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March 20, 2019
Today, Finland was ranked the happiest place in the world.
But its citizens beg to differ.
Finland Is Ranked as the Happiest Place in the World
Today, Finland was ranked the happiest place in the world.But its citizens beg to differ.
Posted by VICE News on Wednesday, March 20, 2019
For the second year in a row, Finland has been named the happiest country in the world by the World Happiness Report . What’s more, the Nordic nation has pulled “significantly ahead” of the other top 10 countries in the report, which ranks the happiness levels of 156 countries using data from Gallup World Poll surveys.
The U.S., by contrast, has continued its downward trend. This year it’s in 19th place for overall happiness. Last year it was 18, down from 14 the year before.
It’s not hard to understand why Finland is doing so well. The northern European country has a strong social safety net, including a progressive, successful approach to ending homelessness. It also has a high-quality education system, and its commitment to closing the gender gap is paying off. With a population of just over 5.5 million people, it’s the only country in the developed world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers.
Finnish society has been built in such a way that people are supported but still feel like they have control over their lives, said Anu Partanen, the author of The Nordic Theory of Everything, who recently moved back to her native Finland after a decade in New York.
“Most people would like a life where they can get health care if they get sick, where their children get a good education, where they can work and hopefully feel fulfilled in that work, while still being able to spend time with loved ones,” Partanen told HuffPost. “It’s not that Finns are necessarily looking to become immensely rich. I think Finland just does a pretty good job of helping people achieve this lovely, ordinary life.”
The top 10 happiest countries are, as in previous years, dominated by the Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Sweden, as well as Finland. And all but two of them, New Zealand and Canada, are in Europe.
The picture is much less positive in other parts of the world, particularly South Asia, where a sustained drop in India’s well-being (now ranked 140th) is responsible for driving the region’s well-being decline. In fact, India performed so poorly and its population is so significant that it dragged down the entire global happiness levels.
More research needs to be done to understand what’s going on in India, but it’s a stark reminder that rapid economic development and social change can impose costs as well as bring benefits, said report co-editor John F. Helliwell, a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
“High economic growth does not necessarily go along with improvements in happiness,” he told HuffPost. “Indeed, it can often come at the expense of people’s social connections and the happiness of their daily lives.”
The U.S. government would do well to take this message on board, said co-editor Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. “We keep chasing economic growth as the holy grail, but it’s not bringing well-being for our country. We should … stop our addiction to GDP growth as our sole or primary indicator of how we’re doing.”
Partanen, who returned to Finland with her American husband and year-old daughter in search of a “more sane” family life, said their time in the U.S. was defined by anxiety. “It takes immense energy to find the right day care, find the right school, find the right doctor, then figure out the right insurance plan and how you’re going to pay for everything, as it’s so expensive.”
As U.S. well-being continues to deteriorate and inequality rises, the country’s social fabric is being put under increasing stress, said Sachs, creating a society that is acutely vulnerable to exploitation and what the economist calls “an epidemic of addictions,” including substance abuse, overwork and gambling. To address this, the government needs to rein in the companies driving these addictions, said Sachs, but the opposite is happening.
“This is the worst administration we’ve ever had in terms of unleashing lobbying power and handing over the regulatory system to the corporate interests,” he said. “[The Trump administration is] working overtime for a very small group of rich and powerful people doing a huge amount of damage to the overall public good.”
Community and social connections are a central theme of the 2019 report, which details how face-to-face activities, such as sports and volunteering, contribute to positive well-being, while online connectivity can undermine it.
This is particularly the case when it comes to younger people. Over the last decade, the amount of time adolescents (ages 13 to 18) spent on screen activities, such as gaming, social media and texting, has steadily increased. By 2018, 95 percent of adolescents in the U.S. had access to a smartphone and 45 percent said they were online almost constantly. Several studies have found a correlation between the time young adults spend online and a reduction in well-being. For example, girls who spent five or more hours a day on social media were found to be three times more likely to be depressed than non-users.
The report concludes that, although burgeoning information technologies have increased the scale and complexities of human connectivity, they risk the quality of social connections in ways not yet fully understood and for which remedies do not yet exist.
Countries should be as concerned by unhappiness as they are by any other public health threat, said Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University. We might think of the goal of becoming happier as only something rich countries have the luxury of worrying about, she told HuffPost, but happiness goes much deeper than that. “Being happy is correlated with job performance, resilience in the face of disease, and even longer life.”
Ultimately, the World Happiness Report aims to encourage governments and individuals to shape policies and life choices with greater well-being in mind. Some countries are already making strides to incorporate well-being into their governance. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, for example, has called for a different kind of economy that brings well-being and environmental principles more systemically into its policies.
“It’s the government’s job to provide higher quality of life for its citizens,” said Partanen. “In the U.S., there’s a lot of focus on achieving happiness, but often the solution is to do more yoga or to meditate ― happiness is what you make of it. For governments, happiness shouldn’t be some sort of internal thing that a person has or doesn’t have, or that they have to figure out for themselves. It’s about helping citizens gain better quality of life … Of course we want to achieve things, but what are we achieving them for if not for better quality of life for all of us?”
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HuffPost’s “This New World” series is funded by Partners for a New Economy and the Kendeda Fund. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundations. If you have an idea or tip for the editorial series, send an email to thisnewworld@huffpost.com
The worst agricultural downturn since the 1980’s is taking its toll on the emotional well-being of American farmers.
In Kentucky, Montana and Florida, operators at Farm Aid’s hotline have seen a doubling of contacts for everything from financial counseling to crisis assistance. In Wisconsin, Dale Meyer has started holding monthly forums in the basement of his Loganville church following the suicide of a fellow parishioner, a farmer who’d fallen on hard times. In Minnesota, rural counselor Ted Matthews says he’s getting more and more calls.
“Can you imagine doing your job and having your boss say ‘well you know things are bad this year, so not only are we not going to pay you, but you owe us’,” Matthews said by telephone. “That’s what’s happened with farmers.’’
Glutted grain markets have sparked a years-long price slump made worse by a trade war with top buyer China. As their revenues decline, farmers have piled on record debt — to the tune of $427 billion. The industry’s debt-to-income ratio is the highest since the mid 1980’s, when Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert.
So dire are conditions in farm country that Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, and Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, pushed for mental-health provisions to be included in the 2018 Farm Bill. The legislation allocated $50 million over five years to address the shortfall of such services in rural areas.
Ernst said she spoke with a woman whose farmer husband died by suicide. While there’s been progress on a trade resolution, the ruckus “has been very, very hard on our farmers,” she said in a telephone interview. “We’ve had such a depressed farm economy.”
Few agricultural states have been hit harder than Baldwin’s Wisconsin, whose state license plates proclaim it as “America’s Dairyland.” Wisconsin lost almost 1,200 dairy farms between 2016 and 2018, government data show.
Smaller operators have been the most affected, she said by telephone. The mental-health provisions in the farm bill aren’t for a “free trip to the psychiatrist,” but rather about “community looking out for each other.”
There was a similar legislative effort in 2008 during the financial crisis, but the program was never funded because prices recovered, said Jennifer Fahy, communications director for Farm Aid, which advocated for the measures.
Two-thirds of the calls to Farm Aid’s hotline originated from growers who have been farming for a decade or more. They were evenly distributed among fruit and vegetable producers, livestock, grain and oilseed and dairy, the data show.
In 2018, the number of calls rose 109 percent to 1,034, increasing in the last five months of the year. In November, crisis assistance accounted for 78 percent of contacts to the hotline.
“The peak of the crisis was in 1986,” said Allen Featherstone, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University in Manhattan. “It is the worst since then by far.”
Mike Rosmann, another of the few mental health counselors in rural America, echoed the sentiments. A partially retired fourth-generation farmer, Rosmann rents out his Iowa property and maintains land under the conservation reserve program.
During the 1980’s farm crisis, the hotlines, counseling and other services that he participated in became the template for the provisions in the farm bill that Baldwin and Ernst advocated for, he said.
“The retaliatory tariffs by China have hurt soybean exports,” Rosmann said. “They’ve hurt our relations with other countries as well to a lesser extent, partly just because of the skepticism that surrounds the reliability of what the U.S. is doing.”
Still, farmers support Trump, in part due to his public support for corn-based ethanol, Rosmann said. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency advanced a plan meant to expand the U.S. ethanol market, the first step in fulfilling a promise Trump made in Iowa last fall. About $8 billion in farmer aid has also taken some of the sting out of the trade war.
Some of that goodwill may be eroded by a 2020 budget proposal that would cut “overly generous” Department of Agriculture subsidies. The 35-day partial government shutdown earlier this year slowed implementation of the program.
Farmers have accrued so much debt because by nature they are optimistic, said Scott Marlow, senior policy specialist at the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA in Pittsboro, North Carolina.
Their fierce independence and deep connection with the land can become an economic disadvantage, Marlow said. “They can be driven far further than most of us would be before they would call it quits, to the point of getting off-farm jobs to be able to continue farming, subsidizing the farming operation with off-farm income, driving themselves extremely hard.”
Sue Judd in Wisconsin set up a suicide prevention group for farmers and those in the rural community after her brother, a hobby farmer, killed himself, she said. Her group’s aim is to convince farmers that it’s all right to seek help and that they’re not alone.
Meyer, 71, who retired from law enforcement, was on the St. Peter’s Lutheran Church dart team with the parishioner who died by suicide. He says another parishioner who’s a farmer confided to him that he also struggled with stress. Meyer says that his aim with the groups is to “give them some hope if we can.” In the last meeting, 59 people showed up to share food, stories and hear financial advice and how to deal with stress compared with 45 in January.
Farmers’ spirits may lift if U.S. negotiators can broker a favorable deal with China soon. For now though, they’re having to cope with soybean prices of about $9 a bushel, almost half of what they were getting in the heyday of 2012. Chicago corn futures have followed a similar path to be trading at about $3.70 from a peak of $8.49 in 2012.
“If the corn price went up $3 a bushel and beans went up $5 my phone would ring a fourth as much as it is now,” Matthews said during a road trip. “Prices are really low and they’re waiting for what are they are going to do. Are they going to lift the tariffs? And so all of those things they’re constantly looking at.”
With assistance from Reg Gale and Cynthia Koons.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mario Parker in Chicago at mparker22@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Attwood at jattwood3@bloomberg.net, Jeffrey Taylor
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com
March 15, 2019
BREAKING: The Ninth Circuit court just DENIED TransCanada’s motion to begin construction on Keystone XL!
“TransCanada keeps losing in the courts because facts m…
He ranted and raved about Jeanine Pirro and went on a Retweet Spree featuring a Qanon account.
By Jack Holmes March 18, 2019
At some point, maintaining your own grip on reality means accepting that the President of the United States has lost his. The man’s brain is not good, you see. One way you can tell is that he spent his Sunday going absolutely intergalactic on the Tweet Machine, offering his considered opinion on Fox News’ weekend programming, decrying the scourge of Saturday Night Live—which he seemed to accuse of colluding with Russia—and, of course, forwarding some caps-heavy ruminations on the many investigations into him and his associates. Oh, and he also wished folks a Happy St. Patrick’s Day, shortly before the party he leads tweeted an attack on Beto O’Rourke linking his 1998 DUI arrest to his Irish ancestry—you know, because the Irish are alcoholic criminals. Some throwback bigotry!
But the cornerstone of the weekend meltdown from Donald Trump, American president, were his complaints about what was coming to him through the TV—the medium that is, without exaggeration, the governing force of his own private reality. He kicked things off with a high-pitched whine about SNL, a comedy show that makes fun of political figures by putting makeup on famous actors and having them read a transcript of what the real person said the week before.
But then it was time to attend to the core matters of state: why aren’t my favorite TV people on my TV saying nice things about me?
After tweeting a Fox clip directly, the United States president proceeded to attack a local Union leader, seeming to blame him for G.M.’s decision to close a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, at the cost of 5,400 jobs.
Then it was back to the president’s main duty as outlined in the Constitution, to serve as the nation’s top television critic.
The president then went on a Retweet Spree. He retweeted one of those professional MAGA fan accounts that, shockingly, agreed with his take on Fox News Anchors Offering Insufficient Praise for the Leader. Trump shared a message from a definitely real account assuring him that millions of Americans like Trump more than John McCain. The president shared multiple articles from “ilovemyfreedom.org.” And finally, he retweeted a supporter of QAnon, a loopy conspiracy theory based on anonymous posts on an Internet forum.
This was apparently a huge boost to the followers of “Q”. An authorless book associated with this “movement” was already in the top 75 books on Amazon. The book claims, among other things, that prominent Democrats murder and eat children.
After the Retweetapalooza, it was almost over. But not before Trump bragged he’d talked to Mary Barra, the GM CEO, about the Lordstown plant closure—once again suggesting the union was to blame. He did not bother to claim the call had accomplished anything. Then he said Democrats tried to steal the 2016 election. And then there was this:
Once again, we’ve been subjected to an extended public presidential meltdown. It appears the World’s Most Powerful Man spent his Sunday watching Fox News and reacting explosively to whatever came on screen. It might seem like this is no way to run your life, much less the country, but that’s why you’re not an Artful Dealmaker and The Leader America Needs.
Throughout, we were also subjected to feeble pushbacks like the one from Senator Lindsey Graham, who piggybacked on John McCain to smuggle himself into political prominence. Now Graham, who once maintained Trump was a “kook” who’s unfit for office, has now attached himself at the hip to the man who dragged McCain’s name through the mud in life, in severe sickness, and in death.
What a nice encapsulation of the kind of moral and political decay of this nation, a collapse that has given this president the time and space to trample our republic. The Mad King rants and raves as the messages filter into his brain from the TV, while the cowards in Congress tell us all in Very Serious Tones that, while it may appear he has no clothes, he merely takes an unconventional approach to dressing himself each morning. Meanwhile, he continues to ratchet up the talk of political violence.
March 18, 2019
Fantastic news coming out of the University of Tennessee today! We have a major crisis in terms of financing higher education. We have hundreds of thousands of bright young people who can’t afford to go to college and millions who will leave school deeply in debt. Public colleges and universities must become tuition-free and we must substantially reduce student debt.
March 18, 2019
February, 2019
24 reasons to be hopeful for 2019
24 good news stories about the planet
24 reasons to be hopeful for 2019 🌎✨
Posted by Brut nature on Friday, February 8, 2019
Wisconsinite Abe Voelker says his family’s farm is yet another in a long line going out of business because of low prices, overproduction, the rise of CAFOs, and more.
By Abe Voelker, Business, Farming March 14, 2019
This Christmas, like every other, I traveled to northern Wisconsin to stay with my parents on the dairy farm I grew up on. As usual I took the opportunity to help my dad and younger brother with barn chores and milk cows. The cows need to be milked twice a day, every day, roughly around 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. I didn’t help out every shift but I worked more than enough to once again be humbled about the life I left behind and recalibrate my nostalgia.
Early morning walk to the barn
Speaking of which, I never had the work ethic to be a farmer. Ever since I was little and playing video games on our NES, I was enamored by electronics. By the time our family got a personal computer and dial-up internet for Christmas in 1997, when I was 11, I was completely and hopelessly sucked in. There followed many evenings where my dad would come flying in to the house to yell at me for being late for chores when I lost track of time on “that damn computer.”
Thankfully for all involved, my younger brother Noah inherited my dad’s insane work ethic and love of farming and took up the farm’s reins (he also picked up my slack when we were younger—thanks Brother). He loves the work and excels at it.
I instead went to college and became a computer programmer, and haven’t lived in my hometown since.
I also have two older brothers; neither of them got the farming gene either. My eldest brother Jerry lives near Madison and also works in the software field. My second-eldest brother, John, lives near my folks and helps out quite often, but he also does other work and has other obligations, so most of the daily farming work falls on my youngest brother Noah and my dad, who is now into his 70’s.
Sadly this year, I found out that it will have been my final Christmas coming home and milking cows, because they’ll be selling off the cows over the coming spring and fall.
My dad and brother Noah getting ready to milk
This probably shouldn’t be a huge shock. Ever since I can remember there has always been a steady drumbeat of family farms going bust. Sometimes the tempo would increase, when milk and/or crop prices would hit new lows, but the drum has always beat on as the industry never seemed to turn a corner.
Our family farm was subjected to the same ups and downs as every other farm but had always managed to weather every storm. I recall my dad saying how farming was a series of upturns and downturns in pretty much everything, and how it was important to save money from the good years so you can survive the bad years.
One of the bad times I can remember was in the mid-to-late ’90’s—I was in elementary school—when milk prices were so low that some farmers were dumping their milk down the drain in protest. At that time, my mom got involved in dairy activism and became a lead organizer of a group of area farmers who worked together to try to improve their lot and raise public awareness of their struggles.
In December 1995, they met with Wisconsin progressive legend Ed Garvey, a labor attorney who successfully helped form the NFL player’s union, to talk about forming a union for farmers.
The following year, after being rebuffed by a state representative for being a negligible percent of his constituency and told to come back when they had more support, they rallied farmers across the state to voluntarily close off their land to all recreational activity such as hunting, fishing, snowmobiling,4 and four-wheeling (snowmobile and ATV trails often cross farmers’ private land in Wisconsin).
They also blockaded a creamery cooperative’s weighing scales to protest the low prices.
In 1997, they founded an organization called Save Our Family Farms with the objective of getting farmers across the country to respond to a non-binding referendum on pricing mechanisms and supply management. I think the intent was to provide evidence of grassroots farmer support for Canadian-style controls on milk price and supply, which reduce volatility and the need for subsidies and have managed to maintain Canada’s family farms’ existence, which would give the American federal government ammo to institute similar policies.
Later, in 1998, they succeeded in establishing their union (technically a guild due to federal labor laws) as a branch of OPEIU, which in turn is affiliated with the AFL – CIO.
Unfortunately, while my mom and the other farmers had some success in raising awareness and garnering some attention from various government officials, their efforts didn’t have any discernible effect on policy or the milk price bottom line. Dairy farmers once again had to either hold on tight and ride it out, or go bust (and many did).
For our family at that time, the milk price situation combined with my dad needing knee surgery (from repeated stress of kneeling on concrete to milk cows) resulted in us having a dispersal sale and selling off most of the herd.
I remember it being an emotional day. After spending a week thoroughly cleaning up the barn and cattle, we set up a fenced-off show area outside the barn where on the day of the auction, the cattle were paraded out one-by-one to display to bidders and the auctioneer.
Milk prices being low also lowers the value of milking cows themselves, so we got less money than we had hoped for. To a kid it felt like vultures were paying a pittance to carry away a piece of my identity. By the end of the day, looking down the alleyway at mostly-empty cow stalls bedded with fresh sawdust, that anger turned to sadness and a sense of loss.
In time, my dad recovered from his surgery, my older brothers graduated from high school and moved out, and as my younger brother and I aged into our early teens, the herd was slowly built up to near-previous levels again.
It seems hard to believe but at one point it was possible to make a decent living as a dairy farmer with a small herd (what’s now considered small, anyway). In 1981, my dad had a herd of 82 milking cows and he cracked the top 50 in all of northwest Wisconsin’s 22 counties for average milk production. This was in the heart of America’s dairyland by the way, to the point that federal milk pricing used to be based on how many miles away you were from here.
While not a scientific poll, it’s an interesting sample. If you look at the herd sizes listed you can see that they’re all what would now be considered small, with only two herds just barely over 100 head.
From what I can tell, the farming landscape changed dramatically in the 1970s when President Nixon promoted agribusiness lobbyist Earl “Rusty” Buty to USDA secretary. Butz had a reputation going back to at least the 1950’s for lobbying for dramatic modernizations to farming at the expense of small farms. “Adapt or die; resist and perish…Agriculture is now big business” he would say. By the 1970’s, before his USDA nomination, he was a director of three large agribusiness corporations.
Before Butz, farming practices were ruled by FDR New Deal-era controls on production, when memories of the Dust Bowl and destruction of the land through overproduction were still vivid. These production controls aimed to smooth out volatility by paying farmers to keep fields fallow in times of overproduction, and to release grain from storage in times of shortages. Farming production was geared toward American consumption, but even with the production controls there was always a surplus of grain to deal with.
Nixon brought Butz in with a mandate to get rid of the grain surpluses. Butz architected this by selling off the grain surpluses to the Soviets in “the largest grain deal so far as we [knew] in the history of the world” in 1972 for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Unfortunately, the deal didn’t come with an upper limit on how much grain the Soviets could buy (“because it did not occur to [them] that the Russians could ever buy too much”), and the Soviets bought up one – forth of the U.S. wheat harvest that year. The following year, American supermarket prices for bread and other goods shot up by 20%, of which some estimates attribute at least 15% of the rise directly on the export deal. Butz and the other deal-makers were dragged before a furious Congress to testify on what happened.
The grain shortages were a windfall for grain farmers, who were getting a higher price for their grain, but bad news for dairy farmers and other livestock farmers who fed their animals with grain.
To make up for the grain shortfall, Butz removed all production limits on grain and fervently encouraged farmers to go wild with production, to plant “from fencerow to fencerow” and “get big or get out.”.
The effects were quickly apparent, as before his USDA tenure was finished Butz became a pariah to everyone but the big farmers, as small farmers went bust under the continual tightening of the efficiency noose (Butz of course had no sympathy for these “inefficient” farms).
While not the whole story, Butz’s era was undoubtedly a major turning point in orienting our food economy towards consolidation and concentration of production in fewer and fewer hands.
The consolidation of dairy and the continual shrinking of profit margins have led to drastic changes to the industry over the years. One change is that through selective breeding, improved nutrition, increased milking frequency, and other factors, the amount of milk that a single cow yields per year has more than doubled since the 1970’s:
Source: USDA Quick Stats
This has allowed overall milk production to increase, even while the total number of cows has shrank:
Source: USDA Quick Stats
While the overall number of cows have decreased a bit, the number of herds of cows, i.e. the number of farming operations, have decreased dramatically (and continues to do so—the latest count on the rate of change is two dairy farms per day closing):
Source: USDA Quick Stats
What this means is that the average number of cows on a given dairy operation has greatly risen, i.e., dairy farms have become much denser in terms of livestock. Looking at government statistics on dairy farm profitability, the reason this is happening (and the reason the trend will only continue) seems to be obvious—only farms with thousands of cows, that can use their size to cut costs, are able to operate in the black:
These changes have given rise to a whole new type of livestock farm: the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO. CAFOs are defined by the EPA as “an AFO [Animal Feeding Operation] with more than 1000 animal units” (which for dairy, is 700 dairy cows, either milking or dry) or “any size AFO that discharges manure or wastewater into a natural or man-made ditch, stream or other waterway.”
Cows on a CAFO operation. Public domain image courtesy Danny Hart/PICRYL
In Wisconsin, the number of dairy CAFOs and the total number of cows on these operations continues to rise rapidly:
The concentration of livestock on small plots of land and the large-scale industrialization of these farming operations have given rise to new negative externalities. CAFO livestock produce literal manure lagoons. There is so much manure produced that a huge pit must be dug, fitted with a liner, and the manure is dumped in, forming an artificial lake made of animal waste.
A typical manure lagoon. Public domain image courtesy USDA NRCS.
These manure lagoons are open-air, and the toxic fumes elevate rates of asthma in children living nearby. The liquid itself contains toxic chemicals, pathogens, and bacteria, and if it leaks out (say during heavy rainfall), is devastating to nearby communities as it contaminates the local water table, where people draw their well water from, and destroys local bodies of water where wildlife live and people recreate.
Due to the number of cows on these operations, high capacity wells that draw over 100,000 gallons of water per day are required in order to draw enough water for all the livestock. In rural Wisconsin, our natural water supply is beginning to be destroyed through a combination of manure and fertilizer spills contaminating our well water, and high capacity wells sucking out so much water that it’s disrupting the water table.
According to a pretty damning 2010 CDC report on CAFOs that is worth reading in its entirety,
The agriculture sector, including CAFOs, is the leading contributor of pollutants to lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. It has been found that states with high concentrations of CAFOs experience on average 20 to 30 serious water quality problems per year as a result of manure management problems (EPA, 2001).
The report goes on to describe the long-term damage from even a single manure spill:
When groundwater is contaminated by pathogenic organisms, a serious threat to drinking water can occur. Pathogens survive longer in groundwater than surface water due to lower temperatures and protection from the sun.
…
Even if the contamination appears to be a single episode, viruses could become attached to sediment near groundwater and continue to leach slowly into groundwater. One pollution event by a CAFO could become a lingering source of viral contamination for groundwater (EPA, 2005).
…
Groundwater can still be at risk for contamination after a CAFO has closed and its lagoons are empty. When given increased air exposure, ammonia in soil transforms into nitrates. Nitrates are highly mobile in soil, and will reach groundwater quicker than ammonia. It can be dangerous to ignore contaminated soil.
…
If a CAFO has contaminated a water system, community members should be concerned about nitrates and nitrate poisoning. Elevated nitrates in drinking water can be especially harmful to infants, leading to blue baby syndrome and possible death.
For some real-world examples, in Wisconsin in 2017, a baby died from blue baby syndrome, a condition linked to high nitrates, in a community in Armenia, WI which had been experiencing a spike in private well nitrate levels after a 6,000-head dairy CAFO set up shop there. In the central sands region of Wisconsin, rivers such as the Little Plover, which was a notably good trout stream, have nearly dried up entirely from the substantial use of high capacity wells.
In Kewaunee County in northeast Wisconsin, more than one-third (!) of 320 wells tested were found to be unsafe to use due to unsafe levels of coliform bacteria or nitrates. In 2004, in that region, a six-month-old became violently ill after taking a bath in water poisoned by manure runoff. A state representative called the situation there a “public health crisis.”
In 2014, in Juneau County, a man was forced to sell the home he had lived in for 20 years after a CAFO began repurposing water irrigation systems to spray manure, and the liquid soaked into the walls of his home (“It was an ammonia smell. It hurt so bad even to breathe,” he said).
An irrigation system is repurposed to spray manure on a Wisconsin field. Public domain image courtesy Wisconsin DNR
Besides environmental externalities, it’s also an open secret that these CAFOs heavily rely on undocumented immigrants for their day-to-day labor, particularly the parlor milking setups. In a recent news story, Congressman Devin Nunes’s family’s large dairy farm in Iowa got busted for such practices.
A dairy CAFO located in a tiny Wisconsin village pins an ad for workers written in Spanish to their Facebook page. There’s no ad in English. 🤔 That’s not a dig towards the immigrants—I married a Mexican woman and I love my inlaws and their culture dearly.
However, it’s important to remember that farms are in competition with each other for labor, land, and other resources. In this case, my brother and other family farms struggle and pay dearly to hire and retain legal workers at a high cost. Other farms, particularly the large ones, pay lower costs for illegal labor and externalize the costs of depressed wages onto everyone else, not unlike externalizing the costs of their pollution. It’s not a fair playing field to compete on.
Just a mile down the road from my family’s farm is the largest CAFO in our county, with over 5,000 head of cattle. This CAFO has received four Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) violations from the EPA, two of which are due to coliform bacteria counts, as well as one Clean Waters Act (CWA) violation for discharging into a wetland.
Those are the federally-documented violations, anyway. My mom took some video of a leak about a month after the EPA-documented CWA violation which traveled down the hill into a creek that runs through my parents’ property, killing the wildlife there for God knows how long. This CAFO is now going through the process of installing a manure pipeline to move waste around to various fields—so far through private lands, but apparently they are also pursuing public right-of-ways.
It’s terrifying to consider how rapidly and how severely the water table and nearby wetlands could be damaged if this pipeline were to burst or leak, and how much manure could be pumped out below the topsoil before being detected.
So I spoke to the county’s conservation officer who had nothing but good things to say about the pipeline and how it will get tanker trucks off the roads, how a pipeline is safer for the environment, and how leaks would be stopped by shutoff valves. That may be true, but yet you can easily find news reports of manure pipeline leaks. When I asked my mom her thoughts, she told me there was allegedly a pipeline break already which sprayed manure across a neighbor’s yard and house, and showed me some pictures she took of the cleanup.
A skid steer cleans up an alleged manure spill at a neighbor’s house. Picture courtesy my mom.
For my brother Noah, who is taking over the farm, having the county’s biggest CAFO nearby unfortunately puts a competetive strain on his already-difficult situation. Because Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES) permit requirements require these CAFOs to own or rent enough land to spread manure on proportional to the amount of cows they have, this multi-million dollar corporation down the road is under land-pressure, and gobbles up all farming land in the area often before it’s even on the market. This makes it harder for my brother to find farmland to buy or rent nearby.
One last thing I’d like to touch on is the failure of the farmer cooperatives in this era.It’s probably well-known that there have been periods where farmers have went through tough times, and going back to at least the 1920’s, farmers have formed voluntary cooperatives (co-ops) to help one another out by pooling resources.
Check out this quaint 1940’s-era video for an explainer:
Unfortunately, the modern reality is that through repeated mergers, farming cooperatives have conglomerated into corporate behemoths. The co-op’s presence in a farming community today is as a local outpost that belongs to a sprawling empire.For example, in my family’s farm area the co-op conglomerate is Cenex, a.k.a. CHS Inc., which is a Fortune 100 company (!). And they’re not the only Fortune 100 farmer co-op either—there was once Farmland Industries, which imploded from the kind of financial stupidity that can only happen when you grow too large.
Anyway, for all the mergers and supposed efficiency gained by the local cooperative turning into a corporate dragon, my brother gets cheaper seeds by buying them from one dude starting up his own business out of the back of his truck, compared to the local co-op’s prices.
I’ve been told other services provided by the co-op suffer from massive inefficiencies as well—too many managers and idle workers at the headquarters, too many trucks show up concurrently at job sites leading to idle workers, inefficient truck routes, etc. The types of issues that crop up when there aren’t any farmers in the mix at the co-op any more—there’s no “skin in the game,” and no connection to the farmers being served.
The same kind of stuff happens with the cooperative creameries—the place where dairy farmers send their milk to be processed. You wouldn’t know there was a crisis going on looking at this creamery’s newsletter, with puff pieces about cheese curds showing up on the QVC channel, or about a director’s jetsetting trips to China and how impressed the locals were he could use chopsticks. Meanwhile member farmers (patrons) are getting the lowest milk checks from the creamery they’ve ever gotten. Yet somehow the board of this creamery had enough cash to allegedly buy another creamery to the tune of $6 million without bringing it up for a patron vote nor mentioning their intention at their annual meeting.
An Ellsworth Cooperative Creamery director visited China while their patrons go bust. Source: Ellsworth Cooperative Creamery newsletter, May 2018
Farmers are generally scared to speak up about this kind of stuff for fear of getting dumped by their creamery and having nowhere to send their milk (because creameries serve limited geographic areas, a farmer may have very few—perhaps even just one—options for where to send their milk). With the overabundance of milk supply, the feeling is that creameries are on the lookout for ways to lower their supply burden by getting rid of patrons.7 Not being able to sell their milk is obviously a death knell for a dairy farmer.
Point being, farmer cooperatives were once local institutions bootstrapped by the farmers themselves, but now they too have fallen into the trap of corporate consolidation and become disconnected from the people they were meant to serve. Now, in hard times, these institutions have become a source of anxiety—at best an indifferent, inefficient use of resources, and at worst a potential hostile actor that could destroy you. Something unthinkable compared to their founding principles.
What’s now happening in the final stages to the American family dairy farm has already happened to other food and livestock industries in this country. Notably poultry, as poultry farmers nowadays are more or less serfs to a handful of huge corporations.
Sunset harvest on the farm
For a time some thought it would be possible for small dairy farms to escape to a niche like organic, but even those farms are going bust as the large corporate farms have penetrated that market and flooded it with product (even if they probably aren’t following the already-lax USDA regulations).
I do think it may have been possible to save the family dairy farm at some point, probably through a supply management program similar to what Canada has. There are all sorts of arguments to be made for or against such a system but by all accounts Canadian farmers and consumers are generally happy with their setup up there. The 2014 Farm Bill would’ve been a good start; it included an oversupply management mechanism, but CAFO lobbyist groups like the Dairy Business Association pushed a last-minute amendment to remove it.
But at this point for America, the cow is out of the barn so to speak and it’s too late for our family dairy farmers. As dairy farms continue to close at record levels, the consolidation into large corporate farms will continue unabated.
For a taste of what the near future looks like, Wal-Mart already began bottling their own milk, shutting down over 100 dairy producers in the process. As for the distant future, I imagine it will look similar to the consolidation in other livestock industries, where a handful of mega corporations dictate production and the “farmers” are more like serfs, deeply in debt and entirely beholden to the corporation. I already mentioned poultry farming, but also look at hog farming: the largest hog producer in the country, Smithfield Foods, is now owned by a Chinese corporation, and which is responsible for staggering amounts of damage to rural American communities due to the concentrated waste it produces.
In the name of efficiency, profits will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while waste gets concentrated into more and more toxic forms to be dumped on rural communities.
Growing up on a dairy farm is a unique experience that I was fortunate to have. The farm was woven through all aspects of our family’s life, and the success of our family depended on everyone’s contribution to the farm. Family bonds were tempered by working with each other every day, and together overcoming the minor crises that arose (cows getting out, equipment breaking down, etc.). That’s why I used “death” in this article’s title; while it may seem melodramatic to some, that is what it feels like to me—like a piece of the family is dying.
Brother John coming back from spreading fertilizer, holding his daughter
You get a little taste of many things working on a farm, from agricultural, to construction (e.g., building and fixing up areas of the barn), to engineering (e.g., designing ad-hoc fixes to broken implements in the field), to mechanical and engine repair (e.g., fixing tractors and welding implements).
It saddens me that my brother Noah won’t be able to pass that legacy on to his daughter, and I can’t give my own kids a glimmer of it by having them work on the farm over the summers (and neither can my nieces or nephews).
It’s also a loss for Wisconsin’s culture—“America’s Dairyland”—that we aren’t going to have farm kids coming up any more, and our rural pastoral landscape that was dotted with barns, silos, and pastures with grazing cattle is being replaced by an industrial one with huge buildings, heavy machine traffic, and artificial lakes made of animal waste. Those of us who grew up in these rural areas and moved out but longed to return can’t even bear to do so any longer because the land has been blighted.
While the future is still uncertain for my kid brother Noah, I have no doubt he will succeed at whatever he puts his mind to. He’s got brains, talent, and a god-tier work ethic.
If there’s anything good to come of the situation, I am glad at least that he’ll be freed from the burden of having cows, which require one to be out in the barn every single day without end. It will also be a relief to my dad, who I mentioned earlier is now in his seventies and still has to work out in the barn every day because of the difficulty in hiring legal farmhands.
Whatever happens, these family bonds that were forged on the farm remain, and we will take care of each other.
Brother Noah getting in the skid steer
As I said, I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that would save family dairy farms, save for a supply management program suddenly appearing like a deus ex machina and solving the overproduction problem. I suggest lobbying your representatives for supporting such a measure in a future Farm Bill, and/or supporting family farm organizations who are fighting for that and other measures such as:
If you live in a rural or semi-rural area, it’s critical you pay attention to what’s going on in your local area. CAFOs will continue to grow and spread, and through organizations like the Dairy Business Association lobby for laws giving them freer ability to pollute the air, water, and land that we all need in order to survive. I suggest proactively lobbying your city or township to pass ordinances banning polluting activities in your area and restrictions that prevent CAFOs from operating in your area (otherwise you might end up on the defensive, which is nearly impossible to win). Some organizations that defend Wisconsin’s water you can support are:
Everyone, including cityfolk, must get educated on what is going on with our food economy, and the dangerous direction it has taken. I’m still getting educated myself so am open to suggestions, but the Food and Environment Reporting Network seems to do good work here.
Finally, I also recommend everyone, but especially rural folks support the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, as they work hard on several fronts (including another issue dear to my heart, improving broadband access) to empower local communities.
This article is based solely on my own reflection and attempts to understand the systemic changes that affected my family’s dairy farm. Any mistakes I made are solely my own and do not reflect upon anyone else mentioned in the article.
I spent a lot of time writing this post but there are so many other issues that I wasn’t able to even get to. For example, the startling rate of farmers committing suicide (more than double that of veterans), which hit close to home when the man who visited our farm my entire life in his familiar white truck and sold my dad farm equipment killed himself (RIP Marty); to creamery cooperative mismanagement and ineffectiveness and the farmers doing battle with their own creameries, and the general failure of the Capper-Volstead Act; to the consolidation of the farm implement industry; to John Deere doing some shady things (here and here); to statistical changes of the price spread from farm to consumer (i.e., the amount of money farmers get from a gallon of milk or other dairy products compared to their retail cost); to digging into the nasty things CAFO lobbyists are doing; to rural communities fighting against CAFOs in their area; to Trump’s tariffs and a certain political anger people direct at farmers; and so many more I regret I wasn’t able to do justice to.
Research shows that kids who spend time outside benefit long-term. Forest schools offer foraging and more as part of the curriculum.
By Stephanie Parker, Environment, Local Eats, March 18, 2019
The Wild Roots Forest School kicks off the school year with the same ritual every fall. First, the children and teachers crack open foraged, dried acorns and then grind and sift them into a fine flour. Then, all the families come together to bake a giant communal loaf of bread in the shape of a dragon.
“The children are not only having the experience of eating; they have to engage in a relationship with it to eat it,” says Lia Grippo, director of the school, which has locations in both Santa Barbara and Bishop, California. Students at Wild Roots range in age from two-and-a-half to seven years old.
Forest schools, also sometimes known as nature schools, come in a number of shapes, sizes, and iterations, but the essential idea is that young children spend the majority of their days outside in nature. The original forest schools began in Denmark in the 1950’s and Sweden soon followed.
Parents who choose forest schools do so because they believe in the positive effects nature has on children. And there’s research to back this up. A recent study from Denmark showed that children who grow up surrounded by nature have up to a 55 percent lower risk of developing mental illnesses later in life. Another study out of Barcelona found that children whose schools have more green space had higher cognitive development. And there are many other tangible benefits for children when they spend time in nature, such as better physical health and social relationships with one another and a greater sense of independence.
Nathan Clay, whose seven-year-old Leo was a student for two years at Wild Roots, says they chose a forest school because “we knew he needed more time outside, playing freely, and moving his body.”
There are currently around 100 forest schools in the U.S. Some offer a combination of indoor and outdoor spaces, while others take place entirely outside, whatever the weather. Most of these are for young children of pre-school and kindergarten age, although there are programs for older, home-schooled children as well. A day at forest school may include a hike, cooking lunch over an open fire, collecting leaves, identifying plants, or picking berries. And many are now teaching kids to forage for wild edibles.
A Wild Roots student holding a basket of foraged elderberries. (Photo credit: Lia Grippo)
“If you’re going to have an intimate relationship with nature, that requires all of the senses, and it requires knowing that our very survival and sustenance is completely interwoven with the land that we live on,” says Grippo. She grew up in Latvia when it was part of the Soviet Union and says her family foraged as a way to connect with nature and to supplement their diets when food was hard to come by.
Kit Harrington, co-founder of Fiddleheads Forest School and founder of the Washington Nature Preschool Association, says foraging comes naturally to children. “It’s something children are drawn to almost immediately within the outdoor classroom,” she says.
Foraging has seen an upswing in popularity in recent years. It has been shown to be a tool in the larger effort to stem food insecurity and an unlikely source of safe food in urban environments. But it’s not without its challenges. In some cities, it is actually illegal to pick wild plants. And of course, when it comes to kids putting things in their mouths, it is vital that they understand that some wild plants are poisonous.
A student at Wild Roots Forest School in California grinds acorns. (Photo credit: Lia Grippo)
Harrington sees foraging as an important part of outdoor education, but recommends that teachers do a risk-benefit analysis to determine whether it makes sense in a particular outdoor classroom. “We need to make sure that there’s enough structure around the activity so that children aren’t likely to engage with it in an unsafe way,” she says. And adult supervision is key.
Grippo believes in modeling safe behavior. She doesn’t only focus on edible plants in her interactions with the kids, but on poisonous plants as well.
Janine Coates, a forest school researcher at Loughborough University in England who is training to become a forest school instructor, also sees foraging as an important part of the forest school experience. “Eating is quite a big part of forest school,” she says. “Being able to cook food over an open fire in a woodland environment and thinking along the lines of a sustainable food system.”
But Coates promotes caution. “Tensions come in when you think about edible plants, like fungi, where there’s a risk,” she says. The students she’s seen learn never to eat fungi or put them near their mouths, because it’s just too hard to be sure. And Coates says that teachers make sure to use the word “fungi” instead of mushrooms, to prevent children from becoming afraid of the edible mushrooms at the grocery store.
At the Secret Forest Playschool in Duluth, Minnesota, students, who are between three and six years old, set around 100 taps on maple trees every March and then learn how to turn sap into syrup. Not only does it teach them where maple syrup comes from, but they also learn how not to over-tap the trees. And when the wild raspberries in the area get eaten by local wildlife before they can pick them, Secret Forest’s founder and director Meghan Morrow says it offers an important lesson, too. “It teaches them that it’s a shared forest,” she says.
The Flying Deer Nature Center, which has locations in upstate New York and western Massachusetts, also makes sustainability a key part of the lesson plan. They have programs for children from ages four to 17.
Julie Kunz, one of the instructors who teaches four, five, and six year-olds, will sometimes plan a lesson around a specific plant to forage, such as the autumn olive, a little berry that grows on a shrub. Although they are an invasive species in upstate New York and western Massachusetts, they’ve become part of the local landscape—and they’re packed with vitamin C. So Kunz makes sure the children harvest them consciously, both so that they keep growing back in the area they are in, but also so that they are not taking seed and spreading into new areas.
Autumn olives are sour and, like many wild edibles, can be off-putting to children initially. “Our palates are not necessarily used to the flavors that nature gives us,” says Kunz. However, she adds, most kids will try new things when doing so is modeled for them by adults they trust, and when other kids are partaking as well.
Children collect leaves at Wild Roots Forest School in California. (Photo credit: Lia Grippo)
Sometimes it’s the parents that need more convincing than the kids themselves. Kunz remembers one day being out with a group of kids and finding an insect on a plant called golden rod. The larva of this insect, she says, tastes like butter and can be eaten alive. A few of the kids wanted to try it.
“I was so impressed!” she says. But shortly after, she realized that one of the kids who had eaten one was a vegetarian. “I told the dad and he was like ‘uh, we don’t eat animals,’” she said.
Overall though, parents appreciate the unique outdoor experiences their children have at their forest schools. Nathan Clay, the father of Leo who spent two years at Wild Roots, says his son’s time there helped make Leo self-assured and has given him a deep appreciation of and wonder about the natural world.
When it comes to wild edibles, Clay says that Leo knows which common plants to avoid and can identify the differences between edible and non-edible ones. “Just a few days ago we want for a walk and Leo began gathering chickenweed, mallow, nasturtium, and plantain for a healing tea. I made myself a salad for lunch,” Clay says. “I ask him all the time what the weeds and grasses are growing in our yard or on hikes.”
And Loughborough University’s Janine Coates, who also has a four-year-old in a forest school in England, says that her daughter loves nothing better than going out and picking wild blackberries or wild garlic, and that when it comes to identifying plants, Coates says of her daughter, “sometimes she is better than me.”
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