Jillian Hishaw Wants to Help Black Farmers Stay on Their Land

Civil Eats

Jillian Hishaw Wants to Help Black Farmers Stay on Their Land

Through her organization FARMS, this farmers’ rights advocate is fighting for today’s farmers as well as the next generation.

By Korsha Wilson, Food and Farm Labor, Food Justice, May 4, 2018

When Jillian Hishaw was studying agricultural law at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, she learned about the many the hardships Black farmers have faced in recent decades. Not only did Black families lose land at a rate of 30,000 acres per year in the 1990s, but the land rush fueled by developers and larger corporate farms has also left many of these farmers especially vulnerable.

Today, Black farmers make up less than 2 percent of the country’s farm population, and they’ve faced ongoing discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In 1999, a federal judge ruled that the agency had systemically denied Black farmers loans and disaster payments between 1981 and 1996, and awarded a group of farmers and their relatives $1 billion in damages as a result of the Pigford vs. Glickman lawsuit.

When Hishaw read about that case, as well as Keepseagle vs. Veneman—a similar discrimination lawsuit involving Native American farmers—she was moved to action. “The discrimination was so blatant to me that I wanted to do something about it,” says Hishaw. Her family had also directly experienced the toll that losing farmland can take. Hishaw’s grandfather lost his farm in Oklahoma; after they relocated to Kansas City, they learned that the lawyer they’d been paying to maintain the farm and pay taxes on the land had pocketed the money instead.

“There was oil on the property, so it was sold to collect the tax debts,” she says. And even though the troubles happened before she was born, it still weighs heavy on her grandfather. “Honestly, he did not like talking about the loss that much,” adds Hishaw.

Jillian Hishaw.

In 2012, six years after she graduated, Hishaw launched Family Agriculture Resource Management Services (FARMS), an organization that helps Black farmers in Southeastern states retain ownership of their land. Now, she spends her days visiting farmers in the Southeast who face losing their property and assets due to mounting debt.

FARMS is part of a growing number of organizations that want to assist Black farmers in this part of the country. “Our primary mission is to provide legal and technical assistance to aging farmers [who] don’t have many resources,” says Hishaw. She and her team help owners write and apply for grants, create fundraisers, and connect land owners to lawyers.

“It’s truly a blessing,” says LeTanya Williams, a farmer living in Chester, South Carolina, of FARMS’ work. Her livestock and alpaca farm was facing foreclosure when she reached out to the group for help applying for grants. The biggest obstacle was the fact that the land had been passed down from a slave owner to Williams’ mother’s family without an official deed.

Williams and Hishaw worked together to track down and contact the descendants of the original owners and then applied for grants to keep the property out of foreclosure.

“What Jillian does is so unique,” Williams says. “There are so many components to it, and she worked with us all the way.”

Hishaw and a team of pro bono lawyers step in to help farms navigate confusing agricultural law and avoid foreclosure. She also works with farm owners to fundraise or create additional revenue streams to keep their farms profitable.

In addition to working to keep Black farmers on the land, Hishaw also created the Farms Eliminating Hunger program, which helps farmers sell surplus produce and meat at a discount to food banks in their communities. “Three hundred thousand people in our local 20 counties struggle to have [at least one] meal a month, and her providing the meals is a tremendous way to feed the local community,” says Doug Groendyke, food sourcing coordinator at Harvest Hope Food Bank in Columbia, South Carolina.

Since 2014, Farmers Eliminating Hunger has delivered more than 200,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables to food banks. The program draws its success from farmers like Williams, who noted that her town of Chester was hit hard by the economic downturn. Fresh vegetables have been hard to come by there and Williams is happy to sell the corn, tomatoes, kale, cucumbers, and other vegetables she grows on her land for less than she would otherwise, if she knows it’s helping the community. “A lot of people here rely on the food banks,” she says.

Even though Hishaw’s work is focused on those who need immediate assistance, she says that she always has her mind on the next several generations of Black farmers. “The average age of the U.S. farmer is [nearly 60] and I’m seeing more and more abuse, predatory lenders, and Medicaid liens against farmland,” she says.

Given all these challenges, it can be hard to see a future for the Black farmer. But Hishaw has hope. One reason is that the latest agriculture census showed a small but significant bump in their numbers—up about 15 percent over 10 years to 44,000. She’s also heartened by the enthusiasm she’s seeing for urban agriculture among young people. “I would love to see people with urban farms moving to rural areas,” she adds, noting that she is currently creating a scholarship designed to support a next-generation family farmer studying agricultural science.

FARMS turns six this year, and Hishaw is looking to expand her staff to help more people. Currently she has a program manager, an intern, and a few agriculture lawyers and attorneys who offer their services pro bono. “It’s really a group effort,” she says. This year, FARMS earned a $10,000 grant through the Renewal Awards.

“It reaffirms our mission,” says Hishaw, who is committed to helping to right past wrongs and ensure that today’s farmers can keep their land despite financial hardship. “I think from what happened to my grandfather to what I’m doing now, it’s all full-circle,” she says.

Photos courtesy of Jillian Hishaw.

Will Robot-Led Restaurants Be a Gift or a Curse to Food Workers?

Civil Eats

Will Robot-Led Restaurants Be a Gift or a Curse to Food Workers?

Spyce, a Boston restaurant built around a robotic kitchen that opens its doors today, might reshape the future of restaurant work.

By Steve Holt – Business, Food and Farm Labor May 3, 2018

The menu at Spyce, which opens today in downtown Boston, isn’t noticeably different than the menus you’d find at a half-dozen other quick-service lunch places within a three-block radius. It’s filled with grain bowls with brown rice and freekeh, mix-ins including pomegranate, chicken, and kale, and toppings such as avocado, egg, and yogurt.

But what sets Spyce apart from the Dig Inn two doors down or the two Sweetgreens within a stone’s throw is who—or, rather, what—cooks the food. The star culinarian at Spyce is a nine-foot long, 14-foot wide robotic kitchen—so, not really an employee at all.

The machine wirelessly collects multiple orders from a bank of self-service menu kiosks, displays the names of the guests whose orders are being prepared, pipes the various ingredients from refrigerated hoppers into a spinning wok to be cooked and tossed, and dumps the hot meal into a compostable bowl waiting on the counter below. Only then does a human handle any part of your meal, adding fresh ingredients and handing over the order, a process designed to take as few as three minutes.

But, despite the small number of humans involved, Spyce’s co-owners appear to be taking the human touch quite seriously.

“At the end of the day, a restaurant is all about hospitality and, obviously, how good the food is,” says Spyce’s COO Kale Rogers, who built an early prototype of the robotic kitchen with his three current business partners in the basement of their fraternity house at MIT. “We see the automation as a tool to allow us to serve incredible quality to more people. A necessary component is the human touch—the presentation, the personalization, the handing it to you with a smile.”

One of Spyce’s robot-prepared dishes.

Spyce’s robotic system, plus a number of other recent advances in restaurant automation, may raise questions about the culinary future we want. They’re questions easily recognized in nearly every sector, from driverless cars in the automotive industry to self-checkout in grocery stores. Will replacing cooks with robots or cashiers with computers be good for the nation’s often-undervalued food workers? Or will it just make them obsolete?

Restaurant industry leaders have blamed fair pay movements like Fight for $15 for the rise of restaurant automation, with the assumption that more robots equals fewer human workers. But some workforce advocates note that automation may actually end up being beneficial to restaurant workers.

A Short History of Robotic Restaurants

In developing Spyce, Rogers and his co-founders had a lot to learn from less-successful experiments in automation over the last several years.

For one, they brought on renowned chef Daniel Boulud, who drew from his Michelin-rated restaurants for design and flow. Along with executive chef Sam Benson, Boulud helped develop Spyce’s menu. Boulud and Benson also convinced the co-founders, who may have been leaning more robot-centric, to place two French-inspired garde mangers at the front counter to garnish the bowls. Two more employees roam the front-of-house, welcoming guests and helping troubleshoot any snags with the kiosk ordering system. A handful of additional human workers prepare ingredients at an off-site commissary kitchen.

From left: Co-founder Luke Schlueter, co-founder Michael Farid, co-founder Kale Rogers, executive chef Sam Benson, co-founder Brady Knight, chef Daniel Boulud.

Kale Rogers, co-founder and chief operating officer, wouldn’t say what Spyce is paying its workers—though Boston’s minimum wage is $11 an hour, so assume employees make at least that much—but he acknowledged that customer service is key to creating an environment to which the lunch crowd wants to return week after week.

“It’s staff whose job is to enhance your experience in the store,” he says.

Technology and automation have been seeping into the restaurant industry for years now, dating back even to the automats of the early 20th century. But not all companies wear their automation on their sleeve like Spyce does.

Visit San Francisco-based eatsa—where customers order on kiosks and pick up their machine-made bento bowl or chile con quinoa from a space-age cubby—and you may avoid interacting with a single employee. And at Café X, a coffee bar also in San Francisco, your barista is a robot that pulls orders from a touch-screen monitor and pours espresso drinks, drip coffee, and cups of nitro cold brew. There’s also Flippy, the food-safe robot arm that has made national headlines for its ability to grill, monitor, and place burger patties on buns at CaliBurger’s Pasadena location.

Many other, more mainstream eateries are experimenting with automation and technology, such as digital menus and payment pads at the table, as a way to lower rising labor costs, says Patrick Maguire, a restaurant consultant in Boston and author of the blog Server Not Servant. Maguire says the idea of automation may make sense from an economic and efficiency standpoint, but it can end up harming the guest experience because machines and humans are not equal in their intangible service skills.

“It’s true that robots can’t call out sick or bitch about their schedules, but they also can’t ‘think on their feet’ or provide the same hospitality that humans can,” Maguire says. “And often, one of the best aspects of dining out is interacting with a great server, bartender, or staff member.”

And yet, some have predicted we’re moving closer to the widespread replacement of human restaurant workers with robots, computers, and other forms of technology. These predictions sometimes come in the form of threats from restaurant lobbyists to advocates of higher wages for food workers, such as the Fight For $15.

Robots and the Restaurant Workforce of the Future

Saru Jayaraman, cofounder of the worker advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and one of the engines behind the Fight For $15, says she has yet to see robots replace humans in the restaurant industry. In fact, Jayaraman noted that data suggest automation could lead to increased restaurant employment in the future.

One need only look, she says, to California: ground zero for both the booming restaurant industry and for automation in restaurants. For starters, even as automation becomes more commonplace in California, restaurant employment there has exploded, increasing 45 percent from 2001 to 2016.

Many headline-grabbing robots and systems, like Flippy, were born in the Golden State, and fast-food chains have used California as proving grounds for technologies like self-service kiosks and tablets, mobile ordering and payment, customizable menus, and table service. A September 2017 ROC memo points out that on the whole, automation of some tasks has led to changes in the kindsof positions restaurants need, but not in the number of staff.

The memo notes that Starbucks has seen mobile ordering and payments boost its sales, allowing it to increase the number of baristas without needing to hire more cashiers; Panera is adding staff to handle greater order volume through its self-serve kiosks. And while servers at restaurant chains like Chili’s, which has added tablet-based ordering at its tables, can handle tables quicker and more accurately during the heavy dinner rush, their presence is still key to the dining experience.

“We see two futures in our industry: One future [leads to] higher wages, better benefits, and professionalizing an industry that has been undervalued for too long,” says Jayaraman. “The other future is what we call the ‘low road,’ and involves digitization and extremely low wages. Which future is tech supporting with automation?”

The real question may be whether consumers will buy wholesale into a more automated, less human-run restaurant industry. Eatsa, the quick-service restaurant where meals were placed into cubbies for customer pickup, closed all but two of its retail locations after sales flagged and shifted its business model to licensing its technology. Jayaraman points to chains that have scaled back automated systems following customer complaints that they were too impersonal. Another full-service chain she heard of rolled out automation on its prep line, only to find that it needed to hire more human employees to monitor and repair the automation.

“Our industry doesn’t lend itself well to workers being replaced by robots,” she says.

Time will tell whether Spyce will be able to find a happy medium in an industry built on hospitality and the human touch. Their model is yet unproven in one of the city’s busiest business districts, but Spyce COO Rogers says he’s confident in what they’ve built, and he and his team will “understand right away if the customer really values what we bring.”

Photos courtesy of Spyce.

Toxic coal ash ponds are at serious risk of flooding

ThinkProgress

Toxic coal ash ponds are at serious risk of flooding

A new report warns that more than a dozen toxic coal ash ponds are located in flood zones.

Natasha Geiling May 3, 2018

Thousands of tons of coal ash is deposited in an unlined landfill, know as “Little Blue,” on September 10, 2008 in Chester, West Virginia. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images.

More than a dozen ponds containing coal ash — the toxic byproduct of burning coal — are located in flood zones throughout the United States, putting them at risk of flooding during storms or high water, according to a report released this week by a coalition of environmental and public interest groups.

The report comes as the Trump administration seeks to weaken standards for coal ash disposal at the request of industry, rolling back the first-ever federal regulations on disposal for coal ash.

“Putting billions of gallons of toxic coal ash next to our rivers and drinking water — that’s just an accident waiting to happen,” John Rumpler, senior director of Environment America’s clean water program and co-author of the report, said in a press statement. “We should be phasing out these toxic pits. The last thing we should be doing is weakening the few standards we already have in place to limit their pollution of our waters.”

Coal ash is the second-largest form of waste in the United States, with more than 100 million tons produced each year. To store coal ash, coal-fired power plants — which tend to be located near water sources used for cooling the power plant’s equipment — combine the ash with water and store it in pits, known as coal ash ponds.

Historically, these pits have been unlined, leading environmental groups to raise concerns about whether toxic compounds found in coal ash — like lead, arsenic, and mercury — could be leaching into nearby groundwater. Those fears have largely been backed up by industry data, which has shown elevated levels of toxic pollutants like arsenic and radium in the groundwater near more than 70 coal ash disposal sites across the country.

Coal ash is polluting groundwater across the country, according to new utility data

But the report from Environment America raises concerns beyond groundwater contamination. It warns that fourteen coal plants with onsite coal ash storage ponds are located within Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 100-year flood zones, meaning that the area is reasonably expected to flood at least once a century. These plants generate 8.4 million tons of coal ash each year, and at least six of those ponds have been designated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to be in poor condition.

“While hundreds of coal plant sites across the country likely put water at risk, those with coal ash ponds located in flood zones may pose an elevated threat, as being in a flood zone indicates both proximity to water and risk of flooding,” the report reads, adding that fourteen plants located in flood zones is likely a conservative estimate.

A large number of these coal plants sit along the Ohio River, which provides drinking water to more than 3 million people.

Evidence suggests that as climate change continues, a warmer atmosphere will be able to hold more moisture, resulting in more frequent extreme precipitation events. As heavy downpours increase, it’s possible that coal ash ponds that otherwise would have only been at risk of flooding every 100 years will be at more frequent risk of flooding.

If a coal ash pond were to be hit by flooding, it’s possible that the toxic waste could then flow into nearby streams or rivers, contaminating surface water near the spill.

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew dumped 18 inches of rain in parts of North Carolina, causing rivers across the state to rise to dangerously high levels. Environmental groups were concerned that the flooding could breach some coal ash ponds operated by Duke Energy. The utility initially said that it did not expect the flooding to breach the ponds, but later admitted that “an unknown amount of coal ash” had in fact been discharged during the flooding at one of its coal-fired power plants.

Watchdog group uncovers a coal ash spill after hurricane flooding

The report released this week calls for a moratorium on new or expanded coal ash ponds, and calls for old coal ash ponds to be excavated and lined in order to keep the waste from seeping into groundwater.

Under the Trump administration’s proposal to rollback Obama-era rules on coal ash, however, utilities would be able to decide if and when they tested for groundwater contamination, rather than requiring all utilities to adhere to a mandated schedule as the Obama-era regulations would have required. The rollback would also give a large amount of autonomy to states in crafting their own requirements for coal ash disposal and cleanup.

“The existing EPA policies on coal ash don’t even classify it as ‘hazardous waste.’ Now, the EPA is trying to weaken coal ash policies even more,” Rumpler said. “That’s just inviting disaster for our rivers.”

Deforestation from palm oil

EcoWatch shared a video.

May 2, 2018

Greenpeace International

A deforested area half the size of Paris has been found in Papua. The company responsible supplies palm oil to Pepsico, Nestle, Mars and Unilever.

These brands are failing to meet their promise to stop buying palm from companies wrecking forests. Help us spread the word.
#WeAreWatching

Papau Palm Oil Deforestation

A deforested area half the size of Paris has been found in Papua. The company responsible supplies palm oil to Pepsico, Nestle, Mars and Unilever. These brands are failing to meet their promise to stop buying palm from companies wrecking forests. Help us spread the word.#WeAreWatching

Posted by Greenpeace International on Tuesday, May 1, 2018

This Congress Only Listens to Rich People

MoveOn shared a video.

May 1, 2018

A study showed that Congress almost always votes in support of the opinions of the wealthiest 10% of America, while routinely ignoring what the other 90% think.

If there’s an issue where 90 percent of Americans think one thing and the richest 10 percent of people think something else, Congress almost always votes in the interest of the wealthiest Americans. That is not democracy.

Congress is Only Listening to Rich People

If there's an issue where 90 percent of Americans think one thing and the richest 10 percent of people think something else, Congress almost always votes in the interest of the wealthiest Americans. That is not democracy.

Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Sunday, April 29, 2018

Do Trump’s ongoing business partnerships make his administration corrupt?

David Frum

March 2, 2018

Do Trump’s ongoing business partnerships make his administration corrupt? I say yes on ABC News. Watch here:

Do Trump’s ongoing business partnerships make his administration corrupt? I say yes on ABC News. Watch here:

Posted by David Frum on Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Ordinary, Everyday Life in America

Esquire

Ordinary, Everyday Life in America

Let’s talk about a mass shooting in New Orleans.

By Charles P. Pierce May 2, 2018

Getty Images

Let’s talk about a mass shooting. Let’s talk about an ordinary, everyday mass shooting. Let’s talk about terrorism. Let’s talk about ordinary, everyday terrorism. And, because we are talking about an ordinary, everyday mass shooting, and ordinary, everyday terrorism, let’s talk about guns. Let’s talk about ordinary, everyday guns and their ordinary, everyday use. Let’s talk about St. Claude Avenue, in the lower Ninth Ward in the city of New Orleans. From the unconquerable New Orleans Times-Picayune:

“NOPD said the shooting was reported at 12:46 a.m. in the 3200 block of St. Claude Avenue (map), which is between Louisa and Piety Streets in the St. Claude neighborhood. Those shot were ages 25, 37, 34, 35 and 38.”

“According to preliminary information from NOPD, officers were responding to a report of gunfire in the area when they found three victims, which were taken to a hospital via EMS. Two additional victims later showed up at a hospital after they were taken there in private vehicles. A preliminary NOPD report issued Tuesday states the victims were at the same location when they heard gunshots coming from the direction of Piety Street.”

(Why does New Orleans so fascinate writers? Because names like “Piety Street” can appear in police reports. And, just for the record, there are two St. Claudes in the Calendar of the Saints and they have given their name to two cities in Canada and five cities in France, as well as a neighborhood in another part of New Orleans.)

OK, that’s the ordinary everyday use of guns in an ordinary, everyday mass shooting. What about the ordinary, everyday terrorism? That’s the second-day story for Emily Lane of the Times-Pic.

“Three U-Haul boxes sat stacked on top of each other in the living room of a St. Claude Avenue home on Tuesday morning (May 1). The resident at the double shotgun said he bought and filled the boxes with his belongings that morning, hours after opening his front door to find a gunshot victim leaning on his front stoop.”

“The man, who asked not to be named out of concern for his safety, said violent crime in his neighborhood has gotten “progressively worse,” in the last two years. He had thought before about moving, he said, but Tuesday’s shooting in his block that left five people wounded “was the last straw.””

“In the four years he’s lived at the St. Claude neighborhood home, he has three times opened his front door to find a person who had overdosed lying unconscious or dead on his front stoop. He estimated hearing nearby gunshots about once a month. Just last week, he said, a car was shot up across the street.”

That is terrorism—disorganized and apolitical, devoid of ideology or even coherent thought, but there’s been so much shooting that this guy is moving away because of it, and that’s terrorism by any reasonable definition, and certainly, by his.

My eye was caught by this story because, three years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the simultaneous arrival in the Ninth Ward of Hurricane Katrina and the Industrial Canal, I was walking down St. Claude Avenue. I visited a remarkable place called the All Saints Community Center about 20 blocks from where five people were shot on an ordinary Monday night. But, if it weren’t for that transient connection, this mass shooting would have gone unremarked, at least as far as I was concerned. It was an ordinary, everyday mass shooting in the inchoate terrorism of ordinary, everyday life in America, where so many ordinary, everyday people have ordinary, everyday guns.

Freedom, as they say, isn’t free.

What Does Climate Change Mean for Vermont’s Maple Sugarers?

Civil Eats

What Does Climate Change Mean for Vermont’s Maple Sugarers?

For an industry that measures time in generations, and works with centuries-old trees, the rapid warming of the planet makes for an uncertain future.

By Chris Richard – Climate, Farming May 2, 2018

Photo CC-licensed by Allagash Brewing Co.

Don Gale started sugaring as a boy, boiling sap outside on a cinder-block fire stand with old steel road signs for baffles. Later his parents would finish the process on the kitchen stove, cooking off so much steam that it parboiled the wallpaper from the walls.

When Gale started his sugaring business in Vermont’s Green Mountains 20 years ago, he regularly worked in snow so deep that he could snowshoe back and forth between the bed of his pickup and roadside drifts.

He misses that kind of late winter, when the night air was so cold and dry it caused a burning sensation in the nose, when the snow glowed ghostly blue in the moonlight and the days were all impossibly blue sky and brilliant white earth, bright even in the leafless deep woods. The sunlight was just warm enough to get the sap flowing in depth on depth of trees.

“It used to be that when we were tapping, there was three or four feet of snow on the ground,” he said. “We just haven’t seen that recently. This year, we had a lot of rain and the snow was as slippery as the ice.” In place of snowshoes, this year Gale often wore ice cleats on his boots.

Vermont’s maple sugaring season started early this year, with February temperatures hitting the 70s in some parts of the state and trees responding with a surge of sap. Temperatures plunged again later in the month, then rose, then dropped again. It’s a winter weather pattern that Vermont has seen repeated several times in recent years.

The state is by far the nation’s biggest maple sugar producer, delivering more than 40 percent of the country’s total supply of maple syrup in each of the last three years. Many Vermont sugarmakers welcome the balmy weather, saying it will bring more sap. But such good fortune may be fleeting.

Sugar maples evolved to release their sap when nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing. Once a string of days occurs without that nighttime freeze, sap stops flowing at the rates sugar makers require. Even if flows are sufficient to meet their needs, there’s also the risk of trees starting to bud. When that happens, sap quality degrades.

Some studies point to long-term threats to the trees as well. In January, the journal Ecology published the results of research that found young maples will be vulnerable to hotter, drier temperatures causes by the changing climate.

“Maples are more effected by drought than many other species,” says Inés Ibáñez, an associate professor at the University of Michigan and one of the four authors of the study. “They need a moist environment during the whole growing season. Older trees have a deep enough root system that they can withstand stressors better. But we’re going to see the younger maples dying.”

Exactly how quickly the change will occur is still up for debate. In February, the USDA Forest Service published an assessment of likely climate change impacts that predicts deteriorating conditions in the coming decades for iconic New England trees such as the paper birch, northern white cedar, and sugar maple. It projects shorter, milder winters, with less snow and more rain.

The Vermont Climate Assessment project goes further. It cites research models predicting that by the end of the century, the northeastern forests could be dominated by oaks and hickories, with sugar maples and other trees being driven north to Maine.

University of Massachusetts researcher Joshua Rapp points out that individual sugar maples can live for up to 400 years, and that means many mature trees can be expected to hang on even as their environment becomes increasingly inimical to young trees. Similarly, it can take a long time for successor species to move in and take over.

Still, Rapp sees signs that the trees that are alive right now may also be responding to recent high temperatures. He’s noted a correlation in the last several years between hot Julys and comparatively low sugar content in maple sap the following sugaring season.

Some technological advances may help sugarmakers weather such environmental change. At the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center, director Tim Perkins first noted more than a decade ago that climate change has shortened the sugaring season by about 10 percent. Nevertheless, syrup production has tripled in the last 15 years, thanks to improved use of vacuum tubing and more efficient taps drilled into the trees to draw out much more sap, Perkins said. The widespread use of reverse-osmosis machines also makes it much easier and faster to remove water and get to syrup, he said. Sugarmakers are investing heavily in such technology. Some still worry for the future of a craft that, for many, remains as much a family tradition as a business.

Adapting to Unpredictable Changes

Gale attributes Vermont’s new winter landscape to climate change. But Buster Grant, who at 80, remembers collecting sap in the iconic metal buckets instead of modern-day plastic tubing, is skeptical. He still enjoys hiking or skiing through the woods, listening to the winter birds, and stopping to look out over the snow-shrouded dairy farms around his stand of trees.

Buster Grant watches as a batch of maple sap boils down to syrup. Grant, 80, has been sugaring for half a century. He’s skeptical about climate change, pointing out that Vermont weather is famous for being unpredictable. (Photo Credit: Chris Richard)

This year, it was warm enough that Grant could have started drawing sap in January. He didn’t, he says, citing that old saw about how if a person doesn’t like Vermont weather, he should wait a minute and it will change. Sure enough, temperatures plunged for several weeks following the warm spell. Had he started early, when the weather turned he would have found his taps drying out. That’s just the business of sugaring, Grant says.

Nearby sugarmaker Tim Bouvier isn’t sure what to blame, but he has certainly noticed strange changes, and not only in the trees. While hunting in February a year ago, he was bitten by a tick, an occurrence he would never have expected as a boy, Bouvier said. Government researchers throughout New England have tied milder winters to a surge in tick populations, prompting cautions about the increased risk of Lyme disease and reports of moose fatally weakened by the parasites in the dead of winter.

Bouvier says the fear of Lyme disease won’t keep him from hunting, but he takes a lot more precautions against tick bites. Likewise, he’s looking into ways to take warmer winters into account at his 288-acre sugarbush—the term Vermonters use for a grove of producing sugar maples. Bouvier has offered a portion of his land for a University of Vermont study on substituting red maples, which are relatively heat-tolerant, for the traditional sugar maple.

Champlain College anthropologist Michael Lange, author of Meanings of Maple: An Ethnography of Sugaring, points out that many Vermont sugarmakers are also dairy farmers, and all farmers give a lot of thought to the weather and to climate. In interviews for his book, climate change came up often, Lange said.

Economics and business prospects played a big part in those conversations, Lange said, and so did people’s hopes of passing along the craft of sugaring. Some recalled columns of dates and sap production figures penciled on sugarhouse walls, from generation to generation. And the constancy of the trees in their family histories.

“If you plant a maple tree, you’re hoping that maybe your kids will tap it someday, and if you tap a tree, it’s one that first germinated 40 years ago, at a minimum, or in some cases 100 years ago,” Lange said.

It reminded the author of another project he’d worked on thousands of miles away, in a Moroccan village beside a lake that had been struck by a draught attributed to the changing climate. Lange remembered the loss on one man’s face when he told him he used to wake up to the singing of the frogs in the lake, and now he wakes up to silence.

When writing about changes to sugaring, Lange says he hit on something universal. “When sugarmakers talk about sugaring, they talk about their woods,” he said. “They talk about knowing the trees: ‘This tree’s a good yielder. This one catches the sun a little bit earlier, so it’s going to start running a little bit earlier, too. You can’t tap this tree on the north side because there’s an old flaw that you can’t really see, but I knew this tree when I was nine years old, so I know that.’”

That might sound sentimental, but it’s not, Lange said. It’s an awareness of where things used to stand, how to apply that now, what the future might hold.

“There’s not a sense of, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is going to be gone tomorrow,” Lange said. “But because of the long timescale that sugar-makers are used to thinking in, three generations feels more immediate.”

Husband of Scott Pruitt’s landlord sought EPA work for lobbying client, memo asserts

Chicago Tribune

Husband of Scott Pruitt’s landlord sought EPA work for lobbying client, memo asserts

Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press May 2, 2018

In this April 26, 2018, photo, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt removes his glasses as he testifies at a hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee for the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Alex Brandon / AP)

The lobbyist whose wife rented a condo to Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt at $50 a night sought EPA committee posts for a lobbying client, according to a newly released EPA memo.

J. Steven Hart’s seeking those appointments from his wife’s former tenant, Pruitt, shows “the extent to which the special interests providing him with gifts have sought specific favors from EPA in return,” said Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The memo makes for the latest in a months-long barrage of news reports and federal investigations questioning spending and other actions at Pruitt’s EPA. Pruitt’s former security chief, whose time with Pruitt saw the EPA administrator provided with round-the-clock security and first-class flights in the name of security, was due to appear for an interview with staff on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday.

The New York Times first reported the new memo from Hart, the lobbyist.

Hart wrote the email Aug. 10 to Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff.

“I want to highlight three candidates…who were nominated by our client, Dennis Treacy, the president of the Smithfield Foundation,” Hart wrote, suggesting appointments for the three to an EPA science advisory board.

The foundation is an arm of Smithfield Foods Inc. of Virginia, known for its hams. Smithfield Foods paid at least $280,000 in lobbying fees in 2017 to Hart’s firm, and Hart was listed by name as representing Smithfield as its lobbyist when he wrote the email, according to federal lobbying records.

Asked if the request represented a conflict of interest for Pruitt, the EPA provided a statement from Jackson that did not address that question directly. The suggestions were among hundreds the EPA received for the board, and the three people suggested by Hart were not appointed to the advisory board, Jackson said in the statement.

Pruitt told Fox News in April that, “Mr. Hart has no clients that had business before this agency,” but a spokesman for Hart subsequently acknowledged that Hart actually met with Pruitt in his office in July 2017 — about one month — before Hart’s proposed nominations to discuss efforts to preserve the Chesapeake Bay.

Pruitt’s assertion had been in response to questions about the propriety of his leasing the condo, at a bargain rate, from Hart’s wife.

Pallone, the lawmaker, called the August email “further proof that Administrator Pruitt has consistently misled Congress and the public.”

Food Policy Councils are Mobilizing to Defend Food Stamp Recipients

Civil Eats

Food Policy Councils are Mobilizing to Defend Food Stamp Recipients

As the 2018 Farm Bill takes shape and proposes significant changes to the nutrition safety net, community groups nationwide are joining forces to defend SNAP.

By Amanda Abrams – Farm Bill, Food Justice May 1, 2028

More than 50,000 people struggle with food insecurity in Durham, North Carolina. So when a group of public health workers, farm advocates, and member of the Duke University community came together in 2016 to create a food policy council in the region, access to healthy food was at the top of their list.

First, the council—called the Durham Farm and Food Network—mapped out the resources available to hungry households in order to gain an understanding of the depth of the problem in the 300,000-person county.

Then, when the federal government proposed cutting almost $200 million over a decade from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) last year, the group mobilized. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, formerly known as food stamps, helps 12 percent of the county’s households get food on the table and is a critical component of the area’s food system.

“We recognized are these federal programs [are effective], and any amount of effort we can apply for hungry people should be put there,” said Neal Curran, one of the Network’s leaders.

Members reached out to another food policy council in eastern North Carolina, which includes the district of House Agriculture Committee member David Rouzer, suggesting that the two collaborate on an advocacy effort aimed at protecting SNAP in North Carolina and nationally.

In the end, 11 food policy councils from around the state joined the effort, co-signing a letter that urged no cuts to SNAP or other federal nutrition programs, and 120 other North Carolina organizations and municipalities signed on as well. Letters were delivered to Rep. Rouzer, both of North Carolina’s senators, and several other members of Congress last month.

It’s not clear what impact the letters will have, if any. In fact, when the House Agriculture Committee’s first draft of the 2018 Farm Bill was unveiled earlier this month it included significant changes to SNAP that raised red flags for the council members. But the group will continue pushing for a bill that protects SNAP. The organization just co-wrote an op-ed with several partners and is discussing coordinating with other food councils in key states.

This type of coordinated action marks a big step forward for the state’s food policy councils, and one that’s being echoed throughout the U.S.

Food Policy Councils on the Rise

Food policy councils have taken root around the country over the past decade, creating grassroots political power to address the specific needs of their communities. And the recent effort to protect SNAP is just one example of the ways these groups have begun to draw powerful connections between their local work and federal-level policies.

Food policy councils, which tend to be city- or county-based, often consist of a range of stakeholders—including unusual allies like longtime farmers, social services staff, and educators—who convene in order to expand dialogue about the local food system and address food insecurity. The first groups originated back in the 1980s, but the movement didn’t reach a critical mass until about 2010.

With 35 councils, North Carolina may be the state with the most in the country (an official tally underway at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, which tracks food councils around the country, isn’t final yet). Much of that growth has been attributed to Community Food Strategies, a North Carolina nonprofit collaborative run by several major food-related organizations; it’s one of the biggest and most active food council networks in the country.

The group itself does not advocate on issues, but it does provide training and information to food councils on topics including how to hold community forums, reach out to elected officials, and conduct advocacy campaigns. It also hosts gatherings that bring the state’s councils together, allowing their members to learn from one another.

“We’re interested in having local councils that have a sense of what’s happening, that can be a go-to group for the community and also for decision makers,” said Abbey Piner, the project lead at Community Food Strategies.

For instance, the organization works with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Food Policy Council, one of the state’s oldest and most active. In 2015 and 2016, the council held candidate forums to draw attention to issues of food insecurity and healthy eating; by 2017, it had become an authority on the subjects. These days, the council works closely with Rep. Alma Adams, a local congresswoman who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, providing her with information about regional needs and receiving regular updates on federal activity.

Community Food Strategies also works with smaller food councils like the one in the town of Alamance, which started out by conducting a community assessment outlining the area’s food system. Three years later, the collaborative is launching a branding campaign, “Authentically Alamance,” to educate residents about supporting local produce.

For the group’s members, who had never engaged in federal advocacy before, signing the letter opposing cuts to the SNAP program was eye-opening—and vital.

“[SNAP] is a very important program for our community,” says Ann Meletzke, director of the Alamance Food Collaborative. And not only because it supports low-income families, she adds. “The farmers [at our farmers’ markets] are running small businesses; there’s a reciprocity between them and those who are using SNAP to shop there. It needs to be cultivated.”

Gearing Up for the Farm Bill Debate

North Carolina is ahead of the game when it comes to federal-level advocacy, but food policy councils around the country are responding, especially when it comes to the farm bill, says Karen Bassarab, a program officer at the Center for a Livable Future. “With reauthorization [of the farm bill], we’re seeing an increased interest—and also since the change in the federal administration.” But local and statewide groups vary greatly in their strategies, she added.

For example, Kentucky’s food council network, the Community Farm Alliance, is launching statewide community forums about the farm bill next month. The Los Angeles Food Policy Council is hosting an awareness-raising party this month; the group will also be working with the mayor’s office to pass a resolution in defense of SNAP. Michigan’s Center for Regional Food Systems, the state’s food council convener, regularly meets with Sen. Debbie Stabenow, ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee. And the Chesapeake Food Policy Leadership Initiative has launched a series of webinars educating the councils in its network about how to engage with the bill.

Many groups around the country are still getting up to speed on the intricacies around federal nutrition programs and the farm bill, says Bassarab. “Some are not at the point where they can engage immediately,” she explains. And that means they’ll probably have to wait until the next farm bill cycle—or another federal food issue—comes around.

However, given the widening gulf between the Democrats’ and Republicans’ approaches to the bill, there’s a chance the House Agriculture Committee will be too deadlocked to move it forward, and might simply extend the current bill for another year. That might give the country’s food policy councils more experience and clout: In another year, many more councils might just be prepared to go to battle to save nutrition benefits for the country’s neediest.