In his new book, What are Animal Rights For?, author Steve Cooke acknowledges this point straightaway. Norms surrounding how we treat animals are deeply entrenched, so a world where no one eats animals—and in fact, those animals have legal personhood—is so far afield from anything we are familiar with that it is hard to wrap our minds around.

But there is a long history of different groups and belief systems that value kindness toward animals or believe in the rights of animals, going back millenia. When it comes to what is codified into law today, the US has laws affording certain protections to animals, but they only go so far. Meanwhile, a movement to give animals the rights of personhood—a legal acknowledgment of the possession of rights—is unfolding globally. Around the world, this designation has been granted to animals, waterways, corporations and more.

Cooke, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Leicester, believes that a world based on animal rights is the type of world we should work toward. As far from our current reality as it is, he hopes that his book will give people some of the tools they need to start imagining that world.

This book, which will be featured in a launch event November 15, is part of Bristol University Press’ What is it For? series, which asks tough questions about what a better future could look like. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: Your book advocates for a society built around nonhuman animal rights, where animals have legal personhood. What inspired you to write this book?

Steve Cooke: My research is all about animal rights. I think animals ought to have rights, and there’s the question of how to get them to having rights. How do we move from the world we’re in now to the world we might have—the ideal world? I think lots of the puzzles around answering that question are connected with the imagination. One of the reasons for writing the book was to try and give people who read it the tools to imagine a possible future where nonhuman animals can have rights. And so the book is aimed at members of the public as well as academic audiences—I wanted to be able to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and just give them the conceptual and imaginative tools to think about this. 

MF: You say that right now, animals generally only have rights insofar as they don’t conflict with human goals or interests. How can an understanding of nonhuman animal sentience change our perception of what rights animals should have?

SC: It relies on our scientific understanding of nonhuman animals, and the scientific understanding of a great number of the kind of creatures that we eat is that they are capable of very complex emotions. They’re capable of feeling fear, of pain, of happiness. But also, the more cutting-edge research on the psychology of animals shows that they can also experience things like grief, they can build complex relationships, anticipate the future, form friendships. 

So, even animals like pigs and cows; cows have really rich emotional lives. You might get cows that are more likely—and you’ll know this if you’ve worked on a farm—to be curious or more fearful. So, they have individual personalities, they have preferred grooming partners and feeding partners. They have these rich lives because they’re social beings. We wouldn’t be able to farm them if they weren’t social beings. It’s kind of required by domestication and farming to have these animals that are capable of forming these relationships. So, we know that they’re capable of rich emotional lives. But when it comes to thinking about that in social settings and as individuals in the society that we live in today, very often, we downplay the sentience of these animals—that capacity to feel. And that’s a real problem for achieving change.

Pigs in a pen. (Photo from Shutterstock)

MF: In the book, you explain that there is a difference between animal rights and animal welfare. Can you explain that difference?

SC: One of the reasons I like doing this with nonhuman animals is it also helps us think about humans. When we think about human rights, fundamental human rights that we have, like the rights against being killed or assaulted, rights to property—those things prevent other people from using us in order to benefit themselves or to achieve social benefits. 

A rights paradigm around animals would be nonhuman animals are provided the same sorts of protections that will prevent us from using another animal for the sake of our own benefit, whereas the welfare paradigm that governs most of our interactions with animals at the moment says that there are limits on what we can do to them. But those limits are really determined by human benefits. So, you should act to minimize suffering, but suffering isn’t ruled out if we can identify a benefit to ourselves. 

The animal rights paradigm is focused on protecting the animal for the sake of the animal and not for the sake of us, whereas the welfare paradigm allows our benefits and our interests to sometimes overcome, to trump the most serious fundamental interests of other animals. And that’s the key difference.

MF: One of the big ways that humans interact with nonhuman animals is through agriculture. In the book, you explore the idea that an animal rights society wouldn’t have to exclude animals from agriculture completely, but it would look a lot different. What kinds of practices would remain, versus which ones would go away?

SC: This is tricky, because I’ve worked on farms for a long time. But, certainly, we wouldn’t be killing animals and breeding them for the sake of killing them. [Industrialized] farming practices would violate the most important animal interests—their interest in not suffering, their interest in continued existence, not being killed. So, those sort of fundamental farming practices of meat, milk, leather are going to be ruled out. 

Now, there are cases where you can think of situations where you might keep animals in ways that respect their rights, that don’t harm them and that might benefit them. And then we could gain some benefits in return. So, there are cases where we can think of animals working as laborers almost, where they might gain labor rights in return. Their labor might contribute to plant-based farming. Perhaps, chickens laying eggs might not violate their rights or sheep that shed wool naturally or where the wool can be harvested without causing suffering. Those kinds of cases might be compatible with respect for nonhuman animal rights. Now, not all theorists are going to agree with me on that. And that does open up some scope between an animal rights position and a strict vegan position; they might not be necessarily the same thing. But you can see there are some highly reduced areas where we might continue to use animals.

A flock of chickens. (Photo from Shutterstock)

MF: Human diet is a big part of this conversation, but widespread diet shifts are notably hard to achieve. You point out in the book that, in an animal rights society, there are probably some living species that could supplement our diet. What are those? And why would they be options?

SC: If we’re talking about the fundamental rights of animals, those are grounded in sentience, and there might be some species that aren’t sentient. There are likely to be at least some animals that haven’t got a capacity to feel, have no sense of self that persists over time. An animal rights position might allow for the consumption or use of those. 

The more likely scenario, I think, is cultured animal products, lab-grown in bioreactors, using harvested cells from animals that have been gathered without causing any suffering. And there’s massive amounts of research going into that at the moment, huge breakthroughs have been made, and there’s a good chance that in the future, meat will continue to be eaten. But it won’t ever have been anywhere near an actual animal, which is almost a stranger position to imagine for the future than the idea of animal rights to some people.

MF: You end the book writing about trust. In a lot of contexts, including agriculture, animals come to trust us and we ultimately end their lives. Why did you choose to include a discussion of trust between humans and other species in this book?

SC: Because I think rights aren’t enough. We don’t change anything in the world without changing people’s attitudes as well. The kind of ways that we relate to others really matter in terms of our intentions and our attitudes, as well as our beliefs that we have about the kind of rules that we ought to follow. And trust, I think, is one of the most important ways in which we interact with nonhuman animals, and not just in terms of farm animals, but also in terms of our companions. I like to try and think about the kind of world that would not only be just and everyone’s rights are protected, but also in terms of being good. 

I think the nonhuman animals that we engage in relationships with ought to be able to trust us. There’s something very wrong with cultivating a relationship, that by its very nature puts one party in a position of vulnerability, that’s the nature of trust; when you trust someone you become vulnerable to them, you make it easier for that person to harm them. And so many of our relationships, particularly with animals, that we then go on to kill for meat, are that kind of relationship. We make them vulnerable. And our emotional relationship with them makes it easier for them to be transported to slaughter, to be moved around the farm to be separated from their children—these are the necessary components of animal agriculture. And I think they don’t just violate your right, they also breach your trust. And I think if we wanted a good society, it would be the kind of society where we could be trusted as individuals. 

The post What if Animals Had the Same Rights as Humans? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The groups are referring to a policy rider in the Fiscal Year 2024 Agriculture Appropriations bill. The rider prevents the USDA from “promulgating, implementing, or enforcing” its proposed rules to strengthen the P&S Act.

The P&S Act is intended to level the playing field, promoting competition for farmers and ranchers. But it’s been notoriously undermined for decades, resulting in a handful of corporations running the vast majority of meat and poultry production, and using lobbyists to influence legislation. This consolidation of power and profit means that many meat producers are at the mercy of these conglomerates, which have come under scrutiny for price fixing in the past. During the height of COVID-19, amid supply chain breakdowns, beef and hog ranchers were struggling, while meat packers saw record profits. 

The Biden administration has released executive orders to look into the P&S Act and promote competition in the industry, and the executives of the “big four” meatpacking conglomerates have faced harsh criticism from opponents on both sides of the political aisle. The USDA has even proposed rules that would require poultry companies to be transparent about contract terms and increase protections against retaliation from major meatpacking corporations. 

However, the rider attached to the FY24 act would prevent the USDA from writing, preparing or publishing rules that could strengthen the P&S Act.  

In response, 102 groups have submitted an open letter to the House Committee on Appropriations, urging the removal of the rider. 

“This rider is an unacceptable attack on the ability of the Department of Agriculture to do its job: protecting American farmers and ranchers and ensuring fair and competitive markets,” the letter states. “Instead of carrying water for multinational meatpacking corporations, we urge the House Appropriations Committee to stand with American farmers and ranchers and reject any attempts to limit the Secretary’s authority under the Packers and Stockyards Act, or the USDA’s capacity to fully and effectively enforce it.”

Signatories of the letter include the Farm Action Fund, the National Farmers Union, National Center for Health Research, Center For Food Safety and Farm Aid, along with several state-run groups of independent cattle ranchers and farms. 

Along with the signatories, Farm Action’s chief strategy officer, Joe Maxwell, told media that the bill “is a blatant act to protect the world’s largest corporations at the expense of America’s farmers and ranchers.”

The bill passed the markup stage this week, with a 37-24 vote along party lines. However, either the House or the Senate could strike the wording from the bill during their individual votes.

The post Farm Groups Urge Legislators to Allow Changes to the Packers and Stockyards Act appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Colorful paintings by local artists hang on the walls. There are reference books such as “Medicinal Mushrooms: An Essential Guide” and recipes for dishes such as Smoky Spanish Style Oyster Mushrooms. A stuffed gnome sits on a window sill. 

The refrigerated display case is where buyers can find Collar City’s crop: the specialty mushrooms produced in its three climate-controlled grow rooms.  

Each room houses vertical racks, lined with brown blocks of substrate that provide the nutrition and energy mushrooms require to grow and fruit. Just 320 square feet in total, the grow rooms yield approximately 150 pounds of mushrooms per week. At any given moment, a half-dozen different kinds of mushrooms are in production.  

“We have mountains of mushrooms right now,” Avery Stempel, owner of Collar City, informs a customer eyeing the oyster, shiitake, lion’s mane and king trumpets in the case. “Want me to put a mix together?” 

Avery Stempel, co-owner of Collar City Mushrooms, shows off some of the mushrooms in his grow room. Photography by Sara Foss.

Collar City, established in 2020 by Stempel and his partner, Amy Hood, is premised on the idea that to know mushrooms is to love them. However, most Americans need a better introduction to the wide diversity of edible fungi species, many of which can be found in their own backyards. Stempel and Hood, for instance, began loving mushrooms through foraging. 

“I would go to the forest, and finding that splash of color, the mysterious mushroom that just suddenly appeared, was always fascinating to me,” says Stempel. “When Amy and I got together, one of the things that connected us was our phones were filled with pictures of mushrooms.” After the two dated for a little while, they began talking about starting a mushroom farm. 

It was mostly a pipe dream —until Stempel was furloughed from his job at a performing arts center early in the pandemic. “I thought, ‘Maybe this is the catalyst I need to start the mushroom farm,’” he says. 

Now, Collar City is selling mushrooms to about 20 restaurants and has plans to double its operations, to 300 pounds from 150 pounds per week in 2023. Other goals include building a grow room in the basement, a bar and a stage for performances and a commercial kitchen. 

In starting their company, Stempel and Hood were ahead of the mushroom curve. The New York Times declared the mushroom 2022’s ingredient of the year, observing that the number of “small urban farms growing mushrooms is expected to bloom.” The buzz was warranted, but most of the mushrooms consumed in the U.S. still come from a single, commercially produced species, Agaricus bisporus. These mushrooms take several forms familiar to anyone who eats pizza or salad: button, brown and portobello. 

Specialty mushrooms—defined as any mushroom not belonging to the genus Agaricus—are a small but emerging niche, one that Stempel and others hope to cultivate and usher into the mainstream. 

Steve Gabriel, specialty mushrooms and agroforestry specialist for the Cornell Small Farms Program in central New York, began teaching outdoor growers to cultivate shiitake mushrooms about a decade ago. Interest skyrocketed, and Cornell began working with indoor farmers about two years ago, in response to grower demand. “People kept asking about it,” says Gabriel. 

“People are super-hyped for specialty mushrooms,” says Devon Gilroy, owner of Tivoli Mushrooms in the small city of Hudson, N.Y., about 50 miles south of Troy. “The problem is that the mushrooms you see at the grocery store are dying in little plastic bags.” 

Established six years ago in a former chair factory on the banks of the Hudson River, Tivoli Mushrooms is in the midst of a major expansion. The farm currently produces about 1,000 pounds of mushrooms per week. A larger building will enable Tivoli to exponentially boost production, to between 12,000 to 15,000 pounds of mushrooms per week. “Nobody in New York State is going all in on specialty mushrooms like we are,” says Gilroy, who sells to restaurants, markets and apothecaries. 

Gilroy is also looking to tap into the booming market for what’s known as “functional mushrooms,” coveted for benefits such as enhanced immunity, better brain function and relief from inflammation, and a key ingredient in wellness products such as powders and teas. He recently launched a sister company, Go Mushrooms, that manufactures medicinal tinctures.

California and Pennsylvania are the biggest producers of U.S. mushrooms, with the Keystone State accounting for 66% of the total volume of sales, according to the USDA. Still, New York growers are optimistic about New York’s potential to become a bigger player, specifically in the specialty market.  

They point to the state’s abundance of protected forests, where conditions for outdoor growing on inoculated logs are ideal, and the possibilities opened up by indoor, vertical farming. Especially well positioned to tap into the burgeoning appetite for gourmet mushrooms in New York City and the lower Hudson Valley are farmers in the eastern part of the state. 

“If you can grow mushrooms, you can sell them,” says Gabriel. “It’s not hard. There’s a demand.” 

The value of sales for commercially grown specialty mushrooms jumped 32% in 2021-2022, to $87.3 million, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. This surge occurred even as the value of the Agaricus crop, estimated at $931 million, fell 7% from the previous season. 

Gabriel estimates that there are at least 500 specialty mushroom growers in the U.S., with about 100 in New York, but it’s tough for many of them to enter the business full time. It’s also difficult to get an accurate picture of how many people are growing specialty mushrooms, because of the USDA’s focus on larger farms in select states.  

“The vast majority of folks are doing this as a side hustle,” says Gabriel. “Most of the farms down in Pennsylvania are grossing $1 million a year or more. That’s very different from the audience we’re working with at Cornell.” About one-quarter of the farmers surveyed by Cornell “produce over 100 pounds of mushrooms a week, and the rest produce under 100 pounds. It’s bringing in income, but it’s not $1 million a year.”

The stock at Collar City Mushrooms is dried or kept refrigerated for customers. Photography by Sara Foss.

In 2012, Gabriel started his own mushroom farm, Wellspring Forest Farm, in New York’s Finger Lakes region. In the beginning, he grew shiitake in the woods, putting into practice the agroforestry practices he espoused at Cornell and in classes offered at Wellspring. When robust demand for his mushrooms sparked thoughts of expansion, he realized the best way to scale up was indoors. Now Wellspring produces oysters, lion’s mane and king oyster mushrooms in a building constructed for that purpose. 

“There were only so many logs we could schlep around,” says Gabriel. “If you really want to make a sizable income from mushroom growing, it’s a much easier transition if you have some indoor capacity.”

From his vantage point at the Cornell Small Farms Program, Gabriel sees big things ahead for specialty mushrooms. In New York, the increase in the number of growers has outpaced other states. But whether the state becomes known for specialty mushroom production depends in part on whether its agricultural leaders find ways to make it easier for would-be growers to get started and expand, such as loosening the rules around turning fresh mushrooms into value-added products such as powders or foods. 

“In some states, like Maine and Vermont, you can do a lot of that stuff in your kitchen, until you gross more than $10,000 in sales or sell more than 100,000 units,” says Gabriel. “If I want to dry my mushrooms, I’ve got to rent a commercial kitchen and dry them there.” 

“The grower interest is there,” says Gabriel, adding that, with state-supported regulations, the community will continue to expand. “We have another several decades of being on the upswing of the curve.”

The post Could New York Become the Mushroom State? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Sara Polon founded the company with her mother in 2008, with the goal of making good food and sourcing local ingredients from farms surrounding the DC metro area. From there, the company grew, getting on the shelves at Whole Foods in 2016, followed by Costco, Kroger and other stores across the country. As the company grew, it began looking further afield to source its expanding ingredient needs. 

Then, everything changed. In 2020, Polon was faced with new supply issues as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. As she looked into solving them, she learned more about the food chain from which she sourced her own ingredients and the farmworkers who were suffering under extreme labor conditions. She vowed to change. 

Modern Farmer caught up with Polon to talk about her own commitments to sourcing ingredients equitably and why she wants to bring other companies on board as well.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: There are a lot of steps to get a vegetable from the field to your bowl of soup. As the purchaser and decision-maker, what do you prioritize?

Sara Polon: You know, we always used to talk about the story of our food. That was one of the phrases we turned to a lot when it came to staying focused as a company. But we were really looking at growing practices, like ensuring things were sustainable, and we hadn’t paid enough attention to humanity, the person who picks those tomatoes. 

When I started looking into our supply chain, I was really upset. Because we really tried so hard to implement the best, the safest practices possible here at our facility. But when I looked at our supply chain and I learned about what was going on on the farms, I was appalled. And it kind of changed our trajectory. 

If the organic tomato you are eating or cooking with was picked by a farmworker whose wages were stolen, who [was] subjected to abuse and assault, is it really worth the organic certification? I would argue no. We have now been working night and day to clean up our supply chain and get others to pay attention. 

MF: Is that when you became affiliated with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)?

SP: Yes, and that’s how we became the first consumer packaged good (CPG) brand to get a fair food certification. 

The CIW was founded by a group of primarily migrant workers that were just fed up. They were fed up with the abuse, they were fed up with the stolen wages. They organized in church basements, after working full days in the hot Florida sun. And they started striking and highlighted all of the abuse that was going on on these farms. 

They started the Fair Food Program, which established basic standards. And you would think that these would be basic norms, such as access to a bathroom and to water and freedom from sexual assault and violence. Most importantly, there was recourse, meaning [that] if there’s a violation, there’s a phone number that farmworkers can call that’s staffed by CIW, and they can enforce these standards. 

Once the standards were founded, the CIW then went to retailers. It started with tomatoes and asked retailers such as Whole Foods and Walmart to commit to buying tomatoes from CIW certified farms. Now, 90 percent of the tomato farms in Florida are fair food certified.

MF: But that’s just tomatoes. 

SP: Yeah, it’s just tomatoes. And just in Florida. There are 1.3 million farmworkers in this county. How many are on fair food certified farms? Not nearly enough.

I think the issue is that consumers aren’t aware, because when consumers get fired up about something, retailers are forced to act. 

MF: You launched in 2008, but when did you learn about your own supply chain?

SP: Right, we launched in 2008, and our original mission was local. We knew a lot of the farmers by name, we sourced really hyper-locally. So, supply chain issues weren’t even a thing for us for the first seven or eight years, because we weren’t big enough. 

And then as our business grew, we had to go bigger. I have to be honest, it wasn’t until 2020 [that] I learned more. Because I never dreamed it. Now, I’m a vegan, and I’m very aware of the capacity for cruelty that humans have towards animals and towards each other. But I never dreamed that, in 2022 and 2021, these abuses would be so rampant. And that was very sobering.

MF: How did it feel to be even passively connected to those kinds of violations? For instance, the decision to keep meatpacking plants at full capacity during the early days of COVID or the wage thefts from farmworkers you mentioned?

SP: Crushing. It was crushing, and it made me question why I started this business. We start every management meeting every Friday with the golden rule: Do unto others as you would do to yourself, treat your neighbor as yourself. And I realized that I had failed. 

MF: This program is just for tomato farms now. What about onions, carrots, lettuce, any other crop? Are there plans to expand?

SP: We are working on it. And that’s the problem, that’s what keeps me up at night, because we need someone big to demand it. I could demand this change, that farms get fair food certified. But, I mean, a farmer would laugh at me with our current volume. But if we could get Nestle to pay attention or Unilever or Heinz to pay attention? I’m a soup company, and I know that to make good soup, you need good onions. Well, Progresso and Campbell’s, they have to buy this stuff, too. 

MF: Retailers are often forced to act when consumers get angry. Individual consumers often care quite a bit about abuses, but they also notice that their grocery bills keep rising. How do you get those people on board and comfortable with paying more for their food?

SP: A lot of the retailers have absorbed the cost; it’s maybe a half a penny more. So, I’m not telling you that your grocery bill is gonna go up by, you know, five dollars, which is a lot of money if you’re a parent feeding a family. I’m talking about maybe two pennies or three pennies. So, that’s been the amazing thing that the CIW has been able to do.

Also, I’ll say that this is not an elitist movement. I’m not telling you that you have to buy certified organic roma tomatoes from Whole Foods, although Whole Foods has been incredible. So is Walmart. So is Trader Joe’s. I am literally just asking you to go to Burger King [which has signed on with the CIW] instead of Wendy’s. This is just focusing on the humans.

MF: Even if the costs jump just half a penny per pound, if you are buying at the kind of volume that Campbells does, that’s a lot. Someone is going to crunch those numbers. 

SP: Absolutely. But also, I would counter that every company now has environmental, social and governance (ESG) departments. They have sustainability offices. And they all have budgets. So, you either put your money where your mouths are or you shut down those offices. Because if this office is made aware of modern-day slavery in their supply chain and chooses to ignore it, shame on them. 

And look, you and I both know that major corporations are experiencing record profits. And if I can absorb the cost, how can they not? I don’t buy it. 

This is also a bigger discussion about the value of food. We really shouldn’t be looking for massive savings when it comes to our food, because the economic pressure trickles down to our farmers and then to the labor. Everyone is struggling now, and I’m not trying to diminish that. But when it comes to food, just remember: When there’s price pressure, it trickles down to the human. And unless you can look that human in the eye and say, ‘Sorry, I need to pay nothing for this product,’ it just doesn’t add up. It’s not a way to build a sustainable society.

MF: For someone else in your position, other CEOs and commercial buyers, what do you propose they do? 

SP: The first thing I think someone in my position should do is go to a farm. I was just on a call earlier with another company that’s interested in the cause, and they have been on one of these farms, and we both agreed that they’re not like farms, they’re more like outdoor factories. They’re miles and miles of these huge vines of tomatoes, in the hot blazing sun with no shade. When I went down, I lasted half a day. 

People in my position need to see that, to have that connection, because it changes you. You think you know the story of your food until you actually go to the farm that it’s coming from. And then you realize you don’t know squat. Once you have that information, once you meet with these people, you realize it’s really important that we do something because the vulnerability of [farmworkers], it’s crazy. You can just so easily see the opportunities for rampant abuse.

So now, I’m here to make any introductions. I’m having multiple phone calls a week, I’m here to help. 

MF: How do you see the issue of farmworkers’ rights playing out as they are compounded by the natural environments of farms?

SP: First, I would ask about when some of the farm regulations were made and when they were updated. Like, if farmworkers have access to water at a reasonable distance, that needs to be looked at. 

I remember when San Francisco residents were told they needed to stay inside because ash was raining from the sky. But there were plenty of people that had to leave their homes. When you have people staying home in their air conditioners, you had workers out in the fields picking the strawberries, and there were stories of new moms with their infants strapped to their chest and ash falling from the sky. And you’re gonna tell me that the regulations say that water needs to be a mile away? I don’t want to hear that excuse, because that excuse does not take into account the humanity behind our food. 

MF: It sounds like you’re advocating for a multi-faceted approach, where everyone has a role—consumers, farmers, farmworkers and retailers—and it only works well if everyone moves together. 

SP: Yeah, and it comes from a groundswell. I think we can all agree that it’s bad to have slavery in our supply chains. And if this is the thing that we can all agree on and we can all take action on and we can all solve, how inspiring would that be? And I might be extraordinarily naive, but all of those actors are going to get into line if the consumers are pissed off.

The post The CEO Who Wants Us to Care More About the Humanity Behind Our Food appeared first on Modern Farmer.

As Ruth Conniff reports in her new book, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers (out today from The New Press), the reduction in American dairy farms has impacted generations of people and moved beyond borders. The longtime journalist and editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner spent a year looking closely at the changes in American dairy farms. A common element on most farms she visited: Mexican workers. Conniff set out to explore how American reliance on Mexican labor bonded these two seemingly disparate groups so tightly.

As Conniff writes, the fall of dairy farms on American soil coincided with a period of crisis in Mexico, which sent “millions of subsistence farmers off their land, sending them into the cities and walking across the desert looking for work.” 

The impetus for these concurring dilemmas, says Conniff, was the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which was enacted in 1994. Under NAFTA, goods could be sold across the three participating countries (Canada, Mexico and the US) with reduced tariffs—or no tariffs at all. Cheap US corn flooded the Mexican market, causing thousands of Mexican farmers to go bankrupt when they could no longer sell their crop locally, eventually causing them to need to migrate north in search of work. “The rural parts of Mexico are suffering, in a more intense way, from some of the same forces that are afflicting rural parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota,” says Conniff. “Big Food and Big Ag are making it really hard to make a living for smaller farmers.” 

Those Mexican workers will often cross the US border illegally to work on dairy farms. While the H2-A visa allows agricultural workers entry to the country, it’s a temporary visa designed for seasonal work. Dairy farming, on the other hand, is year-round. No such visa exists for those workers. 

RELATED: Can Biodigesters Save America’s Small Dairy Farms?

“Circular migration is sort of a hallmark of Mexican workers in the United States,” Conniff explains. She describes a federal program from the 1950s, aimed at supplementing a labor shortage after World War II, which brought undocumented workers across the border to work on farms and in agricultural processing. “The flow back and forth across the border was very easy. Now, we have a militarized border and a moral panic about immigration, but people are still coming. And they’re still carrying whole US industries, especially agriculture, but they’re doing it under really dangerous conditions. And it’s really expensive.”

Conniff focused on a group of farmers in Wisconsin, each of whom employs Mexican workers. In alternating chapters, Conniff tells the stories of the farmers and then their workers, moving swiftly across the border to paint a picture of how  and why these folks are tied so tightly together—especially in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. 

“Most of the [farmers] I talked to voted for Trump, in spite of the fact that they are deeply involved with and completely economically dependent on these undocumented workers from Mexico,” says Conniff.  She describes one farmer named John who, at first, had reservations about employing undocumented workers. Desperate, he cast his doubts aside. 

“The documents John’s employees show him are almost certainly fake,” Conniff writes in the book. “John takes a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach. Even his most ardent Trump-supporting neighbors agree with him on this issue: American agriculture would collapse without undocumented immigrant labor.” 

Part of the reason these farmers can hold these seemingly opposing views, Conniff reasons, comes back to NAFTA. Trump promised to do away with the agreement throughout his presidential campaign, once calling it the “worst trade deal” the US had ever signed. (In 2020, with NAFTA dissolved, the three countries entered into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement instead.) “The way the farmers themselves explain it is to say ‘he doesn’t really mean it,’ or ‘yeah, he’s a loudmouth, but he’s going to do the right thing.’”

In that way, says Conniff, farmers were able to turn a blind eye to the president’s less palatable traits, such as Trump describing Mexicans as rapists, after stating “they’re bringing” drugs and crime across the border. Perhaps this was a bout of cognitive dissonance, or maybe it was willful ignorance. Either way, Conniff describes the American farmers bonding with their Mexican workers, even while some farmers still voted against their workers’ best interests. 

Many of those workers are conflicted as well. Just as important as speaking with the farm owners was hearing directly from the Mexican farmworkers. For many of the folks with whom Conniff spoke, the money they can make in the United States keeps their families fed and housed back home in Mexico. Conniff interviewed several farmers who sent money back to build houses, put their kids through school or started businesses. Still, their lives are often difficult. One woman Conniff interviewed, named Blandina, says that the farmers she and her husband work with treat them well, but there’s the expectation that they will work constantly and for less money than American colleagues. “Our labor is exploited,” Blandina told Conniff. So Blandina and her husband Pablo keep their goals in mind: sending their daughter to university and eventually moving home. 

RELATED: American Agriculture’s Reliance on Foreign Workers Surges

Of course, not every farmworker goes back to Mexico. As people build lives and communities in the United States, it becomes harder to leave. Conniff interviewed one family whose two sons were born in Wisconsin, making them US citizens. With kids, it’s even harder and more expensive to traverse the border, so the parents often stay put for years. And then “the kids go to high school, and potentially on to college in the United States, and they cannot imagine going back to subsistence living in a remote village in Mexico,” says Conniff. Now, there are “parents who have always dreamed of going back…and you have the kids who become increasingly distant from that idea.”

That’s where groups that advocate on behalf of agricultural workers come in. There are campaigns across the country pushing for legislation to help undocumented workers and their families. Conniff writes about the Wisconsin Farmers Union, which works in tandem with immigrant rights activists to push for driver’s licenses for undocumented workers. There’s also Voces de la Frontera, a worker-led organization dedicated to immigration reform and workers’ rights. While those groups, and others like them, push for change, Conniff says it’s important to take stock of where we are presently. “We have this two-decade-old economic relationship that is absolutely baked into the way we run our dairy and agricultural economy,” she says. “It’s a fantasy to think that you’re just going to build a wall, and this will end, and it will be the best economically for the United States.”

Instead, Conniff says that after her year reporting this book, she has come to recognize the importance of a legal year-round visa for agricultural work as a clear first step. The idea has bipartisan support, and it simply acknowledges the real work that people are doing. “Then the bigger question is, how do people live livable lives? How do we have sustainable work lives and sustainable food, and people don’t have to smuggle themselves in the trunk of a car across the border?” Conniff asks. “And how do we [preserve] those beautiful small farms that have made Wisconsin such a lovely place?”

Milked reaches far beyond the people its author profiled. The stories are personal and universal, stretching into farms and fields across the country and over borders. Farmers and workers will continue to be bonded together by the economic demands of both countries. 

In the meantime, the number of dairy farms in the country continues to drop.

The post In New Book, Relationship Between US Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers Laid Bare appeared first on Modern Farmer.

According to the survey, conducted by an organization called Stronger America Through Seafood (SATS), 84 percent of the 1,020 participants found it important for America to expand its seafood production through offshore fish farm growth once learning that many American companies currently build their operations in other countries, taking technology, jobs and revenue overseas.

Aquaculture, simply speaking, is the controlled cultivation of fish or other aquatic life in the water. Aquaculture farmers use large nets in the ocean or, in some cases, freshwater to breed, raise and harvest fish, shellfish, kelp and other organisms. 

RELATED: Bill Seeks to Standardize and Promote Offshore Aquaculture

The organization highlights that America currently imports 85 percent of its seafood, mostly from Europe and Asia, and ranks only 16th in aquaculture production worldwide—facts the organization wishes to see change. SATS’ goal is for the country to have a more clarified policy framework that allows for more American aquaculture production. It says the development of more offshore fish farms would boost not only the country’s supply of sustainable fish but also the economy and labor market. 

“Now is the time for Congress to act and put in place federal policies that would establish an aquaculture industry in US federal waters—and the majority of voters agree,” the campaign manager of SATS, Sarah Brenholt, said in a press release. “According to our recent survey, more than two-thirds stated they would feel more favorable towards a member of Congress who established pathways for offshore aquaculture so the US could benefit from the economic and environmental benefits that aquaculture provides.”

With a 2020 executive order, the Trump Administration supported the idea of increasing aquaculture—currently the fastest-growing sector of the food production industry—in the United States. The order called for “more efficient and predictable” permitting for the offshore fish farms, and it claimed that the inaction of policies within the order would “propel the US forward as a seafood superpower,” increase food security and improve American industries’ competitiveness, according to the NOAA.

RELATED: Where to Look for Climate- and Environment-Friendly Seafood

But not everyone agrees that investing in American aquaculture is the way to go. In fact, advocates for sustainable fishing, fishing industry folks and environmental and Indigenous groups sent an open letter to the Biden administration in April, calling on the president to revoke the Trump-era executive order supporting more aquaculture industry in the country. 

The letter, published through an organization called Don’t Cage Our Oceans, says the expansion of aquaculture would “contaminate our marine waters with drugs, chemicals, and untreated wastes while creating a breeding ground for pests and diseases.” The letter goes on to outline that pollution caused by the farms could potentially harm wild-caught fish populations, and in doing so, effectively decrease seafood production instead of bolstering it. 

Those who signed the letter say that the offshore fish farms may just replace the wild fish population with farms, which they say would not only offer consumers lesser-quality fish but undermine historical fishing communities and their practices.

The post Majority of US Voters Support Offshore Aquaculture Expansion appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Lawyers for Tyson Foods, one of America’s largest meatpacking companies, drafted an early version of a 2020 executive order that allowed plants to continue operating during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new Congressional report based on company emails shows.

It’s been reported that the meatpacking industry wrote a draft version of President Donald Trump’s executive order, but the new Congressional investigation shows that Tyson Foods—mostly in collaboration with Smithfield Foods—authored the specific language that the industry pushed to federal officials. Similar language in Tyson’s draft would appear in the finalized executive order signed a week later.

RELATED: Trump to Order Meat Processing Plants to Stay Open

It’s one example laid out in detail in the report that shows meatpacking CEOs petitioning their allies in the federal government to curb any safety measures that “could reduce their production and profitability.”

The report, compiled by the staff of the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis and released Thursday, reveals that the country’s largest meat companies coordinated with each other—and with political appointees at the federal agency charged with their regulation, the US Department of Agriculture—to keep meatpacking plants operating at maximum capacity while thousands of workers were infected in the COVID-19 pandemic’s early months.

Meatpacking industry leaders understood the threat coronavirus posed to their employees, emails show. But rather than enforcing safety measures, such as social distancing and masking, the companies instead asked the federal government to exclude them from public health measures meant to protect employees from illness and death.

The USDA largely did as the companies asked, according to the report. In several instances where state or local officials temporarily closed down meatpacking plants due to high rates of coronavirus infections among workers, USDA leaders intervened on the companies’ behalf and pushed public health officials to reopen plants.

USDA officials led the charge to convince the White House to enact the executive order authored by Tyson.

“The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated,” subcommittee chairman Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said in a press release provided to Investigate Midwest.

In media statements, the companies named in the report defended their overall safety efforts during the pandemic, but they did not address any of the specific actions outlined in the subcommittee’s investigation.

Tyson Foods said it has worked with officials at all levels of government to navigate the pandemic’s challenges. (Tyson’s fact sheet on its COVID-19 response can be read here.)

“This collaboration is crucial to ensuring the essential work of the US food supply chain and our continued efforts to keep team members safe,” it said in a statement. “For example, last year Tyson Foods was supported by the Biden Administration as we became one of the first fully vaccinated workforces in the US. Our efforts have also included working cooperatively and frequently with local health department officials in our plant communities.”

Smithfield Foods’ spokesman, Jim Monroe, said COVID-19 presented a “first-of-its-kind challenge,” and to date the company has invested “more than $900 million” supporting worker safety.

“The meat production system is a modern wonder, but it is not one that can be re-directed at the flip of a switch,” he said. “That is the challenge we faced as restaurants closed, consumption patterns changed and hogs backed-up on farms with nowhere to go. The concerns we expressed were very real and we are thankful that a true food crisis was averted and that we are starting to return to normal.”

RELATED: Congress Is Investigating Meatpacking Plants for COVID-19 Safety Violations

The North American Meat Institute (NAMI)—the industry’s lobbying organization—said the subcommittee’s report “distorts the truth” about the industry’s effort to protect employees.

“The report ignores the rigorous and comprehensive measures companies enacted to protect employees and support their critical infrastructure workers,” NAMI’s president, Julie Ann Potts, said. “As more became known about the spread of the virus, the meat industry spent billions of dollars to reverse the pandemic’s trajectory, protecting meat and poultry workers while keeping food on Americans’ tables and our farm economy working.”

Trump’s agricultural secretary, Sonny Perdue, who personally lobbied other government officials to keep plants open, is now the chancellor of the University System of Georgia. In a statement, the system said, “Chancellor Perdue is focused on his new position serving the students of Georgia.”

Dulce Castañeda, co-founder of Children of Smithfield in Crete, Nebraska, a group that has advocated for meatpacking workers’ rights and protection during the pandemic, said the report is not surprising based on what she already knew about the lack of science-backed coronavirus mitigation measures in meatpacking plants.

“Drafting its own executive order was a complete overreach of the private sector in convincing government officials to put profit over people,” Castañeda said. “The meatpacking industry disenfranchised the ability of public health departments and local governments to enforce public health measures inside plants. These companies have more than animal blood on their hands. They are also responsible for the loss of human lives as workers died on their clocks.”

(Other individuals and companies denoted in this story could not immediately be reached for comment. The story will be updated with their responses if and when they are received.)

The report is based on more than 151,000 pages of documents collected from meatpacking companies and interest groups, as well as interviews with meatpacking workers, union representatives, former federal officials, and state and local health authorities.

The subcommittee’s investigation into meat companies’ handling of the pandemic is ongoing, as JBS is still producing documents relevant to the investigation, according to the press release.

Meatpacking workers were more likely to be exposed to the coronavirus than workers in other kinds of manufacturing jobs, primarily because employees often work shoulder-to-shoulder as they cut and package meat.

More than 400 meatpacking plant workers have died from the coronavirus, according to Investigate Midwest tracking. There have been at least 86,000 positive cases.

‘Potentially explosive’ executive order

Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods initiated the push for an executive order to keep plants operating, the emails the subcommittee obtained show. The industry’s lobbying group, NAMI, executed the plan.

On April 9, 2020, South Dakota officials temporarily shuttered a Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls after hundreds of workers had tested positive for COVID-19. Two days later, Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan reached out to his counterpart at Tyson Foods, Noel White, with an idea—an executive order that would prevent authorities from shutting down meatpacking plants.

The next day, Sullivan shared the idea with even more CEOs of other major meatpacking companies, including National Beef, JBS and Cargill. He called for “a Presidential Executive Order, invoking the Defense Production Act as a mechanism to manage public perception and state/local interdiction,” he wrote in an email.

The following day, Tyson produced a draft executive order that would shield companies from closure and also protect them from potential lawsuits by infected workers or their families.

Not everyone in the industry was on board with the idea of an executive order, however.

Johnsonville CEO Nick Meriggioli supported liability protection for meat companies but pushed back on Tyson and Smithfield’s approach in an email to Potts, NAMI’s president.

“Perhaps the intent should be to get federal assistance to gain priority on PPE and testing supplies,” Meriggioli wrote. “I am concerned that it could become a social/public relations nightmare if we are too aggressive in asking for an EO to make us off limits. If not handled right, it could come across as all the industry is interested in is ‘production at any cost.’”

The American Farm Bureau Federation also disapproved of the executive order, writing “the perception that there is a balance to be struck between worker safety/health and productivity is potentially explosive.”

After receiving pushback from the Farm Bureau, Potts told the CEOs of Tyson, Smithfield, JBS, Cargill, National Beef, Hormel, Seaboard, and Clemens that they would “back-channel” the request for an executive order with Sonny Perdue, the Trump-appointed Secretary of Agriculture.

Perdue “has made his desires known on this topic to AFBF,” Potts wrote.

Instead, on April 18, 2020, NAMI signed onto a Farm Bureau-approved formal letter to President Trump asking that he allow food companies to operate “without undue disruption,” with no mention of an executive order. But behind the scenes, lobbyists engaged with federal officials about the possibility of enacting an order.

According to the report, “Smithfield and Tyson were initially reluctant to drop the public ask for an executive order, but ultimately did in the interest of time.”

A day after sending the scaled-back letter, White, Tyson’s CEO, appeared impatient with the lack of movement. He emailed Potts and suggested an agency other than USDA might be more effective in enacting the order.

“As of my conversations with USDA this afternoon, they still think they are on it…and in better shape with POTUS than other agencies. I have said we have to see some results!”’ Potts replied.

As previously reported, NAMI provided the draft version of the executive order to the USDA, which then passed it to the White House. The draft version NAMI provided to the USDA has the exact same language as the version Tyson lawyers wrote up.

Trump signed the order a week later, on April 28, 2020, after several calls among White House, USDA and meatpacking leaders.

As USDA officials suspected, the order didn’t explicitly prohibit plant closures. But it did give the federal government ammunition to intimidate public health officials who wanted to impose temporary closures.

After the executive order was issued, a national Farm Bureau official asked Little whether the executive order shielded meat companies from potential coronavirus-related lawsuits.

RELATED: COVID-19 Infections and Deaths at Meatpacking Plants Much Higher Than Previously Thought

“It is subtle, but it does…We are avoiding mentioning it at all costs. It is a terrible fact, but it is what it is,” Little replied.

Based on that exchange, the report’s authors wrote that the meat industry recognized “the optics of lobbying against measures intended to protect workers from a lethal virus while simultaneously seeking insulation from liability for ensuing worker illnesses and death.”

Potts said the report “has done the nation a disservice.”

“The Committee could have tried to learn what the industry did to stop the spread of COVID among meat and poultry workers, reducing positive cases associated with the industry while cases were surging across the country,” she said. “Instead, the Committee uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency.”

Cargill said worker safety is its number one priority.

“Throughout the pandemic we’ve worked hard to maintain safe and consistent operations. At the same time, we have not hesitated to temporarily idle or reduce capacity at processing plants when we determined it necessary to do so,” its statement reads. “The well-being of our plant employees is integral to our business and to the continuity of the food supply chain.”

The ‘industry’s go-to fixer’

When meat company CEOs wanted the USDA to help them out, they knew who to call.

Mindy Brashears, the former Under Secretary of Agriculture for Food Safety and head of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, was the top food safety official in the US. when the pandemic began. While inspectors employed by her division—many of whom worked in meatpacking plants—risked contracting coronavirus on the job, Brashears helped meat companies skirt coronavirus mitigation measures.

The report details how Brashears, often referred to by just her first name in meatpacking CEOs’ emails, became the industry’s key ally within the federal government. The report calls her the “industry’s go-to fixer.”

On March 13, 2020, when the Trump administration was putting together its White House Task Force on coronavirus, a meatpacking lobbyist told Brashears on the phone that the industry “would certainly like [Brashears] to be involved in any discussion regarding meat.” Brashears agreed and promised to find a way to be more involved.

She often handed out her personal cell phone number and email address to meat companies, according to the emails the subcommittee obtained. In more than one instance, companies sent “official” communication to Brashears’ work email and “presentations” to her personal email.

Brashears’ work email is subject to public records laws. Her personal email is not.

It would be a violation of federal law for Brashears to use her personal email to conduct government business, unless she copied her work email or forwarded the relevant emails to her work email address within 20 days, according to the report.

“The Select Subcommittee has not obtained evidence that she did so,” the report states.

NAMI also obtained advance copies of internal FSIS and USDA documents from “a friend” working at the USDA, though the report does not specify which USDA employee leaked the confidential documents.

Also, when USDA political appointees intervened in the decisions of local health authorities to temporarily close meatpacking plants with large coronavirus outbreaks, career staff were “sidelined,” the report states.

Current USDA officials and staff told the Congressional subcommittee that Brashears and other political appointees left “no paper trail” of their interactions with state and local health authorities. Many of these meetings did not appear on the agency’s public calendar, according to the report.

‘Pesky health departments’

Brashears also played a key role in convincing local health departments that they didn’t have the authority to close down meatpacking plants where large outbreaks occurred. One industry lobbyist told a meatpacking executive that she “hasn’t lost a battle for us.”

Between March and May 2020, 42 states and territories issued stay-at-home orders. Meatpacking companies, worried that the stay-at-home orders would keep their employees home, urged USDA officials to take action.

The USDA raised the industry’s concerns all the way to Vice President Mike Pence. The Department of Homeland Security ultimately designated meatpacking workers as “critical infrastructure” employees, exempting them from stay-at-home orders and social distancing requirements.

This occurred before the industry had taken steps to address outbreaks among its employees, the report states.

“Email correspondence related to the meatpacking industry’s push to be designated as ‘critical infrastructure’ makes virtually no mention of the health risks to the meatpacking employees being forced to work,” the report states.

For example, in May 2020, Koch Foods’ chief operating officer, Mark Kaminsky, emailed National Chicken Council lobbyists to say he thought the only worker safety measure that plants should take was screening for high temperatures.

RELATED: The Cost of Covid

Chicken Council vice president and lobbyist Ashley Peterson agreed, then said, “Now to get rid of those pesky health departments!”

Without addressing Peterson’s comments, National Chicken Council president Mike Brown thanked the industry’s front line workers in a statement. He said he regrets the “report failed to shine light on the momentous efforts between industry, government and state and local health officials to keep employees safe and to keep Americans fed during one of the most challenging and uncertain times in our nation’s history.”

Political appointees from the USDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the White House called local health departments on several occasions, claiming that the executive order blocked local authorities from closing meatpacking plants, no matter how severe the outbreak was.

By May 2020, companies and USDA political appointees were “regularly” intervening, the report states.

Some examples of federal interference in local public health decisions took place at Rochelle Foods in Rochelle, Illinois; JBS in Greeley, Colorado; Tyson Foods in Center, Texas; and Foster Farms in Livingston, California.

The health director in Rochelle said his understanding from meeting with Trump administration officials was he couldn’t shut the plant down over safety concerns. The experience was echoed in what Merced County Department of Public Health officials told the subcommittee.

When the Merced County health officials issued a temporary closure order for a Foster Farms plant in California, executives reached out directly to Brashears. She, in turn, called the local health department.

Local health officials told the subcommittee they left the call with the understanding that closure was not an option and that they would need to find a solution to the coronavirus outbreak that wouldn’t involve a decrease in production at the plant.

The health department ultimately succeeded in enforcing a temporary closure, but it compromised with the USDA by giving the company a 48-hour notice, the report said. Ultimately, at least 392 Foster Farms employees contracted coronavirus and eight died.

The post The Meatpacking Industry Drafted Trump’s 2020 Order to Keep Plants Open At the Expense of Worker Safety appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Reuters reports that the USDA will begin a one-year trial for nine large hog processing plants, including ones owned by JBS, Tyson and Smithfield. This trial will, according to the USDA, be used to gather data and create safe work environments in a higher-speed processing environment. 

Meat processing line speeds have been a wrestling match for years. There have been various pilot programs similar to this, including one operated under Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama. For that previous program, a 2013 report from the USDA Office of Inspector General found significantly higher safety violations in plants with less oversight and more speed. But because deregulation and increased line speeds are so obviously conducive to higher profits, the meat industry has long pushed for these sorts of permissions.

The Trump administration’s plan was designed to place monitoring in the hands of the plant operators themselves, rather than USDA inspectors, and to all but eliminate line speed limits. In March 2021, a federal court essentially canceled the line speed expansion, a decision that was pilloried by the meat industry. The Biden administration, which had previously frozen line speed limit increases, said it would follow the decision of that court.

Now, though, the Biden administration seems to have changed their minds. The meat industry has often cited a Food Safety and Inspection Service study that indicated increased line speeds are not correlated with increased injuries, but that study could be misinterpreted. According to a follow-up, the USDA Office of Inspector General found that the FSIS did not verify the data used, may have used inaccurate data and eventually even declined to use that study at all when making regulations. 

Data indicating the exact opposite, that increased line speeds are dangerous to workers in the form of increased accidents and repetitive stress injuries, are certainly out there, but tend to be anecdotal. It is not exactly in the interest of a meatpacking plant to carefully monitor and honestly and transparently divulge that their super-profitable faster methods are less safe. As a result, those fighting the line speed increases rely on worker testimonials and specific studies from agencies like the Government Accountability Office and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. 

In any case, this news was met with dismay by worker’s rights advocates. “With this decision, the Biden administration is caving to industry pressure,” writes Food & Water Watch’s senior staff attorney, Zach Corrigan, in a statement.

The post Biden Administration Returns to Trump-Era Theme: Increase Meat Processing Line Speeds appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The Trump-era revision of WOTUS removed a vast amount of regulation. This week, the Biden administration acted to roll back the Trump-era version to, essentially, the one created by President Barack Obama in 2015. How will this affect farmers?

WOTUS is necessary because the government needs to know which waterways to protect and to what degree. It’s more complicated than it sounds; some wetlands are only present seasonally, for example. But the rule was very cannily used by the Trump campaign and by right-wing and Republican-leaning groups such as the American Farm Bureau Federation, which repeatedly hammered that this rule would result in, say, the government telling ranchers that their cattle can’t go near a creek on their own property. This was always pretty misleading; WOTUS has long had significant exemptions for farmers.

Trump’s WOTUS was a major act of deregulation; all kinds of projects that would have previously needed research and permits, including a mine in Georgia, airport runways in Kentucky and some new homes in California, no longer needed any examination whatsoever.

The action taken by President Joe Biden’s EPA basically rolls back all of those deregulations, re-establishing the 2015 rule created by Obama. The EPA’s press release is also careful to note that this WOTUS rule will include “the exemptions and exclusions in the Clean Water Act on which the agricultural community has come to rely.” 

There are tons of these exemptions. Farmers, unlike those in other industries, are exempted from regulation for, just for example, constructing drainage ditches, constructing irrigation systems, constructing stock ponds, maintaining dams and levees and discharging anything that’s in the act of “normal farming activities.” 

The conservative and agribusiness sectors, of course, hate WOTUS, because it does restrict pollution in the country’s streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands. The American Farm Bureau Federation promptly called the new/old rule “overreaching” and “overly complicated.” It certainly can be complicated! One example of that would be the “significant nexus” ruling, which comes from a 2006 Supreme Court case, which established that any waters, such as lakes and wetlands, that are, basically, within a general zone of navigable waters must be subject to regulation from WOTUS. 

Is “significant nexus” vague? Yes, it is, and it’s generally been left to a case-by-case basis when deciding certain outcomes. But waterways are complicated. Seasonal wetlands, underground rivers, creeks that move each year—these are basically impossible to govern with one permanent rule. The only way to do that would be to not govern them at all, which is also not a great idea. 

The Biden administration says that it is likely not done with WOTUS; “the agencies continue to consult with stakeholders to refine the definition of WOTUS in both implementation and future regulatory actions,” reads the press release.

The post EPA Erases Trump-Era ‘Waters of the United States’ Rule appeared first on Modern Farmer.

It’s now known that meatpacking plants were major COVID-19 hotspots that spread the virus in rural and suburban communities far more than in similar towns without a plant. From federal inspectors put at risk to allegations of betting on infection numbers, meatpacking plants were chaos zones for months. They were uniquely situated to spread the virus: Workers have to work in close physical proximity for long hours, in indoor environments, and they often live together in company-provided housing. And the rapid consolidation of the meat industry has meant fewer, but larger, packing facilities. If one plant gets hit with a wave of COVID-19—and many did—that can infect a far greater number of workers than if the industry was more spread out.

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, chaired by James Clyburn (D-SC), this week released the results (and gave a hearing) of an investigation into meatpacking plants and the response from the meat corporations and from the various branches of the government involved in the COVID-19 crisis.

It has not been easy to find precise numbers on how many meatpacking plant workers were killed by COVID-19, let alone the number of confirmed infections, at any given site. Previous findings were full of contradictions. There’s been a lack of data provided by individual companies, as well as an inability (or unwillingness) for some to even keep proper track of infection figures. Even without that data, some studies have tried to link county-wide infection data with the presence and size of meatpacking plants, because workers at these plants could and did spread the virus into their local communities.

The Congressional subcommittee’s investigation led it to internal documents from the major players in American meatpacking—JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Smithfield and National Beef—which had previously not been public. It found about 59,000 positive cases at plants run by those companies between March 2020 and February 2021, with some plants having COVID-19 infection rates of around 50 percent. At least 269 deaths of plant workers can also be attributed to COVID-19, according to the subcommittee’s report.

The report makes a big deal about this being nearly three times higher than previous estimates. The previous estimate to which it is  referring was 22,700 infections, and it came from the nonprofit Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN). That FERN estimate, though, was not exactly an established fact; FERN made no secret of the fact that the estimate relied on inconsistent and almost certainly inaccurate reporting. According to FERN: “The data represented in these maps and charts is primarily collected from local news reports, with additional information gathered from state and local health authorities and, on occasion, from companies with outbreaks.”

In any case, the subcommittee also dug up some other disturbing evidence. According to the report: “An internal document from Tyson obtained by the Select Subcommittee shows that, on March 20, 2020, Tyson had not begun to conduct temperature checks, but it nonetheless was telling its workers: ‘It is vital that you come to work as planned, despite stories about ‘shelter in place.’’” Other documents revealed ineffective barriers created from plastic bags, dirty protective gear and statements from plant management that seem to disparage and resist efforts by the CDC to create a safer work environment.

There’s also a pretty good amount of bashing of the Trump administration’s handling of COVID-19 in meatpacking plants. According to the report: “Meanwhile, under the Trump Administration’s leadership, OSHA exercised minimal oversight and failed to protect worker safety. The Select Subcommittee learned during a staff briefing with OSHA that OSHA leadership made a ‘political decision’ not to issue a much needed regulatory standard requiring meatpacking companies to take specific steps to protect workers, limiting the universe of enforcement tools OSHA had at its disposal.”

It’s unclear what, if any, measures will be taken as a consequence of these findings. Clyburn, in his opening reports, said, “Meatpackers and other essential workers are the foundation of this country. We must get a full accounting of what happened to them during the coronavirus pandemic so we can learn from these failures to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again.”

The post COVID-19 Infections and Deaths at Meatpacking Plants Much Higher Than Previously Thought appeared first on Modern Farmer.