay a small fine to fund a nationwide air monitoring study. The EPA said its goal was to gather data to establish methodologies to measure CAFO emissions to help animal farms comply with the Clean Air Act.

That process was supposed to end in 2010. But 17 years later, the CAFO emission methodologies have yet to be released and the industry continues to be exempt from air pollution enforcement and associated litigation. The EPA still has no air monitoring program for CAFOs. Over the past three years, the agency has released updated draft CAFO emission models, but officials say they don’t know when the process will be complete. And experts have said the air pollution data collected through the monitoring study is deeply flawed because it lacked adequate peer review and was based on a very small number of CAFO sites.

Environmental and public interest groups last year filed a legal petition asking the EPA to scratch the industry agreement and start enforcing federal laws to control CAFO air emissions. It’s one of several petitions related to CAFOs filed recently with the EPA. And earlier this summer, advocacy groups again sent a letter to the EPA demanding the agency protect communities from CAFOs’ harmful impacts. They cited President Biden’s Executive Orders on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad and on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities, which establish environmental justice and racial equity as administration priorities.

The petition and letter are but the latest salvos in a years-long battle to highlight the harms experienced by rural residents who live near CAFO operations, many of them people of color. In recent years, rural communities across the U.S. have pushed for more such regulations and moratoriums on new CAFO construction, arguing that pollution from confined operations harms the environment, public health, and people’s quality of life—though the health of workers is rarely included in such campaigns.

Simultaneously, the industry is pushing legislators to pass the Livestock Regulatory Protection Act, which would exclude livestock emissions from Clean Air Act regulations. The legislation prohibits the EPA from issuing permits on emissions to industrial livestock operations for greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, or methane. A similar bill has been introduced in each Congress since 2009.

A 2018 study of Latin American immigrant swine confinement workers found that two-thirds of the workers interviewed did not perceive their jobs to be dangerous, though 28 percent self-reported occupational health problems, including coughing, nausea, nasal congestion, and sneezing.

While CAFOs skirt emission rules, workers on the ground have scarcely any safeguards from the hazardous air. Even CAFOs that have more than 10 employees and do fall under OSHA’s jurisdiction often don’t conduct necessary trainings—including offering them in languages that the workers understand—or distribute PPE, according to worker surveys by researchers and Civil Eats’ interviews with half a dozen workers across the nation.

“Workers are not aware of the dangers,” Gabriel, a swine worker at the Smithfield-owned Whitetail CAFO in Unionville, Missouri, told Civil Eats. (He said his managers don’t provide PPE and asked that his last name be left out of the story.) “Most of them have high school diplomas and don’t know much about respiratory illness,” he said.

A 2018 study of Latin American immigrant swine confinement workers in Missouri found that two-thirds of the workers interviewed did not perceive their jobs to be dangerous, though 28 percent self-reported occupational health problems, including coughing, nausea, nasal congestion, and sneezing. Some reported working 13 days straight and then having one day off. Many lacked health insurance and had not seen a doctor in more than a year.

Dr. Athena Ramos, the study’s principal author and a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said the findings were not surprising. In another related study, Ramos found that among workers who’d been injured on the job all those who spoke English (about 20 percent) had received safety training, but about half the rest, who did not speak English, received no training at all. Other non-English speaking workers received training in English or through an unqualified interpreter.

The training “is basically a check the box for the employer. Yes, we’ve done it. But the workers themselves didn’t actually get anything or much out of that training,” Ramos said.

“There are long-term consequences to not using the types of PPE that are necessary in that job.”

Even when workers reported respiratory and chemical exposures in surveys, Ramos said, “most workers did not know what types of things they were exposed to . . . they couldn’t name the chemicals.” Similarly, many workers who have access to PPE—in one survey, more than 92 percent—did not use it. Workers told Ramos there was a wall with respirators and other PPE, however, “Nobody told them that they should use it, how to use it, or when to use it. So they don’t,” Ramos said. “They may not understand or may kind of downplay the fact that there are chronic health conditions that may develop. It’s not just a nuisance. There are long-term consequences to not using the types of PPE that are necessary in that job.”

The National Pork Producers Council explained by email that “worker health and safety are key priorities for all pig farmers.” The group pointed to a set of principles adopted by the industry roughly 15 years ago, which includes a commitment to employee education and training as “crucial in creating a safe and ethical workplace.” The council declined to comment on why many CAFOs fail to provide promised training and PPE to prevent worker sickness and injury. The council also did not comment on whether some corporate models allow farms to skirt responsibility for workers’ health and safety.

Even when workers do grasp the risks or notice elevated levels of toxic fumes or dust, speaking out may not be an option, Ramos said. Many workers choose to work at CAFOs because they lack work authorization and industrial farms are one of the few places that hire them without asking for “papers.” Workers may prefer to work at remote rural locations that aren’t subject to OSHA inspections so they can live under the radar and avoid immigration raids, Ramos said. And because it can be extremely difficult for undocumented workers to get work, they don’t dare speak up and risk losing their jobs.

“Even if they know something is hazardous or causing them harm, the likelihood of them speaking up about it is dependent on a lot of factors. Am I going to lose my job if I speak up? Are they going to report me? Am I going to be able to sustain my life or my family’s livelihood?” Ramos said. “You’re, in a sense, powerless.”

Some CAFO workers also keep quiet about hazardous emissions to protect their housing. Chicken workers often live with their families in employer-provided trailers or other types of housing next to the massive barns—but the trailers are available to them only as long as they are employed, said Leila Borrero Krouse at CATA.

Last year, Borrero Krouse said, several families of chicken workers were evicted in separate incidents in Maryland, a state with more than 500 CAFOs where poultry accounts for 60 percent of the gross agricultural income. One worker was fired after taking time off to drive a sick child to a doctor in another state. The farmer immediately disconnected the family’s water and electric service, forcing them to leave their home—a common tactic to evict workers’ families, she said.

“They work so hard, and then within a moment’s notice, they have to be gone off the property,” Borrero Krouse said. “They’re expendable, they have no job security.”

Living in trailers or houses next to the chicken barns also means the workers are exposed to hazardous fumes and flies 24 hours a day. Their spouses and children also breathe in the concentrated ammonia that blows out of the chicken houses via large exhaust fans.

One worker whom Borrero Krouse visited in Wicomico County, which has some of the highest number of CAFO operations in Maryland, would take his then 2-year-old into the chicken barns, leaving the toddler strapped into a car seat, breathing in toxic fumes, while he tended to the birds. The family had no access to childcare in the remote area where they lived, his wife was at work herself, and the worker faced an impossible choice about whether to protect his child’s health or keep his job and housing, Borrero Krouse said.

Smith, the former Expedition Acres worker, was in a less precarious position because she didn’t have to worry about such pressures. As an American citizen, she knew she would likely be able to find another job if she was fired after speaking up.

For others, the choice is much more difficult. “The company cares more about the pigs than the workers,” said Gabriel, the Missouri animal agriculture worker, who added that managers require biosecurity measures, such as coveralls, and safety protocol in order to protect the pigs in contrast to the limited protective gear provided for workers. “There are many people who, out of fear, do not report anything.”

Contract Growers Also Exposed to Fumes, Lack PPE

Contract growers—who are entirely controlled by chicken corporations and work alone or alongside the hired laborers, sometimes with other family members—are just as vulnerable, said Watts, the former contract grower.

During more than two decades of raising broilers (chickens for meat), Watts says he and another laborer were exposed daily to high levels of ammonia and particulate matter, including dust from chicken feathers and feces. At first, Watts told Civil Eats, he shrugged off the risks: “When I was young, I was very stupid. I didn’t wear any protection.”

But as time went on, he started having headaches and respiratory problems. And he developed allergies to chicken feathers and dust. “It was allergies just getting me up at night and I could hardly breathe,” he said.

Watts started wearing a dust mask. It eliminated some of the dust, but was useless when it came to filtering out ammonia. Eventually, he bought a half mask respirator with a filter and an ammonia cartridge. He wore the respirator to work daily, he said, even though a respirator “cuts your wind when you’re walking around picking up dead chickens all day.” He also offered a respirator to the laborer he had hired, but the man preferred to wear only dust masks.

Workers sent by Perdue Farms to retrieve chickens for processing sometimes also wore dust masks, Watts said, but never respirators—though they stirred up huge clouds of dust.

Watts also applied pyrethrin-based pesticides in his barns in between loads of chickens to control for darkling beetle, a ubiquitous pest in chicken barns. He wore full protective gear doing that, he said. Still, applying pesticides “wasn’t as bad as working with chickens because I was in and out within just a couple of minutes,” he said.

Watts eventually got fed up with the health hazards of his work and the chicken industry’s dishonesty. He quit. He has since transformed his farm into a mushroom growing operation. Six years out of the CAFO business, his allergies and breathing problems have finally cleared up.

“I realized,” said Watts, “you only get one set of lungs.”

Previously: The lack of OSHA oversight on smaller animal agriculture operations puts workers at risk of injury and death.

Next: Despite harms to workers, the federal government is incentivizing biogas. Those incentives may be deepening consolidation in the industry and making barns even more densely packed with animals. Read the full series here.

The post ‘I Was Coughing So Hard I Would Throw Up’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

A New Film Documents the Immigrant Farmworker Journey

Gosia Wozniacka — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:00:14 +0000

It seemed like a dream. The sisters grew up hearing about a village high up in the mountains, where their parents had once lived without running water or cell phones—a place where their grandmother made delicious food and grandfather eked out a living planting corn, where everyone spoke Triqui, an Indigenous language hardly heard in the United States.

Esmirna Librado and Noemi Librado-Sánchez, and their cousins Heriberto and Esmeralda Ventura were all born in the U.S. to farmworker parents. They only ever had seen relatives from their family’s village in Mexico in faded photographs. The children grew up together in overcrowded apartments, wondering if and how the American dream might apply to them.

In 2016, the four cousins, who were by then teenagers, decided it was time to meet the grandparents and see their parents’ ancestral village for the first time. In December of that year, a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, they travelled together by truck from California to San Martín Itunyoso, Oaxaca, a distance of more than 2,000 miles. Seth Holmes, an anthropology professor and family friend, accompanied the youth.

They recorded their journey to the village and their two weeks in Oaxaca on video. Back in the U.S., they decided the footage was worth sharing with a wider audience. Five years after the epic journey, the cousins co-directed and released a 30-minute film called First Time Home. Unscripted and raw, it offers a rare, authentic glimpse into what life is like for farmworker families and the reasons why immigrants choose to sacrifice their lives in Mexico to pursue better opportunities up North. Earlier this year, the film won the award for Best Youth Film at the San Diego Latino Film Festival.

Civil Eats recently spoke with First Time Home’s co-directors Esmirna Librado, 22, and Noemi Librado-Sánchez, 18, about growing up with farmworker parents, how the trip to their ancestral village changed them, and their plans for the future.

First Time Home’s co-directors: From left, Esmeralda Ventura, Noemi Librado-Sánchez, Esmirna Librado, and Heriberto Ventura.

What was it like growing up in a farmworker family in the U.S.?

Esmirna Librado: Our parents were both very young when they got here, around 15-16 years old. They came because there were not enough well-paying jobs [in Mexico]. A year after they came, I was born, and they decided to stay so I could have a better future. But growing up was hard for me. Our parents picked strawberries and blueberries in Washington State and peaches and grapes in California. When my dad would go to work, we would be asleep, and when he came back, we’d be asleep. That’s how it was most of the time. We barely got to see him or my mom because they had to work in the fields to keep their kids fed, pay rent, and stuff like that.

Noemi Librado-Sánchez: My uncle—our dad’s brother—he’s the one who helped raise us. He took care of us whenever our parents were working really late. My uncle would do my hair or take me to church with him. He was my father figure growing up.

One thing that really struck me in the film was how incredibly overcrowded the living conditions were for your families. Multiple families lived in one small apartment.

NLS: Yes, it was quite a few people. Rents are really high and farmworker wages are low. Plus, undocumented people get paid less than regular Americans. Luckily, things have changed for us in recent years, but our families lived like that for a really long time. Living together was a way to make things work.

EL: It was the only way we could help each other out. When our parents went to work, the older kids would take care of the younger ones. That was a way for our parents to save up money. It was hard. When we got older, my dad decided that it was time to stay put and have a steady place. So, we stayed in Washington State, and that’s where I started school.

But we continued migrating back and forth between Washington and California during the picking season. [When we went to California,] it was hard to find a place to live right away so there were times when we would even stay in cars—we would be homeless for a week or so. But if we knew a family that had a house, we would go and rent with them. We eventually stopped migrating, but my uncles continued to go back and forth. Until last year, they were still doing that.

Working in the fields isn’t an easy job, but our parents have done it for years. And they had no other choice. . . . Farm work was the only way they can make money. They have to work outside in extreme heat and during wildfires to bring food to the table for their families.

NLS: Moving back and forth means having to change schools multiple times, and it can really mess up your education. Many children of farmworkers have this experience. My dad didn’t want us to go through that. That’s a major reason why our parents chose to stay in one place.

If you could tell Americans one thing about farmworkers’ lives, what would it be?

EL: Working in the fields isn’t an easy job, but our parents have done it for years. And they had no other choice. They have no education; most of our relatives didn’t even get to finish middle school in Mexico. They came here for better opportunities, but farm work was the only way they can make money. For many of them, documentation is an issue. They can’t go and get a more comfortable job indoors. They have to work outside in extreme heat and during wildfires to bring food to the table for their families.

When you made the journey to your family’s village, Noemi was just 12 years old and Esmirna was 16. What was the experience like? How did the trip impact you?

NLS: The trip felt like stepping into a story that you’ve been told multiple times. You could finally picture it all. When I was a child, my dad would tell us about walking through the dirt, the field of corn just beyond their doorstep, and the lack of running water. He would describe our grandma’s good food. And when we got there, everything was just like [he’d described]. For a moment, it felt surreal. Like, “Wow, I’m actually here. These are actually my grandparents.” Before I went to Mexico, I felt like the United States was the only place for me. Now, I feel like I have two places to call home.

The trip also taught me to think more about my decisions and to focus on how I want to live my life. When I think about what I’m going to do next and who I really want to be, I remember my time in San Martín Itunyoso. I realized that I want to do something to help people, whether it’s through writing a book, making a video, or some other way.

EL: Before I went, I was kind of lost. I’m Mexican-American, but I did not feel American, I didn’t look American. I also did not feel Mexican. Now, I feel I’m more connected to both [sets of] roots somehow.

Most people migrate here from Mexico to make a better future for their families. And for so many of them, that opportunity means having to live under the same roof as five other families and working from sunrise to sunset in the rain, the mud, or under the scorching sun.

In Oaxaca, I learned how hard life can be. In the past, I could see how hard it was for my parents in the United States. But now, I also understood how difficult it was for them to make the decision to come to the U.S. For so many immigrants—not just my mom and dad—living close to their parents or grandparents is what they give up to give their own children a better chance at life. They can’t see their parents grow old, they can’t be with their parents when they need them.

Just recently, my grandpa died and relatives here were not able to say goodbye or attend the funeral. None of them were able to go back. You hear a lot of stories on the news about people who do go back just to see their aging parents or attend a funeral and they end up getting kidnapped or killed while crossing the border back to the U.S. Our family didn’t want to go through that risk. But I know that not going back is something that weighs on them. I also imagine my grandpa leaving this world without having his children there for his last goodbye. It’s heartbreaking.

Why did you decide to make a film out of this very personal trip? What message did you hope it would tell?

NLS: After we had everything recorded, the footage felt valuable. It’s not like we scripted anything or filmed with the intention of using it later on. But around this time, Donald Trump was running for president and he was publicly saying that Mexicans came here to steal jobs, that they were criminals, and other horrible things. Since we had all these clips showing what it’s really like, we decided to prove that his words were not true, that you can’t blame a whole community just because one person might have done something wrong. Most people migrate here from Mexico to make a better future for their families. And for so many of them, that opportunity means having to live under the same roof as five other families and working from sunrise to sunset in the rain, the mud, or under the scorching sun.

EL: In the film, we show footage of people working in the fields and my dad saying [on camera], ‘Oh, you don’t see Americans here.’ It’s not that he wants to be rude. But everyone who works in the fields is Hispanic. Based on our family’s experience, there’s no way [Mexicans] could be stealing people’s jobs. White Americans don’t want to do the heavy work of harvesting crops. So immigrants like our parents have to do it.

During the trip to Oaxaca, you were the emissaries of your parents. You brought video letters for your relatives in Mexico. And you then returned home with recorded messages from the village. Why were these video letters so meaningful?

EL: We made video letters with our parents in California and Washington for our relatives in the village. It was a way for them to connect with each other. They’ve always had phone calls, but it’s not the same thing as seeing your relatives’ faces and watching them say something “live.” Even phone calls are rare since there is no phone reception or internet service in the village. It’s in the mountains. If our relatives want to talk to anyone here in the U.S., they have to go to a nearby town to make a phone call [from a phone booth in a store].

Esmirna Librado reviewing footage on an iPad with family.

Your film has been shown in several cities throughout the U.S. How do you feel about the reception that it has received?

NLS: I was pretty surprised. I flew out to San Diego to watch it during the film festival there and it was one of the coolest experiences. I think the film gives people a place to start a conversation. I was happy to see so many people who connected to it and who want to do something. We met with students who have the same feelings we do: they see their parents struggling and they want to help, but they can only do so much. This film builds a community outside the community, if that makes sense.

EL: A lot of people connected to what we recorded. I think people saw a more universal story about returning home.

I think the film gives people a place to start a conversation. We met with students who have the same feelings we do: they see their parents struggling and they want to help, but they can only do so much. This film builds a community outside the community.

Your film focuses on a community that many people don’t even know exists, Indigenous Triqui immigrants from Oaxaca. Can you tell us more about your community and the unique challenges it faces in the U.S.?

EL: As you know, Mexicans in the U.S. face a lot of discrimination. But being Indigenous and Mexican—having a darker skin color, being a little shorter, and speaking a different language than Spanish—brings even more discrimination [from both Americans and Mexicans]. Some of our people still don’t know how to speak Spanish. Our dad didn’t know Spanish coming here. The only language he knew was Triqui and he learned some Spanish while going to my mom’s prenatal checkups because the clinic only had Spanish translators. Triqui is still the language my parents and relatives speak at home.

I’ve worked for several companies and I have witnessed a lot of discrimination. People with the lighter skin color, those who [can pass as white] get the lighter jobs. And people who are darker-skinned have the harder jobs. I fit more into the darker-skinned crowd, so I was given a hard job. And I had to say to my managers, “Is there a way I can change that?” For me, it’s easier to ask because it’s fine if I get fired, I can get another job. But when I get into the shoes [of people who don’t have legal status], I understand why they don’t speak up.

My uncle and my dad are always saying, “Don’t let them put you down, because you have opportunities. This is why we came here.” And that’s another reason why we made this film. It gave us an opportunity to be able to speak up for the people who can’t speak.

NLS: The Triqui community here is very connected, though in Washington it’s not as big as in California. Our family was very close, united. We went to California every year to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s. In California, the Triqui community organizes parties and celebrates traditions from back home. It’s so beautiful, seeing so many women and girls in their huipils, a traditional garment worn by Indigenous women in Mexico.

Have either of you gone back to Oaxaca since your first trip?

EL: I have not gone back, but I hope to in the future. I have a 4-year-old daughter; I plan to take her one day and show her where my parents are from.

NLS: I went the year after. And that was the last time I saw my grandpa. I do wish to go back again, but my grandpa’s [death] deeply affected me. It makes me so upset to think that once I’m back, he’s not going to be there. There was this moment in the film when he and I just looked at each other. And every time I see it, I [get emotional].

In the film, your uncle says, “Tu historia vale mucho,” or your story is important. Do you hope to tell more stories about farmworkers and their families? How do you hope to shape your own future story?

EL: My uncle is right because each one of our stories is different, but they are all valuable. In the fall, I’ll start college again to study nursing. I had started and stopped going. Now, I plan to get to the finish line. My parents have inspired me to take up those studies because I want to do something to help people get better health care and better access to various resources.

NLS: I do hope to tell more stories. I’m going to be attending university and I hope to major in journalism and communication or psychology. I want to expand my storytelling, to talk about other serious situations that impact the Latino community and that aren’t talked about, including mental health issues.

Writing is something that I love to do, but I’m also fascinated with how the brain works. Growing up, I was always told that I was a rebel. I was a troubled kid, pretty much. But I felt that it was a lot more than just me being “troubled.” A lot of it had to do with being a kid who wanted and needed my parents’ attention. But obviously, because they were farmworkers and they were working so much, they couldn’t give it to me.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. All photos courtesy of the filmmakers.

The post A New Film Documents the Immigrant Farmworker Journey appeared first on Civil Eats.

What the Story of DDT, America’s Most Notorious Chemical, Can Teach Us Today

Gosia Wozniacka — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 08:00:24 +0000

Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT, is a notorious pesticide that was once considered a panacea in the United States. It was unleashed with abundance from the 1940s to the 1960s, used to fight a wide range of agricultural pests and human diseases, but its toxicity and carcinogenicity in animals and humans soon came to light, and the chemical’s use was discontinued.

While DDT has been banned in most countries across the globe (with an exception for malaria control), for five decades, it has persisted in our environment and continues to cause disease in humans and animals. Despite that, in recent years, some have been calling for more use of DDT to fight not just malaria, but also West Nile Virus and the Zika virus.

In How to Sell a Poison, historian of medicine Elena Conis traces the history of DDT, its impacts, and the implications of the shifting science. In a masterful narrative style that reads like a novel, Conis tells the stories of ordinary people and the nascent environmental movement that sought to expose the chemical’s harms. Her book offers insights about the mechanisms of science denial, disinformation campaigns, and the role of politics and other social forces in shaping a nation’s approach to regulating a toxic substance.

Civil Eats spoke with Conis about the light that DDT’s story sheds on the many other toxic chemicals used today, how social inequality, race, and environmental pollution are linked, and why the tobacco industry funded a secret campaign to bring back DDT.

Why did you decide to write a book about DDT, and why now?

I grew up in the 1980s, a decade after DDT’s ban. I knew of it as one of our most toxic chemicals. I knew that it was responsible for the loss of major numbers of bald eagles and, where I lived in New York, a loss of osprey, among other birds. Then, as a graduate student, I attended a conference where some global health experts talked about the problem of malaria getting worse, particularly in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. They all mentioned the need to bring back DDT. That alone surprised me. But what surprised me even more was that nobody else in the audience seemed to find that strange, weird, or troubling. I carried these questions around for a long time: What had happened to DDT? Had its reputation changed? Had people reconsidered how toxic it was?

Fifteen years later, I became a historian of medicine. I had been a journalist focusing on health and medicine for a while, I got my PhD in history [at the University of California, San Francisco], and found an electronic archive at UCSF that contains scanned versions of corporate documents disclosed in the mid-1990s during hearings on the tobacco industry. I stumbled upon a couple of curious documents about DDT. It turns out the tobacco industry had an expressed interest in the return of DDT. That’s when I realized the chemical had a more complicated story. It had gone from war hero to public enemy to a third act a generation later, when we completely reconsidered it. It seemed like an interesting case study for understanding how we change our minds about science, who is involved in shaping what we know, and [shaping] technology based on our scientific knowledge.

As a society, we’ve been fighting about science for the past decade or so, with many people seeming to reject accepted scientific claims. And people who believe those scientific claims feel completely frustrated when they aren’t simply accepted as a matter of fact. DDT’s story to me showed how scientific facts can change depending on the context, the questions that we ask, and the interests pursuing the answers to those questions. It seemed a helpful case study for understanding why we fight about science and what we’re actually fighting about when we do. In the story of DDT, I found that the debates about the chemical were proxy battles for struggles over gender, race, class, and the economy.

You describe in shocking detail the ubiquitous, constant, large-scale spraying of homes, fields, pets, cattle, and entire American cities with DDT. Why was this chemical so widely used?

If you could put yourself in the shoes of people who first encountered this chemical on a large scale in the ‘40s and ‘50s, you would see that the earlier generation of pesticides and insecticides—those used before DDT—were so much more toxic. They were known poisons, compounds made with lead and arsenic. It was an accepted fact that if you were going to kill insects, you would use something that was poisonous to people. DDT wasn’t toxic in the same way. Animals and people could be exposed to a lot of DDT in the very short term and they would be okay.

The fact that we had something that could kill insects and not make us sick in the short term suddenly made DDT seem like the answer to everything. People became dependent on it really quickly because they didn’t have to go to great lengths to rid their houses of ants or roaches, or their whole community of flies or mosquitoes. DDT offered a way to keep things clean, salubrious, “healthy.” At the same time, it was a way to make agriculture more profitable—because with a sweep of DDT, farmers could eliminate some of the worst pests.

Despite these benefits, other countries did not use DDT in such huge quantities. The U.S. was unique in how abundantly it sprayed the chemical, even though it had actually been developed by a Swiss chemical company. Why?

DDT’s story was woven into the story we told during and after the Second World War about how the U.S. became a superpower. Americans constantly heard about how DDT had protected our troops, prisoners of war, and refugees from malaria and other devastating diseases. The chemical, they were told, had essentially transformed the war. So, DDT was accepted as part of this bigger project of seeing ourselves as a global leader.

The big companies manufacturing DDT were also subsidized by the federal government during the war. So, they emerged bigger and more powerful than they had ever been. Combine that power with the enormous American appetite for DDT and suddenly, it was huge. It just took off.

Thousands of other chemicals have since been released on the market and the federal government regulates only a tiny percentage of them. What lessons does your book offer about the regulation of chemicals?

The first takeaway is that DDT created a set of problems that we gradually became aware of and then we thought we solved by banning the chemical [in 1972] and later through the passage of Superfund [a program of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established in 1980 to clean up hazardous waste dumps]. But here we are, 50 years later, and this chemical is still with us. It’s still affecting people’s health, and it’s still in wildlife, in birds, and in marine mammals, affecting their health too. It continues on in the environment, including in places we didn’t even know about or we allowed ourselves to forget about. We’ve been cleaning up DDT on land, but we recently discovered that loads of DDT were dumped into the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of California. So, one of the big takeaways is that when we move with haste, we have no idea how long the health and environmental consequences of our technological developments are going to last.

Second, when we take steps to solve those problems, we also don’t have a good handle on the timeframe required for those solutions to be meaningful. We “solved” the problem of DDT by banning it and by cleaning up the environment. At one of the Superfund sites that I looked at, the EPA created a cleanup plan in the early ’80s that involved rerouting a river and monitoring fish over time to make sure that their DDT levels were going down. After 30 years of cleanup and monitoring, the fish had DDT levels that were considered safe [at the time], but today we don’t think that level is safe enough. The moment we create a technology or a chemical, we start running a race to understand all kinds of ways in which it’s going to reshape ourselves and our environment. We’re forever going to be playing catch up.

How did the science on DDT evolve and what are the lessons about science that this history exposed?

DDT was and still is one of the most well-studied chemicals we’ve created. It was so well-studied because it was used so extensively. During the war, men serving in the armed forces spent morning, noon, and night just spraying, spraying, spraying. They were covered in DDT all day. And everybody studied them—the manufacturers, the army—and concluded these men seemed fine. The war was over, they were discharged, and that was it. Then there were studies after the war to follow not just sprayers, but also people working in the factories that manufactured DDT. There were studies in which DDT was fed to prisoners. Typically, scientists would study a small group of men, ask a limited set of questions, and conclude that all was fine.

Then, after the war, the horse was out of the barn. Everybody knew about DDT, its formula was published, and all of the big and little manufacturers were making and selling it. There was so much research—including on DDT’s accumulation in fat tissue and in breast milk—that was published, reported, and for all intents and purposes, ignored for decades.

Over the latter half of the 20th century, we shifted from short-term toxicology studies to longer-term epidemiological studies. We also started to change the questions we asked. And we began looking at DDT’s effects in much more representative samples of the population, including women, children, the elderly, people with pre-existing conditions or diseases, and people who had been exposed to DDT in different ways and for different lengths of time. A lot of this research took place after DDT was banned, so they had to be creative about the questions that they asked. Also, the way people were exposed to DDT was shifting. During the war, people were exposed to the spray. After the war, they were mostly exposed through their diets. So, scientists had to ask entirely different questions.

We treat science as a source of concrete, unyielding, indisputable answers. But science is, in fact, a process we use for understanding ourselves and our world. And over time, that process is going to give us new kinds of information. The process itself is going to change the kinds of questions we are interested in asking, how we ask them, and how capable we are of getting certain kinds of answers. At the same time, science is social. It’s carried out by human actors. And scientists bring to this process all of their pre-existing biases, prejudices, and assumptions. If we could just acknowledge that and see it more clearly, it would help restore public trust in science.

Rachel Carson, the famed author of Silent Spring, often gets much of the credit for bringing DDT to the attention of the American public. But your book focuses on other actors, including farmworkers. How did the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) fit into the battle against DDT?

The contribution of farmworkers has not gotten nearly the amount of attention that it deserves. I came across a quote from Cesar Chavez in which he claimed responsibility for the public turn against DDT. At first, I thought, “That’s a really big claim!” But the more I read, the more I realized that farmworkers did do a lot to turn the public against DDT. There were a few instances of mass poisonings of farmworkers, and as Chavez began to organize boycotts of grapes grown in California, some of the workers asked to include pesticides on the list of demands made to growers. They publicized the fact that if you bought non-union grapes, they might have loads of pesticides on them. This was effective and got the public’s attention.

When the UFW finally got its first union win, the contract included a ban on hard pesticides, including DDT. This was one of the earliest bans of DDT in the United States. So, before the EPA banned it at a national level and before states banned it at the state level, farmworkers got DDT banned in their union contracts. This is a part of the story that has gotten lost in our focus on Silent Spring and the environmental movement.

You tell the stories of ordinary people impacted by DDT, from soldiers to housewives to farmers. Why did you choose to focus on them, as opposed to the big players?

I’ve always been interested in gaining a deeper understanding of why certain people can place their trust in science more easily than other people. We often turn to institutions and experts for answers to this question. I felt like the best way to explore it was to set the institutions aside. I made a deliberate choice to make the small farmer just as important as the chemist. It was important for me to let them all stand on level playing ground, to see their interactions more clearly and understand exactly why regular people came to the conclusions they did and took the actions they did.

Science historians sometimes point out that, years ago, science took place when people engaged in observation or experimentation right where they lived. Today, by contrast, science is far removed from where ordinary people live. As soon as DDT was released for public sale in 1945, all of these chemists got the formula and made it themselves. For example, there was a man who lived in Georgia who ran a pharmacy and he wanted to sell DDT. His daughter got the formula from a journal at the college library. She gave it to her dad, he made DDT in the lab in his garage, and then sold it in his shop. Today, this sort of thing is unthinkable [because of patenting and intellectual property rights]. This makes us dependent on experts and institutions to know what’s going on. That removal is related to the breakdown of public trust in science.

I also tried to get inside the heads of people who defended DDT. They would do things like eat DDT on camera, before a reporter on the evening news. DDT didn’t seem that toxic to them; so many other chemicals were clearly more toxic. They believed so strongly in its benefits and they thought those benefits outweighed the harms.

Your book shows how social inequity, race, and environmental pollution are inextricably linked. How were these inequalities addressed by the government, if at all?

Without a doubt, people of color were exposed to far greater amounts of DDT and for longer periods of time than white people, especially white middle-class people. So much of it was used on cotton, and in the South many of the farmers and those working in the fields were Black. But there was little attention to the implications of that fact. Studies looked at how many of the persistent pesticides were in the diets and the bodies of children and average Americans. And if you took those results and then stratified them by race, Black people had higher levels of chemicals, including DDT, in their bodies than white people. We had this evidence starting in the ’70s, completely correlated with what we knew about where and how DDT had been used for decades. And we didn’t act on it.

I tell the story of Triana, a small African American town in northern Alabama. Its mayor, Clyde Foster—who was a scientist and mathematician at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—became aware of high DDT levels in the fish in the river running through his community. He turned to the federal government for help investigating exactly how much DDT the town’s residents had been exposed to. The results of Foster’s actions was that the company that was responsible for manufacturing the DDT reached a $24 million settlement [to compensate the town’s residents], and the EPA agreed to make Triana a Superfund site, meaning the agency would oversee DDT’s cleanup.

In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agreed to study how much DDT was in the bodies of the people living in that town and what it was doing to them. Triana’s story revealed that we had focused on the middle class food supply. In the town of Triana, people were eating fish right out of the river because it was free. People were consuming DDT at levels that scientists hadn’t even thought were possible.

Eventually, studies investigating people’s exposure to persistent and other chemicals through the diet started to take these variables into account. They began to ask: How we can fully account for the different diets that people living in the U.S. are consuming and what that might mean for their chemical exposure? As a result several studies looked at dietary patterns of Alaska Natives, including those who ate large amounts of marine animals with high retention of DDT in their fat. We began to see different patterns of exposure decades after people had been exposed.

Subsequent studies have shown that the children and grandchildren of people exposed to DDT suffer the impacts of this chemical, so $24 million isn’t actually a very large settlement.

Yes, and it’s just one chemical. As scientists started studying people in Triana, they found that people in town also have high levels of PCBs. These are industrial chemicals used in electronics and other products. So there was something there that nobody even knew to ask about. The legacy of environmental racism is so much bigger than we imagined.

Why did the tobacco industry want to “bring back” DDT after its ban?

In the beginning, the industry studied DDT because it was used in tobacco fields. In the early ‘60s, when the Surgeon General linked smoking to cancer, smokers actually wrote the tobacco companies saying, “maybe it’s the pesticide.” Then, as European countries proposed limits on the amount of DDT on imported crops [including tobacco] . . . the tobacco industry started pressuring growers and the USDA to stop using DDT. The USDA eventually moved to ban DDT on tobacco before the full national ban.

Fast-forward to the late 1990s, when the tobacco industry started fundraising for a campaign to bring back DDT. It was a communications campaign to convince the public that DDT should never have been banned in the first place because millions of people, particularly children, were dying around the world due to malaria and DDT was a tool to fight it. Big Tobacco didn’t actually care about DDT. The industry was trying to protect the [global] market for cigarettes by undermining public support for federal regulations and for the idea that western nations should be dictating global health policy. This wasn’t a simple story of the tobacco industry being the bad guy. Conservative think tanks had approached the industry with this idea because they wanted to promote a right-wing ideology and knew the tobacco industry would fund it.

Campaigns aimed at discrediting science seem to be a threat in many current scientific debates. How do we remain vigilant in the face of those campaigns?

When it comes to some of the scientific debates today, we might not even know who’s in the game, who is behind the scenes pulling levers and determining what we hear and what we don’t hear. One of the biggest takeaways from the book is that it’s crucial for us to know who we’re hearing from and why we’re hearing from them . . . to know what their real interests are and who is giving them the power and the voice that they have. And it’s not just about interests, but also about how those interests create allies out of different people. It isn’t always as simple as looking for industry sponsorship or ties. Rather, it’s a matter of understanding the ideological bent and objectives of the people who are sharing scientific stories.

DDT’s fall from grace is touted as a major success story by the environmental movement. But we’re still awash in toxic chemicals. What has the ban accomplished?

The ban distracted us from the fact that pesticide use was only increasing and has continued to increase. We banned persistent organic pollutants, including DDT and other organochlorine pesticides, but we replaced them with organophosphates [such as chlorpyrifos], which are actually more toxic, and we use them in greater amounts. We then started to ban some of those pesticides and have replaced them with neonicotinoid pesticides and so-called systemic pesticides. We’re just repeating everything all over again, using new chemicals without understanding the full scope of their impact or their long-term effects.

We’re not reducing our reliance on pesticides at all and we’re further and further diminishing the total insect population in the U.S. and the globe. We need insects for our survival, and we haven’t even begun to grapple with where we’re headed. This is the thing that scares me more than the toxicity of a chemical like DDT. It’s the bigger questions related to our utter dependence on and over-use of such a wide array of ever-changing and insufficiently studied chemicals that are indisputably reshaping the world we live in. Probably not for the better.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post What the Story of DDT, America’s Most Notorious Chemical, Can Teach Us Today appeared first on Civil Eats.

‘Slaves for Peanuts’ Tells the Tragic Story Behind America’s Favorite Snack

Gosia Wozniacka — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 08:00:17 +0000

Peanuts are a key ingredient in many of America’s quintessential snacks. Yet few of us know that the ordinary peanut has a turbulent history linked to the slave trade and to colonization on the African continent.

Jori Lewis, an American journalist who has lived in Dakar for the past 10 years, has reported on Senegal’s agricultural sector throughout her career. In her debut book, Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History, she unearths the stories of African kingdoms and colonial settlements, showing how demand for peanut oil in Europe drove the expansion of the peanut trade in Senegal in the 19^th century and ensured that slavery and indentured labor in West Africa would continue long after the Europeans had abolished it.

The book’s engaging narrative, based on meticulous archival research, is told in rich detail through the eyes of West African men and women—from missionaries to rulers to peanut growers and slave traders. Lewis doesn’t shy away from complexity. She shows how enslaved people often escaped their captors and struggled to get their “freedom papers,” only to be returned by European authorities. She also describes the ways that a safe house run by a Black missionary from Sierra Leone—himself deeply enmeshed in the Europeans’ civilizing mission—offered enslaved people a chance at freedom.

Civil Eats spoke with Lewis, whose book hits shelves this month, about how peanuts became a tool for colonial expansion, how the colonial approach to peanut farming destroyed some of Senegal’s prime cropland, and why the nut is so popular in the U.S.

Why did you decide to write a book about peanut cultivation in West Africa?

I came to Senegal in 2011 on a two-year fellowship from The Institute of Current World Affairs. The project I pitched was on food security in West Africa. I’d been to Senegal before, and it was a country I felt was really manageable [to report on]. It’s small but has a strong democratic tradition. It’s easy to get around, not as difficult as many other countries in terms of bureaucracy, and people are pretty easy to get a hold of. My interest in food security was also about understanding how the agricultural economy works. I had done reporting on Senegal’s fishing industry and on rice cultivation. I ended up spending a lot of time in this area called the Peanut Basin, which is three hours south of Dakar.

When I first moved to Senegal, I understood that peanuts were a huge part of the economy, and that they had also influenced how the cultural economy has been structured. I remember reading a book about the Muslim brotherhoods, which were organized around peanut agriculture. So, I ended up regularly going to check out what was going on in the Peanut Basin, seeing how people were cultivating, what shifts were happening, observing the market going up and down. I was interested in thinking about this particular place and why the peanut had so much power here. When I finished my fellowship, I decided to stay. Fairly soon after that, I started thinking about writing this book.

Your book centers on the connection between European colonialism and slavery in French West Africa, which continues after it had been banned by France. How did peanuts fit into the European ambitions for expansion? Why was this crop so pivotal?

In the early 19th century, Europeans were established in coastal West Africa, but had not formally colonized large parts of the interior. They were mostly practicing mercantile capitalism. They set up in coastal villages and islands and traded with people from the interior. And for a long time, that trade was [indirectly] linked to the slave trade.

By mid-century, there was a slow-down in trade and the merchants established in West Africa were looking for new objects of commerce; they settled on peanuts. The colonial authorities also had commercial interests—many came from large trading families—so that became their rationale for pushing into the interior. There was also the burgeoning logic of colonial domination. The French weren’t just thinking, “we can grow nice peanuts here, so we should dominate Senegal.” They were thinking, “we should secure our economic and political interests here” because of the imperialist logic that was becoming widespread. So, as time went on, the French attempted to expand their empire. That led to a union between the commercial interests and the colonial political interests. The peanut trade, despite its dependence on slave labor, was an integral part of that union.

Were peanuts present in West Africa before the Europeans arrived?

The peanut [which originated in Bolivia] had been grown in West Africa for hundreds of years—though not on any grand scale. Our best guess is that Portuguese explorers and merchants brought it there. And the Portuguese were already exploring [and extracting resources from] Senegal in the mid-15th century. I spent a lot of time trying to trace how the peanut might have moved, from either the Caribbean or from Brazil to Cabo Verde or to Spain and then down to what’s now Guinea Bissau. The historical records are difficult to pin down because there was a plant that grew in a similar way called the bambara groundnut. And the peanut in various West African languages sometimes had similar names.

You tell the story of the rise of peanuts in West Africa through Walter Taylor, a Protestant missionary. He was a Black man from Sierra Leone who later became a French citizen and who, in addition to evangelizing, ran a shelter for formerly enslaved people out of his own home. What role did missionaries play in Europe’s conquest and pillage of West Africa, and how did they influence the growth of peanut production?

During my research, I came across one reference to this mission for runaway slaves. I had never heard of it before, although I knew there was a French Protestant church in Dakar. And when I went to France, I found 20 years of correspondence between Taylor and the director of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. And I realized that I could use Taylor’s voice to tell the story. I wanted, as much as possible, to privilege the voices from below and the history from below— the history compiles the voices of commoners, peasants, and sometimes the enslaved. It’s a voice that is difficult to unearth because it is not often captured in archives or even epic poems. For me, it was preferable to tell the story from Taylor’s point of view rather than from that of some French merchant’s. I became so enmeshed in his own personal story and in the end, it resonated with me in so many ways.

His character represented the very idea of colonialism. It was clear to me that for all his good points, he was very much involved in the “civilizing mission” of the Europeans. He was a man of his time, which doesn’t excuse anything, of course. Being from the Liberated African community of Sierra Leone with a British surname, he aspired to a type of excellence that he was conditioned to believe was the best route for both him and other newly freed, liberated [Black] men and women he was helping in Senegal. You get the sense that he really cared for them, that he wanted the best for them. And he thought that what was best . . . was to collaborate.

You write extensively about Kajoor [also known as Cayor], the African Wolof kingdom on the mainland just south of Saint Louis.

Kajoor was at the center of the peanut trade. It was premium peanut-growing land. But the Peanut Basin of today is not the Peanut Basin of the 19th century. That intrigued me. To think that there once was this fertile place where the best peanuts were grown, the capital of the peanut, and now it’s no longer relevant. Today, the Peanut Basin is in a region called the Saloum, and this has been the case since maybe the 1920s.

In the Senegalese National Archives, I saw all these letters from Lat Joor, the [king] of Kajoor, talking about his runaway slaves. I knew that not all of these slaves who were running away from Lat Joor were connected to peanuts. But I wanted to understand why there was still so much slavery in this place. [Lat Joor is also known for battling the French and opposing their expansion efforts. He’s considered a national hero in Senegal.]

In the book, you describe how slavery was prevalent in West African societies, practiced by tribes and kingdoms and wealthy families, before the arrival of Europeans. Can you talk about how Europeans used those structures to fuel their colonial ambitions and the peanut trade?

There was slavery everywhere [in the world] and it existed on a continuum. In this particular part of West Africa, there existed many extremely hierarchical societies and they included people who were enslaved. That enslavement had different types of functions, different types of durations, and different levels of integration. And that’s fundamentally one of the biggest differences between African slavery and slavery in America, where integration was much less likely. There are, of course cases, many cases, of people in America buying their freedom, and then maybe eventually buying the freedom of their children. That did happen, but it was less likely. And even though it’s controversial to say, not every place in the United States was a plantation with 500 slaves who were dying every day. There were also family farms with one or two slaves who did have closer relationships with the people who had enslaved them. These types of paradoxes existed in both places.

In West Africa, it was possible and much easier to buy yourself out of slavery and to integrate. Still, because West African societies were hierarchical, being formerly enslaved was a difference that was known about you. It meant you could make money and acquire land, but you couldn’t get married to certain people or do certain other things.

There was a system in place in West Africa for the acquisition of slaves, usually through wars in which they would be taken as hostages and ransomed off, and sometimes kept as laborers. At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, the Europeans mobilized those networks. So, the people who normally would be ransomed off instead found themselves on slave ships heading to Brazil, Havana, or Virginia. Of course, once there was demand for enslaved people, the system mobilized itself to enslave more. [Even though the French empire had abolished slavery,] as peanut production ramped up in the 19th century, so did the demand for more labor and a push to put even more land into production. Many of the peanut farm laborers were enslaved or in various states of indenture and the Europeans turned a blind eye to this and even returned runaway slaves to their owners, essentially supporting the perpetuation of slavery.

Why was this pattern of turning a blind eye to the continued use of slave labor so pervasive and so convenient for the Europeans?

The Europeans’ territorial control was limited. And they were afraid of wide-scale rebellion [among African leaders who depended on slave labor]. For example, as the region around Dagana [in northern Senegal] was annexed and came under direct French administration—meaning the French were going to have to impose their own rules—many of the herders and farmers in the region started to migrate to Mali. Slavery was not the only reason they were moving. But in their reports, the French administrators were worried about finally having control of a territory and having all its people leave. They worried about not having enough labor to produce the peanut crop. So, they tried to negotiate this line. At the same time, they also created a rhetoric about their concern about slavery. It was like [spin]. It took me a while to start reading the documents in a way to integrate the kind of hypocrisy that was present.

The French described their railroad project to export peanuts from Kajoor as a mechanism to fight slavery. Was that, partly, their justification for building it?

The explicit reason for that particular project, known as “the peanut train,” was to bring “civilization” to the region. As the track and stations were built, they were annexed and became French land, where the French should have imposed their own laws by freeing runaway slaves who managed to arrive there. But the French were loath to do so. That situation feels like America in Afghanistan. Whenever you have an occupation, you can tell people what to do and maybe when you have enough firepower, they listen to you the moment you’re there. But if you don’t convince them in other ways to collaborate with you through various corrupt means, your occupation doesn’t work.

When the rail line was finally built, it led to more peanut production and even more enslaved people being brought into the area to raise those crops. Eventually, the French occupied the entire region. Was there was any silver lining to the arrival of the railroad?

When I was working on this book, I considered the peanut to be its own character. This is the peanut’s dramatic arc. The peanut is this tool for colonial expansion, but it paradoxically also becomes an instrument for certain people to become free. It was similar in America as well, with kitchen farms for slaves, where they could sell [food] on the side and gain a little money. But because peanuts were grown at such scale and people were selling them for a meaningful amount of money, some were able to buy their own freedom more quickly than before. And because there was this peanut rush, they could move to other places and acquire land to grow peanuts and would have a way to support themselves. The [enslaved people] often hailed from societies where even if they wanted to be free, they wouldn’t have access to land and wouldn’t be able to support themselves. And in Kajoor, as the peanuts continued to grow in demand, more people could use them as a tool for their own freedom. That’s one of the surprising arcs of the peanut’s story.

After the railroad was built through Kajoor, how did the pressure to expand peanut production impact that region?

As production expanded in Kajoor, there was also an expansion of an extractive form of agriculture. There was less crop rotation, fewer fallow periods. Many trees were cut down to clear land and grow more peanuts. It was a burgeoning monoculture. All this reduced the primary productivity of the land over time. It was a short-sighted extraction. In addition, because farmers became indebted, they were getting junk seeds from merchants and that led to peanuts of lesser quality. It was a gradual decline.

Today, the landscape of Kajoor feels bereft of life. Some people there still grow peanuts, but it’s on a much, much smaller scale. In fact, when you drive through the area, it feels devastated. It doesn’t seem fertile at all. Over the years, there has been even more deforestation, leading to problems with water erosion. When it rains it squalls, hard and fast. And because of deforestation, the erosion caused by these violent rains is significant. Such man-made disasters have changed the topography and economics of Kajoor.

Today, the U.S., China, and India dominate the peanut trade. Do peanuts still fuel the economy and the culture in Senegal?

Senegal is number six in world production and number four in world peanut exports. Granted, it’s producing just 3 percent of world’s production [China is churning out 36 percent], but I still think it’s pretty extraordinary that this country that is slightly smaller than South Dakota is growing such a large amount of peanuts. From talking to people on the ground, I know that the peanut is still grown on a wide scale in many regions in Senegal. It’s traded mostly to China and India, which are top producing countries but don’t have enough peanuts [for the people there].

Peanuts are a quintessentially American food; people love peanut butter, roasted peanuts, and peanut candy. And peanut consumption has risen dramatically in the U.S. during the pandemic. How did peanuts become so popular here?

In West Africa, people don’t eat peanuts the way we eat them in the U.S. They don’t eat peanut butter sandwiches, oh no! Senegalese people like savory sauces. In the book, I briefly focus on the peanuts’ rise, mostly to explain why this man—Samuel Cobb—was importing peanuts from West Africa where Walter Taylor was the accountant. He was selling peanuts from Senegal to foreign nut and fruit sellers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—places along the Eastern Seaboard where there was a burgeoning desire for peanuts for newly popular leisure activities such as baseball, theater, and the circus.

Another strange part of this story is that many of New York’s earliest peanut grinders were Italian. Italians in the late 19th century weren’t particularly well thought of, so maybe they were less afraid to touch the peanut? Peanuts suffered from a reputation as “slave food,” because initially Black people in the South were the only ones eating them. I have seen a few recipes for peanut-based dishes in old Southern cookbooks, but guess who was cooking for the Virginia housewife? So, the peanut had this bad reputation and after the Civil War, and Thomas Rowland, a white man from Virginia, made it his mission to increase the cultivation and popularity of this nut. It eventually became much more popular thanks to these new entertainment forms for the masses.

Agriculture is usually controlled by white men and done for the benefit of white men. Your book talks about how Europeans often believed that African farmers didn’t know much about peanut cultivation. Do you see this narrative repeating in Africa today?

There’s an inability in the Western context to believe in, for lack of a better word, Indigenous knowledge. As a result, there are all these efforts to reinvent the wheel even though we could sometimes just talk to the people who are already growing these crops and dealing with these systems to understand how they measure the world around them. There’s often a lot of lip service to this question of Indigenous knowledge, but it’s almost never put into practice.

And yet, even in Africa, people grow things differently now. I mentioned in my introduction that great grandfather was growing a number of diverse crops on his land, and then everyone pulled them out and started growing just one or two crops. And that’s happening everywhere now, this movement away from holistic systems designed to be sustainable and to help farmers with various needs. In the past, the peanut was grown on a small scale, alongside millet, tomatoes, okra, and cow peas. People were growing everything they needed to live. But that now rarely happens. There are all these efforts to “modernize agriculture” — that’s the catchphrase you hear in development circles in Africa—and Senegal is not immune to that trend

Are there other places in Africa with similar trajectories, where the Europeans used their trade and political powers for expansion? Is this still happening?

The story of Senegal doesn’t exist in isolation, it’s just one adaptation that the people of Senegal had to make when faced with the [trade and expansion] needs of the French. The peanut story is analogous and happening at the same time as the rise of palm oil culture. Of course, palm oil grows naturally in West Africa and there’s a whole tradition associated with it. It had a similar trajectory to the peanut and the British exploited it for the same reasons . . . the soap industry, the Industrial Revolution. There are many iterations of this principle. Essentially, the Europeans, and later the Americans and the Asians, absorbed what they could from Africa. Using trade is, of course, the playbook of every diplomatic mission. The Americans and the Chinese are always promoting their own trade. This is par for the course. This is the way foreign powers exert influence.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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A New California Law Will Create a Lot More Compost—but Will it Make it to Farmland?

Gosia Wozniacka — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:00:58 +0000

Since January, new regulations in California now require all residents and businesses across the state to separate food and other organic materials from the rest of their garbage in an effort to reduce organic waste in landfills. The new law is seen as groundbreaking, a significant step in combating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, producing fuel, and creating compost that can help sequester carbon in soils.

But compost advocates say the law could make it difficult for farmers to access the so-called “brown gold” at scale, thwarting efforts to increase adoption of climate-friendly agriculture. The regulations don’t require that the newly generated compost be used on farmland, include funding for costly transportation to farms, or mandate that compost be of a quality that would make it appealing to farmers and ranchers. And because each municipality must decide how to implement the rules, there is no uniform approach that could lead to an increase in on-farm compost applications.

“Everyone is looking at California as a hopeful example. It’s a huge win to get the food scraps and green waste out of the landfills,” said Anthony Myint, executive director of Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit that distributes grants for sustainable agricultural practices. “But the regulation could also create a challenge for farmers.”

Undervalued ‘Brown Gold’ Can Increase Carbon Capture

California generates 23 million tons of organic waste every year, including 5 to 6 million tons of food waste, according to CalRecycle, the state agency overseeing the new regulations. As it decomposes in landfills, organic waste emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas with a 25 times greater impact on global warming than carbon dioxide. Organic waste is the third-largest source of methane emissions in the U.S.

Senate Bill 1383, which was signed into law in 2016, aimed to reduce the level of organic waste sent to landfills by 50 percent by 2020 and 75 percent by 2025—though the state has acknowledged it failed to meet the 2020 target. The newly diverted organic waste will be transformed into compost, mulch, and energy via the burning of biomass. But the state says compost will make up the bulk of the new material given that California produces limited amounts of biogas and compressed recycled natural gas (RNG).

“It’s a huge win to get the food scraps and green waste out of the landfills. But the regulation could also create a challenge for farmers.”

Compost, long used by organic growers and backyard gardeners, has in recent years become popular among mainstream farmers interested in regenerative agriculture. Several studies have shown that spreading a layer of compost on farmland and ranchland can lead to increased carbon storage, especially if the compost is coupled with cover crops. Compost also increases the water holding capacity of soils. And while compost use on urban landscapes, including in parks and school grounds, may improve soil health, applying compost to farmland has multiple co-benefits, experts say, including boosting food’s nutrient content, increasing crop yields, helping soil absorb and retain more water (which cuts irrigation costs), and reducing the need for expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

CalRecycle estimates that about 5.5 million more tons of compost should be produced in California by 2025—enough to apply to an extra 27 million acres or up to 4 percent of the total cropland in the state. Ramping up compost production through organic waste diversion dovetails with California’s efforts to sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including improving soil health through “carbon farming.” Nearly three quarters of the agricultural projects that received grants from the state’s signature Healthy Soils Incentives Program include compost applications. But the number of funded projects—around 600 so far— is small relative to the enormous number of farms in California. Experts say expanding access to compost could help more farmers reduce emissions and put them on track to adopt other sustainable practices.

A Recology truck drops a load of compostable material at a transfer station in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

“We have an impetus to try to build bridges between compost producers, generators, and farmers. Getting compost to agricultural land is a critical part of closing the loop,” said Neil Edgar, executive director of the California Compost Coalition, a statewide lobbying group.

Some cities in Northern California, such as San Francisco, have run food waste diversion programs for years and already have robust compost markets and relationships with local composting companies. But many other cities and counties—particularly in the southern part of the state, where most residents live—are scrambling to accommodate the new law. While some existing waste-processing facilities will expand, several dozen facilities still need to be permitted and built around the state. Meanwhile, fines for failing to separate out food and other organic waste from garbage bound for the landfill are set to go into effect in 2024.

The new regulations also require that cities and counties purchase a certain amount of compost and other products made from recycled organic waste every year—based on the jurisdiction’s population size—and either use it or give it away to residents for free. Localities can procure and distribute the products anywhere in the state. But the regulations do not specify who should receive the compost, where, or how to pay for the transport and spreading costs.

Will Farmers Get More Compost?

About half of what California composters currently produce is compost, and they sell 65 percent of their compost to the agriculture industry, according to a report commissioned by CalRecycle. The market is tight, with agriculture-quality compost in very high demand, especially in areas with access to composting facilities, transportation, and spreading services, said Cole Smith, a staff research associate with the University of California.

Still, for many other farmers, the cost of compost—and that of transporting and spreading it, which often double the price for farmers—is prohibitive, Smith said. While some small and medium farms do use it, their budgets don’t allow them to do so every year, the interval that would be optimal for their soil and for the environment. When money gets tight, Smith said, compost applications are among the first practices to go. Growers of high-value fruit, vegetables, and cannabis tend to rely more on compost, Smith said, because they can afford it.

“Yes, we want to bring organic waste out of landfill and reduce landfill emissions. But growers . . . think you want to use their fields as a disposal [site].”

But by far the biggest challenges are contamination and convincing farmers to use compost in the first place, Smith said. Many will use it from agricultural, on-farm waste but avoid urban-generated compost. The distrust is partly linked to California’s history of direct farmland applications of green waste without composting, said Smith. Similarly, it echoes a decade-old controversy over a San Francisco program that aimed to transform human waste into backyard compost. The distrust is also a direct result of farmers receiving badly contaminated compost batches.

“Yes, we want to bring organic waste out of landfill and reduce landfill emissions. But when growers hear that, they think it has hit the plate, then the trash, and now you want to use their fields as a disposal [site],” said Smith.

Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, a 400-acre diversified operation in northern California, said he stopped using urban compost several years ago.

“The compost we were getting had a good deal of foreign material in it . . . there was glass, plastic, forks, and bits of non-carbon material that we ended up spreading on our fields,” Muller said. “We were concerned about microplastics and also about handling safety for our crew if small bits of glass were spread around.”

Muller also said since compost quality is poorly defined in the state, the material was often “pretty raw,” meaning it had to break down in the fields.

Trucks deliver fresh compost from food waste to Tresch Family Farms in California. (Photo courtesy of Zero Foodprint)

Smith has been working to build trust and communication between compost facilities and growers. Part of that work is teaching farmers how to assess compost for quality before it’s delivered or spread on the fields. Smith is also working with Edgar of the California Compost Coalition to run workshops for farmers on how compost can improve soil, boost productivity, and help fulfill the state’s climate goals. The two hope for more funding to continue similar outreach to farmers across the state. But all of those efforts, Smith said, are dependent on local governments teaching their residents how to effectively sort their trash.

Where Will All the Compost Go?

As California’s new law goes into effect, it’s hard to predict how much compost will be available and where it will end up. With food waste diversion just starting up for many localities and a dearth of composting facilities, the law’s procurement requirements are currently unattainable, said Kelly Schoonmaker, program manager with StopWaste, a public agency that helps residents and businesses in Alameda County, just east of San Francisco, recycle better. And yet the requirement also means California will soon see a huge unmet demand from cities and counties for compost.

But over time, as new collection schemes ramp up the supply of compost will grow. And once supply increases, there won’t be enough space in cities to spread the compost purchased by local jurisdictions, added Schoonmaker.

“In theory, the law has the potential for a lot of greenhouse gas benefits if we’re putting the compost in the right locations and in appropriate ways.”

Two years ago, a study showed that “enough farmland exists near every city in California for the distribution of 100 percent of . . . . diverted organic waste as compost.” But it’s unclear how many communities will choose to work with farmers because that would entail willingness to produce and purchase higher quality compost and pay additional money to transport it to the farms. Under the current regulations, a jurisdiction could potentially pay for low quality compost and let it sit in an empty lot.

“In theory, the law has the potential for a lot of greenhouse gas benefits if we’re putting the compost in the right locations and in appropriate ways,” said Ian Howell, a resource conservationist at the Alameda County Resource Conservation District. “We need to work with local governments and farmers to ensure that . . . . it isn’t just put wherever.”

Some cities own large tracts of land where they can potentially apply compost to fulfill their procurement requirement. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, for example, owns approximately 60,000 acres of rangeland, more than half of which is leased out for grazing.

Rangeland could offers a significant home for municipal compost, given that there are about 38 million acres of it in California. Recent studies at the Marin Carbon Project have shown that compost significantly increases carbon sequestration on rangeland—however, the impact of compost applications can last for decades, meaning that annual applications aren’t needed. And some rangeland may be difficult to access and spread compost on.

Cities or counties that don’t own much land could focus on using compost to help solve food justice issues, said Edgar. They could distribute the compost to urban farming projects, food banks, and gardeners in food deserts or send it to smaller and mid-size, disadvantaged, and BIPOC farmers who usually cannot afford compost, such as the Latino farmworkers-turned-farmers who are members of the ALBA farm training program in Salinas.

“Local jurisdictions could be part of a solution to bridge the gap on food insecurity,” Edgar said.

Compost Brokers Connect Cities, Counties with Farmers

Assuming compost quality is high enough and farmers want to use it, several innovative approaches already exist for getting it to growers. The new regulations allow local governments to contract with so-called “direct service providers” to fulfill their procurement requirement on their behalf.

One model is for local Resource Conservation Districts (RCDs)—special independent districts that offer expertise in conservation, agriculture, and wildlife—to step in to work with farmers. There are around 60 active districts across the state.

For instance, the San Mateo Resource Conservation District is already teaming up with San Mateo County to start a two-year compost brokering pilot program for farmers. The pilot program will launch later this spring and the county hopes to pay for initial implementation costs through a pending grant from CalRecycle, said Adria Arko, senior program manager of the conservation district’s Climate and Agriculture program.

San Mateo county has only one small composting facility that doesn’t offer transportation or spreading services, so farms typically bring it in from other counties.

“Farmers here are interested in using it and sequestering carbon, but they tell us it’s too expensive,” Arko said. “So it seemed a great opportunity to connect the county with farmers to get the compost to them at no cost.”

A tractor drives past piles of compost at the Jepson Prairie Organics compost facility outside Vacaville, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The conservation district has the staff and expertise to identify the farmers in need and distribute the compost to them. “We can help connect the dots,” Arko said. “We want to develop a system that could be scaled up and replicated by other RCDs.”

The pilot will distribute free agricultural-quality compost to any farmer in the county, though initially the number of participating farms may be limited, Arko said. The county’s average farm size is 191 acres, well below that of the rest of California.

If interest proves high, the conservation district can apply for additional funding from the Healthy Soils program or the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), Arko said. But the ultimate goal, she added, is to find a consistent source of funding to help farmers adopt regenerative practices that lead to carbon sequestration—practices that require the kind of money many small and medium-sized farmers don’t have.

Opting in to Fund Carbon Farming Practices

Zero Foodprint already offers a funding mechanism. The nonprofit teams up with restaurants and other food businesses to collect a 1 percent opt-in fee from dining customers (usually a few cents per meal) to fund the adoption of regenerative farming practices.

The nonprofit then distributes grants to farmers and ranchers. Two-thirds of the projects Zero Foodprint has funded involve compost applications, said Myint, the executive director. Currently, the organization works with restaurants and farmers in California, Colorado, and is expanding to other parts of the U.S. and the world.

Over the past two years, Zero Foodprint has distributed grants to more than 30 farms, Myint said. And while any farmer can apply, BIPOC farmers and small farmers are prioritized in the process. Farmers work with cooperative extension and other technical assistance advisers to track project benefits.

In anticipation of the new regulations, Zero Foodprint is preparing to help match farmer demand for free compost with cities and counties that need to buy and give away enough to fulfill their procurement goals. Its Compost Connector program will identify and coordinate farm compost projects and share the costs of additional regenerative practices so as to maximize the amount of carbon sequestered. The nonprofit already has pilot contracts with Alameda and San Mateo County and is in talks with the city of San Francisco.

But for compost to fulfill its carbon farming potential, systemic solutions are needed, Myint said. Instead of local governments trying to claw the funding for compost procurement out of existing budgets and fee increases, they could set up formal programs to fund healthy soils, giving local customers the solution. This could include funding structures similar to Zero Foodprint’s, with local businesses—restaurants, wineries, even online food retailers—opting in to pay a small percentage per customer to fund these practices, he said. Alternatively, a small fee could be added to waste collection or energy bills. Government agencies would then equitably re-distribute the funding to farmers.

“If you had all these local businesses contributing, you could hit huge ambitious carbon farming targets,” Myint said. “Customers would still buy the sandwich if it’s 6 cents more.” And, he hopes, as the links between healthy soils and resilience in the face of extreme drought and other aspects of the deepening climate crisis become clearer—some may even be eager to contribute to a solution.

The post A New California Law Will Create a Lot More Compost—but Will it Make it to Farmland? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Farmworkers Bear the Brunt of California’s Housing Crisis

Gosia Wozniacka — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:00:54 +0000

On most days, Rosalia Martinez finds it unbearable to live in the converted garage she shares with her husband and three young children. It’s a single room without privacy and the rent—$1,350 a month—is a lot more than the farmworker family can afford. But in Greenfield, an agricultural town on California’s central coast, it’s the best they could find.

“It’s uncomfortable, but here we are,” said Martinez. “We want to move, our children need more space, but there are no other homes for rent, there is literally nowhere else to move.”

Martinez’ plight is not unique, as farmworkers throughout California’s agricultural regions face an extraordinary housing shortage. At the end of last year, Governor Gavin Newsom announced with great fanfare that the state would invest over $30 million in upgrading its 24 migrant housing centers. The governor also committed $100 million for the construction and rehabilitation of permanent farmworker housing. The funding comes as the state tries to dig itself out from the pandemic slump while its affordable housing crisis continues to deepen and its share of homeless residents is projected to rise.

But while farmworker housing advocates and developers have welcomed the money, they say much more is needed given the overwhelming scale of the problem and the fact that farmworkers are essential to the productivity of California’s lucrative agricultural sector.

“It’s a significant investment, but we need to do a lot more,” said Assemblymember Robert Rivas (D-Salinas). “Farmworkers feed our state and our nation every single day and have been doing it for generations . . . but they live in some of the worst conditions imaginable. They are still sleeping in their cars. But now it’s not just individual workers, it’s also their families.”

Ildi Carlisle-Cummins, the executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS), put it more starkly: “The new funding is woefully inadequate—a drop in the bucket,” she told Civil Eats. It’s better than nothing, she added, but “doesn’t begin to match the need.”

Many Farmworker Families Share a Single Room

“The new funding is woefully inadequate—a drop in the bucket.”

In the early days of California agriculture, farmworkers lived in substandard, deplorable conditions, much like the ones described in the Grapes of Wrath. They shared cramped rooms and shacks in squalid migrant camps, and slept in cars and in the fields.

It turns out, little has changed. Today, California growers rely on approximately 400,000-800,000 farmworkers to churn out more than 400 commodities—including the lion’s share of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Most of those workers now live permanently with their families in the U.S. and earn an average annual pay of $20,500 due to the seasonal nature of their job, and often live in areas that suffer severe shortages of affordable housing.

California is deep in the midst of a state-wide housing crisis and although its cities often get the most attention, the crisis is just as acute in rural areas, where rentals are extremely expensive and hard to find. At one school district in Salinas on the Central Coast, 40 percent of the student population is considered homeless. The housing that’s available is in substandard condition and many farmworkers can’t afford the fees associated with applications and move-in costs, said Sarait Martinez, executive Director of Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, a nonprofit that works with Indigenous farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley and on the Central Coast. Several families often share a small apartment or even a single room—and those are the lucky ones, she said.

“We have families with kids that have been evicted and they have nowhere to go. There are no places available and people don’t have access to shelters until they are on the streets,” said Martinez. “Our families have to constantly move from county to county because they cannot find housing.”

In Greenfield, Martinez and her husband are struggling to get by. They’re seasonal workers and agricultural jobs are scarce during the winter months. She stays home to care for the couple’s 9-month-old baby. Her husband has been out of work, but just last week found a temporary job pruning grape vines for minimum wage. Their landlord just raised the rent by $200. The family has been relying on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), i.e. food stamps to survive.

“I have no cash in my pocket,” Martinez told Civil Eats. “And I have no idea where we’re going to find enough money to pay the rent. Maybe the lottery?”

Like many in Greenfield, she hails from the Mexican state of Oaxaca and is part of the Indigenous Triqui community. Martinez applied for a unit in a farmworker housing project six years ago. Since then, she has heard nothing back.

Many people are facing similar challenges. California has done little to help agricultural workers and their families find a permanent place to live. The state’s Office of Migrant Services operates 24 migrant housing centers that are scattered throughout California and open during the peak harvest season. The centers offer almost 1,900 rental units that can house up to 11,000 agricultural workers and family members, but that’s likely a tiny fraction of the housing that’s needed.

The state has not created any new migrant housing in decades. And it’s unclear just how much permanent housing would stem the tide of homelessness among farmworkers. California’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) does not have data on how many units are needed statewide, department spokeswoman Alicia Murillo told Civil Eats. In fact, the state hasn’t ever completed a state-wide farmworker housing study.

“It’s the NIMBY response. People love the produce, but they don’t want farmworkers living in their communities.”

In the coastal area of Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties, a consortium of local agencies released their own housing report in 2018 and found that about 73,000 workers live in the two valleys year-round. Most are married and many live with children. An estimated 77 percent live in overcrowded or extremely overcrowded conditions, with multiple families sharing bedrooms, living rooms, garages, and other spaces. Just over 1,000 subsidized farmworker housing units are available to those workers.

The study concluded that an additional 45,600 units of farmworker housing are needed for year-round farmworkers and their families in the two valleys alone to end “stunningly high rates” of overcrowding. Advocates say similar farmworker housing deficits exist in every single agricultural valley in the state.

Racism, Lack of Infrastructure, Funding Barriers to Housing

Advocates say building housing for all or even most agricultural laborers in the state would be a huge challenge. Because so many people are suffering homelessness across the state, it can be politically difficult to ask for funding for farmworkers, said Carlisle-Cummins. But it’s essential to focus on this group, she added, because farmworkers are one of the most vulnerable populations and they’re also the backbone of the state’s lucrative agricultural industry.

“Without their knowledge and labor, we don’t eat and we don’t have a food system,” said Carlisle-Cummins.

The pandemic has exacerbated the need for more farmworker housing. From the start, they were deemed essential workers and publicly praised for risking their lives to feed the country—yet they also saw higher rates of infection with COVID-19 due in part to their severely overcrowded living conditions. And housing costs—already astronomical prior to the pandemic—rose further in rural areas, said Assemblymember Rivas, as tech workers and other affluent families were newly able to work outside of cities.

“COVID has intensified the farmworker housing crisis,” said Rivas, who grew up in a two-room farmworker housing unit with 10 family members. “Rents are now even higher. And the severe overcrowding means farmworkers have no room to quarantine or isolate. Social distancing is nearly impossible.”

Despite the clear need, some local governments reject farmworker housing projects. There are restrictions to build on undeveloped land and localities use zoning to make building difficult. Two car garage ordinances, elaborate parking requirements, or low density requirements—meaning the project would not be able to house enough people to pencil out financially—can lead many housing projects to going nowhere, said Rob Wiener, executive director of California Coalition for Rural Housing, a group of nonprofit and public developers, activists and local government officials who advocate for the creation of more farmworker housing.

“It’s the NIMBY response. People love the produce, but they don’t want farmworkers living in their communities,” Wiener said. “There’s racism and prejudice against farmworkers who are overwhelmingly Latino immigrants.”

The lack of basic infrastructure in rural areas is also a problem, as local governments—many of which are low on funding—can’t pay for adequate sewers, water, or roads, Wiener said. This adds to the development costs. Lack of access to schools and transportation are also barriers.

The recent trend of agricultural employers bringing thousands of temporary H2A workers from Mexico and elsewhere is also exacerbating the affordable housing crisis in rural areas, Wiener added. Because employers must guarantee housing to H2A workers, some growers are buying up or renting out old motels, trailer parks, and single-family homes, which were previously traditionally used by farmworkers who live in the U.S. permanently.

Not Enough Funding to Meet the Need

But by far the biggest challenge—for developers of any affordable housing—is the lack of financing to cover development costs, Wiener said. Those costs are driven by the rising prices of land, labor, building supplies, local government fees, and financing. Developers must layer subsidies from 5-6 sources for affordable housing projects to pencil out, he said.

And farmworker housing can be particularly costly because agricultural workers can only afford low rents—meaning developers can’t take out too many loans because they won’t be able to cover management and repair costs enough to pay them back. Hence the need for more grants and tax credits, Wiener said.

The state’s principal program for developing new farmworker housing is the Joe Serna, Jr. Farmworker Housing Grant Program, which is named after a farmworker who grew up in public housing and later became Sacramento’s first Latinx mayor. It finances the new construction, rehabilitation, and acquisition of owner-occupied and rental units for agricultural workers as well as grants for home buyers. Current, retired and disabled farmworkers qualify, with no questions are asked about legal status.

Last year’s $100 million allocation (as part of California’s 2021-2022 budget, or the “California Comeback Plan”) is one of a series of investments the state has made into the program. In 2002, the program received $200 million. And in 2018, $300 million. Last year’s budget agreement also included $37 million for the upgrades to the 24 migrant housing centers and additional funding for repairs and new developments is in the pipeline.

Most other funding sources available to farmworker housing developers are inadequate, said Wiener. There’s California’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, which has a set-aside of state low-income housing tax credits for farmworker housing developments. (It’s modeled after Oregon’s Agriculture Workforce Housing Tax Credits program.) The program allows corporate investors who help finance the development or rehabilitation of agricultural housing to get a tax break.

But the farmworker set-aside accrues at a rate of just $500,000 a year, meaning it’s not a major funding source, Wiener said. In addition, the tax credit program has a set-aside for rural projects, which can theoretically benefit farmworker housing. But again, it’s limited and most projects don’t receive the credits they seek.

Developers can also apply for a loan from the state’s Multifamily Housing Program, in which case the housing can be open to other residents in addition to farmworkers. There’s also $50 million set aside for farmworker housing projects in the newly established California Housing Accelerator program, which launched last year and will distribute $1.6 billion in zero-interest loans to shovel-ready projects that have already received a state award and are financially unable to move forward due to the shortage of low-income housing tax credits and bonds.

In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Labor Housing Loan and Grant Program provides financing to develop or upgrade rental housing for year-round and migrant or seasonal domestic farm laborers. But the USDA funding has declined steadily, said Wiener. And even if it were a larger pool of money, there’s a hitch: only farmworkers who can prove they are U.S. citizens or permanent residents can live in the housing. This disqualifies many workers since half of all crop farmworkers in the U.S. lack legal status and the share of unauthorized workers is highest in California.

Other Solutions to the Farmworker Housing Crisis

Beyond allocating more funding to stem the farmworker housing crisis, Wiener said the state needs to incentivize localities to be more proactive in making space for affordable housing in their communities. This includes penalizing local governments that outright reject farmworker and other affordable housing projects or create zoning and other rules that make it challenging to build.

CIRS’s Carlisle-Cummins would like to see the state totally rethink its farmworker housing models. She said in the current set-up landlord arrangements can be exploitive and often involve residency restrictions tied to immigration status or migration status (in some cases, the housing is available only to families that move every six months). The current housing options don’t allow workers to save money or build wealth, she said, and are often built to maximize the profits of large developers. And farmworkers are excluded from the design process.

“There are alternative housing projects that can create communities for farmworkers and others in rural areas and transfer some power to them,” Carlisle-Cummins said.

Alternatives include the mutual housing model—such as Mutual Housing at Spring Lake in Woodland—where the property is owned by a nonprofit mutual housing association and residents play a role in its governance and in the property’s operations. Housing cooperatives on the other hand, allow farmworkers to collectively own and democratically control their own housing.

At least 11 such cooperatives currently exist in the state, many of them in Monterey County. Another option is for a community land trust to acquire the property to keep it affordable, in which case the residents own their homes but lease the land underneath them from the land trust. And mutual self-help housing allows groups of typically 10 to 12 families to build each other’s homes with construction supervision provided by a nonprofit housing organization.

Of course, as Carlisle-Cummins sees it, the most promising solutions would keep farmworkers from needing subsidizing housing in the first place. “The issue comes down to a dignified salary and citizenship status,” she said. “Farmworkers should be able to afford decent housing.”

The post Farmworkers Bear the Brunt of California’s Housing Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.

Glass, Plastic, Or PLA? Dairies Struggle to Replace Single-Use Bottles

Gosia Wozniacka — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 09:00:44 +0000

Alexandre Family Farm prides itself on being America’s first certified organic regenerative dairy. It’s a large-scale operation—4,500 mature cows pastured on about 9,000 acres—and it successfully uses rotational grazing and compost applications to boost soil health, build up carbon, and foster biodiversity.

But one aspect of its operation remains contentious: the packaging. Like most dairy products in the U.S., Alexandre Family Farm’s milk and yogurt are sold in plastic jugs and containers, to the chagrin of some customers. Most plastic packaging is made from fossil fuels and more than 90 percent of it is not recycled. Instead, it fills our landfills, ends up as tiny particles in our soil and our bodies, and more than 8 million tons of it is dumped into oceans annually.

As more dairies turn to organic and regenerative practices, consumers are pushing for packaging that eliminates single-use plastics, and dairies like Alexandre are actively looking for new solutions. But, it turns out, there is no simple fix. Switching to glass milk bottles is one approach that has become popular among some consumers, but it comes with the potential for high carbon emissions and logistical challenges. New technologies, including containers made from plants, aren’t yet optimized for holding liquids. And, even if they were, our waste systems can’t process them, meaning most end up in landfills.

“We’re not happy to use plastic . . . but there aren’t yet alternative solutions, especially for beverage companies,” said Robert Brewer, Alexandre’s chief operating officer, who has been focused on finding new packaging since he was hired two years ago. “We just can’t continue to put billions of pounds of waste into the ocean and expect to have life on earth.”

The dairy industry’s pursuit of new packaging also reflects the ongoing debate about whether society’s focus should be on inventing and refining disposable single-use packaging that is compostable or biodegradable or on improving recycling and reinforcing a circular economy that continues to rely on plastic. The makers of plant-based milks (almond, oat, rice, and soy)—many of which are also sold in plastic bottles—face similar conundrums.

Retailers, Distributors Refuse Glass Milk Bottles

Regardless of how milk is produced, in the U.S. most of it is sold in plastic containers made from virgin high-density polyethylene, also known as HDPE or No. 2 plastic. Nearly two-thirds of milk containers sold in North America are HDPE bottles, followed by cartons (24 percent) and plastic bags (7 percent). In recent years, some dairy companies—including Alexandre Family Farm—are turning to containers made from transparent, sturdy polyethylene terephthalate, which is also known as PET or No. 1 plastic, and commonly used in water bottles.

Reba Brindley, a project manager at the University of California, San Francisco, said she gave up on buying Alexandre’s milk specifically because it came in plastic bottles—a choice she finds incompatible with the farm’s other values.

“I am impressed by their work and dedication,” Brindley said of Alexandre. “But considering how little plastic is recycled and what an inefficient process it is, I don’t see how they can be held up as an environmental example when they pump out plastic bottles . . . I just can’t handle throwing out a plastic bottle every week.”

Brindley switched to milk from the Straus Family Creamery, which comes in reusable glass containers. “There is so much emphasis on recycling when I think we need to move towards reuse and reduce,” said Brindley.

Brindley is not alone in believing that glass—once the material of choice for milk bottles—is the dairy industry’s best shot at sustainability. Over the past decade, glass manufacturers have seen a resurgence of glass milk bottles across the U.S., particularly among small dairies and creameries. Some companies offer old-fashioned glass milk delivery to consumers’ doorsteps, while others offer reusable glass bottles that and can be returned to grocery stores, as in the case with Straus.

But while using glass may keep plastic out of landfills, prevent some toxic chemicals from leaching into our milk, and cater to our nostalgia and notions of improved taste and freshness, it’s not a panacea. Each packaging system has environmental impacts that go beyond the issue of solid waste, said Gregory Keoleian, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. Those environmental impacts stem from material production, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life processing and include energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use.

“There will be tradeoffs with respect to these impacts and also between packaging performance and cost,” Keoleian said.

Glass bottles weigh much more than other containers, so they take more energy to transport and result in higher transport-based emissions per volume of packaged milk. Extracting raw materials for new glass is also energy intensive, fueled mainly by natural gas. And only 31 percent of all glass containers are recycled—most end up in landfills, where they will take more 1 million years to decompose. Despite these drawbacks, when Keoleian and his colleagues studied milk packaging systems, they found that glass refillable bottles can outcompete single use containers such as plastic HDPE milk jugs and gable-top cartons with respect to energy and carbon footprints as long as they are reused at least five times—and the savings increases at higher reuse rates.

Keoleian’s research also found that refillable plastic bottles—which are not used much today— can have an even lower environmental impact than glass because they can have higher reuse rates. But the most sustainable choice for milk packaging? He says it’s lightweight plastic pouches, which are used mostly in Canada and have a significantly smaller environmental impact than reusable glass or plastic. Aluminum, which is recycled at very high rates, could also serve as a sustainable packaging for milk.

But most consumers want traditional bottles, Alexandre’s Brewer said, hence his dairy’s search for an alternative to standard plastic. Brewer was vice-president of sales and distribution for Straus from 2004 to 2008, overseeing its glass bottle reuse system. At the time, a significant number of retailers and distributors were willing to offer glass bottles, Brewer said. Today, it’s difficult to get them into large grocery chains.

The system, he adds, is a logistical nightmare. Straus buys the glass bottles, made of approximately 30 percent recycled glass, sanitizes, fills, and counts them. They are then sent to a distributor, who is charged a deposit. The distributor delivers the bottles to retailers who, in turn, are charged another deposit, and retailers then sell the milk to customers, who get charged yet another deposit. The whole process is then repeated backwards, until the used bottles are returned to Straus for sanitizing and refilling. In all, it entails six different accounting steps, Brewer said. In addition, the bottles can break during shipping, increasing costs.

So while Straus bottles are reused an average of five times before they are recycled (that number is primarily driven by the consumer return rate, which prior to the pandemic was close to 80 percent, and by ink wearing out on bottle labels), it’s a limited retail niche.

“It’s not a bad system, it’s just that we were told clearly by retailers and distributors that they were not willing to do it,” Brewer said. “They told us, ‘If you want to come into our stores, you have to put the milk in plastic bottles.’ So the choice was existential.”

A spokesperson from Straus Family Creamery, which has bottled its milk in reusable glass since 1994, told Civil Eats that “it may take longer for some stores to adapt and implement new sustainability programs.” But, the creamery added, the bottle logistics and accounting are not onerous once in place and “when retailers realize that there is demand among their shoppers . . . they are willing to invest time in developing the program with us and our distributor partners.” The creamery’s analysis has shown that its glass reuse program prevents approximately 500,000 pounds of milk containers and plastic out of the landfills each year.

There’s one limiting factor: Straus operates a regional distribution model, with its milk sold in California and other Western states, primarily in natural food co-ops and independent grocers, as well as a few retail chains (Sprouts, Whole Foods, and Fred Meyer). Because it’s minimally processed, the milk’s shelf life is also shorter, making it more difficult to sell in other regions.

“The reusable glass program would be more costly to implement in a national distribution model,” the spokesperson said.

Alternatives to Single-Use Plastic in the Works

With glass no longer an option, Alexandre Family Farm is searching for other green options to replace its PET bottles. Brewer has worked with the Climate Collaborative—a natural foods industry group of companies committed to climate action—on finding new packaging solutions and assessment tools.

Virgin plastic bottle alternatives, including recycled plastics and plant-based bioplastics, are being rapidly developed and have attracted significant attention from the food industry, Brewer said. But for now they’re mostly suitable for dry packaging.

“The packaging is in the final steps [of development] and then it’s about manufacturers being willing to make the packaging,” he said.

Bioplastics—the most commonly used being polylactic acid or PLA—have characteristics similar to plastic, but are made from plants such as corn, sugarcane, sugar beet, or cassava. Bioplastics help companies continue with their disposable, single-use packaging status quo. But because they are biodegradable or compostable, and because they can reduce non-renewable energy inputs and greenhouse gas emissions, they’re championed as a greener solution to stemming the growth of plastic pollution. Bioplastics are now used to make everything from bottles to cups to cutlery and bags.

But PLA and other plant-based materials are far from perfect. Bioplastics also require a complex mixture of chemical additives to improve their functionality—and because of those additives, biopastics are just as toxic as other plastics, according to a 2020 study. And PLA requires specialized, high-temperature industrial composting facilities to decompose. Because few such facilities exist and because most consumers assume they can simply dispose of plant-based packaging in garbage or compost bins, most PLA containers end up in oceans or landfills where they emit methane and don’t actually decompose for hundreds of years. And when PLA containers are recycled alongside other plastics they tend to look nearly the same, making it impossible to separate them out and prevent them from contaminating recycling streams.

And while bioplastics tend to generate fewer emissions in their lifecycle—since the crops used to make them absorb carbon out of the atmosphere—those crops also tend to be genetically modified, grown using monoculture agricultural practices, and sprayed heavily with pesticides. They also require a lot of water and take vast amounts of land out of food production. Bioplastics don’t create as enough of a barrier between milk and the outside world, meaning they let in some gas and light that degrades and eventually allows the milk to spoil faster, Brewer said. They are also more brittle than plastic bottles.

PLA milk bottles aren’t yet available—but the dairy is looking into bottles currently being developed by PLA Bottles EU, a company based in the Netherlands which has an ambitious goal of collecting 90 percent of its bottles after use, 90 percent of the time, assuring they do not end up in landfills. Alexandre is also evaluating containers made with PLA beads by Gaia Herbs and Earth Renewable Technologies as an alternative to its plastic yogurt tubs.

One major challenge, Brewer said, is the fact that legacy plastic packaging manufacturers tend to be unwilling to run unfamiliar resins through their molding machines, because they fear gumming up the machines. Cost is also an issue since testing milk bottles made with custom molds is a sizeable investment, he said. Now that Alexandre Family Farm has become a successful brand and has increased its packaging purchases, the company has a better chance of convincing plastic manufacturers to try something new and it can afford to pay for testing the alternatives.

“We’ve grown a lot in the past few years,” said Brewer. “So now our plastic usage is large enough that it’s a priority for us.”

Another option Alexandre is exploring for its packaging is post-consumer (recycled) plastic. It’s another recent trend in the food industry, with several U.S. beverage companies already in the process of switching to bottles made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET). While no dairy company in the U.S. is currently using such technology, it’s been deployed in other parts of the world. The Austrian milk processing company NÖM AG introduced a milk bottle made of 100 percent rPET in 2019. Similarly, the Dutch multinational dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina and New Zealand dairy producer Lewis Road Creamery have both switched to bottles made entirely of recycled PET.

Is Chemical Recycling the Future of Food Packaging?

Alexandre Family Farm is also teaming up with King Plastics, a food container manufacturer in Orange, California, to do a test run of a yogurt container made of chemically recycled polypropylene (rPP), by using the latest advances in plastic recycling.

Polypropylene—one of the most widely used materials in packaging for consumer goods, including yogurt tubs—is currently marked with number 5 and is one of the least recycled post-consumer plastics (just under 1 percent of it is recycled). Most curbside recycling programs don’t accept it. Since it’s difficult to distinguish between food grade and non-food grade containers during the sorting process, what little polypropylene is recycled is potentially contaminated and unavailable for food-grade packaging. Instead, most is reused by decking companies, furniture manufacturers, and crate and bin makers.

Enter chemical recycling, an emerging industry that promises a solution to the plastic pollution problem by recycling plastics in an infinite recycling loop. The process is purported to “purify the plastics” at the molecular level and restores them to a “virgin-like” quality that’s devoid of contaminants, colors, or odors. Chemically recycled plastic can potentially be reused an infinite number of times, while mechanically recycled plastic falls apart after just a few uses. Chemical recycling also has the potential to recycle multiple plastics and composites together and may still be used for food-grade packaging.

When it comes to polypropylene, a new chemical recycling process invented by Procter & Gamble could vastly increase the amount recycled. PureCycle is developing facilities to collect, sort, and chemically recycle polypropylene plastic. The company will provide chemically recycled resin (rPP) to King Plastics to make the test yogurt containers for Alexandre Family Farm.

Tom Bryan, director of sales with King Plastics, said chemical plastic recycling has many advantages over manufacturing new packaging with plant-based bioplastics. Not only does chemical recycling result in a cleaner product that’s food-grade safe as compared to mechanically recycled polypropylene, Bryan said, but container manufacturers across the country who currently use virgin polypropylene could use existing machines and processes. If they wanted to make containers with bioplastics, on the other hand, they would have to invest in new equipment infrastructure.

“We think chemical recycling is a faster and better solution,” Bryan said. “There’s already a recycling infrastructure in the U.S., the pieces are there, and there’s more investment year after year. And recycling feeds into the circular economy.”

Even if manufacturing compostable or biodegradable containers made of plant-based material was easier or less costly, Bryan added, the lack of industrial composting facilities that can handle these products makes their current use questionable.

“A lot of brands are trying to find compostable, disposable plastic so the customer can feel good about throwing it away,” Bryan said. “But it’s a false narrative meant to convince customers they don’t bear any responsibility for those products. Right now, the technology just isn’t there.”

But chemical recycling’s technology is also untested and not yet commercially viable. So while billions in capital are being invested and startups in the U.S. and Europe have announced plans to build chemical recycling facilities, critics point out that quickly building enough commercial plants to make a dent in the plastic pollution problem doesn’t seem feasible. And a report published last year by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) reveals that the chemical recycling process generates chemical byproducts toxic to the environment and to human health, is extremely energy intensive, and produces high greenhouse gas emissions.

“Chemical recycling . . . is not at present, and is unlikely to be in the next 10 years, an effective form of plastic waste management,” the report’s authors conclude.

Keoleian, the University of Michigan professor, said the U.S. should focus on developing a circular economy that aims to reduce all lifecycle impacts, including the resource extraction stage and energy use, not just solid waste. Reducing overall consumption and production of plastic is also key, he said, as is improving the recycling process. A major challenge is that the market doesn’t currently drive a circular economy, he added, because markets for recyclables are weak, meaning “the costs of petroleum and the natural gas feedstocks needed to make plastic are relatively inexpensive compared to the value of recycled resin.” The cost of plastic disposal is also relatively cheap. In addition, he said, the costs of climate change aren’t currently reflected in the economy.

“Until we put a price on carbon and better value the use of nonrenewable resources, it will be more difficult to create sustainable solutions,” Keoleian said.

While none of the milk packaging choices are impact-free, it’s clear that consumers have a role in reducing the environmental impact of the milk they buy. And they can start by using it all before it spoils. Keoleian’s research showed that packaging impacts can be dwarfed by the impacts of consumer food waste.

The post Glass, Plastic, Or PLA? Dairies Struggle to Replace Single-Use Bottles appeared first on Civil Eats.

How I Changed My Relationship to Grocery Shopping—and My Financial Future

Gosia Wozniacka — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 09:01:07 +0000

I’m standing in a warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Portland, Oregon, tearing mounds of plastic wrap from a pallet stacked tall with hundreds of cardboard boxes of salvaged fruits and vegetables. The wrap curls in mounds at my feet as I slice boxes with a carboard cutter and sort through clamshells filled with strawberries, flats of organic peaches, giant cantaloupes in mesh bags, and a mammoth bin of herbs in tiny plastic cases.

Some of the produce is rotten—this I dump onto another pallet—but most is perfectly good and I arrange it on a warehouse cart. I volunteer once a month here as a member of a local food redistribution nonprofit, Birch Community Services, which aims to uplift working families and to staunch the river of waste inherent in our food supply chains. Birch membership has given me an incredible backdoor glimpse into the challenges that plague our food system—and the solutions available to solve them.

Birch Community Services is one of Oregon’s largest food distribution programs—last year it redistributed 13.7 million pounds of food and household goods—but it’s no food pantry dispensing emergency food assistance. Using rescued food as a base, Birch also runs a financial literacy program that helps families take control of their money—and gain consistent access to healthy food—over the long term. It could serve as a national model for how to address some of the roots of food insecurity and to stop more food from heading to the landfill.

“It goes back to the old saying, we’re not just giving people fish,” Birch’s warehouse manager, Andrew Rowlett, told me. “The participants are the answer. We give families the tools to be successful and we do it in an environment where people are supporting each other.”

Financial Stability Through Groceries

Food insecurity has soared for some Americans during the pandemic. Many people were already living paycheck to paycheck. When COVID-19 hit, their cars lined up for miles outside food banks while volunteers loaded pre-packed boxes of food into their trunks. Communities of color and immigrants, who historically have had higher food insecurity rates, were especially impacted.

And while the food crisis has eased a little, it continues at pre-pandemic levels, with many food banks expanding their warehouses to accommodate the higher demand and others struggling to meet demand. But experts have warned for years that food banks and pantries are meant as temporary solutions and other programs and policies are needed to address the roots of the problem—namely, financial instability and systemic racism. In other words, anti-hunger organizations have to start thinking beyond food, according to Katie Martin, executive director of the Foodshare Institute for Hunger Research and Solutions, and author of Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries.

Birch offers one such approach. The nonprofit is a cross between a members-only food bank, a food co-op, and a financial fitness club. Every month, member families pay $80 and volunteer at least two hours at the warehouse—where they can then shop weekly, at no cost, for food and household products. Each family is paired up with a financial counselor (the organization employs two in-house) and is required to take a multi-week financial course. Families meet with their counselor to set financial goals, craft a savings plan, and create a “family vision” to align their budget and spending with their values. They check in every three months on accomplishments and challenges. Families also get free access to a budgeting app and financial literacy books for their children.

“[Our program] vastly reduces the cost of [members’] groceries and builds a margin, a bubble that goes back into their budget to be repurposed,” said executive director Suzanne Birch, who founded the organization nearly 30 years ago with her late husband Larry Birch. “The accountability, combined with the finance class, gives people tools to succeed.”

Birch serves a different demographic than most aid programs. It focuses on working, lower-middle-class families who are struggling to get ahead financially due to low salaries, sudden job losses, illnesses, and large debt burdens. People who are unemployed and/or already receive government food assistance like SNAP or cash benefits (TANF) are not eligible to join, unless they are actively looking for work.

“There are lots of people who don’t qualify for assistance and yet are having a hard time,” said Birch. “Those people often fall through the cracks.”

My partner and I both have university degrees, yet we live paycheck to paycheck. Over the past five years I have worked only part-time as a freelance journalist, raising our young son and watching my income shrink. My partner works full time as an early childhood family specialist, a profession notable for low wages. We have educational and other debts and a mortgage to pay. And, as two first-generation immigrants, we can’t rely on our parents for help. Joining this program has allowed us to start paying off some debt, build an emergency savings account, and start breathing easier.

Birch isn’t a charity. Participants are essential to the functioning and financial stability of the organization. Families and other volunteers account for 65 percent of the nonprofit’s labor; the work they put in equates to that of more than 20 full time employees. Membership fees pay nearly 70 percent of the nonprofit’s operational costs. The remaining revenue comes from individual donations and grants. Birch has never applied for nor received government funding. Most of its paid staff and two members of its board of directors are former Birch members. In other words, the emphasis is on working as a community to become self-sufficient and to help others do the same.

“We call it the dignity of the exchange,” Birch told me. “Everyone has something to offer—a service fee, the volunteering. Even if you’re broke, you can make a positive impact. People realize this place would not be open if it wasn’t for them.”

This sense of reciprocity also removes the stigma that is often associated with receiving emergency food assistance. “I’ve heard many participants tell me about previous experiences of getting food boxes or going to food banks and just feeling bad,” said Valerie Rippey, Birch’s community development manager. “Here, there is no shame. Everyone is going through a hard financial time and needing a little extra help, but no one is looking at them with pity.”

Over the past three decades, the organization has served close to 20,000 families directly. About 600 are currently part of the program. Last year, the average Birch family included a household of five with three children, $25,000 in debt, and $60,000 in annual income. In Multnomah County, where most Birch members reside, the living wage for a family of five with one working adult is $89,000 (or $120,000 with two working adults). The average family belongs to Birch for two to three years, though there is no time limit to membership. About 70 nonprofits are also Birch members with shopping privileges, including drop-in food pantries at churches, community centers, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters. These partnerships help the organization reach another 15,000–20,000 people weekly.

Keeping Food Out of Landfills

Birch members can also feel good knowing that 100 percent of the food and household items the nonprofit redistributes is rescued from the landfill. Most food banks purchase new food in addition to receiving private donations and U.S. Department of Agriculture food aid. But, said Birch, “our policy is to never buy anything.”

Birch volunteers pick up food from 300 different corporate donors, ranging from local distribution centers to individual grocery stores, Costco, a produce company, a dairy cooperative, and a large bread company. Out-of-town truck drivers whose loads get rejected by distribution centers or stores also often drop off perfectly good products at Birch.

Much of this food would be rejected by a regular grocery store due to slight damage or product changes, said Rowlett, the warehouse manager. Packaging is routinely damaged at distribution centers as workers accidentally drop boxes or run into pallets with fork lifts. Manufacturers retire products after changing packaging styles, ingredients, or UPC codes—or launching a new product line. Some products are “excess inventory,” don’t sell, or get too close to their best by/peak freshness dates (though they aren’t usually expired). Bakeries overproduce bread, chips, and other goods. And grocery stores throw out everything that has even a minor blemish or damage—such as a large bag of potatoes with one bad potato in it—because their customers expect pristine products and store employees don’t have the time to pick through boxes to find the damaged ones.

“[In the distribution and retail world] everything is move, move, move, constantly,” Rowlett said. “The manufacturer doesn’t want it back, the vendor doesn’t want it, they can’t quickly find a third-party liquidation company to sell it to, so they used to just throw it away. Now they give it to us.”

Birch also receives new and experimental food products that never make it into mainstreams stores. “We once got cappuccino-flavored chips, 80 pallets of them,” Rowlett recalls. “I think it was a flop.”

The nonprofit prides itself on how quickly and efficiently it can take donations. That’s why it has seen such growth, Rowlett said. He personally answers the donation hotline 24/7—sometimes at 1:00 in the morning—and dispatches the organization’s five trucks to pick up waiting food. “When they call, we’re there. We get it off their dock so they can feel good about it and continue working,” he said.

To Rowlett, Birch has always been “a microcosm of the rest of the food industry.” The unwanted products that come into the warehouse offer a window into what’s selling, what’s not, and where the biggest sources of waste are. This past year, that included fruits and vegetables, dairy products, and baked goods, Rowlett said. Plant-based dairy and meats were also in over-supply—and they aren’t popular with most of the shopping families.

To further cut down on what goes to the landfill, Birch donates spoiled produce to more than 20 livestock and compost farmers. The organization recycles cardboard, cans, pallets, and metal. It has also worked over the years to expand the number of families and diversify the type of nonprofits it works with. Still, there is waste left over. After several months spent working it the warehouse, it has become clear to me that Birch cannot do it alone; the manufacturing and distribution sectors must change to reduce food and plastic waste before food reaches families like ours.

Drowning in Debt, Paying it Back

My family is new to Birch, so we’re not yet financially stable. But the program appears to work for those who stick to their financial goals. Take Sara and Ray Hurst of Woodland, Washington. They worked long hours—one as a cosmetologist, the other as a construction worker—and their toddler had special needs requiring countless specialists. Ray’s work was seasonal, making it difficult to budget, and the unpaid bills began to stack up. And yet their income didn’t qualify them for food assistance either.

“We starved in winter and thrived in summer, and we were poor money managers,” Hurst told me. “We were drowning in debt.”

When they joined Birch four years ago the Hursts finally stopped worrying about food. As their cupboards filled up, they could focus on paying down their debt. Since then, Hurst and her husband say they have paid back $31,000 in credit card, personal, medical, and family debts. They bought two used cars and put all their bills on auto-pay for the first time. They were even able to “live a little,” buying new clothes for their three children and ordering pizza and donuts on special occasions.

“I never knew much about money,” said Hurst. “Birch is great about food, but the financial education aspect is even better. Having the support makes all the difference.”

Their story is not atypical. According to Rippey, most families who join Birch eliminate $10,000–$40,000 of debt within the first few years and accumulate significant savings. They’re able to pay cash for emergency expenses and many are able to send their children to college debt-free.

Hurst no longer worries about not having enough food, and she’s confident that sense of security will remain even once she leaves Birch. “With the new tools I’ve learned, plus my budget shopping skills, our family will be ok,” she said.

Wanting Less, Wasting Less

Birch families also often undergo a personal transformation when it comes to food waste. Unlike at many food pantries, where clients receive a pre-packed box of food, Birch shoppers get 50 minutes to shop—though what’s available at the warehouse varies widely from week to week and day to day. Sometimes, there are 20 different varieties and flavors of yogurt. At other times there’s no yogurt at all. Some produce is incredibly fresh, some is overripe. Staples such as white flour and tomato sauce are hard to come by, meaning creativity is sometimes required to make a meal.

Still, the sheer array of goods at the warehouse is dizzying, including many organic, high-end, and novelty products that cost top dollar at the grocery store. There are snacks, hot sauces, ice creams, and teas galore. Limits on some items—”one box per family,” or “choose two different items from specialty shelf”—ensure that less abundant products get shared equitably. Everything else is unlimited. Shopping is done on an honor system—families promise not to sell the food or give it away outside the household—and there is no checkout counter or cash register.

Every year, new families calculate the retail value of all the items they receive during one month of shopping at Birch, as if they had purchased them at the grocery store. On average, that value is about $1,000. It’s a significant amount, but that number also exposes a flaw of the Birch program, or rather a flaw of human nature—yet it’s one that over time can turn into a strength.

The incredible abundance of goods at the warehouse can be overwhelming at first, making it difficult not to take home more than you need. During our first few months at Birch, we certainly took a lot more than we ever would have if we were shopping at a store and paying for it all. After becoming Birch members, as our pantry and fridge filled to the brim, I kept asking myself, “Do we really need quite so many boxes of organic quinoa, slabs of grass-fed butter, and boxes of artisanal crackers?!”

I felt incredibly grateful for being able to bring these products home and proud for rescuing them from the landfill. Yet, I also worried we were learning to want too much. I fretted that we were contributing to our planet’s waste problem by consuming too many fancy organic foods—pistachios, almond flour, apricots. It was like being invited to an all-you-can-eat buffet and overeating every single time.

Suzanne Birch told me most families struggle with this impulse—at least at first. The program doesn’t want to control what people take, she said, especially as many come to Birch after significant hardships. “When you have gone without for a long time, it’s hard to pass it by,” she adds.

But here is the beauty of Birch: Its financial literacy program also teaches participants how to spend less, consume less, and want less in order to reach freedom from debt. At the grocery store, people usually think about whether they can afford to buy something. At Birch, they start thinking: Is this the best choice for my family? Do we really need it? It took time, self-reflection, and a determined mouse who started nibbling at our pantry’s overflowing provisions to help us realize we did not need to take it all.

Making Birch More Diverse

Suzanne Birch says the nonprofit still has work to do to improve its program. At the top of the list is making Birch more diverse and culturally responsive, especially given that food insecurity and financial instability are more rampant in immigrant communities and communities of color. Currently, less than 1 percent of Birch participants are Black, 1 percent are Asian, and just 6 percent are Latinx (in a county where 6 percent of the population is Black, 12 percent is Latinx, and 8 percent is Asian). Also, the nonprofit is located on the edge of Rockwood, one of Oregon’s most diverse neighborhoods where Latinx people make up one third of the population, making it imperative to widen access.

Since Birch isn’t just a food pantry, communication for non-English speakers is a major challenge, Suzanne Birch said. In the past, the nonprofit employed translators, but the results were awkward and inefficient. Within the next 10 years, she said, Birch plans to hire a Spanish-speaking financial counselor and other multilingual staff, and to translate its written curriculum to better serve more diverse families.

“Many local Spanish speakers fit into our target demographic,” said Birch. “And we ultimately don’t want language to be a limiting factor of who can receive our services.”

With the holiday season upon us and so many still struggling with food insecurity, I have often wondered why there aren’t more nonprofits like Birch. It’s easier to hand out a food box than to accompany someone for a few years as they attempt to make a significant life change, Rowlett, the warehouse manager, told me. But when you do, the results are lasting.

“We’re not just here moving boxes,” he said. “We’re supporting families as they go through tough times. When someone comes into the program, the moment they can finally breathe and see a path forward . . . watching that transformation unfold is worth it.”

The post How I Changed My Relationship to Grocery Shopping—and My Financial Future appeared first on Civil Eats.

In ‘Required Reading,’ Indigenous Leaders Call for Landback Reforms and Climate Justice

Gosia Wozniacka — Wed, 03 Nov 2021 08:00:10 +0000

November 15, 2021 update: As a new global agreement was struck at the COP26 summit, Indigenous communities lamented the lack of a complete phase-out of coal and fossil fuel subsidies, and criticized the over-reliance on offset mechanisms such as carbon markets. Read more.

As the world watches what transpires at COP26, the United Nations climate summit taking place this week in Glasgow, the U.N. has blasted governments and businesses for utterly failing to meet their climate obligations. There’s a sense that time is running out and radical change is the only hope–including a sweeping transformation of industrial agricultural practices to more sustainable and regenerative ones.

At the same time, Indigenous peoples from the U.S. and from across the globe are converging in Scotland to talk about the climate impacts on their communities and to advocate for their own solutions–ones they have successfully used to manage land for millennia. And on the brink of crisis, people may finally be willing to listen.

The new book, Required Reading: Climate Justice, Adaptation + Investing in Indigenous Power, can serve as a practical guide to this movement—during COP26 and after. It was curated and produced by the NDN Collective, a national organization based in South Dakota. It’s a handbook for grassroots advocates, Indigenous leaders, and mainstream politicians on how to support Indigenous communities and their allies in healing our planet and moving forward to a post-oil future.

The book features in-depth essays and analytical pieces on topics ranging from the growing LANDBACK movement to return Indigenous lands to the impacts of lithium extraction in the Andean Altiplano and the critique of mainstream environmentalists’ rigidity when addressing climate change.

Civil Eats recently spoke with Kailea Frederick, NDN Collective’s climate justice organizer and the book’s editor; Jade Begay, the group’s director of climate justice; and Demetrius Johnson, NDN’s LANDBACK campaign organizer, about the power of kelp farming, the problems with carbon markets, and why climate solutions don’t need to be “scalable.”

Frederick, Begay, and Johnson are currently in Scotland as part of NDN Collective’s COP26 delegation and have been handing the book out to U.S. governmental officials, policymakers, and world leaders there this week.

Before we get into the essays in Required Reading, can you talk about what the NDN Collective is and its role in the climate justice movement?

Jade Begay: We are an Indigenous-led collective that aims to build Indigenous power through advocacy and philanthropy. Our work in philanthropy isn’t just about doing granting and sharing resources, it’s about intentionally organizing within philanthropy. Indigenous communities receive just 0.4 percent of all philanthropic dollars in the U.S. [although they represent 2 percent of the population]. When we do the math and we acknowledge that Indigenous peoples protect and sustain 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, it makes zero sense that we receive a smidgen of the resources, especially in investment into nonprofits and frontline environmental organizations. So our collective builds strategies to dismantle white supremacy within philanthropy so we can remove barriers and gatekeeping in that sector.

NDN Collective also has a subsidiary for-profit [NDN Partners], where we do community development and support tribes and Indigenous entrepreneurs who are building regenerative, renewable solutions to combat racial injustice and climate injustice. And we have an impact and investing arm, which does similar work to help finance projects that are really meant to move our communities into the realm of building regenerative economies and local systems to address deep-seated inequities. Our advocacy arm houses four campaigns: climate justice, LANDBACK, racial equity, and education equity.

Kailea Frederick: Our climate justice campaign has the same goal as the collective: We’re trying to build power throughout Indigenous communities to tackle the climate crisis. We run and support campaigns aimed at ending extraction, contamination, and violence because these three are closely interlinked and very prevalent on our land and our territories. We also do policy work, broader coalition building, and advocacy.

One of the main messaging points in our book is that Indigenous peoples hold climate solutions inherently through our cultures and through our land-based practices, which we have not lost touch with. That’s a direct bridge to our LANDBACK campaign work because returning land back to Indigenous peoples is a core part of climate mitigation work. We need land returned in large quantities at this moment so that Indigenous peoples can be in direct conversation with the land and engaged in their traditional practices, which inherently mitigate climate change.

More Americans are becoming aware that they’re living on land that was taken by white settlers who exterminated many of the original Indigenous inhabitants. Your LANDBACK campaign is a direct response to these injustices. Can you talk about that work and why it’s so important?

Demetrius Johnson: Our LANDBACK campaign focuses on making sure that before we help grow other people’s gardens, we can take care of our own. We need to understand that public land is stolen land. We’re talking about national parks, national forests, and other wild areas that are now areas of recreation but once were [Indigenous] lands, which we took care of. We’re now focused on reclaiming these public lands, which are under the control of the federal government. One of our most important works currently is reclaiming the Black Hills, which are located near Mni Lúzahaŋ Otȟúŋwahe, or Rapid City, South Dakota.

That’s where Indigenous activists protested stolen land and white supremacy
and were arrested last summer when Donald Trump visited Mount Rushmore National Memorial. What is the significance of the Black Hills?

Johnson: The Black Hills protest is where the seed of our LANDBACK campaign sprouted from. But the narrative of LANDBACK didn’t start there. Its history goes back to the time of our people resisting colonization, resisting invading governments. More recently, the term was popularized by a group of Indigenous youth who started making memes and it caught on. Everyone can make it their own and I think that’s why it’s a very powerful campaign and movement. It can be used domestically in the United States, but it can also be used internationally.

LANDBACK also directly connects with the issue of climate. For Indigenous peoples to survive, we need to have a connection to the land. When you steal land from us, you’re literally killing us, you’re committing acts of genocide. What happens to the land happens to us. And this violence has been happening since the arrival of settlers. We also need to understand that Indigenous peoples hold the keys to saving the world, and that’s not hyperbole. Within the last few decades, we’ve seen an increase in wildfires, droughts, and floods in places that were previously protected by Indigenous peoples. What we are seeing now is a direct result of taking land away from people who loved it and putting it into the hands of people who use it for profit.

Even today, when we try to protect our sacred sites, when we try to protect our land and water, the military and police come after us, arrest us, even kill us. So, as part of the LANDBACK movement, we have to take a stance on militarism, incarceration, and capitalism—because they are all related and all of them actively kill our people.

The book amplifies an array of Native solutions to the climate crisis and the fact that Indigenous people are in the unique position to develop them. Can you share some examples of solutions happening across the country?

Frederick: Jade is a board member of Native Conservancy, an Eyak-led organization based in Alaska that’s working to empower the Indigenous community through kelp farming and other projects. Kelp farming is a huge opportunity for emission drawdown across our oceans and Native Conservancy is doing incredible work in this area.

Begay: The executive director and founder of Native Conservancy, Dune Lankard, created the first Native-led and Native-owned land trust. Ever since, it has been responsible for protecting large swaths of land—and not just putting it under Indigenous peoples’ management, but actually taking it in a very brave new direction by moving those lands out of the corporate model. Unlike federally recognized tribes in the so-called U.S., where tribal councils run sovereign governments on reservations, Alaskan Natives are required to organize as corporations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).

There’s a big effort now for Alaska Natives to pull out of these corporate systems. Dune not only pulled land from the authority of non-Native folks, but has made sure that it’s also not incorporated. It’s fully managed by a non-capitalist entity.

NDN Collective has recently joined as a partner in Native Conservancy’s work to scale up a regenerative local economy rooted in the traditional knowledge and wisdom of the Eyak people. It is focused on enhancing and revitalizing the relationship between the fish and the kelp. Their endeavor is to build an economic model of farming kelp that not only cleans the ocean and helps remove carbon dioxide but can also serve as a food, fuel, and infrastructure source. It’s a great example of taking land back and having a plan to go with it to revitalize community and culture. And although the Eyak community has lost all of its Indigenous speakers, by working with the land and doing cultural work there’s an effort to bring the language back.

That’s a great example of a solution that not only tackles climate change but also strengthens the Indigenous community.

Begay: What sets NDN Collective apart from other organizations is that we’re able to invest in these types of models and in Indigenous leadership. Take the work we’re supporting with a buffalo sanctuary in South Dakota. [Sixty buffalo were released on the Wolakota Buffalo Range and Wildlife Sanctuary, 28,000 acres of grasslands where the Rosebud Sioux Tribe plans to raise up to 1,500 bison to revitalize the land and the tribe’s cultural connections to the buffalo.] That’s holistic systems change work. We need all communities to see these models and ask how can they adapt them. We want to encourage our communities to think about these type of approaches that can really shift the systems have been exploiting us and making us sick.

The essays in the book discuss the importance of localized projects. How do you reach a balance between doing local work and sharing solutions among tribes and outside Indigenous communities so that the projects and their impacts are scalable and have more impact?

Begay: This word “scalable” is one I hear all the time in the climate space, and I really have to turn this word on its own head and reframe it. Because we don’t need scale. The term “scalable” is rooted in capitalism. And what we’re needing right now is anti-capitalist solutions to the climate crisis. When we show up in spaces like COP26, “scalable solutions” is what the majority of industry, tech, and governments are trying to do. It’s a buzzword. What we do is look at solutions in terms of an Indigenous community, nation, or tribe. Each of these communities has its own traditional ecological knowledge to inform its own solutions. We’re not interested in blanket solutions that are meant to keep production or consumption going at the rate that it has been going at.

Things will be changing so rapidly that we need to have regions and local communities adapt in the ways that make sense to those ecosystems, and it’s not going to look the same for everyone. So we’re welcoming, encouraging and leaning into these local, regenerative solutions that really honor the biodiversity of our people and our communities.

Frederick: The reality is we are heading into a post-oil future, one that must move at a much slower pace and will involve smaller lives. But it will also involve the possibility of more enriching lives. One thing that our campaign asks is: What if the best times are ahead of us, while simultaneously asking what does the post-oil world look like? We’re looking to bring forward ideas and models of a different way of engaging in day-to-day life and very different ideas of what success looks and feels like. We just can’t get around the fact that we need to move away from fossil fuels.

The opportunity comes through inviting as many people as possible across as many diverse communities, regions, and geographies as possible to be sitting with a question of what does a local, regenerative economy look like in their own communities.

Can you speak to the barriers for Indigenous communities across the country in implementing their own climate solutions?

Begay: It’s systemic racism in all aspects of [preventing us from] being self-determining. When it comes to a just transition away from fossil fuels, one of the biggest barriers is resources. A just transition towards renewable energy will, I hope, ensure that regenerative and sustainable economies are a part of our lifeways and of how we move in the future. The reality is that a lot of our communities and tribal economies are dependent on fossil fuels right now, which is unsustainable. This drives up climate change, but it also makes us vulnerable. If there’s a pipeline leak or the closure of a mine or a refinery—whatever that tribe or community is dependent on— it devastates that community. So it’s also about recognizing that removing ourselves as dependent on or reducing the dependency on fossil fuels also protects us from future catastrophes.

One of the essays in the book heavily criticizes so-called “nature-based solutions.” These include carbon markets that rely on crops or trees to sequester carbon. Can you talk about why regenerative agriculture, reforestation, and carbon markets can be misguided, and what the alternatives are?

Frederick: There are quite a few issues when it comes to carbon trading. One of the biggest ones is that it allows governments and companies to continue polluting and emitting. Actual solutions are pretty simple. We need to stop emitting at the scale we’re emitting at and we need to do drawdown. Another problem is that carbon trading can lead to continued colonization and land dispossession of Indigenous peoples, including land grabbing that’s happening as different companies are trying to buy up their credits. Then there are issues around companies or governments double-counting their emission reductions so it looks like they’re reducing more emissions than they actually are.

Begay: We should be concerned when companies like Nestlé are promoting “nature-based solutions.” It should be a big red flag that the companies and industries that have blood on their hands, that have been human rights violators for decades, are now promoting these types of solutions. “Nature-based solutions” are greenwashing. It’s just a tool to continue business as usual. And as these companies take land—yes, this is a Land Back issue—to do so-called reforestation or tree planting, they are displacing Indigenous peoples, especially in the Global South. It’s complex, and we also acknowledge that some Indigenous communities have promoted “nature-based solutions.” But we also know some of these communities are put between a rock and a hard place; it’s about their livelihoods and putting food on the table—or not. And so they’re forced into these decisions, compelled to join false solutions or to work with the oil industry. We want to build the conditions in which those are not the only options for Indigenous communities across the world.

Johnson: When we’re talking about regenerative economies, we’re ultimately talking about caretaking economies: how to take care of the land and take care of each other. And that’s something that we don’t have here in the U.S. Indigenous peoples understand that you don’t just take care of your nuclear family, but that we have responsibilities to the land and to our community. I’m not totally opposed to farmers getting compensated for drawing down carbon. But there needs to be a broader approach to regeneration: a systemic change for people to have their needs met, to have healthcare, electricity, enough food to eat, and the ability to access transportation. We don’t live in an era of scarcity; that’s a myth.

One of the essays in the book mentions that the climate justice movement will require serious commitments from white allies. How can non-Indigenous allies support Indigenous climate solutions, including NDN’s campaigns?

Johnson: We are establishing toolkits and resources to direct people on how to give land back, specifically spelling out what that process looks like. I’m also personally excited for a collaboration with Nuns & Nones. It’s a group of nuns nationwide that’s working on issues of social and climate justice. And these nuns are shifting resources and land from the church back into Indigenous communities. Finally, we’re writing to legislators and making presentations to our local tribal governments. Getting land back is going to take a lot of different avenues, a lot of different specialties and people to make it happen.

Frederick: Our climate justice campaign this year published a memo that we sent out to various offices within the White House and to Congress, titled “Mobilizing climate and environmental justice investments to Indigenous frontline communities.” And that’s one aspect we really need. We need support in terms of building out the infrastructure to move funding equitably and through a lens of justice.

This question also made me think of a meme I’ve seen circulating, a quote that resonates with me as someone who is half Black. It’s something like: “Slavery needs to be taught not as Black history but as white history.” This is a critical reframe. This work of advocating for Indigenous rights within the Indigenous led climate justice movement is often seen as only an Indigenous issue. When in fact, what we’re trying to do is create a planet that’s going to be just and habitable for everyone. That’s why it’s so important that colonization be taught globally not as the history of Indigenous peoples, but also as the history of those who come from the lineages of the colonizers.

I have quite a few friends who are direct descendants of original colonizers of North America. These are people whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, started a colony, or got down on one knee with the flag and said, “This land is now mine.” And they have been some of the most important relationships I’ve built and tended to over the last six or seven years of my life. Mostly because the friends that come from these lineages are willing to actually be honest about who they come from and what resources they have inherited and are currently holding. Some of the work they’re doing is just so critical. They’re the first in their lineage who understand the responsibility they hold to redistribute resources that were made off the backs of my mother’s people and off the land of my father’s people. They understand it doesn’t belong to them anymore and that a big part of showing up honestly in this world right now is starting to redistribute those resources.

Oftentimes, people reach out to me and say, “I’m the granddaughter of so and so, and I have so much guilt about all of this stuff.” And the one message I have is that it’s time to let go of the land, let go of the money. Brace yourself for what it means to participate in your family’s businesses and board spaces so that you can be an advocate and an active voice in moving funding. This is how you can show active solidarity, not just solidarity through reposting and reading a book.

The post In ‘Required Reading,’ Indigenous Leaders Call for Landback Reforms and Climate Justice appeared first on Civil Eats.

Climate Anxiety Takes a Growing Toll on Farmers

Gosia Wozniacka — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 08:00:28 +0000

Nikiko Masumoto grew up revering the peach trees and grape vines on her family’s farm in California’s Central Valley. The orchard and vineyard have been passed down through her Japanese American family for generations and their fruits were the juicy economic engines that fed her community and assured the farm’s survival.

But this year, there’s anguish in the peaceful groves as record-breaking heat waves, air-polluting wildfires, and droughts repeatedly pummel California. Warmer winters and more severe droughts spell poorer fruit sets and smaller fruit. And Masumoto, who returned 10 years ago to farm with her father, author and well-known farmer (and Civil Eats advisory board member) Mas Masumoto, will be responsible for transforming the farming operation so it remains viable into the future. It’s a calculus that likely includes using much less water and replacing some or all of the farm’s beloved peaches and grapes with other crops.

“We will need to adapt, even if it means the painful reality that I might not get to leave this living cathedral of memory—the orchards—to a next generation,” said Masumoto. “If it comes to it, I fear the weight of that grief.”

As climate change-fueled extreme weather events such as storms and droughts become more frequent and intense, farmers and others in the agriculture community across the country are increasingly feeling the brunt and contemplating a dark future. Beyond the inherent stress of farming, they face anxiety, depression, and grief linked to a fast-changing natural environment on which they’ve staked their livelihoods—at a time when few mental health-related resources are available to them.

“The weather has become a more dominant factor in farmers’ stress than it was in times past,” said Mike Rosmann, an Iowa farmer and agricultural psychologist. “We’re seeing more concern. Even the farmers who are climate deniers say spring is coming earlier than it used to or are seeing longer periods without rainfall.”

Farming In the Era of Climate Change

This year is proving to be one more in a series of disastrous years for farmers. Intense heat waves have ravaged the western U.S.—from Washington state to California and Arizona—and most of the region is experiencing extreme or exceptional drought conditions, leading to severe irrigation water restrictions, farmers fallowing fields, and ranchers culling cattle they can no longer feed. Mega-fires across the West have destroyed crops and infrastructure. Drought is also spreading in the Northern Plains and the Midwest, putting key commodity crops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans at risk. And in the Northeast, producers have seen repeated heavy rains this summer, and post-Hurricane Ida flooding imperil crops and food distribution networks.

These ongoing, often long-term disasters are impacting farmers’ well-being, experts say. The farmer crisis hotline run by Farm Aid (1-800-FARM-AID or through an online form) has seen a significant increase in calls related to “natural disasters that are exacerbated if not caused by climate change,” said Jennifer Fahy, the group’s communications director.

For Lori Mercer, a Farm Aid hotline operator, several recent calls come to mind. An older California rancher called to say he had woken up one morning to take care of his livestock—but when he opened up his well, nothing came up but sand. He couldn’t afford the $15,000 to $30,000 it would take to drill a new well, Mercer said.

“The dearth of care is incredible. In farming communities, people just carry on and put their health as the last priority.”

Another call came from the western region of the U.S.: a producer’s entire farm, including his farmhouse and all of his crops, had burned down in a raging wildfire. His plea to the hotline, Mercer said, was elemental: He needed help finding emergency housing. And a more recent call from a farmer in one of the southeastern states devastated by Hurricane Ida revealed another desperate situation: livestock missing and/or killed, crops ruined, all of the fences, the power, and the computer down, and all crops in the freezer and fridge storage spoiled.

“It’s terribly hard for farmers to talk,” said Mercer, who stressed that the calls are fully confidential. “And the calls we get are just the tip of an iceberg. Most don’t reach out because of their streak of independence and pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality.”

Farmers calling the hotline get to vent about their experience to supportive listeners and often get help crafting a plan of action, Mercer said. They receive referrals to local organizations in their county or state that can help them address the crisis on the ground and support them in its aftermath. Farm Aid also links farmers with a slew of resources and sends out $500 emergency checks to help the farmers with bills such as household expenses and food. (It can take up to six months to two years to get help through a relief program, said Mercer.)

But in recent years, in response to mounting calls for help related to the climate, Farm Aid has shifted to organizing workshops that can proactively help farmers address the climate crisis. The workshops focus on how farmers and ranchers can become more resilient to future disasters by implementing sustainable methods of farming such as rotational grazing, soil regeneration, and habitat restoration. Others train farmers on how to document their losses and apply for federal financial relief.

The increase in climate-related disasters and calls for help is also forcing the organization to reframe the very idea of disaster relief, said Fahy, the communications director. In the past, isolated natural disasters motivated giving. But in recent years, getting the public interested in giving money to a group of farmers facing a localized crisis is more challenging, she said, given that such weather events have become “the new normal.”

“How do we raise public awareness and ask for support when the disasters are a constant, ongoing extreme situation?” Fahy said.

Painful Decisions on Family Farms

Climate change is especially stressful for beginning farmers who must find a way to continue farming and remain profitable for decades to come. For Nikiko Masumoto, whose family grows organic peaches, nectarines, and grapes on 80 acres 15 miles southeast of Fresno, the pressure and potential losses are significant. Already, the Masumoto family has pulled some vines and trees to fallow land because of dwindling groundwater reserves and a lack of rain and snow that in the past fed surface water sources. They have reduced their irrigation by 20 to 30 percent, leading to smaller peaches, which are more difficult to sell.

The family is looking at planting more drought-resistant perennial crops such as fig or olive trees—or even annual vegetable or grain crops, Masumoto said. This would be a radical change, but it might be necessary. And as she’s struggling with the weight of the decision, she remembers the resilience of her jiichan (grandfather) who was imprisoned during World War II in a Japanese-American concentration camp and later returned to Central California to buy the farm’s first 40 acres and plant its first crop of peaches.

“Climate change can get depressing,” said Masumoto, “but I think of my ancestors and their incredible will to survive. I have no right to give up now.”

Forty miles west, in Madera, another young farmer contemplates the uncertain future of her farming family. Allie Quady said her family’s winery, which grows some of its own grapes, had to drill a new well this year because the casing of the old one was broken and it was pulling up sand. And because the water table had dropped significantly—10 feet per year for the past seven years, compared to only 10 feet over a 20-year span prior to that—the new well had to go in much deeper, said Quady, the winery’s health, safety, and organization manager.

It has taken three months for Quady Winery to get its new well because hundreds of other wells in Madera County have also needed replacement. The county’s aquifer is vastly over-drafted by farmers, some of whom rely entirely on groundwater that is not being replenished due to long-term drought. The Quady family’s yields were much lower as a result, but the grapes were saved, Quady said, thanks to the back-breaking work of the winemaker who went out every day, three times a day, even at temperatures that surpassed 100 degrees to check the drip lines and replace a filter that kept some water flowing.

“It was very stressful . . . to not be able to water the grapes consistently and efficiently,” Quady said. “[They] do die pretty quick if you don’t get the water to them.”

The family is contemplating moving some of its operations to other parts of California, Quady said, although its muscat grapes require heat as well as abundant water, which is scarce everywhere in the state. If the water runs out, Quady also worries about the livelihood of the area farmers who sell grapes to her family.

“We’re tied to the local community of growers,” Quady said. “We all rise and fall together.”

Diminishing Mental Health Stigma in Farm Country

Small- and mid-scale farmers and ranchers have long experienced high levels of stress and anxiety. They can’t control prices or trade policies, and many have faced increasing debt levels and diminishing incomes.

Farmers are also known for their grit, self-reliance, and perseverance, despite holding down one of the most dangerous occupations. They’re used to working alone, in far-flung isolated areas. They also are among the occupational groups with the highest rate of suicide. But, experts say, climate change is challenging the very nature of farming—and causing farmers even greater emotional distress—because the job engages directly with the shifting forces of nature.

And yet, the stigma of seeking help in rural communities remains real, said Fahy. “Everyone knows everyone and knows that’s your truck parked in the therapist’s parking lot,” she said. And many farmers continue to lack access to care. In some Iowa counties, for example, there’s one professional mental health care provider for roughly every 12,000 residents. Another barrier is the lack of therapists, behavioral health care professionals, and extension specialists who actually understand the nature of farming. And even when enough trained providers are available, farmers often lack the health insurance to cover care expenses, Fahy said.

“The dearth of care is incredible,” she said. “In farming communities, people just carry on and put their health as the last priority.” But, Fahy added, there’s growing willingness in recent years to acknowledge the stress farmers face and services are expanding rapidly in states including Illinois, Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire.

The shift toward more services and increased openness in the farming population are partly due to a transition to the term “behavioral health,” which carries less stigma than mental health, said Rosmann, the agricultural psychologist. “Farm stress” is also commonly used.

“We once thought it was sacred, but depression is now viewed more like diabetes, it’s something we have to accept and manage,” Rosmann said.

“I think the time is coming where the understanding of how we manage our behavior is a central factor in our success as farmers.”

To improve access to behavioral health among farmers, Rosmann said the federal government should establish a permanent program—and permanent funding—similar to the AgrAbility program that supports disabled farmers or programs that support veteran farmers. Currently, the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) grant program, established in 2008 and run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, is up for reauthorization in the farm bill every five years. The grants fund hotlines, training and workshops, support groups, and outreach services. Last year, NIFA awarded $28.7 million to four regional entities and funded additional Farm Aid hotline operators and expanded hotline hours, among other services.

More research and academic training is also needed, including support for agricultural behavioral programs that are just getting established, said Rosmann, who is working on the first textbook in the field. Behavioral skills—including coping with stress, establishing a support network, curbing substance abuse, or effectively managing family relationships and employees—also need to be taught in agricultural and vocational programs, he added.

“I think the time is coming where the understanding of how we manage our behavior is a central factor in our success as farmers,” Rosmann said.

Farmers who are bearing the burden of climate change should also consider modifying their farming practices if the current ones no longer work, he added. Research has shown that farmers’ job satisfaction—and hence their emotional well-being—is often higher when they employ more sustainable, non-extractive practices, Rosmann said. In one study, done in Iowa in the 1990s, researchers from Iowa State University found that sustainable farmers reported “improved physical health, reduced job stress, more challenging and satisfying work activities, and more satisfying family and community relations”—all potential boons to their mental health.

“When you feel you are farming in a way that benefits consumers and sustains the resources needed to farm, you feel satisfaction. And satisfaction is more important than money,” Rosmann said. “It’s hard to change, but if farmers don’t, they’re going to lose out.”

Agricultural Community Feels Weight of Desperation

Matt Angell, a well fixer in Madera, knows first-hand that a farming community is more than just its farmers—and that climate change is also causing distress to everyone who supports agriculture. In recent years, an unprecedented number of well drillers, pump service people, and water district officials—who are under constant, intense pressure to keep agricultural wells running—have suffered heart attacks and strokes, said Angell, the owner of Madera Pumps. During the 2012–2016 mega-drought, Angell was diagnosed with diabetes because, he said, he ate dozens of donuts every day to keep up his energy and smother the incredible stress.

“We’re going after deeper water, and as we go deeper, the aquifers aren’t as strong. Tier 3 drilling is coming. It’s kind of like Stage 4 cancer; it’s terminal.”

Homeowners in agricultural areas are also facing extreme stress levels, Angell said. In counties like Madera, where more than 720,000 acres—representing more than half of the county’s land—are harvested and many people live near the fields, home wells are going dry as the farmers dig increasingly deeper ones in a race to suck water out of the dwindling aquifer. Those homeowners, just like the farmers, also call well fixers for help. Often, the farmers and homeowners are the well fixers’ family and friends.

“We’re a community. People are connected with one another. And when wells start to fail, people reach out in desperation. Desperation then turns to fear and anger,” Angell said, emotions that everyone in a farming town must face just about daily during the drought.

This year, Angell said, he is seeing an unprecedented number of wells drilled during the previous drought broken, their steel casings crushed by subsidence. And because the water table has dropped down further than Angell has ever seen, new wells must now be drilled even deeper to hit water. This is likely the third and final round of drilling before well fixers hit granite and/or water that’s too salty to irrigate crops, said Angell. And it could spell a decline of the community he calls home.

“We’re going after deeper water, and as we go deeper, the aquifers aren’t as strong,” Angell said. “Tier 3 drilling is coming. It’s kind of like Stage 4 cancer; it’s terminal.”

Angell is concerned that the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, which was signed into law in 2014 and requires addressing the groundwater overdraft by the early 2040’s, won’t make a difference in time to save the aquifer or its farming community. He said most farmers he works with—despite the deep anxiety they feel about the drought—are unwilling to change their practices. And it’s probable, he said, that unless they soon pull some trees and fallow land, the aquifer will continue to disappear.

“We’re not trying to solve the problem, we’re just kicking the can down the road,” he said. “Everybody’s in denial.”

Quady agrees. She says for now, the race is on as to which farmer can dig the deepest well—which causes anxiety to the small and mid-size farmers who will likely lose out in that race. “I feel a lot of frustration because if everybody would recognize the problem, we could find solutions,” she said.

Mental Health Resources

If you or someone you know needs immediate mental health support, there are a number of national hotlines available:

Farm Aid Hotline: 800-FARM-AID (327-6243) Monday-Friday 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. ET
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-TALK (8255) 24/7
211, a comprehensive hotline that connects callers with local resources
911 in an emergency

The Rural Health Information Hub also maintains a detailed page dedicated to farmer mental health and suicide prevention.

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