Brut Nature
February, 2019
24 reasons to be hopeful for 2019
24 good news stories about the planet
24 reasons to be hopeful for 2019 đâ¨
Posted by Brut nature on Friday, February 8, 2019
Read About The Tarbaby Story under the Category: About the Tarbaby Blog
February, 2019
24 reasons to be hopeful for 2019
24 good news stories about the planet
24 reasons to be hopeful for 2019 đâ¨
Posted by Brut nature on Friday, February 8, 2019
Wisconsinite Abe Voelker says his familyâs farm is yet another in a long line going out of business because of low prices, overproduction, the rise of CAFOs, and more.
By Abe Voelker, Business, Farming March 14, 2019
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on. As usual I took the opportunity to help my dad and younger brother with barn chores and milk cows. The cows need to be milked twice a day, every day, roughly around 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. I didnât help out every shift but I worked more than enough to once again be humbled about the life I left behind and recalibrate my nostalgia.
Speaking of which, I never had the work ethic to be a farmer. Ever since I was little and playing video games on our NES, I was enamored by electronics. By the time our family got a personal computer and dial-up internet for Christmas in 1997, when I was 11, I was completely and hopelessly sucked in. There followed many evenings where my dad would come flying in to the house to yell at me for being late for chores when I lost track of time on âthat damn computer.â
Thankfully for all involved, my younger brother Noah inherited my dadâs insane work ethic and love of farming and took up the farmâs reins (he also picked up my slack when we were youngerâthanks Brother). He loves the work and excels at it.
I instead went to college and became a computer programmer, and havenât lived in my hometown since.
I also have two older brothers; neither of them got the farming gene either. My eldest brother Jerry lives near Madison and also works in the software field. My second-eldest brother, John, lives near my folks and helps out quite often, but he also does other work and has other obligations, so most of the daily farming work falls on my youngest brother Noah and my dad, who is now into his 70’s.
Sadly this year, I found out that it will have been my final Christmas coming home and milking cows, because theyâll be selling off the cows over the coming spring and fall.
This probably shouldnât be a huge shock. Ever since I can remember there has always been a steady drumbeat of family farms going bust. Sometimes the tempo would increase, when milk and/or crop prices would hit new lows, but the drum has always beat on as the industry never seemed to turn a corner.
Our family farm was subjected to the same ups and downs as every other farm but had always managed to weather every storm. I recall my dad saying how farming was a series of upturns and downturns in pretty much everything, and how it was important to save money from the good years so you can survive the bad years.
One of the bad times I can remember was in the mid-to-late â90’sâI was in elementary schoolâwhen milk prices were so low that some farmers were dumping their milk down the drain in protest. At that time, my mom got involved in dairy activism and became a lead organizer of a group of area farmers who worked together to try to improve their lot and raise public awareness of their struggles.
In December 1995, they met with Wisconsin progressive legend Ed Garvey, a labor attorney who successfully helped form the NFL player’s union, to talk about forming a union for farmers.
The following year, after being rebuffed by a state representative for being a negligible percent of his constituency and told to come back when they had more support, they rallied farmers across the state to voluntarily close off their land to all recreational activity such as hunting, fishing, snowmobiling,4 and four-wheeling (snowmobile and ATV trails often cross farmersâ private land in Wisconsin).
They also blockaded a creamery cooperativeâs weighing scales to protest the low prices.
In 1997, they founded an organization called Save Our Family Farms with the objective of getting farmers across the country to respond to a non-binding referendum on pricing mechanisms and supply management. I think the intent was to provide evidence of grassroots farmer support for Canadian-style controls on milk price and supply, which reduce volatility and the need for subsidies and have managed to maintain Canadaâs family farmsâ existence, which would give the American federal government ammo to institute similar policies.
Later, in 1998, they succeeded in establishing their union (technically a guild due to federal labor laws) as a branch of OPEIU, which in turn is affiliated with the AFL – CIO.
Unfortunately, while my mom and the other farmers had some success in raising awareness and garnering some attention from various government officials, their efforts didnât have any discernible effect on policy or the milk price bottom line. Dairy farmers once again had to either hold on tight and ride it out, or go bust (and many did).
For our family at that time, the milk price situation combined with my dad needing knee surgery (from repeated stress of kneeling on concrete to milk cows) resulted in us having a dispersal sale and selling off most of the herd.
I remember it being an emotional day. After spending a week thoroughly cleaning up the barn and cattle, we set up a fenced-off show area outside the barn where on the day of the auction, the cattle were paraded out one-by-one to display to bidders and the auctioneer.
Milk prices being low also lowers the value of milking cows themselves, so we got less money than we had hoped for. To a kid it felt like vultures were paying a pittance to carry away a piece of my identity. By the end of the day, looking down the alleyway at mostly-empty cow stalls bedded with fresh sawdust, that anger turned to sadness and a sense of loss.
In time, my dad recovered from his surgery, my older brothers graduated from high school and moved out, and as my younger brother and I aged into our early teens, the herd was slowly built up to near-previous levels again.
It seems hard to believe but at one point it was possible to make a decent living as a dairy farmer with a small herd (whatâs now considered small, anyway). In 1981, my dad had a herd of 82 milking cows and he cracked the top 50 in all of northwest Wisconsinâs 22 counties for average milk production. This was in the heart of Americaâs dairyland by the way, to the point that federal milk pricing used to be based on how many miles away you were from here.
While not a scientific poll, itâs an interesting sample. If you look at the herd sizes listed you can see that theyâre all what would now be considered small, with only two herds just barely over 100 head.
From what I can tell, the farming landscape changed dramatically in the 1970s when President Nixon promoted agribusiness lobbyist Earl “Rusty” Buty to USDA secretary. Butz had a reputation going back to at least the 1950’s for lobbying for dramatic modernizations to farming at the expense of small farms. “Adapt or die; resist and perish…Agriculture is now big business” he would say. By the 1970’s, before his USDA nomination, he was a director of three large agribusiness corporations.
Before Butz, farming practices were ruled by FDR New Deal-era controls on production, when memories of the Dust Bowl and destruction of the land through overproduction were still vivid. These production controls aimed to smooth out volatility by paying farmers to keep fields fallow in times of overproduction, and to release grain from storage in times of shortages. Farming production was geared toward American consumption, but even with the production controls there was always a surplus of grain to deal with.
Nixon brought Butz in with a mandate to get rid of the grain surpluses. Butz architected this by selling off the grain surpluses to the Soviets in “the largest grain deal so far as we [knew] in the history of the world” in 1972 for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Unfortunately, the deal didnât come with an upper limit on how much grain the Soviets could buy (âbecause it did not occur to [them] that the Russians could ever buy too muchâ), and the Soviets bought up one – forth of the U.S. wheat harvest that year. The following year, American supermarket prices for bread and other goods shot up by 20%, of which some estimates attribute at least 15% of the rise directly on the export deal. Butz and the other deal-makers were dragged before a furious Congress to testify on what happened.
The grain shortages were a windfall for grain farmers, who were getting a higher price for their grain, but bad news for dairy farmers and other livestock farmers who fed their animals with grain.
To make up for the grain shortfall, Butz removed all production limits on grain and fervently encouraged farmers to go wild with production, to plant “from fencerow to fencerow” and “get big or get out.”.
The effects were quickly apparent, as before his USDA tenure was finished Butz became a pariah to everyone but the big farmers, as small farmers went bust under the continual tightening of the efficiency noose (Butz of course had no sympathy for these âinefficientâ farms).
While not the whole story, Butzâs era was undoubtedly a major turning point in orienting our food economy towards consolidation and concentration of production in fewer and fewer hands.
The consolidation of dairy and the continual shrinking of profit margins have led to drastic changes to the industry over the years. One change is that through selective breeding, improved nutrition, increased milking frequency, and other factors, the amount of milk that a single cow yields per year has more than doubled since the 1970’s:
Source: USDA Quick Stats
This has allowed overall milk production to increase, even while the total number of cows has shrank:
Source: USDA Quick Stats
While the overall number of cows have decreased a bit, the number of herds of cows, i.e. the number of farming operations, have decreased dramatically (and continues to do soâthe latest count on the rate of change is two dairy farms per day closing):
Source: USDA Quick Stats
What this means is that the average number of cows on a given dairy operation has greatly risen, i.e., dairy farms have become much denser in terms of livestock. Looking at government statistics on dairy farm profitability, the reason this is happening (and the reason the trend will only continue) seems to be obviousâonly farms with thousands of cows, that can use their size to cut costs, are able to operate in the black:
These changes have given rise to a whole new type of livestock farm: the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO. CAFOs are defined by the EPA as âan AFO [Animal Feeding Operation] with more than 1000 animal unitsâ (which for dairy, is 700 dairy cows, either milking or dry) or âany size AFO that discharges manure or wastewater into a natural or man-made ditch, stream or other waterway.â
In Wisconsin, the number of dairy CAFOs and the total number of cows on these operations continues to rise rapidly:
The concentration of livestock on small plots of land and the large-scale industrialization of these farming operations have given rise to new negative externalities. CAFO livestock produce literal manure lagoons. There is so much manure produced that a huge pit must be dug, fitted with a liner, and the manure is dumped in, forming an artificial lake made of animal waste.
These manure lagoons are open-air, and the toxic fumes elevate rates of asthma in children living nearby. The liquid itself contains toxic chemicals, pathogens, and bacteria, and if it leaks out (say during heavy rainfall), is devastating to nearby communities as it contaminates the local water table, where people draw their well water from, and destroys local bodies of water where wildlife live and people recreate.
Due to the number of cows on these operations, high capacity wells that draw over 100,000 gallons of water per day are required in order to draw enough water for all the livestock. In rural Wisconsin, our natural water supply is beginning to be destroyed through a combination of manure and fertilizer spills contaminating our well water, and high capacity wells sucking out so much water that itâs disrupting the water table.
According to a pretty damning 2010 CDC report on CAFOs that is worth reading in its entirety,
The agriculture sector, including CAFOs, is the leading contributor of pollutants to lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. It has been found that states with high concentrations of CAFOs experience on average 20 to 30 serious water quality problems per year as a result of manure management problems (EPA, 2001).
The report goes on to describe the long-term damage from even a single manure spill:
When groundwater is contaminated by pathogenic organisms, a serious threat to drinking water can occur. Pathogens survive longer in groundwater than surface water due to lower temperatures and protection from the sun.
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Even if the contamination appears to be a single episode, viruses could become attached to sediment near groundwater and continue to leach slowly into groundwater. One pollution event by a CAFO could become a lingering source of viral contamination for groundwater (EPA, 2005).
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Groundwater can still be at risk for contamination after a CAFO has closed and its lagoons are empty. When given increased air exposure, ammonia in soil transforms into nitrates. Nitrates are highly mobile in soil, and will reach groundwater quicker than ammonia. It can be dangerous to ignore contaminated soil.
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If a CAFO has contaminated a water system, community members should be concerned about nitrates and nitrate poisoning. Elevated nitrates in drinking water can be especially harmful to infants, leading to blue baby syndrome and possible death.
For some real-world examples, in Wisconsin in 2017, a baby died from blue baby syndrome, a condition linked to high nitrates, in a community in Armenia, WI which had been experiencing a spike in private well nitrate levels after a 6,000-head dairy CAFO set up shop there. In the central sands region of Wisconsin, rivers such as the Little Plover, which was a notably good trout stream, have nearly dried up entirely from the substantial use of high capacity wells.
In Kewaunee County in northeast Wisconsin, more than one-third (!) of 320 wells tested were found to be unsafe to use due to unsafe levels of coliform bacteria or nitrates. In 2004, in that region, a six-month-old became violently ill after taking a bath in water poisoned by manure runoff. A state representative called the situation there a âpublic health crisis.â
In 2014, in Juneau County, a man was forced to sell the home he had lived in for 20 years after a CAFO began repurposing water irrigation systems to spray manure, and the liquid soaked into the walls of his home (âIt was an ammonia smell. It hurt so bad even to breathe,â he said).
Besides environmental externalities, itâs also an open secret that these CAFOs heavily rely on undocumented immigrants for their day-to-day labor, particularly the parlor milking setups. In a recent news story, Congressman Devin Nunesâs familyâs large dairy farm in Iowa got busted for such practices.
However, itâs important to remember that farms are in competition with each other for labor, land, and other resources. In this case, my brother and other family farms struggle and pay dearly to hire and retain legal workers at a high cost. Other farms, particularly the large ones, pay lower costs for illegal labor and externalize the costs of depressed wages onto everyone else, not unlike externalizing the costs of their pollution. Itâs not a fair playing field to compete on.
Just a mile down the road from my familyâs farm is the largest CAFO in our county, with over 5,000 head of cattle. This CAFO has received four Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) violations from the EPA, two of which are due to coliform bacteria counts, as well as one Clean Waters Act (CWA) violation for discharging into a wetland.
Those are the federally-documented violations, anyway. My mom took some video of a leak about a month after the EPA-documented CWA violation which traveled down the hill into a creek that runs through my parentsâ property, killing the wildlife there for God knows how long. This CAFO is now going through the process of installing a manure pipeline to move waste around to various fieldsâso far through private lands, but apparently they are also pursuing public right-of-ways.
Itâs terrifying to consider how rapidly and how severely the water table and nearby wetlands could be damaged if this pipeline were to burst or leak, and how much manure could be pumped out below the topsoil before being detected.
So I spoke to the countyâs conservation officer who had nothing but good things to say about the pipeline and how it will get tanker trucks off the roads, how a pipeline is safer for the environment, and how leaks would be stopped by shutoff valves. That may be true, but yet you can easily find news reports of manure pipeline leaks. When I asked my mom her thoughts, she told me there was allegedly a pipeline break already which sprayed manure across a neighborâs yard and house, and showed me some pictures she took of the cleanup.
For my brother Noah, who is taking over the farm, having the countyâs biggest CAFO nearby unfortunately puts a competetive strain on his already-difficult situation. Because Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permit requirements require these CAFOs to own or rent enough land to spread manure on proportional to the amount of cows they have, this multi-million dollar corporation down the road is under land-pressure, and gobbles up all farming land in the area often before itâs even on the market. This makes it harder for my brother to find farmland to buy or rent nearby.
One last thing Iâd like to touch on is the failure of the farmer cooperatives in this era.Itâs probably well-known that there have been periods where farmers have went through tough times, and going back to at least the 1920’s, farmers have formed voluntary cooperatives (co-ops) to help one another out by pooling resources.
Check out this quaint 1940’s-era video for an explainer:
Unfortunately, the modern reality is that through repeated mergers, farming cooperatives have conglomerated into corporate behemoths. The co-opâs presence in a farming community today is as a local outpost that belongs to a sprawling empire.For example, in my familyâs farm area the co-op conglomerate is Cenex, a.k.a. CHS Inc., which is a Fortune 100 company (!). And theyâre not the only Fortune 100 farmer co-op eitherâthere was once Farmland Industries, which imploded from the kind of financial stupidity that can only happen when you grow too large.
Anyway, for all the mergers and supposed efficiency gained by the local cooperative turning into a corporate dragon, my brother gets cheaper seeds by buying them from one dude starting up his own business out of the back of his truck, compared to the local co-opâs prices.
Iâve been told other services provided by the co-op suffer from massive inefficiencies as wellâtoo many managers and idle workers at the headquarters, too many trucks show up concurrently at job sites leading to idle workers, inefficient truck routes, etc. The types of issues that crop up when there arenât any farmers in the mix at the co-op any moreâthereâs no âskin in the game,â and no connection to the farmers being served.
The same kind of stuff happens with the cooperative creameriesâthe place where dairy farmers send their milk to be processed. You wouldnât know there was a crisis going on looking at this creameryâs newsletter, with puff pieces about cheese curds showing up on the QVC channel, or about a directorâs jetsetting trips to China and how impressed the locals were he could use chopsticks. Meanwhile member farmers (patrons) are getting the lowest milk checks from the creamery theyâve ever gotten. Yet somehow the board of this creamery had enough cash to allegedly buy another creamery to the tune of $6 million without bringing it up for a patron vote nor mentioning their intention at their annual meeting.
Farmers are generally scared to speak up about this kind of stuff for fear of getting dumped by their creamery and having nowhere to send their milk (because creameries serve limited geographic areas, a farmer may have very fewâperhaps even just oneâoptions for where to send their milk). With the overabundance of milk supply, the feeling is that creameries are on the lookout for ways to lower their supply burden by getting rid of patrons.7 Not being able to sell their milk is obviously a death knell for a dairy farmer.
Point being, farmer cooperatives were once local institutions bootstrapped by the farmers themselves, but now they too have fallen into the trap of corporate consolidation and become disconnected from the people they were meant to serve. Now, in hard times, these institutions have become a source of anxietyâat best an indifferent, inefficient use of resources, and at worst a potential hostile actor that could destroy you. Something unthinkable compared to their founding principles.
Whatâs now happening in the final stages to the American family dairy farm has already happened to other food and livestock industries in this country. Notably poultry, as poultry farmers nowadays are more or less serfs to a handful of huge corporations.
For a time some thought it would be possible for small dairy farms to escape to a niche like organic, but even those farms are going bust as the large corporate farms have penetrated that market and flooded it with product (even if they probably arenât following the already-lax USDA regulations).
I do think it may have been possible to save the family dairy farm at some point, probably through a supply management program similar to what Canada has. There are all sorts of arguments to be made for or against such a system but by all accounts Canadian farmers and consumers are generally happy with their setup up there. The 2014 Farm Bill wouldâve been a good start; it included an oversupply management mechanism, but CAFO lobbyist groups like the Dairy Business Association pushed a last-minute amendment to remove it.
But at this point for America, the cow is out of the barn so to speak and itâs too late for our family dairy farmers. As dairy farms continue to close at record levels, the consolidation into large corporate farms will continue unabated.
For a taste of what the near future looks like, Wal-Mart already began bottling their own milk, shutting down over 100 dairy producers in the process. As for the distant future, I imagine it will look similar to the consolidation in other livestock industries, where a handful of mega corporations dictate production and the âfarmersâ are more like serfs, deeply in debt and entirely beholden to the corporation. I already mentioned poultry farming, but also look at hog farming: the largest hog producer in the country, Smithfield Foods, is now owned by a Chinese corporation, and which is responsible for staggering amounts of damage to rural American communities due to the concentrated waste it produces.
In the name of efficiency, profits will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while waste gets concentrated into more and more toxic forms to be dumped on rural communities.
Growing up on a dairy farm is a unique experience that I was fortunate to have. The farm was woven through all aspects of our familyâs life, and the success of our family depended on everyoneâs contribution to the farm. Family bonds were tempered by working with each other every day, and together overcoming the minor crises that arose (cows getting out, equipment breaking down, etc.). Thatâs why I used âdeathâ in this articleâs title; while it may seem melodramatic to some, that is what it feels like to meâlike a piece of the family is dying.
You get a little taste of many things working on a farm, from agricultural, to construction (e.g., building and fixing up areas of the barn), to engineering (e.g., designing ad-hoc fixes to broken implements in the field), to mechanical and engine repair (e.g., fixing tractors and welding implements).
It saddens me that my brother Noah wonât be able to pass that legacy on to his daughter, and I canât give my own kids a glimmer of it by having them work on the farm over the summers (and neither can my nieces or nephews).
Itâs also a loss for Wisconsinâs cultureââAmericaâs Dairylandââthat we arenât going to have farm kids coming up any more, and our rural pastoral landscape that was dotted with barns, silos, and pastures with grazing cattle is being replaced by an industrial one with huge buildings, heavy machine traffic, and artificial lakes made of animal waste. Those of us who grew up in these rural areas and moved out but longed to return canât even bear to do so any longer because the land has been blighted.
While the future is still uncertain for my kid brother Noah, I have no doubt he will succeed at whatever he puts his mind to. Heâs got brains, talent, and a god-tier work ethic.
If thereâs anything good to come of the situation, I am glad at least that heâll be freed from the burden of having cows, which require one to be out in the barn every single day without end. It will also be a relief to my dad, who I mentioned earlier is now in his seventies and still has to work out in the barn every day because of the difficulty in hiring legal farmhands.
Whatever happens, these family bonds that were forged on the farm remain, and we will take care of each other.
As I said, I donât think thereâs anything on the horizon that would save family dairy farms, save for a supply management program suddenly appearing like a deus ex machina and solving the overproduction problem. I suggest lobbying your representatives for supporting such a measure in a future Farm Bill, and/or supporting family farm organizations who are fighting for that and other measures such as:
If you live in a rural or semi-rural area, itâs critical you pay attention to whatâs going on in your local area. CAFOs will continue to grow and spread, and through organizations like the Dairy Business Association lobby for laws giving them freer ability to pollute the air, water, and land that we all need in order to survive. I suggest proactively lobbying your city or township to pass ordinances banning polluting activities in your area and restrictions that prevent CAFOs from operating in your area (otherwise you might end up on the defensive, which is nearly impossible to win). Some organizations that defend Wisconsinâs water you can support are:
Everyone, including cityfolk, must get educated on what is going on with our food economy, and the dangerous direction it has taken. Iâm still getting educated myself so am open to suggestions, but the Food and Environment Reporting Network seems to do good work here.
Finally, I also recommend everyone, but especially rural folks support the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, as they work hard on several fronts (including another issue dear to my heart, improving broadband access) to empower local communities.
This article is based solely on my own reflection and attempts to understand the systemic changes that affected my familyâs dairy farm. Any mistakes I made are solely my own and do not reflect upon anyone else mentioned in the article.
I spent a lot of time writing this post but there are so many other issues that I wasnât able to even get to. For example, the startling rate of farmers committing suicide (more than double that of veterans), which hit close to home when the man who visited our farm my entire life in his familiar white truck and sold my dad farm equipment killed himself (RIP Marty); to creamery cooperative mismanagement and ineffectiveness and the farmers doing battle with their own creameries, and the general failure of the Capper-Volstead Act; to the consolidation of the farm implement industry; to John Deere doing some shady things (here and here); to statistical changes of the price spread from farm to consumer (i.e., the amount of money farmers get from a gallon of milk or other dairy products compared to their retail cost); to digging into the nasty things CAFO lobbyists are doing; to rural communities fighting against CAFOs in their area; to Trumpâs tariffs and a certain political anger people direct at farmers; and so many more I regret I wasnât able to do justice to.
Research shows that kids who spend time outside benefit long-term. Forest schools offer foraging and more as part of the curriculum.
By Stephanie Parker, Environment, Local Eats,  March 18, 2019
The Wild Roots Forest School kicks off the school year with the same ritual every fall. First, the children and teachers crack open foraged, dried acorns and then grind and sift them into a fine flour. Then, all the families come together to bake a giant communal loaf of bread in the shape of a dragon.
âThe children are not only having the experience of eating; they have to engage in a relationship with it to eat it,â says Lia Grippo, director of the school, which has locations in both Santa Barbara and Bishop, California. Students at Wild Roots range in age from two-and-a-half to seven years old.
Forest schools, also sometimes known as nature schools, come in a number of shapes, sizes, and iterations, but the essential idea is that young children spend the majority of their days outside in nature. The original forest schools began in Denmark in the 1950’s and Sweden soon followed.
Parents who choose forest schools do so because they believe in the positive effects nature has on children. And thereâs research to back this up. A recent study from Denmark showed that children who grow up surrounded by nature have up to a 55 percent lower risk of developing mental illnesses later in life. Another study out of Barcelona found that children whose schools have more green space had higher cognitive development. And there are many other tangible benefits for children when they spend time in nature, such as better physical health and social relationships with one another and a greater sense of independence.
Nathan Clay, whose seven-year-old Leo was a student for two years at Wild Roots, says they chose a forest school because âwe knew he needed more time outside, playing freely, and moving his body.â
There are currently around 100 forest schools in the U.S. Some offer a combination of indoor and outdoor spaces, while others take place entirely outside, whatever the weather. Most of these are for young children of pre-school and kindergarten age, although there are programs for older, home-schooled children as well. A day at forest school may include a hike, cooking lunch over an open fire, collecting leaves, identifying plants, or picking berries. And many are now teaching kids to forage for wild edibles.
âIf youâre going to have an intimate relationship with nature, that requires all of the senses, and it requires knowing that our very survival and sustenance is completely interwoven with the land that we live on,â says Grippo. She grew up in Latvia when it was part of the Soviet Union and says her family foraged as a way to connect with nature and to supplement their diets when food was hard to come by.
Kit Harrington, co-founder of Fiddleheads Forest School and founder of the Washington Nature Preschool Association, says foraging comes naturally to children. âItâs something children are drawn to almost immediately within the outdoor classroom,â she says.
Foraging has seen an upswing in popularity in recent years. It has been shown to be a tool in the larger effort to stem food insecurity and an unlikely source of safe food in urban environments. But itâs not without its challenges. In some cities, it is actually illegal to pick wild plants. And of course, when it comes to kids putting things in their mouths, it is vital that they understand that some wild plants are poisonous.
A student at Wild Roots Forest School in California grinds acorns. (Photo credit: Lia Grippo)
Harrington sees foraging as an important part of outdoor education, but recommends that teachers do a risk-benefit analysis to determine whether it makes sense in a particular outdoor classroom. âWe need to make sure that thereâs enough structure around the activity so that children arenât likely to engage with it in an unsafe way,â she says. And adult supervision is key.
Grippo believes in modeling safe behavior. She doesnât only focus on edible plants in her interactions with the kids, but on poisonous plants as well.
Janine Coates, a forest school researcher at Loughborough University in England who is training to become a forest school instructor, also sees foraging as an important part of the forest school experience. âEating is quite a big part of forest school,â she says. âBeing able to cook food over an open fire in a woodland environment and thinking along the lines of a sustainable food system.â
But Coates promotes caution. âTensions come in when you think about edible plants, like fungi, where thereâs a risk,â she says. The students sheâs seen learn never to eat fungi or put them near their mouths, because itâs just too hard to be sure. And Coates says that teachers make sure to use the word âfungiâ instead of mushrooms, to prevent children from becoming afraid of the edible mushrooms at the grocery store.
At the Secret Forest Playschool in Duluth, Minnesota, students, who are between three and six years old, set around 100 taps on maple trees every March and then learn how to turn sap into syrup. Not only does it teach them where maple syrup comes from, but they also learn how not to over-tap the trees. And when the wild raspberries in the area get eaten by local wildlife before they can pick them, Secret Forestâs founder and director Meghan Morrow says it offers an important lesson, too. âIt teaches them that itâs a shared forest,â she says.
The Flying Deer Nature Center, which has locations in upstate New York and western Massachusetts, also makes sustainability a key part of the lesson plan. They have programs for children from ages four to 17.
Julie Kunz, one of the instructors who teaches four, five, and six year-olds, will sometimes plan a lesson around a specific plant to forage, such as the autumn olive, a little berry that grows on a shrub. Although they are an invasive species in upstate New York and western Massachusetts, theyâve become part of the local landscapeâand theyâre packed with vitamin C. So Kunz makes sure the children harvest them consciously, both so that they keep growing back in the area they are in, but also so that they are not taking seed and spreading into new areas.
Autumn olives are sour and, like many wild edibles, can be off-putting to children initially. âOur palates are not necessarily used to the flavors that nature gives us,â says Kunz. However, she adds, most kids will try new things when doing so is modeled for them by adults they trust, and when other kids are partaking as well.
Sometimes itâs the parents that need more convincing than the kids themselves. Kunz remembers one day being out with a group of kids and finding an insect on a plant called golden rod. The larva of this insect, she says, tastes like butter and can be eaten alive. A few of the kids wanted to try it.
âI was so impressed!â she says. But shortly after, she realized that one of the kids who had eaten one was a vegetarian. âI told the dad and he was like âuh, we donât eat animals,ââ she said.
Overall though, parents appreciate the unique outdoor experiences their children have at their forest schools. Nathan Clay, the father of Leo who spent two years at Wild Roots, says his sonâs time there helped make Leo self-assured and has given him a deep appreciation of and wonder about the natural world.
When it comes to wild edibles, Clay says that Leo knows which common plants to avoid and can identify the differences between edible and non-edible ones. âJust a few days ago we want for a walk and Leo began gathering chickenweed, mallow, nasturtium, and plantain for a healing tea. I made myself a salad for lunch,â Clay says. âI ask him all the time what the weeds and grasses are growing in our yard or on hikes.â
And Loughborough Universityâs Janine Coates, who also has a four-year-old in a forest school in England, says that her daughter loves nothing better than going out and picking wild blackberries or wild garlic, and that when it comes to identifying plants, Coates says of her daughter, âsometimes she is better than me.â
AFL – CIO Staff      March 15, 2019
For Women’s History Month, the AFL-CIO is spotlighting various women who were leaders and activists working at the intersection of civil and labor rights. Today’s profile is Frances Perkins.
Perkins was born in Boston in 1880, descendant from a long line of Maine farmers and craftsmen. At Mount Holyoke College, she studied the natural sciences and economic history and was exposed to a variety of works and lectures who exposed her to new ways of thinking about the social problems she witnessed.
After graduation, she learned more about the plight of working people when she volunteered in New York’s settlement houses. She heard stories directly from workers about the dangerous conditions of factory work and the desperation of being unable to collect promised wages or secure medical care for workplace injuries. She left her teaching career, just as it was beginning, to earn a master’s degree in economics and sociology.
In 1910, she became secretary of the New York Consumers’ League and was part of a team that lobbied the state legislature for a bill limiting the workweek for women and children to 54 hours. On March 25, 1911, she was attending a social function near the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory when the fire began. She witnessed the entire event. She was deeply affected by it:
Up until that point she had lobbied for worker rights and on behalf of the poor, but she had been on a conventional trajectory, toward a conventional marriage, perhaps, and a life of genteel good works. After the fire, what had been a career turned into a vocation. Moral indignation set her on a different course. Her own desires and her own self became less central and the cause itself became more central to the structure of her life. The niceties of her class fell away. She became impatient with the way genteel progressives went about serving the poor. She became impatient with their prissiness, their desire to stay pure and above the fray. Perkins hardened. She threw herself into the rough and tumble of politics. She was willing to take morally hazardous action if it would prevent another catastrophe like the one that befell the women at the Triangle factory. She was willing to compromise and work with corrupt officials if it would produce results. She pinioned herself to this cause for the rest of her life.
The results were obvious.
Perkins began to focus more on practical remedies to the challenges faced by working people. She held to a strong belief that legislation was the most important avenue to “right industrial wrongs,” and she simultaneously championed labor organizing and collective action. In 1918, she was invited by Gov. Al Smith to join the New York State Industrial Commission, becoming the first woman to serve. By 1926, she had become the commission’s chairwoman. In 1929, Gov. Franklin Roosevelt appointed her as the industrial commissioner for the state. She led a series of progressive reforms that included expanding factory investigations, reducing the workweek for women to 48 hours and championing minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws.
In 1933, Perkins was chosen by President Roosevelt to serve as secretary of labor, making her the first woman ever appointed to a federal Cabinet position. She focused on creating a safety net to counteract the Great Depression’s effects on working people. This was evident in the legislation she helped secure, including the Wagner Act (which gave workers the right to organize unions and bargain collectively), the Fair Labor Standards Act (which established the first minimum wage and created a maximum workweek) and the Social Security Act of 1935.
She also played a crucial role in the dramatic labor uprisings of the 1930s and 1940s. She consistently supported the rights of workers to organize unions of their own choosing and to pressure employers through economic action. She successfully resolved strikes with gains for workers time and time again, most notably helping end the 1934 San Francisco General Strike without violence or the use of federal troops, an option that was on the table.
In 1945, Perkins resigned from her position as labor secretary to head the U.S. delegation to the International Labor Organization conference in Paris. President Harry Truman appointed her to the Civil Service Commission, a job she held through 1953. She also returned to the classroom to teach at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She died in New York in 1965 at the age of 85 and was buried in her family’s plot in New Castle, Maine.
Read more about Perkins.
March 15, 2019
Congratulations to all the young people participating in the Youth Climate Strike all over the world today. Their message is simple: We must come together to take bold and aggressive action to solve the existential crisis of climate change. We will fight the greed of Trump and the fossil fuel executives who are more worried about their short term profits than the well-being of the planet. We will fight to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We will fight to create millions of new jobs in sustainable energy and make this country and world a habitable place for our kids and grandchildren to live.
March 8, 2019
This International Womenâs Day, donât forget about the thousands of Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered in Canada.
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
This International Womenâs Day, donât forget about the thousands of Indigenous women and girls who have gone missing or been murdered in Canada.
Posted by Direct From on Friday, March 8, 2019
March 8, 2019
WASHINGTONÂ â Within moments of Paul Manafort being sentenced to less than four years in federal prison, there was shock on cable news and online.
It was a far cry from the 12 to 25 years he could have been ordered to serve behind bars.
Many outlined cases in which defendants accused of lesser crimes were given much harsher punishments. Some used the case as a way to display the racial disparities within the criminal justice system.
Others targeted U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis, who had been critical of prosecutors in special counsel Robert Mueller’s office. During Manafort’s sentencing on Thursday, Ellis said had committed “serious, very serious crimes,” but he also said Manafort had “lived an otherwise blameless life and earned the admiration of many.”
The issue sparked debate on how much time President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman should spend behind bars and why the sentence was considerably below what sentencing guidelines called for and what prosecutors had noted in court filing.
But data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission for 2017Â shows that Manafort is not alone in receiving a lesser sentence.
In the Eastern District of Virginia, where Manafort was sentenced, about a quarter of defendants were sentenced below federal guidelines. The data for the 2017 fiscal year shows that about two-thirds of defendants received sentences that fit within the guidelines.
For fraud cases, in particular, the Eastern District was harsher on defendants than the national average. Defendants were given 36 months in prison on average, compared to the national average of 24 months.
Data shows the Eastern District took up 126 fraud cases in 2017.
When it came to drug and gun crimes, the sentences varied but were higher in the Eastern District of Virginia than national averages.
Data shows the Eastern District handed down an average of a 66-month sentence for firearm charges, whereas the national average was 52 months. For drug trafficking, defendants in the District were sentenced to 84 months, higher than the national average of 60.
Of course, handing down a sentence is complex and judges consider an array of information, including who was harmed, any previous crimes and the sheer size of the crime.
A jury in Virginia convicted Manafort of eight charges, including bank and tax fraud, after a three-week trial last summer. The case, as well as a related one in Washington, stem from his work as a political consultant in Ukraine before he joined Trump’s campaign in 2016.
In explaining his sentencing decision, Ellis said “it is important to avoid unwarranted disparity” among comparable white-collar cases.
As an example, he cited a previous case that involved a more substantial loss to victims. In that case, over which Ellis also presided, he sentenced the defendant to seven months in prison.
Ellis also raised pointed questions about whether Manafort deserved credit for cooperation with prosecutors in the related criminal case in the District of Columbia where he agreed to plead guilty and assist the special counsel in the ongoing inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Prosecutor Greg Andres told Ellis that Manafort deserved no credit, describing how the cooperation agreement collapsed when Manafort repeatedly lied to prosecutors and to a federal grand jury.
In the 50 hours Manafort spent with prosecutors as part of the cooperation agreement, Andres said Manafort provided no useful information. The prosecutor said Manafort either provided information prosecutors already knew or lied.
Ellis also questioned whether Manafort intended to defraud bank authorities on a $5.5 million loan application by not disclosing the existence of a separate outstanding loan, suggesting that it might have been an oversight by a “very busy man.”
The notions did not sit well with others, including Democratic lawmakers.
“My view on Manafort sentence: Guidelines there for a reason. His crimes took place over years and he led far from a ‘blameless life.’ Crimes committed in an office building should be treated as seriously as crimes committed on a street corner,” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a 2020 presidential candidate. “Can’t have two systems of justice!”
The difference in Manafort’s sentence from that of someone who commits a drug or gun violation was noted by many attorneys, public defenders and former federal prosecutors on social media Thursday.
Scott Hechinger, who serves as a public defender in New York for the Brooklyn Defender Services, outlined an array of cases he and his colleagues have worked, including a client that he said on Wednesday was offered a sentence by prosecutors of between 36 to 72 months for stealing $100 in quarters from a residential laundry room.
He said the offer was a result of the crime being considered a second-degree felony in New York, where the minimum sentence is listed as 3 1/2 years.
Hechinger said he was not advocating for harsher sentences or that Manafort should serve more time but wanted to showcase “the outrageous disparity” between Manafort’s case and that of poor people of color. He added he wished “my clients received [the] same treatment as the privileged few.”
Ken White, an attorney and former federal prosecutor, said on Twitter that Manafort’s sentence was one “defense lawyers dream of.”
“It’s the kind of departure that’s FAR more likely to be enjoyed by the sort of person who commits crimes with banks and wires than drugs or guns,” he tweeted.
In an interview with USA TODAY, White added that Ellis’ leniency wasn’t a sign of bias.
“I think that’s the simple explanation that lets this system off the hook,” White said. “The real issue isn’t Manafort getting 47 months, but that so many other people get much longer sentences.”
He noted Ellis’ track record of opposing mandatory minimum sentences for drug and gun crimes that constrain judges to hand down harsh sentences but allow “broad discretion for cases like Manafort’s, where the defendant has money.”
White noted that while this case may be a good example in the harsh realities of the criminal justice system, it’s just one of many similar cases.
“The problem isn’t too short of sentences,” White said. “The problem is who is getting the much larger sentences.”
In addition to 47 months in prison, Ellis ordered Manafort to pay a $50,000 fine and approximately $24 million in restitution, and to spend an additional three years on federal supervision. Ellis said the nine months Manafort has already spent in jail should count against his total sentence.
Ellis’ decision is not the end for Manafort.
He will be sentenced again next week in a related case in Washington where he faces an additional 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy charges for failing to report his lobbying work in Ukraine and tampering with witnesses.
Contributing: Kevin Johnson, Brad Heath and Kristine Phillips
March 5, 2019
Five ways to get around Trump’s useless and racist border wall:
5 Reasons the Border Wall Won't Stop Drugs
Five ways to get around Trump's useless and racist border wall:
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday, March 5, 2019
11 MILLION TAXPAYERS LOSE $323 BILLION IN DEDUCTIONS IN TRUMP TAX…