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Record-breaking heat waves are rippling across the planet, bringing death and destruction in their wake. via Climate Facts
Posted by EcoWatch on Wednesday, August 1, 2018
The farm manager at the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, Reyes approaches agricultural systems from a justice lens.
Anthony Reyes found his calling working at the intersection of farming and social justice with organizations such as the Tilth Alliance in Seattle, the youth education program Common Threads Farm in Bellingham, and now with the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz. Reyes credits his college days at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for his passion for sustainable agriculture with a food justice focus. Reyes, a biracial Millennial with Mexican-American roots, always wanted to return to the area, a hub for farming with a mission. In 2017, he returned to the community where he first learned to grow food and view agricultural systems through a justice lens.
In his first year at the Homeless Garden Project, Anthony Reyes says he was asked about every stereotype imaginable when working with this marginalized population. Chief among them: Do homeless people really work? There’s a lot of stigma associated with this population, he says. “For the record, the crews here are some of the most hardworking people I’ve ever met,” says Reyes of the participants in the non-profit’s year-long employment-training program at Natural Bridges Farm.
The project serves people in Santa Cruz County who are homeless or formerly homeless, who have experienced barriers to employment, and who want to maintain a stable productive place in society. “The crew tackles every task seriously with passion and heart.”
Reyes spends his days on the farm bouncing between different posts—whether the field, greenhouse, farm stand, or kitchen—helping crews with their tasks on the 3.5-acre farm, which grows row crops and flowers. He’s also in charge of the organization’s three-pronged Community Supported Agriculture program. CSAs, an alternative marketing model that features a direct relationship between farmer and consumer, accounts for about 10 percent of the 25-year-old institution’s income.
The program includes a traditional CSA, a U-pick version, and a scholarship fund, where people can donate to a CSA program for 10 local organizations serving the needy. Flowers go to a local hospice program and the program includes a value-added enterprise making and selling jams, dried herbs, and floral wreaths, which are sold at their downtown store, in a new shop in nearby Capitola, and online.
Relationships are central to Reyes’s job, he says, and inform every aspect of work on the farm, which is slated to expand to a 9-acre permanent site expected to be fully operational in 2020. The 28-year-old strives to treat each crew member with care, compassion, and respect. He says he learns as much from his 17-member crew as they learn from him. “Every single day they inspire me. The farm itself is such a place of radical inclusivity. Everyone is embraced and welcomed,” he says. “And that is reflected in the pride people take in the work and the collaboration on the farm. It’s really a beautiful thing to witness on a day-to-day basis.”
Reyes has farming in his blood: Wisconsin dairy farmers make up his mother’s side of the family. His father is of Mexican heritage and his paternal grandfather ran a “mow and blow” business in Los Angeles. The smell of grass and a four-stroke engine is embedded in childhood memories, he says, and he looked up to his grandfather, a gentle soul. In college, Reyes says his studies helped him begin to see agriculture and outside work though a social justice lens. A key mentor on campus: a UC Santa Cruz lead groundskeeper whom he worked with, Jose Sanchez.
His “juiciest” days, Reyes says, are whenever he can get his hands in the earth. “I make some of the deepest connections with our crew members simply working alongside them,” he says. “Working the soil creates a safe space for people to be seen and heard for who they are.”
Reyes has seen first-hand what a difference growing food can make in someone’s life. “There’s something very restorative and transformative about planting a seed and watering it and watching it grow into a flourishing plant that can provide sustenance,” he says. “From a little speck in your hand to the harvest for your lunch: That has a calming, therapeutic effect.”
Crew members see the fruits of their labor and the value that it brings. “There are very real, tangible benefits at the end of the day, whether someone has spent it building a bed, weeding, or picking. You can see the difference you’ve made,” says Reyes. “There’s ownership and a sense of accomplishment.”
As Reyes points out, homelessness and joblessness go hand in hand. Lack of job skills, a spotty work history, an absent social support network, and low self-esteem can all make the transition out of homelessness more difficult. The Homeless Garden Project’s program is designed to address these concerns, in addition to the challenges that come with substance abuse, mental health issues, physical or developmental disability, and the unique problems faced by veterans—all obstacles that disproportionately impact the homeless community.
Housing is one of the most immediate problems. Some of the Homeless Garden Project’s clientele live in shelters, while others camp outside or in cars, or reside in tenuous subsidized housing situations. A team of social work interns help garden crew members find stable employment and housing. The interns also help the crew find resources to address other obstacles like transportation, substance abuse, and mental health problems.
“Every single person on the crew has personal challenges they’re trying to work through. We very much meet people where they are,” says Reyes. In a region known for exorbitant rents and real estate, Reyes is well aware that many residents of the greater community—including some farm project volunteers—are just a paycheck or two away from homelessness themselves.
Measuring success comes in multiple ways. More than 90 percent of participants in the program find stable housing and employment at the end of their garden project tenure. There’s also the less quantifiable personal growth that Reyes observes in his crews over time: “I watch people try new things and come out of their shell.”
His own on-the-job goals? “I remind myself constantly to show up, and what it means to be present. I’ve learned so much about myself in this line of work,” he says. “It’s also given me more confidence and allowed me to be okay with, and find strength in, vulnerability. It’s not just me. Every single person who steps onto the farm is changed by it.”
Reprinted with permission from Hungry for Change, a publication of the Berkeley Food Institute. Read about other California emerging food systems changemakers here.
Photos: Fabián Aguirre and Maya Pisciotto, The Understory.
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Hmong farmers Blia and Phua Thao put their 40-plus years of experience to work in Spring Valley, where they grow organic produce entirely by hand.
Sandwiched among dairy farms and fields of conventionally grown corn and soybeans outside Spring Valley, Wisconsin, Thao’s Garden, is the only immigrant-owned, certified organic farm for miles.
“We grow all kinds of vegetables,” says Phua Yang Thao, who owns the farm with her husband, Blia Tou Thao. Phua corrects herself with a laugh, “mostly Caucasian vegetables.” She says vegetables common to cooking in the Thaos’ community of Hmong Americans, like bok choy and Asian bitter melon, are not as popular in the Upper Midwest as crops like asparagus and rhubarb.
The 28-acre farm has been the Thaos’ full-time occupation since 2007, building on more than 40 years of farming experience in the United States. They grow a diverse complement of garden vegetables, including peas, carrots, potatoes, beets, and peppers, and raise 400 chickens for eggs and meat. Phua says they don’t use pesticides and have no need for irrigation—though sometimes, after a wet spring, they must wait for the soil to dry out before planting.
The “organic farm” sign outside of Thao’s Garden.
Consistent with the farming practices used in the Hmong culture, Phua and Blia weed and harvest exclusively by hand. That’s why, for the past several seasons, they’ve kept less than half their land under active cultivation, farming on the same 13 acres each year.
This hands-on approach leads to a farm powered by many hands. They have assistance from extended family members, many of whom live nearby in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, and they sometimes hire local people to help out. Their son Boun, who lives with them, works on the farm most summer mornings before making a one-hour commute to Minneapolis for his job in the Hennepin County library system.
Phua’s highest concern as a farmer is growing food without pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. “Organic foods must be the future,” she says. “The conventional American farmer uses too many chemicals.”
Back in Laos, she says, many of her friends and neighbors lived long lives and died in their sleep. But after more than 40 years in the United States, she has seen members of the Hmong community face health issues unheard-of in Laos. “Now we have heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, strokes,” she says. “Is this from the food?”
The Thaos were invited to give the keynote address at The Food Group’s Emerging Farmers Conference in Minnesota earlier this year. But their journey to this green patch of farmland in the Upper Midwest started thousands of miles away and decades ago.
In 1961, Blia was 21 years old when he left Laos for a year of military training in Thailand led by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In the years that followed, he joined the 30,000 men who were to serve as CIA guerilla fighters during the Vietnam War. Their covert military operations are now referred to as the Secret War.
“I had some schooling when I was young,” Blia says, “so the CIA trained me to operate radios.” The job meant he was not on the front lines, but he recalls the challenges of traversing an almost entirely roadless region of rugged mountains and dense jungle in Laos. “Sometimes they would pick us up in helicopters,” he says. “But sometimes the helicopters did not come. Then we walked for days.”
After American forces left the region and communist leadership assumed control in 1975, Blia recalls, “The CIA said we must leave.”
Phua (left) and Blia Thao at Thao’s Garden.
Blia and Phua moved to a refugee camp in Thailand with their four children, and the family’s future was unclear. Blia gave birth to their fifth and youngest child, a daughter, in the camp. After a year, they learned they could move to the U.S.
“Because of the war,” Phua says, “we never farmed in Laos.” But agriculture had long been an important part of Hmong culture, and her parents grew corn, rice, and squash. In her youth, Phua learned from them while helping to raise her younger siblings.
The Thaos stablished their first farm outside Beatrice, Nebraska, where the family moved in 1976 after leaving the refugee camp. A local Lutheran church sponsored their move, and its members also helped them take night classes to learn English. Blia took a job as a janitor and inspector with AT&T and worked for the company for 22 years.
Blia and Phua moved to western Wisconsin after one of their grown sons, a medical doctor, moved to Minnesota’s Twin Cities, 50 miles west. And for the past 11 years, they have been part of the Upper Midwest’s farm community.
The Thaos’ deep commitment to organics has helped them connect to a network of other producers in the region. According to a 2017 University of Wisconsin organic agriculture report, the state ranks second only to California in its number of organic farms, and third nationwide in organic acres.
It’s not clear how many organic farmers in Wisconsin are Hmong. But according to the 2010 U.S. Census, the state’s Hmong population of around 47,000 is the third-highest in the country, and Hmong producers are significant contributors to the area’s farmers’ markets.
Diane Mayerfield, the Wisconsin Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education state coordinator and an outreach specialist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Extension, notes that many Hmong producers in Wisconsin also grow ginseng to sell into the commodity market. But she says that diversified producer growers like Phua and Blia are more visible to the general public.
For example, Hmong producers at the enormous Dane County Farmers’ Market in Madison comprise nearly 20 percent of the market’s 270 members.
MOSES headquarters in Spring Valley, Wisc.
Many Hmong growers share Blia and Phua’s commitment to chemical-free farming, Mayerfield says, but the Thaos stand out for their full organic certification. They worked with the Spring Valley-based farmer resource nonprofit Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) to go through the process in 2012. They’ve also participated in trainings at the MOSES annual conference, the largest event of its kind in the U.S.
Blia and Phua know that organic certification makes their farm unique, but they’re reluctant to consider themselves innovators in other areas. More than anything, they prize the close personal connection they their land and their produce.
While the Thaos grow their produce in Wisconsin, all their off-farm sales occur in Minnesota. In addition to the farmers’ market, they have a contract to sell bulk produce to a Twin-Cities-based food hub, The Good Acre. The Good Acre works to expand producers’ access to markets, especially among immigrant and underserved farmers, and includes the Thaos’ vegetables in multi-farm CSA boxes.
Blia and Phua’s son Boun changes the oil in Thao’s Garden’s tractor.
“Their product is always good,” says Rhys Williams, executive director of The Good Acre. “Becoming a good farmer takes time, and I respect the work they do. And it’s all by hand!”
This summer, staff from The Good Acre will work with Phua and Blia to build an unheated high tunnel greenhouse at Thao’s Garden. Also known as a hoop house, high tunnels are season-extenders, Williams explains, because they provide protection from late-spring and early-fall frosts. “And since [The Good Acre’s] whole point is helping farmers make more money, season extension is one way to do that.”
They will also host a field day this fall for other farmers who are considering building their own high tunnels. Staff at the Good Acre and MOSES will invite other immigrant and underserved farmers to learn from the Thaos.
The Thaos are grateful for the help they’ve been offered since coming to the U.S.—from Nebraska to Wisconsin. “Anything we need, we go to any neighbor,” Blia says.
Asked about the future of Thao’s Garden, Blia tells a story about Isabella, one of his 12 grandchildren, who lives in nearby Stillwater, Minnesota, and visits often to help on the farm. Recently she said, “Grandpa, someday I want to take over your farm.”
“I am 78 this year,” Blia says, a hint of concern in his voice. Then he smiles. “Isabella is 17.”
Phua (left) and Blia Thao.
Mathew Lawrence; orig. published by Open Democracy July 26, 2018
Ownership matters. Who owns and controls the productive wealth of nations and communities is fundamental to how an economic system operates and in whose interests. The nature and distribution of ownership intimately shapes the distribution of power and reward within society, undergirding the present and shaping our economic futures.
For 40 years, the economy has been a one-way-street. Assets and equity have flowed upwards and outwards, and with them wealth. Margaret Thatcher promised a world ‘where owning shares is as common as having a car’. But the grand promise of a share-owning democracy, and with it broad-based economic power, has crumbled. Now, more than half of UK company equity is owned abroad and only just over 12% by individuals, while the richest 10% own more than 60% of the nation’s financial wealth. The interests of those who own Britain’s businesses, moreover, are often misaligned with those of other stakeholders, such as employees, customers, service users and local communities. And even where they are better aligned, a concentration of shareholding and the distant power of capital markets hollows out the agency of individual shareholders and workers.
Piecemeal reform that leaves current models of ownership and the distribution of economic assets untouched will leave the fundamental values, operations, and outcomes of our economic system unchallenged. In place of extractive, disconnected and short-termist forms of ownership, we have to build forms of ownership that are distributive by design, generative in purpose, democratic in orientation, and have a sense of connection to place.
There is no single step that can achieve this. What is required is a pluralistic and proactive strategy to scale alternative models of ownership that can reorient enterprise towards the common good, shape production toward democratic needs, stem financial leakage and build a future of shared economic plenty by sharing the rewards of our collective economic endeavours.
Co-operatives – a tried and tested means of democratising and equitably sharing the benefits of enterprise – must be central to this agenda. At their heart, they are free and democratic enterprises. Indeed, in the countries in which they have thrived, they are often rooted in resistance to oppressive government or the march of a market economy that is prejudiced in favour of an extractive and financialised model. Co-ops are by nature organisations with a purpose, and are very often established to achieve a specific social or environmental goal by pooling the resources of a defined group of people.
Co-ops exist to share risk, power and reward. They are therefore more democratic and accountable forms of business that cannot sell equity on capital markets and so are beyond the influence of the shareholding conglomerates. Recent studies have also shown them to be more enduring and resilient in the face of market disruption, more profitable, more productive, happier and longer-lasting than non-co-operative forms of enterprise.
Yet co-operatives – and indeed all alternative forms of ownership – operate in a hostile economic environment. From challenges in accessing finance to poorly tailored regulatory and legal systems to an underpowered supportive infrastructure, they face an uphill challenge. By contrast, the most successful co-operative economies such as Italy, France, and the USA, provide the legal, financial and operational arrangements for the sector to thrive. It is not surprising then that the co-op sector in those countries is much deeper than our own.
Given this, we should not expect significant co-operative expansion to happen in the current institutional context. Nor can or should we expect co-operativism to expand dramatically through the force of ethical example and exceptional effort, not least because co-operatives are currently subject to intense external pressures due to their operating in a wider, extractive and dysfunctional economy.
Instead, it should be because they are a form of purposeful, successful enterprise that most effectively brings together the ability and interests of ordinary people backed by a supportive institutional, financial and legal framework. Co-operatives should thrive, in other words, as a form of economic organisational ‘common sense’.
Public policy – and an ambitious politics for a new economy – are crucial to creating the conditions for this to occur. NEF’s new report, Co-operatives unleashed, sets out how this can be done.
First, a new legal framework for co-operatives should be established, including a statutory underpinning for the creation of co-operative indivisible reserves and an asset lock, and the introduction of a ‘Right to Own’ to support employee buyouts and the co-operatisation of existing businesses.
The second step is to develop a range of financial instruments and institutions tailored to the needs of the co-operative economy. This should include the creation of mutual guarantee societies, common across Europe, that help co-ops and SMEs pool risk and access funding, as well as the introduction of tax relief on profits reinvested in asset-locked indivisible reserves and on profits paid into a co-op development fund to incentivise common wealth creation.
Third, to develop and extend the capabilities of the co-operative movement, a new Co-operative Development Agency for England and for Northern Ireland should be established. These would seek to replicate and expand on the success of Cooperative Development Scotland and the Welsh Cooperative Center in developing the capacity of the co-op movement across the rest of the country. It should focus on facilitating knowledge exchange and sectoral co-ordination, supporting co-op business development, and help replicate, shelter and expand successful co-op models by providing an accessible co-op replication service.
Finally, cooperatives must be supported to thrive in their communities and localities as genuinely rooted businesses capable of retaining power and control within that place and returning value to communities. This requires creating real life contexts across the UK where people can come into contact with coop ideas and realise how they can be applied to their livelihood and community. Innovative place-based community wealth building and local industrial strategies are crucial to this and hence to co-operative development. This could include encouraging local procurement and commissioning strategies to support, where appropriate, co-operatives and social enterprises, and local authorities, in combination with the community, social oriented enterprises and unions, should work together to increase the capacity of co-ops and other local businesses to bid for anchor institution contracts.
As the political sun sets on neoliberal economics, and demand grows for greater wealth-building and sharing of value with those that add it, there is a real need for policy that creates the kind of enterprises that can fulfil this demand.
What is needed – alongside an expansion of the co-operative sector – is a deep economic heartbeat that consistently and over time transfers the ownership and control of businesses to workers and other key stakeholders. Alongside the co-operative specific proposals, we therefore set out a new institution called an Inclusive Ownership Fund to do just that. Under this proposal, all shareholder or larger privately-owned businesses would transfer a small amount of profit each year in the form of equity into a worker or wider stakeholder-owned trust. Once there, these shares would not be available for further sale.
When the fund reached a controlling level of ownership of a firm (or, in the case of businesses succession, proposed takeover or crisis, a lower but significant level of ownership) the stakeholders controlling the fund could opt to assume control of the business. But prior to that, steps could be built into the fund that would see incremental improvements in worker or wider stakeholder participation when the fund reached certain levels. In other words, the Inclusive Ownership Fund would act as a mechanism for transforming ownership over time, putting power and control in the hands of people rooted in places that depend on the success of purposeful business rather than remaining the preserve of rootless capital.
Ownership matters. It is both a force and fulcrum; it is no coincidence that the two major transformations in the UK’s political economy were under-girded by changes in ownership models, with nationalization securing the post-war settlement, and privatization driving its undoing. As we urgently seek a third transformation, new models ownership – as today’s report sets out – must be at the heart of our economic re-imagining.
Think recycling is good enough?
What Happens To Your Plastic Water Bottles? | The Swim
Plastic water bottles rarely become bottles again. Here’s what you should know about plastic recycling.#TheSwim #BenLecomte #PlasticFreeJulyMake sure to follow The Swim on Seeker and Discovery!
Posted by Seeker on Monday, July 9, 2018
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July 19, 2018
These shocking images show how polluted the U.S. was before the creation of the E.P.A.
See Photos Of The U.S. Environment Before The E.P.A.’s Creation
These shocking images show how polluted the U.S. was before the creation of the E.P.A.
Posted by Seeker on Thursday, July 19, 2018
By Luke Barnes July 25, 2018
Environmental, land, and indigenous activists are being killed at a record rate and governments are turning a blind eye, according to a new report by the watchdog group Global Witness.
According to the report, at least 207 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2017. More than half (60 percent) of the murders took place in Latin America, with Brazil recording 57 killings, Colombia 24 and Mexico 15. The report also stressed that documenting and verifying these murders — particularly in Africa — was extremely difficult, so the real figure might be even higher.
“[Government and business’] willingness to turn a blind eye has permitted the systematic impunity that lets perpetrators know they will almost certainly never be brought to justice,” the report reads. “In fact, governments are often complicit in the attacks.”
The report singled out the threat that indigenous communities face. While the number of indigenous victims fell from 40 percent in 2016 to 25 percent in 2017, they still are a massively over-represented group of victims.
The Cáceres case highlights a consistent pattern that continued through 2017; activist and protesters falling foul of big business interests and paying a deadly price. Of the 207 documented victims last year, 46 were killed protesting against large-scale agriculture, another 40 against mining and oil, and 23 against logging and poaching each. Many of the murders were linked to government security services.
“Global Witness data shows that it is often government security forces committing the crimes,” the report reads. “They were linked to around a quarter of the murders last year — 30 linked to the army and 23 to the police.”
One such incident occurred in late December 2017, when the Filipino military attacked the town of Lake Sebu, in the far south of the country, where the local Tabloi-manubo community had opposed a 300-hectare expansion of a coffee plantation over their ancestral land. According to Global Witness, at least eight members of the community where killed, 10 were missing and more than 200 were forced to flee the area.
“When I got there, the place was covered in empty bullet shells,” environmental defender Rene Pamplona said. “It made me think: all these indigenous people ever wanted was to be able to reclaim their ancestral lands and live in peace.”
By Cat Modlin – Jackson, Farming, Local Eats July 24, 2018
Judith McGeary wanted answers that the State of Texas wasn’t willing to give, so the lawyer-turned-farmer fought the law—and won.
When McGeary learned she needed a food manufacturer’s license to keep selling meat at her local farmers’ markets, she contacted the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) for clarification. “The response was, ‘that’s for you to decide,’” says McGeary.
Judith McGeary
Without the license, McGeary would have been unable to store packaged meat in a home freezer during the days between processing her grass-fed lamb meat and selling it at the market. Meeting requirements for the license was expensive, but there was no viable alternative if she wanted to stay in business. When McGeary learned she might have to spend hundreds of dollars on water testing to attain the permit, she asked the state for a concrete response. But instead of answers, she was told to take a gamble.
The decision is fraught: On one hand, paying steep fees for potentially unnecessary processes, and on the other skipping the testing and running the risk of punitive fines down the road. The incident illustrates a bureaucracy that hinders small-scale farmers, says McGeary. “The laws and regulations are just so opaque that a reasonably intelligent human being—even one with legal training—who reads through them will have significant difficulty figuring out just what do you have to do.”
And McGeary has more tools than just legal training. The one-time federal appeals court clerk is executive director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA), which she founded in 2006 to support independent family farmers and protect them from convoluted regulations like the one she encountered. McGeary and the national organization she operates with the help of one other employee work to level the agricultural landscape by liaising between a predominantly Texan base of 1,000 members and lawmakers in both Austin and Washington, D.C.
Through her advocacy with FARFA, McGeary lobbied in 2013 for the successful passage of the state’s Better Communications Bill (HB 1392) requiring officials to answer farmers’ questions about how to follow the law.
In spite of the state’s reputation as a friend to small business, it’s no friend for small farmers, says McGeary. “The regulations are just not designed for small-scale or diversified production. They’re designed for large-scale single product lines.”
Since the organization was founded, FARFA has racked up a list of wins for small farmers. The first came after FARFA rallied a group of activist organizations across the country to stop the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), an elaborate livestock-tagging program that opponents said would have brought devastating costs and complications for small ranchers.
FARFA also led led a nationwide lobbying effort to get the Tester-Hagan amendment attached to the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The amendment kept small farmers from needing to comply with safety standards that FSMA opponents like McGeary said were designed for large-scale operations and burdensome, if not impossible, for small-scale farms to meet.
And under McGeary’s direction, FARFA has also brought cottage food laws to Texas, blocked legislation that would have inhibited rural communities’ access to vital water resources, and pushed to make it easier for permaculture farmers to receive the same benefits afforded to corporate monocropping operations.
A Texas native, McGeary started her career as an environmental lawyer in 1997, but she found herself frustrated trying to solve problems within the confines of the legal system. She decided to pursue a master’s degree in biology and become a consultant. But her path changed after meeting Dick Richardson, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Texas.
“If you care about the environment, you should care about where your food comes from,” Richardson told McGeary, and also offered a number of reading recommendations on sustainable agriculture. She studied independently for years, learning about the ways that sustainable agriculture is beneficial for both the planet and its people, and was so inspired by her education that she decided to put her knowledge into practice. In 2003, McGeary made the leap and became a sheep farmer in a town just outside of Austin.
Now McGeary is on the final leg of FARFA’s 2018 Raise Your Voice tour, traversing nearly 20 towns across Texas to hear from other farmers trying to survive.
From the Coast to the Panhandle, McGeary has heard from Texas farmers concerned about keeping up with the costs of licenses, permits, and equipment necessary to grow their business. A common complaint comes from those wanting to can vegetables at home for market sales.
McGeary wants what she calls a “scale-sensitive approach” to food safety regulation. She’s spent years advocating for looser laws on the sale of raw milk and policies that make it easier for farmers to process their food.
The cottage food laws she helped pass in 2011 and 2013 allow people to make and sell up to $50,000 of certain “non-potentially hazardous foods” in their home without having to pay thousands of dollars for a food manufacturers’ license and access to a commercial kitchen. But canned vegetables other than cucumber pickles don’t fall under the law’s purview—and McGeary says that’s preventing growers from applying sustainable practices to maximize profits. She plans to keep pushing lawmakers to include a practice that would allow farmers to extend harvests, prevent food waste, and, in some cases, keep from going under.
Few of the 48 states with cottage food laws allow producers to can food. The Food and Drug Administration reports that improperly canned foods can cause botulism, a potentially deadly illness. A representative with the Texas Department of State Health Services told Civil Eats that current canning regulations “are required to maintain a baseline of safety, regardless of the size of the operation.”
But local food advocates like McGeary say the real safety issues stem from the conventional labyrinth, wherein food from various farms is funneled into a centralized processing location, making it difficult to trace the source of a food-borne illness outbreak. Cottage production, however, closes the gap between producer and consumer, making it easier for both ends of the supply chain to troubleshoot in the event of an outbreak.
“The best way to protect food safety,” says McGeary, “is to reduce the complexity and scope of these distribution systems.”
Glen Miracle can testify to the impact that FARFA is having in Texas. McGeary is working to help farmers like Miracle, who struggled to get his 21-acre diversified vegetable farm recognized by officials as agricultural land.
The Texas Department of Agriculture is more concerned with the interests of large farms, says Miracle. “We needed somebody like Judith to set up advocacy for small farmers.”
When Miracle started farming vegetables and sheep full-time in 2012, he went to the Waller County Appraisal Office to apply for agricultural valuation, an assessment that would save him about $4,000 a year in taxes—no small sum in what’s often a break-even profession, at best. But he was denied.
Under Section 23.51 of the Texas Tax Code, land qualifies for agricultural use valuation if the space has been “devoted principally to agricultural use to the degree of intensity generally accepted in the area” for at least five years.
In Waller County, there are no clear guidelines for mixed vegetable farmers. Each of those farms is considered case-by-case, says the county’s chief appraiser, Chris Barzilla, who makes the final decision on what land meets the county definition for agriculture. Barzilla explains that one reason he denied Miracle the valuation in 2012 was because he had not been farming long enough. But that was only part of the problem. For diversified farmers like Miracle, who also keeps livestock and bees, it can be difficult to meet the county’s requirements of animal or crop density per acre.
It didn’t matter that Miracle made a living off income combined from his vegetables and sheep. “We don’t piecemeal it together,” says Barzilla. Were Miracle to qualify because of his sheep, he would have had to have at least three sheep per acre, a standard Barzilla says was set by a board of large farmers.
That definition of agriculture runs contrary to the principles of permaculture farming that Miracle lives by, however. “They have a set of rules that aren’t supported by science,” Miracle says. “They told me I had to have 60 ewes on this property… [but] this of course leads to overgrazing and erosion.” Ultimately it was Miracle’s bees that garnered the valuation in 2018, because Waller County residents with at least 20 acres and eight hives are also eligible.
Miracle says this is a prime example of the nonsensical approach to agricultural regulations in Texas. “How in the world does 60 ewes relate to eight beehives?”
Erin Flynn of Green Gate Farms, a FARFA supporter.
For the past three sessions, McGeary has lobbied the state legislature to make it easier for farms like Miracle’s to be recognized as agricultural for tax purposes. FARFA has proposed so-called fair property tax bills that would specify vegetable and fruit production as agricultural activity and encourage appraisers to consider farming methods, as opposed to just outcomes, when determining what land qualifies for the tax exemption.
Joe Outlaw, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University who’s spent his career analyzing policies in Texas, explains that what seems like common sense doesn’t always translate into policy, especially in a state where land value feeds the budget.
“There’s a lot of people that question a lot of what happens in the government, but nothing happens that someone didn’t want,” says Outlaw. “[And] every time somebody wants something there’s going to be somebody on the other side.”
On the side of farmers and consumers nationwide, McGeary is one of the few lobbyists interested in sustainably produced food, says Brad Stufflebeam, a former president of the Texas Organic Farmers Association who played a role in FARFA’s creation.
“When we helped set FARFA up, it was because we saw the need for a national organization that would give small farmers and consumers a lobbying organization,” he says. “Judith grabbed the baton and ran with it.”
As state lawmakers prepare for the 2019 session and congressional representatives butt heads over the farm bill, FARFA has its work cut out for it. The organization is pushing for legislation that McGeary says will help farmers stay in business.
Now that McGeary’s nearing the end of her listening tour, she’s using notes from the road to write FARFA’s legislative agenda for 2019. Small farmers want expanded cottage food laws, fairer taxes, and an agriculture ombudsman to help navigate the “regulatory maze,” she says.
Chasing after lawmakers is tiresome business, says McGeary, but local and sustainable food is worth fighting for because it benefits folks on all sides of the political spectrum.
“It doesn’t have to be a trade-off,” she says. From left-leaning environmentalists to far-right constitutionalists, “it’s something that’s good for everyone that can appeal to everyone.”
Top photo: Cowhands drive the 200-head longhorn herd at the 1,800-acre Lonesome Pine Ranch, a working cattle ranch that is part of the Texas Ranch Life ranch resort near Chappell Hill in Austin County, Texas. (Photo by Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress). All other photos courtesy of FARFA.
Eco Interns, a teen-focused entrepreneurial program in Southern New Jersey, offers job training and education in community gardens and farmers’ markets for an underserved urban community.
By Susanne Cope, Food Deserts, Urban Agriculture – July 24, 2018
Last fall, a half-dozen teenagers from the Southern New Jersey city of Camden brought hot peppers they’d grown in an urban garden to a rented industrial kitchen. Donning latex gloves, they de-seeded and chopped the chilies before adding them to vinegar and salt. A few days later, they processed and bottled the resulting product into their own brand of hot sauce, Kapow!
The group is part of a teen-focused entrepreneurial program called Eco Interns, offered by the Camden-area Center for Environmental Transformation (CFET). The mission of this nonprofit is to create a sustainable, healthy source of fresh fruit and vegetables—through community gardens and a farmers’ market—for an underserved urban community, while offering job training and education with a focus on meeting environmental challenges.
The interns do everything from picking and preparing the peppers to processing and selling their hyper-local, all-natural hot sauce. And they’re paid a competitive hourly wage to do so. In the early stages of the annual summer program, about a dozen interns work in one of the organization’s urban gardens, cook nutritious food, and run a stand at a weekly summer farmers’ market. The garden has both raised and in-ground beds, a greenhouse, a beehive, and a fruit orchard, all tended primarily by the teenagers.
In a neighborhood where jobs—particularly for young people—are hard to come by, participants say they appreciate the program and the training it provides. “I was very grateful to have this experience,” one teenager reflected in a writing activity at the end of the summer. “I learned a lot of things that I plan on carrying with me for the rest of my life.”
The inaugural cohort of teenagers conceived of Kapow! three seasons ago from the ground—or garden—up, working with a designer and small-business consultant to get the product into the hands of customers. During the first year of this entrepreneurial enrichment program, which takes place after the summer Eco-Intern program has ended, they made and sold a little more than 100 bottles; in 2017, that number rose to 450.
Bottles of Kapow! are mostly sold at CFET events, and through people and organizations that reach out to the group directly. Recently a representative of Subaru came across Kapow! at a CFET event and ordered a few dozen bottles to use as corporate giveaways. All of the proceeds are invested back into the program, where they help pay for additions like the recent beehives that CFET has acquired for its gardens.
Participants learn much more than how to produce a condiment; they gain experience with every aspect of developing and building a small business. The initiative provides not just diverse job training but also nutritional education and a source of fresh, locally grown produce in a region labeled a food desert for its lack of access to fresh food. CFET grew out of an effort by parishioners at the nearby Sacred Heart Church, who were so moved by volunteer work they had performed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that they sought to create similar change in their own backyard.
The entrepreneurship program that developed Kapow! began with the help of a grant from New Jersey’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives as a way to extend CFET’s efforts. As the program grows in size and popularity, community groups say local nutrition and food security is improving and area youth are better prepared for higher-paying jobs and further schooling—opportunities that long felt out of reach in this community.
In addition to making Kapow!, CFET manages urban garden spaces around Camden that include community gardens, fruits orchard, and a plant nursery, and offers gardening programs to younger children (called Garden SEEDS).
“Our first mission is respect for the environment,” says Teresa Niedda, CFET’s program director, of the group’s goals. “But we are also concerned with food issues: the availability of fresh, local food for the youth workers and the local community. Also, of course, we’re committed to youth development—giving Camden youth a safe place they can go to learn about the environment, health, and job training, among other things.”
The decade-old CFET is located in the city’s Waterfront South neighborhood, a mix of residential and industrial areas where shipbuilding was once the biggest industry. Throughout Camden, more than a third of the almost 75,000 residents live in poverty, compared to the United States’ 12.7 percent average poverty rate.
And whereas 14 percent of Americans nationally receive federal nutrition assistance programs, 65 percent of Camden County residents are eligible, and studies have shown that there are many food-insecure families in the city who don’t qualify for or receive SNAP. In response to the widespread food insecurity and the limited job opportunities available for young people, CFET chose to focuse on teenagers.
Participants have the ability to work their way up from an eco intern to a senior farmer, at which point they can take part in community food justice discussions, lead workshops, speak at Earth Day events, and collaborate with high schools and colleges that now come to Camden for service learning and to learn about food justice issues.
In addition to benefitting participants, the program serves the local community. The farm offers growing space and a green oasis for the urban neighborhood. The weekly farm stand the teenagers run provides one of the few sources of fresh produce in the area and the kids are allowed to bring home any excess from the week.
Rutgers researcher Kate Cairns studied the effect of the program on its participants and found that the added income and fresh food home have both made noticeable differences in their lives. It has also taught them skills that will affect their ability to provide for themselves throughout their lives. “Now I don’t have to worry about [accessing fresh food] because I can do it myself if it ever got serious,” one participant in the study was quoted as saying.
Cairns’s research also highlights the lack of opportunity for teenagers in Camden. In her article, she shared participants’ stories of being encouraged to sell drugs instead of working at CFET.
She says one youth told her that a student had been approached by a man who asked, “Why you doin’ this for $9 an hour?” While waving a stack of cash, he continued, “Do you know how fast I can make this much money?” Cairns notes how appreciative the participants are to be part of a program that provides options beyond those neighborhood pressures.
While CFET doesn’t yet have a system for tracking youth who have finished the program, Niedda says it’s clear that interest is growing. They no longer have to advertise for summer workers, and as many as 35 people applied this summer through word-of-mouth alone. Interest in the locally grown produce has increased as well. “When I first started, the youth just weren’t into the healthy food,” she says with a laugh. “Last year’s group fought over taking the extra food home. It was amazing.”
In 2013, Niedda notes, only three Camden high school graduates who took the SATs were considered college-ready. But things are changing. “[Last year’s] senior farmer and assistant farmer are both in college,” she says, while another former participant is majoring in botany thanks to his work at CFET.
The success of Kapow! has led students to expand their offerings. Last fall, they created Midas Touch Honey, made from last summer’s newly productive hives. Working with a pro-bono designer, they came up with a branding concept: a queen who turns everything she touches into golden honey. This is a fitting metaphor for their own experiences: As a result of the program, they see their futures looking brighter. As one teenage participant says, “I know I could sustain myself because I learned so much from here.”
Photos courtesy of CFET.
Editor’s note: As the Senate and House get set to reconcile the 2018 Farm Bill—the House version would lead to dramatic changes to SNAP nutrition assistance programs—during #SNAPweek, we are looking at how SNAP affects a range of different communities, and what the proposed changes might mean for a variety of Americans.
The future of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could be shaped this year, as Congress seeks to pass a final 2018 Farm Bill before the existing bill expires in October. Roughly 80 percent of the farm bill goes to SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, and while the Senate version of the bill maintains the program more or less in its current form, the House version goes to great lengths to restrict access to food assistance.
The House bill would raise by 10 years, to 59, the age limit that requires recipients to work or enroll in job training programs, remove dispensations for parents with children older than six years old, and impose harsh penalties for non-compliance, revoking an individual’s benefits for a year for a first offense and three years for subsequent infractions. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, these changes would affect between 5 and 7 million of SNAP’s 40 million enrollees.
Farmers at Detroit’s Brother Nature Urban Farm. (Photo courtesy the Michigan Municipal League)
These proposed changes to SNAP would have wide-ranging impacts on communities around the country—rural and urban alike. To illustrate what those changes would look like on the ground, Civil Eats traveled around Detroit, Michigan—a state that is rolling out new state-level work requirementsfor SNAP recipients—for a first-hand look.
On the east side of Detroit, 42-year-old Roquesha O’Neal is one potential target of cuts to SNAP. She relies on the program to take care of herself and her disabled, teenage son. She receives a monthly Supplemental Security Income (SSI) check worth $750 for her son and makes an additional $150 a month babysitting and doing odd jobs for neighbors. After rent and utilities, her family is left with about $500 a month to live on.
Even with SNAP, putting food on the table can still feel like a full-time job: SNAP recipients only receive on average $1.40 a meal. O’Neal gets even less than this, feeding herself and her son on $205 a month or roughly $1.13 per meal, per person. And this doesn’t include her daughter’s son, for whom she provides free childcare and also has to feed.
O’Neal has had to be resourceful, visiting the local soup kitchen run by Capuchin Friars and “bargain shopping” with neighbors, making bulk purchases of staples like bread and rice to share. Luckily, O’Neal has a branch of the Aldi grocery store chain nearby, but she has to take public transportation or carpool with neighbors to get to the soup kitchen because she doesn’t have a car. She says that bus fare is her largest monthly expense.
She suffers from high blood pressure and fibromyalgia, and says that side effects from her medications make it nearly impossible to work. Even so, the state is disputing her claims for disability, something that could force her to work or lose SNAP benefits, and would put her in a bind in terms of taking care of her son and grandson. “Everything is connected,” O’Neal says. If she were to lose her benefits, “that means my son would miss meals,” a situation that could also affect her grandson. In terms of her own health, “It would mean life and death for me. If I don’t eat healthy, I could lose my life.”
O’Neal worries that other proposed changes in the House version of the farm bill would hurt her community. This area, in what’s sometimes called the “deep eastside” of Detroit, hasn’t gained much from recent investment downtown and, like many parts of the city, it suffers from high poverty and unemployment.
A reduction in food assistance here could radiate consequences, undermining local businesses, reducing employment even further, and placing additional stress on food pantries and other nonprofits. In addition, the House bill would remove benefits for residents who are just leaving prison, a move that some believe could increase recidivism.
Sam Attam owns the Farmer John Food Center, a heavily secured market that anchors the businesses on the corner of Harper and Gratiot Avenue. He employs around a dozen people and offers the sort of full service-grocery that is often lacking in Detroit, where “party stores” with pre-packaged foods predominate. Attam says that food stamps make up 80 percent or more of his business, a statistic echoed by several grocers in the city, including Charles Walker, a former grocery store owner and the retail specialist for the Detroit-based Fair Food Network.
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, estimates that changes like those in the House bill could remove roughly 2 million people from food stamps, or about 5 percent of the program, creating a small but significant loss for businesses with typical profit margins in the low single digits.
Auday Arabo, President and CEO of the Associated Food and Petroleum Dealers, a trade group that represents grocery stores, gas stations, and convenience stores in the Midwest, says that SNAP cuts could result in layoffs and store closures in urban areas where chain stores have generally already left.
He also notes Detroit-specific problems: “you’re running into an infrastructure issue—you have a lack of transportation, and it’s just [a low] number of rooftops … if you have less rooftops, the stores are not going to sustain.” That lack of “rooftops” refers to Detroit’s dispersed population, where large areas of the city have seen sharp population declines. This, coupled with the lack of transportation, makes it harder for people to get to grocery stores and harder for grocery stores to survive.
All these factors weigh on a business like Attam’s, the loss of which could make both food and jobs harder to find in an already-struggling area.
Farmers’ markets have emerged as one bright spot in Detroit’s food landscape. The Double Up Food Bucks program, facilitated by the Fair Food Network and funded by the Farm Bill through the Food Insecurity Nutrition Program, allows food stamp recipients to double their food stamp dollars for up to $20 a day if they buy Michigan-grown fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets.
And it appears to be working. The Michigan Farmers’ Market Association (MIFMA) reports that shoppers spent $662,921 in SNAP benefits in 2016, and they expect that figure to grow. Markets report an average of $470 in SNAP sales the first year they begin accepting benefits, whereas overall the average for markets that accept benefits is $4,725 a year, representing a tenfold increase for most markets that stick with the program.
But cuts to SNAP could diminish the positive effect programs like Double Up Food Bucks are beginning to have. “It’s detrimental to both families and to farmers,” says Amanda Shreve, MIFMA’s executive director. “In this case, cuts to SNAP can hit direct-marketing farmers twice: Once through cutting SNAP dollars spent at market, and the second time through limiting the number of families that can take advantage of the Double Up Food Bucks program.”
In addition, there’s a looming threat of discontinuation of the Mobile Market+ app by the Novo Dia Group. The Austin-based software company allows farmers’ markets to process SNAP transactions on certain mobile devices. Although Michigan has funds for markets to obtain new wireless devices, some markets may be unable to process transactions for several weeks until they get the new equipment.
Purchasing fruit at Detroit’s Eastern Market. (Photo courtesy the Michigan Municipal League)
Eastern Market, near downtown Detroit, which is one of the largest year-round farmers’ markets in the country, accounts for a significant portion of SNAP transactions statewide, Shreve says, and could be deeply affected by the cuts. But smaller neighborhood markets like the Oakland Avenue Farmers Market in the North End neighborhood—which also serves as a community art and performance space—could be even more vulnerable because they don’t have a wide customer base of both urban and suburban shoppers.
Jerry Ann Hebron, executive director of the North End Christian Community Development Corporation, which runs the market, says, “people walk to us or ride their bikes to us. We’re concerned about the impact it’s going to have on them to utilize those benefits to buy food.” Overall, she says that food stamps account for 40 percent of the sales at Oakland Avenue.
Hebron does say that those facing SNAP cuts could still get some food from the market in exchange for volunteer work. “It’s a kind of a barter that we work here,” she says. However, she adds “we don’t get too many volunteers on a regular basis … because people just don’t have the agility or the time to do this work when they’re working two or three jobs—or trying to.”
It’s unlikely that food banks or charities will be able to pick up the slack should food assistance be reduced in coming years. “For every one meal that the food bank network provides nationally, SNAP provides 12 meals,” says Kait Skwir, Deputy Director of the Food Bank Council of Michigan, underlining the massive disparity between what charities and government can do.
And if charities can’t make up the difference, the results would be predictable. “There would be more people who are hungry,” Skwir says. As she and others point out, roughly 40 percent of SNAP recipients are already working, using food stamps to supplement their salaries. Even if that population is able to pick up more work—or get paid a higher wage for their work—the effects on children and seniors who depend on those workers for caregiving could be significant.
There may also be other difficulties in store for the people forced to move into the workforce. As Roquesha O’Neal puts it, “If you don’t have the education, if you don’t have the right health … and if they take the SNAP program away, people are going to be too hungry to even go to work. To me it’s a losing situation.”
In a statement to Civil Eats, Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee that oversees the Farm Bill, stressed her support for the Senate version of the bill saying, “Just as the Farm Bill has a safety net for farmers, it also has a safety net for families, which many people rely on to put food on the table during tough times.”
But even if the final version of the bill maintains SNAP as is, the fight over nutrition assistance seems destined to increase in intensity during the 2018 and 2020 elections. O’Neal says she’s committed to engaging in the fight. She has shown up at rallies in support of SNAP and engaged with local non-profits like Michigan United and Mothering Justice to learn about food stamps and other issues and raise awareness in her neighborhood. “I’m going to keep fighting and take a stand,” she says. “I’m going to wake my neighbor up and say you need to vote.”
