According to the American Immigration Council, women slightly outnumber men at over 23 million female immigrants in the U.S. But while immigrants move by choice, refugees have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, war, hunger and climate change. Some need items as basic as shoes. At MAKE, these women are offered not just support, but a launching pad to their new lives in the US. 

MAKE Projects, which stands for Merging Agriculture Kitchens and Employment, is a spin-off of the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency, and provides the women three months of paid worker training through a community garden, kitchen and 16-table café.

“While not all refugee and immigrant women have a strong connection to farm, everyone has a strong connection to foods that evoke memories, nostalgia or just an important sense of cultural identity,” says Anchi Mei, MAKE’s executive director and founder.

Mei launched the nonprofit in 2017 to address the lack of workforce development opportunities for refugee women with English language and cultural barriers, who can find themselves isolated and trapped in poverty. 

“Over time, we have come to understand that access to employment is more than financial. It is personal, emotional, social and benefits not just the immediate family but the whole community.” 

Mei’s program for women and youth, which has built partnerships with local colleges, community organizations, employers and customers, is a necessary bridge.  

Weekly English coaching provided by volunteers helps smooth the path for the newcomers. But it all begins with the universal language of food, in all its worldly flavors. The first two weeks are spent on the farm.

MAKE Farm, a roughly quarter acre plot, uses low-till practices to improve soil health and nutrient density in crops, along with intercropping – growing two or more crops close together – and integrated pest management. Fish and kelp meal are the main fertilizers. Throughout the grounds, pollinator plants and bird habitats promote cross-pollination and a more complex ecosystem.

The resulting bounty travels to the kitchen side, but it loops back to the farm in leftovers to nourish new plantings. “We promote living soils with a robust composting system using our restaurant food waste and regular applications of compost teas,” Mei says.

Farm Program Manager Robbie Wilcox chooses a diverse planting mix. A winter CSA mix contained Taiwanese chrysanthemum greens alongside more familiar customer favorites: spinach, radishes, beets and sweet potato. The produce goes into several dishes at the cafe, like the MAKE Market Salad and Wellness Soup Bowl, tailored by chef Renee Fox around whatever is fresh and abundant that week. 

As the women plant, prune and prep vegetable boxes for subscribers, they ease into the many skills needed to enter the workforce. And when they begin the next phase of the program by working at MAKE’s cafe in North Park, they continue to hone their culinary and hospitality skills serving up such fare as Afghan chicken, cardamom crepes and toasted milk bread; recipe ideas the women share from their own experiences. Several graduates have gone on to work in food service at local hospitals.

“We are a better San Diego with more different voices, flavors and faces at the table.”

Not all choose to work with food, however. Gulnara, who is originally from Kazakhstan, found a job in finance and operations at a local nonprofit. Others work in local hospitals and schools, like Nejat, a recent graduate from Ethiopia.

The farm to table training is a unique way to enter the American workforce, Mei says. Students learn essential job readiness skills and expectations as they transition from the farm to a more intensive work experience in MAKE’s restaurant. And with participants who have hailed from over 30 countries since the program began, it’s a cultural dialogue that enriches the entire San Diego community.

Last year, she says, “was epic.” Thanks to a large workforce development grant, they expanded their facilities and scaled up the adult trainee program, allowing them to work with many more refugee and immigrant women of all different English speaking levels, and educational and professional backgrounds from their home countries.

This year, they are preparing to move to a more permanent address, as they work through the permitting for a new MAKE cafe in San Diego’s Normal Heights neighborhood, not far from their current location. It’s expected to open before the end of the year. In addition to the existing farm in Mission Valley, the new cafe will add its own 2,000 square foot garden on-site. 

Mei says they won’t be deterred by the roiling political climate, as another round of the Trump administration again takes aim at immigrants. After all, they survived the first go-round, and forged their way during COVID, the toughest of times.

“We will continue to be nimble, resourceful and resilient, much like our participants,” she says. Fortunately, MAKE has a strong community of local supporters that believe in their mission. 

“We are a better San Diego with more different voices, flavors and faces at the table.”

The post Spotlight On an Urban Farm Helping Refugees and Immigrants Build Community appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Some farmers are looking at succession plans, trying to figure out who will take over the family business. Others are looking to transition away from factory farming, and still others are looking at bringing on new technology or systems to help them be more efficient.

This year, we explored what farming means to people across the US and the world, and brought you stories of truly modern farmers.

Here, we’ve collected our top 10 most read, shared, and commented on Farming Redefined stories for you to revisit. Let us know which stories you connected with the most in the comments.

The post Top 10 Farming Redefined Stories of 2024 appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Scorching temperatures in the Brazilian state of Pará have now made that routine unsafe. The heat has “been really intense” this year, said Pinto da Costa in Portuguese. It feels as if the “sun has gotten stronger,” so much so that it’s led her to shift her working hours from daytime to the dead of night.

Abandoning the practice that defined most of her days, she now sets off to the river in the pitch dark to chase what fish are also awake before dawn. It’s taken a toll on her catch, and her life. But it’s the only way she can continue her work in the face of increasingly dangerous temperatures.

“A lot of our fishing communities have shifted to fishing in the nighttime,” said Pinto da Costa, who advocates nationally for fisherfolk communities like hers through the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil, or the Movement of Artisanal Fishermen and Fisherwomen of Brazil.

Moving from daytime to overnight work is often presented as the most practical solution for agricultural laborers struggling with rising temperatures as a result of climate change. But it is no longer simply a proposal: This shift is already underway among many of the communities that catch, grow, and harvest the world’s food supply, from Brazil to India to the United States. Studies show the most common means of adapting to rising temperatures in most crop-growing regions has been to start working when it’s still dark out, or even to shift to a fully overnight schedule.

“The obvious piece of advice that you’ll see given is, ‘Work at night. Give workers head torches,’ and so on,” said Zia Mehrabi, a food security and climate researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “But the reality is, that can lead to other rights violations, other negative impacts.”

That’s been the case for Pinto da Costa and her fishing community in Brazil. Nighttime work has been an additional hardship for a community already struggling with the impacts of climate change. The region has experienced decades of severe drought conditions, causing fish to die off and physically isolating people as waterways dried up.

Research shows that regularly working during the night is physically and mentally disruptive and can lead to long-term health complications. Nighttime fishing is also threatening social and communal routines among the fisherfolk. A daytime sleep schedule can curb quality time spent with loved ones, as well as limit when wares can be sold or traded in local markets.

It’s also impacting their ability to support themselves and their families through a generations-old trade. “We’ve actually been working more hours with less food, with less production,” said Pinto da Costa, noting that working at night has made their work less efficient and led them to find less fish. “This is across all regions of Brazil,” she added.

The impact of a shift to nighttime hours is an understudied piece of the puzzle of how climate change and rising temperatures threaten the world’s food supply and its workforce. But for many experts, and those on the front lines, one thing is clear: Overnight work is far from a straightforward solution.

“It’s a very scary time for us,” said Pinto da Costa.

Outdoor workers, with their typical midday hours and limited access to shade, face some of the most perilous health risks during periods of extreme heat. A forthcoming analysis — previewed exclusively by Grist — found that, on average, the amount of time considered unsafe to work outside during a typical 9-to-5 workday will increase 8 percent by 2050, assuming greenhouse gas emissions stay on their current trajectory.

Led by Naia Ormaza Zulueta, a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Mehrabi, the analysis measures the number of extreme heat days by geographic region, and then breaks down daily and hourly temperatures by the estimated amount of population exposed. The research reveals that an estimated 21 percent of the global population already faces dangerous levels of heat stress during typical workday hours for more than a third of the year. By 2050, without cuts to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions (known as the “business-as-usual” scenario), that portion will jump to 39 percent.

“The number of days that people will experience a violation of their rights to a safe climate is going to substantially increase, but then also the number of possible working hours in a season, and productivity, is going to be substantially reduced,” said Mehrabi. “It’s a massive lose-lose situation.”

Their analysis finds that outdoor agricultural workers will encounter the largest health-related risks, with laborers in some areas being hit harder than others.

India, in particular, is projected to be one of the countries whose workforce will be most exposed to heat stress under the business-as-usual climate scenario. There are roughly 260 million agricultural workers in India. By 2050, 94 percent of the country’s population could face more than 100 days in a year when at least one daytime working hour exceeds a wet-bulb temperature of 28 degrees Celsius, or 82.4 degrees Fahrenheit — a conservative threshold of what is considered safe for acclimatized workers experiencing moderate rates of work. (Unacclimatized workers, or those unaccustomed to working in such environments, will face greater levels of heat risk at the same temperature and amount of work.)

In Brazil, another of the world’s top agricultural suppliers, heat risk is not as dire, but still poses a substantial risk for outdoor workers, including Pinto da Costa’s community of fisherfolk. By 2050, roughly 41 percent of the country’s population could experience more than 100 days a year when wet-bulb temperatures exceed the recommended threshold for at least one hour a day, according to the Boulder team’s analysis.

Mary Jo Dudley, the director of Cornell University’s Farmworker Program and the chair of the U.S. National Advisory Council of Migrant Health, said that the analysis is significant for what it reveals about the human health consequences of extreme heat, particularly as it relates to the world’s agricultural laborers. She’s seeing more and more outdoor agricultural workers in the U.S. adopt overnight schedules, which is only adding to the burdens and inequities the wider workforce already suffers from. This is poised to get worse. Zulueta and Mehrabi found that 35 percent of the total U.S. population will experience more than 100 days of wet-bulb temperatures exceeding 28 degrees C, or 82.4 degrees F, for at least one hour a day every year by 2050.

“This transition to a nighttime schedule pushes an extremely vulnerable population into more difficult work conditions that have significant mental and physical health impacts,” said Dudley.

Rebuking the human body’s circadian rhythms — that 24-hour internal clock that regulates when you sleep and wake — ramps up a person’s risk of health complications, such as cardiovascular disease and types of cancer, and diminishes their body’s ability to handle injury and stress. Working untraditional hours also can reduce a person’s ability to socialize or participate in cultural, communal activities, which are associated with positive impacts on brain and body health.

Women are particularly vulnerable to the social and economic impacts of transitioning to nighttime schedules. Despite making up nearly 45 percent of artisanal fishers in Brazil, women receive lower pay than their male counterparts. That means that when harvests decline with nighttime fishing, their margins are even smaller.

In the Brazilian state of Bahia, tens of thousands of women fishers work to collect shellfish en masse, while in Maranhão, women fisherfolk herd shrimp to the shore using small nets. Clam harvesting in Brazil’s northeast is also dominated by women. Because these jobs traditionally happened during the day and close to home, they allowed women to balance cultural or gendered family roles, including managing the household and being the caregiver to children. Shifting to evening hours to avoid extreme heat “poses a fundamental challenge,” said Mehrabi. “When you talk about changing working hours, you talk about disrupting families.”

Overnight work comes with other risks too. In many areas of Brazil, nighttime work is “either impossible” or “very complicated” because there are procedures and regulations as to when fisherfolk in different regions can fish, said Pinto da Costa. Nighttime fishing is regulated in some parts of Brazil — measures that have been shown to disproportionately impact artisanal fishers.

Even so, says Pinto da Costa, many are braving the risks “just to reduce the amount of exposure to the sun.”

“Honestly, when I saw that this was accepted in the literature, that people were giving this advice of changing their working shifts to the night, I was shocked,” said Zulueta, the author of the Boulder study, citing a paper published earlier this year where overnight work is recommended as an adaptation tool to reduce agricultural productivity losses to heat exposure. Under a policy of “avoiding unsafe working hours,” shifting those hours to the nighttime “is not a universally applicable solution,” she said.

Growing up a pastoralist in Ahmedabad, India, Bhavana Rabari has spent much of her life helping tend to her family’s herd of buffalo. Although she now spends her days advocating for pastoralists across the Indian state of Gujarat, the routine of her childhood is still ingrained in her: Wake up, feed and milk the herd, and then tend to the fields that surround their home.

But extreme heat threatens to change that, as well as the preservation of her community. When temperatures soar past 90 degrees F in Ahmedabad — now a regular occurrence — Rabari worries about her mom, who hand-collects feed for their buffalo to graze on. Other pastoralists are nomadic, walking at least 10 miles a day herding cattle from region to region in the hunt for pastureland.

“If we lose our livestock, we lose our culture, our dignity,” said Rabari. “If we continue our occupations, then we are dignified. We live with the dignity of our work.”

But rapidly rising temperatures are making it hard to hold on to that dignity of work. “The heat affects every life, every thing,” said Rabari.

Working overnight is a tactic Rabari has heard of other agricultural workers trying. But the idea of tending to the herd in the dark isn’t something she sees as safe or accessible for either her family or other pastoralists in her community. It’s less efficient and more dangerous to work outdoors with animals in the dark, and it would require them to overhaul daily lives and traditions.

“We are not working at night,” said Rabari. But what the family is already doing is waking up at 5 a.m. to beat the heat, collecting milk from their buffalo and preparing products to sell in the market during the dusky hours of the morning.

Rabari’s family and other pastoralists across Gujarat are increasingly in an untenable position. Hotter temperatures have already caused pastureland to wither, meaning animals are grazing less and producing less milk. More unsafe working hours means lost work time on top of that, which, in turn, changes how much income pastoralist families are able to take home.

The result has been not adaptation, but an exodus. Most pastoralists Rabari knows, particularly younger generations, are leaving the trade, seeking employment instead as drivers or cleaners in Ahmedabad. Rabari, who organizes for women pastoralists through the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan, or the Pastoral Women Alliance, says women are most often the ones left behind to tend to the herds.

They “have to take care of their children, they have to take care of the food, and they have to take care of the water,” she said. “They face the heat, they face the floods, or the excess rain.”

Halfway across the world, April Hemmes is facing off against unrelenting bouts of heat amid verdant fields of soybeans and corn in Hampton, north-central Iowa. A fourth-generation small Midwestern farmer, Hemmes works more than 900 acres entirely on her own — year in and year out.

The Midwest is the largest agricultural area in the United States, as well as one of the leading agricultural producers in the world. It’s also an area that has been battered by human-caused climate change. In fact, scientists just recently declared an end to the drought that had devastated the region for a whopping 203 weeks. The conditions impacted crop yields, livestock, the transportation of goods, and the larger supply chain.

Hemmes has the luxury of not having to face the same degree of heat stress that Rabari and Pinto da Costa are confronting elsewhere in the world, per the Boulder analysis. When compared to India and Brazil, the U.S. is on the lowest end of the worker health impact scale for extreme heat. And yet, heat is also already the deadliest extreme weather event in the U.S., responsible for more deaths every year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.

A few years back, while building a fence on her farmland, Hemmes suffered her first bout of on-the-job heat exhaustion. Suddenly, her heart started to race and her body felt as if it began to boil from within, forcing her to abandon her task and head indoors, away from the menacing heat. It was a wake-up call: Ever since, she’s been hyper-cautious with how she feels when tending to her fields.

This past summer, the heat index repeatedly soared past 100 degrees in Hemmes’ corner of Iowa. She found herself needing to be extra careful, not only pacing herself while working and taking more frequent breaks, but also making sure to get the bulk of the day’s work done in the morning. She even began starting her day in the fields an hour or so earlier to avoid searing temperatures compounding with brutal humidity throughout the afternoon.

“This [farm] has been in my family for over 125 years,” she said. “I do everything from banking to planting to spraying, everything. So it’s all on me, and it’s my family farm. I’m very proud of that.” In 1993, her dad and grandfather both retired, and she took over operations. She’s been more or less “a one-woman show” since. Keeping her farm well-managed is a responsibility she doesn’t take lightly. “You do what’s best for the soil. Because that’s the inheritance of future generations,” she said.

When Hemmes looks at how to prepare for a future with hotter working conditions, she knows one thing: Nighttime work is out of the question.

Not only are summertime mosquitoes in Iowa “terrible after dark,” but Hemmes says some of the chemicals she uses are regulated, restricting her from spraying them during the nighttime. In addition, she would need to get lights installed throughout the fields to alleviate the risk of injury when she uses equipment, and she would be even more fearful of that equipment breaking down.

“It would take more energy to work at night,” said Hemmes. “I think it would be far more dangerous … to work after the daylight was gone.”

Like Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is involved in advocacy for her community. With the United Soybean Board, Hemmes advocates for women in agriculture. With more resources at her disposal than Pinto da Costa and Rabari, Hemmes is focused on how to ensure solo-farming operations like hers have access to the technology they need to overcome heat spells — and never have to seriously consider an overnight harvest schedule.

On her own farm, she’s invested in “expensive” autonomous agriculture technology that allows her to take breaks when she needs to from the blistering sun. And she would like to see more precision technology and autonomous agriculture tools readily applied and accessible for farmers. She currently uses a tractor with an automatic steering system that improves planting and plowing efficiency and requires much less work, which she credits as one of the pivotal reasons she’s able to successfully manage her hundreds of acres of fields on her own.

She also hopes to see farmers tapping into their inherent flexibility. “What farmers are is adaptable,” she said. “I don’t have an orchard on my farm, but if I did, and I saw this thing [climate change] coming, you know, maybe you look at tearing the trees out and starting to plant what I can in those fields. Maybe the Corn Belt will move up to North Dakota. Who knows, if this keeps progressing?”

In Gujarat, Rabari and the Maldhari Mahila Sangathan are working to secure better representation for pastoralists in policymakers’ decisions about land use. The hope is for these communities to inform policies that would allow pastoralists job security and financial safety nets as climbing temperatures make it difficult to work and turn a profit.

Women pastoralists in particular are entirely left out of these policy spaces, said Rabari, which isn’t just an issue of exclusion but means their unique ecological knowledge is lost, too. “We have a traditional knowledge of which grass is good for our animals, which grass they need to eat so we get the most meals, how [they] can be used for medical treatment,” she said.

Pinto da Costa and the Movimento de Pescadores e Pescadoras Artesanais do Brasil are also advocating for monetary relief from the Brazilian government to offset the losses her fisherfolk community has faced from climate change and shifting work hours. In addition, she is looking for technical support to improve fisherfolk’s resources and equipment.

“I have maintained my energy and motivation to continue to fight for our rights,” said Pinto da Costa.

For all, it’s a race against time. Eventually, even working at night may not be enough to keep outdoor agricultural work viable. The Boulder researchers found that an overnight working schedule will not significantly alleviate dangerous heat stress exposure risk in key agricultural regions of the world — particularly across India. After all, heat waves don’t only happen during the day, but also take place at night, with overnight minimum temperatures rising even more rapidly than daytime highs.

Zachary Zobel, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who has separately researched the impact of overnight work adaptations on global agricultural productivity levels, said the Boulder team’s analysis has a “novel” result, and lines up with what his team has found.

“Warming past 2 degrees C, which we will experience over the next 30 years, would mean that even overnight shifts wouldn’t recover productivity,” said Zobel.

“How do you solve a problem like that?” Mehrabi said. “The reality is that the workers most at risk are the people contributing least to the climate change problem. That’s not to say that we can’t have better policies around hydration, shading, health. But it’s just kind of trying to put a BandAid on a problem. It doesn’t actually deal with the problem at its root cause, which comes down to this trajectory of fossil fuel consumption and emissions.”

This article originally appeared in Grist.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post The Night Shift appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The tips are especially helpful for folks hoping to make a go of farming on smaller plots of land. Given the challenges in an industry dominated by factory farms, such as slim profit margins and little control over pricing and markets, between 52 percent and 79 percent of small family farms are at high financial risk. More than half of small farmers also have to work a second job to make ends meet. 

“We only have 45 acres, which is a really small farm around here,” says Larson. “Conventional wisdom was [that] you could never make a living off that small amount of land, because the farmers around here are all commodity farmers.”

But, some small-scale farmers like Larson have been able to make their operations profitable with creative techniques such as monetizing their social media presence and carving out interesting, competitive niches.

One way Larson did this is by finding breeds with great marketing stories behind them, such as Dexter cattle. Brought back from near extinction by homesteaders who wanted a dual purpose for beef and dairy, this Irish heritage breed works well for Larson because of their smaller size and good beef quality when raised on grass without grain.

“You want to be able to tell a story to customers that they can buy into,” says Larson about his choice cattle breeds. “You need to have a marketing hat on as much as anything else.”

Eventually, says Larson, the farm began to make enough money for the family to take home a profit. Then, about seven years into the endeavor, Larson says he had another idea: monetizing Just A Few Acres’ social media to help support their small livestock farm.

“It’s enabled us to … gradually, taper down the numbers of animals that we raise,” says Larson. “And it’s allowed me to say, ‘well, if I’d like to retire before I die, I can do that now.’ It’s given us breathing room.”

Likewise, across the country, Rob Miller and Melanie Jones had to think way outside the box—and their own fence—in order to acquire enough land to farm in Woodstock, GA. As owners and operators of Trefoil Gardens, they adapted a “multi-locational” model that has grown into a neighborhood agricultural cooperative, and it relies on the partnership of their neighbors. 

Through a program called SPIN-Farming, which stands for small plot intensive and teaches aspiring farmers to take a systematic approach to backyard-scale growing, Miller says he was able to connect with a farmer who already had a template for a yard-sharing contract. He brought the contract over to his neighbor, and they broke ground on their first neighboring plot on July 4, 2016.

Now, with plots spread across the yards of six of their neighbors, and a few others a two-minute drive from their suburban home, they currently have 15,000 square feet under cultivation. Since then, Trefoil has been able to take its yard and neighborhood to new levels of productivity. The SPIN program has also helped thousands of other farmers use this multi-locational approach to farming on limited space.

But, Miller says it took him a long time to stop burning himself out with the hard work, and to get to a sustainable mindset.

“We’re a mission-driven company, and I know a lot of a lot of people in our space are and so, for us, it’s not so much about money, but at the same time, we’ve got to earn a living. This thing has to be financially sustainable,” says Miller. “It’s been a big transition to move from that solely mission-based focus… you can only do that for so long before you just burn yourself out.”

Given the yard-sized scale of the operation, they have had to really look at which crops have outsized value for profitability, and which are too time-consuming or fickle to rely on in such a limited space. Miller says Trefoil has recently pivoted toward perennial instead of annual crops because they are more manageable and save time.

“We’ve also really dialed in to floral and mushrooms, and then also herbal products, botanical products,” says Miller. “It’s a joke, but it’s not really, that we grow food so that we can get into our farmers markets, and then we grow flowers so that we can afford to grow the food that we bring to the farmers market.”

Trefoil has also had to look at non-traditional methods of selling, because growing on spec with such little land became not only impossible but also incredibly stressful. So, Trefoil took on a community-supported agriculture (CSA) food box subscription model with a short subscription period allowing them to pivot based on what was growing well.

Now, having been profitable for the last three years and selling 25 food boxes at the peak of this year, they’ve also found creative ways to cut costs as compared to a traditional agricultural plot of land. 

“We’re in an older neighborhood and so everybody’s on septic systems, so there’s no sewer,” says Miller. “The water is pretty inexpensive for our neighborhood, and that’s really important.”

For many things, though, Miller says they rely on their relationships and community. “I wake up every morning fully indebted to everyone around me, and it’s the most freeing thing in the world. And it just sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true,” he says.

While Larson has also been successful by building up his community, albeit online, he cautions against expecting the farm to be profitable from the start, and he encourages aspiring small farmers to have some kind of a safety net, be it savings or part-time work off the farm.

“You have to have some kind of financial security to start out, because … you don’t have any income from the farm on day one,” says Lason, explaining that he and his wife had some savings that they lived off in a “very modest way” for a few years.

“When we sold our first products at market, everything that came back, the money that came back in stayed on the farm side, and we used that to reinvest and gradually, bootstrap ourselves and grow the size of the farm,” says Larson. Despite land becoming increasingly expensive for aspiring small farmers, a little creativity can still make the business viable. 

The post The Financials of Profitable Small-Scale Farming appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In the spring of 2014, I found myself sitting across from a man who was by every definition my enemy. His name was Craig Watts and he was a chicken factory farmer, raising chickens for slaughter. My career is devoted to protecting farmed animals and ending factory farming. Until that point, I’d spent my whole life working against everything Craig Watts stood for. Now I was sitting in his living room.

As I sat there, a thousand questions were swirling in my mind. I’d been trying for years to get footage from inside a chicken factory farm at a time in our country when seeing inside a chicken farm was—and still is—nearly impossible. I’d failed every previous attempt.

That day, I’d driven from my home in Atlanta to Craig’s home in rural North Carolina. Before I left, I gave my husband the address and told him, “If I don’t come back, look for me rotting away in the chicken litter.” I was convinced I was heading into an ambush, not knowing my life would soon be changed forever.

Prior to our meeting, Craig Watts had been raising chickens for twenty-two years in factory farms for Perdue, the fourth-largest chicken company in the United States. When Craig was a young adult, he had searched for a way to stay on the land that had been passed down in his family for five generations, in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. There were very few jobs in the area, so when Perdue came to town and offered him a contract to raise chickens, it sounded like a dream come true. He took out a $200,000 loan from the bank to build the chicken houses while Perdue agreed to pay him for each flock he raised. With that money, he planned to pay off the loan, as you would a mortgage.

But soon the chickens started to get sick—it was a factory farm, after all. Twenty-five thousand chickens were stuffed wall-to-wall in darkened warehouses, living on their own feces, breathing air thick with toxic ammonia. Many of the sick chickens died, and you don’t get paid for dead chickens. Craig started to struggle to pay off his loan. His paychecks got smaller, but the bills kept coming. Soon he wanted out, but he’d been trapped. Now he was all but an indentured servant, and if he stopped, he’d risk losing everything.

By the time he and I met, Craig had reached a breaking point. His payments seemed never-ending, and so did the illness, death, and despair of the chickens. He was ready for a change. Through late afternoon conversations, and much soul-searching, I realized that I had overlooked an ally. I learned that chicken factory farmers wanted to see factory farming change about as much as animal rights activists did. We had been over-looking each other all these years.

Throughout the summer of 2014, I came back many times with my filmmaker partner Raegan Hodge to learn from Craig. I walked those warehouses as Craig explained the problems, as he picked up the chickens who had died or had to be killed because they had messed-up legs, trouble breathing, difficulty walking. All of these horrors, all of our conversations, were captured on film.

In the winter of 2014, after months of filming and learning to trust each other, Craig and I did something neither of us expected to do. We decided to release the footage together. This was a huge risk. He feared losing his income, his land, and having his neighbors hate him. But he did it anyway. The New York Times broke the story. Within twenty-four hours, a million people had seen our video about the horrors of chicken factory farming. Our story went viral. Suddenly, we had a megaphone. Our unlikely alliance put the truth about factory farming on a global platform.

Too often we become so entrenched in our values, in our fight, that we don’t stop to consider what we might have in common with the so-called opposition. We jump straight to the differences. And it is often the tyranny of small differences that holds progress hostage. Craig was the very first chicken factory farmer I ever connected with, but there would be many more.

In the United States, we still hold close an image of a quaint, independent family farm. But what actually exists is industrial animal agriculture, a system that does more harm than good. If you cross the country, no matter what state you are in, you’ll find a similar story. There is a person in a poor rural county who is searching for a way to stay on the land that had been passed down in their family for generations, searching for a way to make their living off the land and live out their version of the American dream, one in tune with nature and set to the soundtrack of crickets, cicadas, warblers, and chickadees. With few jobs around, the chicken industry’s offer sounds like a dream come true. This farmer often ends up just like Craig.

Meeting Craig would change my trajectory as an activist. We’d become close friends, collaborators, and conspirators in the decade that followed, working to dismantle factory farming piece by piece. We’d see that we’d been fooled. As Craig said: “We were red ants and black ants trapped in a jar. And then someone would shake the jar and we’d start fighting each other. But we’d never stop to question—who’s shaking the jar?” And I’d ask, “Why are we trapped in this jar?” The years ahead, we’d look to smash the jar and remove the shaker’s power. We’d look to reform our food system away from industrial animal agriculture and remove the power of Big Animal Agriculture—the great monopolies with strongholds over our political and economic systems.

When it comes to the meat, dairy, and eggs we eat, the price at the grocery store or restaurant is never a fair reflection of the true cost. In factory farming, risks and liability are mostly externalized by the industry, and most often to the most vulnerable among us. This damage, this harm, is borne by many—from the workers to the animals to the farmers. The industry makes extraordinary profits off this harm by externalizing risk and liability. Externalities are the root of the business model, and they’ve driven the spectacular success, power, and wealth of this industry. But because these costs are hidden from those who purchase the products, consumers don’t affirmatively consent to the harm caused by eating animals and their products.

The workforce in slaughterhouses, the communities living around factory farming, and, in recent years, refugee communities who’ve been brought in as the next generation of farming communities are some of the most affected. These vulnerable communities lack political and social capital, and they have few choices and little ability to fight against the harm that factory farming imposes upon them. 

In slaughterhouses, some immigrant workers have documentation and some don’t, but regardless of their situation, if they complain they take risks. When people die on the job, the federal agencies don’t respond 85 percent of the time, according to Civil Eats. Agricultural work is some of the most dangerous work in the country, ranking third among all occupations in fatal injuries together with forestry, fishing, and hunting. According to Civil Eats, animal confinement workers are subject to long-term lung and acute respiratory injuries from their work environments and are exposed to asphyxiating gases from manure.

Black communities in the South, many of whom are descendants of enslaved people, are also disproportionately affected by factory farms. Maps of North Carolina clearly show higher clusters of factory farms surrounding historically Black and low-income rural communities. Studies indicate that in some communities in North Carolina, for example, there are ten times more concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in low-income and Black and Brown neighborhoods than in higher-income, whiter areas. This is a clear example of environmental racism, a form of institutional racism where environmental hazards and harms are disproportionately distributed in and around communities of color. Where once these communities enjoyed the land that meant so much to their families’ freedom and history, that enjoyment is now ruined. Now they are surrounded by hog and chicken farms, unable to even leave their homes without suffering the smells, flies, and even spray from the farm’s waste.

As the pool of people willing to take on the perils of working in factory farms and slaughterhouses diminishes, the industry has begun to recruit a new, unsuspecting crop of factory farmers: refugees fleeing persecution in war-torn countries. From Burma to Cambodia to Laos, families looking for opportunity and escape come to the US and take on factory farming, only to find themselves trapped and unexpectedly in danger again.

Though farmers, workers, and animals have been suffering for decades, the system responsible for their collective oppression was thrust into the public eye during the pandemic. The attention it received was unprecedented, as was the desire for change.

Transfarmation

During this time of great loss and uncertainty, the people closest to factory farming—farmers, slaughterhouse workers, and communities living next to factory farms—who had already begun to build a new way, accelerated their efforts. They were tired of feeling vulnerable to the fragility and oppression of factory farming.

In late 2019, Mercy For Animals, the organization I lead, launched a new project. We called it the “Transfarmation Project,” and it aimed to be a platform where we could support farmers wanting to make the transition from animal agriculture to plants. It built on the work Craig and I started all those years earlier. But it ended up being so much more. In the years that followed, I would continue my curious journey through rural America, meeting farmers and together rolling up our sleeves to set out a road map for a new rural economy—everything from hemp to mushrooms to lettuce and whatever other innovations we could dream up.

This book is about more than individual farmers going through a career transition. It is about how we transition away entirely from factory farming. Many times, when people are tackling systemic challenges, they write about either the problem or the solution. But a gulf is left in the middle—the complexity of how. This book peers deeply into that gulf, at the transitional moment, and shows how it might be done, through the experience of those who are already doing it. It is told in three parts from the perspective of those closest to factory farming: farmers, the animals, and vulnerable communities working in or near factory farms or slaughterhouses.

This book is about smashing the jar and changing the common narrative that this food and farming system is serving us well. It is about rebuilding our food systems so that we are not trapped in a container, controlled by a monopoly causing us harm. Instead, we are in a collaborative, community-built network that honors all animals and nature, unlocks our highest potential, and empowers everyone to thrive.

The post Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us From Factory Farming appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Calvin Head

Farmer and Director of Milestone Cooperative Association

I’m participating in a regenerative agriculture initiative with several other farmers and youth and have served as director of Milestone Cooperative Association for about 12 years. I’m also a community organizer with emphasis on economic and community development. And, historically, I’ve been in this civil rights work almost all of my adult life and most of my young life.

One of the primary purposes of our organization right now is to offset these health issues by growing quality food, which is really not accessible here for most people. We’re helping people to understand what it is to eat healthy because a lot of people don’t really know, believe it or not. We’re also just trying to enhance the quality of life for low-income individuals and limited-resource farms.

I think the Farm Bill was written with us in mind in terms of how it’s presented to Congress, but when it comes to actual distribution and allocation, I think that the rules of the game change somehow. Historically, every time we get inside the process and we get to understand and master that process, they change the rules right away. They know who gets what. It’s the same people in the same places for the most part. They’re all well connected with who they want to help. I will just say the educational piece around the Farm Bill needs to be improved. Instead of just announcing it, let people really, really know what’s in it and how to take advantage of it—especially rural people and people of color.

We have many priorities for the Farm Bill, but where our community is really, really getting left behind is with broadband access. Having access to it where we are is really difficult. Our service providers are price gouging and taking as much advantage of us as they can because they know we have few alternatives. 

Right now, we’re limited to one small hotspot at our farm store for internet access. And everything is set up online, even our surveillance system. So, we can’t run the cash register, the gas pump, the surveillance system and the credit card machine at the same time. We’re limited and that hotspot can only go so far. So, we have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Broadband is so important in everyone’s everyday life. You’re almost third world without it. When we first got certified with the USDA Food Safety Program for our vegetable initiative, there was so much stuff that you had to go online and do.

It needs to be made mandatory that some of the resources from the Farm Bill reach us. Do you know what it would mean to have access to a new tractor to do some of the work we need done in these fields? One day your tractor is working and the next day you’re just hoping it makes it through that day. Or just being able to have some upfront money would be helpful. Most of the time, we’ve invested out of our own pockets. We’ve taken on all the risk and then we’re one flood away from bankruptcy. Getting support from the Farm Bill could give us the same flexibility that big farmers have when there’s a disaster. And you wouldn’t have to spend your life’s savings just to try to get a crop in the ground. It would have a tremendous impact. I have never as a farmer operated in the black.

There’s money allotted just for farmers in the Farm Bill and we just want our fair share. At least, before I leave this earth, I would like to see it. I would just like to see a level playing field just for once. All we want is the opportunity to work hard. Nobody is asking for a handout, just some flexibility.

The post Faces of the Farm Bill: Calvin Head appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Good shoes are a must. Beneath my Doc Martens, the floor is already strewn with fat and meat scraps and bone fragments as the cutters heft chunks of what was very recently a living cow, deftly scraping every edible bit from the bones. The butcher pushes a massive carcass into the cutting room from the cooler, hanging from a hook on a rail. It looks like a red and yellow wall of flesh, but the cutters work it like sculptors, carving away to reveal the recognizable food within. 

This is a dying art—and an art of dying. I grab a cart filled with freshly cut steaks and roasts— wrapping and weighing, labeling and stacking. Two days a week, gunshots from the kill floor punctuate the mechanical noise of the place.

This is what it’s like to work at a meat-processing plant. 

In August of 2023, I began my time at a small-scale, family-owned, USDA-inspected plant in rural Virginia, where I worked until February 2024. I was in the middle of a season at an organic vegetable farm, realizing I preferred working with animals rather than plants (having had prior livestock farm experience). I wanted to stay involved in local food production, and meat processing was the only piece of the puzzle I hadn’t seen yet. Besides, I’ve always been fascinated by the craft of butchery and, as a hunter, I knew I’d gain valuable skills. So, I jumped into the fire.

Today, it’s kill day, and the slaughter crew is on the front lines of the transition from animal to food. Where I worked, they slaughtered two days a week. Pork and beef must be kept separate and are killed on different days and stored apart. The crew stuns, kills, bleeds, guts, and skins them all before breakfast.

Here’s how it works: Livestock are unloaded into the pens, and provided with water and shelter. Legally, they must be slaughtered within 24 hours of drop-off. When their time comes, they walk one at a time onto the kill floor, where they are restrained in a box-like device. This standardized equipment is designed to minimize livestock stress, and similar to the squeeze chutes used for handling back on the farm. Then, under federal law, they are rendered insensible to pain. At this particular plant, the preferred stunning method was a rifle round to the brain, but electrocution, gas, and various bolt guns are also permitted, depending on the animal and facility. Afterward, the animal is dressed; if it’s pork, it’s cooled and cut immediately.

The “suck truck” (a truck with a huge trailer and hoses) then collects usable byproducts such as hooves, hides, and viscera to be hauled to a rendering plant—one of around 300 in the country—and made into a plethora of industrial products used for anything from shampoo to dog food. It’s considered a form of biological recycling. 

Although the plants try to use as much of the animal as possible, there are restrictions. Trimmed meat and fat become burger and sausage. Organs go into pon hoss (similar to scrapple), bones are cut for soup and dog chews. Anything that can’t be consumed or rendered must be discarded.  

But beef must be aged for a week or more to help develop its flavor, mellow its texture, and reduce its moisture content. When it’s ready, the butcher brings it out to the cutting room and then the process starts again: breaking, boning, wrapping, and freezing—stored until it’s picked up by the retail or custom slaughter (private use) client.

It’s a dynamic and dirty job, but someone has to do it. One of the more than half a million workers helping to get the billions of pounds of meat on America’s tables is Britny Polk of Mount Jackson, Virginia. She’s been at the plant for six years, learning from her mother, who worked there for two decades. In addition to wrapping hundreds of pounds of meat a day, Polk manages cut sheets—instructions on how customers want their meat butchered and packaged —and much more. 

“As I’m wrapping, I get pulled away a lot to help wait on customers, answer the phones, doing bills, scheduling hogs, beef, and lambs,” she said in an email. Depending on the day, she also makes sausage and hamburger patties using a modified cookie dough machine, orders supplies, and makes sure people show up to drop off their live animal and, later, pick up their meat.

The need for these services is only growing, yet there is a constant labor shortage. “We have a really hard time finding workers and for workers to stay,” Polk said. There are unique workplace hazards here; using sharp implements and machinery comes with an elevated risk of injury. Live animals may behave erratically and even a deceased animal can kick. On busy days, the time flies, but it’s still hours of standing on a hard floor, and around constant sensory stimulation.

Heavy lifting, slippery surfaces, sub-zero temperatures, and exposure to bestial bodily fluids are all part of a typical workday. Every season can be stressful because people often celebrate with meats: spring lamb, summer grilling staples, and holiday roasts. But it can also be fun, and time flies on busy days. I worked in an environment where people were supportive and shared a sense of humor. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have participated in a part of our food system that’s too often intentionally overlooked.

It was awesome watching the butchers breaking carcasses into primals and fabricating mouthwatering cuts. My coworkers were rock stars of the food prep world, cutting it to order right there behind the counter. I miss cracking jokes while listening to music, lamenting bizarre cutting requests (New York strips ground into burger?), or wishing someone would breed a cow with more than one heart, tongue, and tail so we could keep up with demand for offal. 

I saw some truly exemplary meat: exquisitely marbled steaks, thick chops from healthy hogs—aesthetics and culinary qualities reflecting the mindful husbandry of the livestock. But that’s not always the case, as farming practices vary. Meat from stressed animals can exhibit off coloration or blood spots, and underfed animals are woefully lean or even atrophied. “There is a lot that goes into producing a good animal,” Polk said. “If you’re not feeding them appropriately, when they need it, your beef will either be way too fatty or it won’t have enough fat on it. A lot of factors go into having a nice-looking cow to process. ”

Regardless of who raises the animals and how, it’s the meat processor’s job to turn them all into food. I sincerely hope that more consumers will try to understand that there is a human cost behind their meat. “A farmer brings this live animal in and we go through every step from killing to wrapping to ensure people have food. It would be great for everyone to know how we get that product to people,” adds Polk.

There are no windows in slaughterhouses, but I aim to shed light on this crucial and underappreciated profession in the spirit of transparency, acceptance, and progress. The meat industry is here to stay and awareness is what it needs to survive.

“I think everyone should educate themselves on the process of how a living animal becomes a steak that is ready to eat. People should care because this is how you get your food,” Polk said. 

For those interested in the fascinating fields of meat science and butchery, learn hands-on. Do a season on a farm or with a deer processor. Consider a meat-cutting apprenticeship. It takes an open mind, a team player attitude, and a stomach as strong as your back, but also a love and respect for the people, places, and animals that feed us. My experience at the meat plant is summed up well by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote: “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.” If you purchase meat, you are part of this system, and blissful ignorance and denial are a disservice to every being within it. It’s time for consumers to recognize their role, take accountability, and help wherever they can.

The post Inside a Slaughterhouse: The Human Cost of Your Meat appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an increasingly vital source of food to feed her family. 

It also makes her think of Guatemala, where she grew up surrounded by plants. “It reminds me of working the earth there,” Morales said in Spanish. 

Tending to the peaceful community garden is a far cry from the harvesting Morales does for her livelihood. Ever since moving to the United States 16 years ago, Morales has been a farmworker at local nurseries and farms. She takes seasonal jobs that allow her the flexibility and income to care for her five children, who range from 18 months to 15 years old. 

This year, she picked blueberries until the season ended in May, earning $1 for every pound she gathered. On a good day, she earned about two-thirds of the state’s minimum hourly wage of $12. For that, Morales toiled in brutal heat, with little in the way of protection from the sun, pesticides, or herbicides. With scant water available, the risk of dehydration or heat stroke was never far from her mind. But these are the sorts of things she must endure to ensure her family is fed. “I don’t really have many options,” she said. 

Now, she’s grappling with rising food prices, a burden that isn’t relieved by state or federal safety nets. Her husband works as a roofer, but as climate change diminishes crop yields and intensifies extreme weather, there’s been less work for the two of them. They have struggled to cover the rent, let alone the family’s ballooning grocery bill. 

“It’s hard,” she said. “It’s really, really hot … the heat is increasing, but the salaries aren’t.” The Campesinos’ Garden helps fill in the gap between her wages and the cost of food.

Her story highlights a hidden but mounting crisis: The very people who ensure the rest of the country has food to eat are going hungry. Although no one can say for sure how many farmworkers are food insecure (local studies suggest it ranges from 52 to 82 percent), advocates are sure the number is climbing, driven in no small part by climate change. 

The 2.4 million or so farmworkers who are the backbone of America’s agricultural industry earn among the lowest wages in the country. The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, an almost unimaginable sum for families bringing home as little as $20,000 a year, especially when food prices have jumped more than 25 percent since 2019.  Grappling with these escalating costs is not a challenge limited to farmworkers, of course — the Department of Agriculture says getting enough to eat is a financial struggle for more than 44 million people. But farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they are largely invisible in the American political system.

“When we talk about supply chains and food prices going up, we are not thinking about the people who are producing that food, or getting it off the fields and onto our plates,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli. 

Xiuhtecutli works with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to protect farmworkers from the occupational risks and exploitation they face. Few people beyond the workers themselves recognize that hunger is a problem for the community, he said — or that it’s exacerbated by climate change. The diminished yields that can follow periods of extreme heat and the disruptions caused by floods, hurricanes, and the like inevitably lead to less work, further exacerbating the crisis.

There isn’t a lot of aid available, either. Enrolling in federal assistance programs is out of the  question for the roughly 40 percent of farmworkers without work authorization or for those who fear reprisals or sanctions. Even those who are entitled to such help may be reluctant to seek it. In lieu of these resources, a rising number of advocacy organizations are filling the gaps left by government programs by way of food pantries, collaborative food systems, and community gardens across America.

“Even though [farmworkers] are doing this job with food, they still have little access to it,” said Xiuhtecutli. “And now they have to choose between paying rent, paying gas to and from work, and utilities, or any of those things. And food? It’s not at the top of that list.”

∴

Historically, hunger rates among farmworkers, as with other low-income communities, have been at their worst during the winter due to the inherent seasonality of a job that revolves around growing seasons. But climate change and inflation have made food insecurity a growing, year-round problem. 

In September, torrential rain caused heavy flooding across western Massachusetts. The inundation decimated farmland already ravaged by a series of storms. “It impacted people’s ability to make money and then be able to support their families,” Claudia Rosales said in Spanish. “People do not have access to basic food.” 

As executive director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Rosales fights to expand protections for farmworkers, a community she knows intimately. After immigrating from El Salvador, she spent six years working in vegetable farms, flower nurseries, and tobacco fields across Connecticut and Massachusetts, and knows what it’s like to experience food insecurity. She also understands how other exploitative conditions, such as a lack of protective gear or accessible bathrooms, can add to the stress of simply trying to feed a family. Rosales remembers how, when her kids got sick, she was afraid she’d get fired if she took them to the doctor instead of going to work. (Employers harassed her and threatened to deport her if she tried to do anything about it, she said.) The need to put food on the table left her feeling like she had no choice but to tolerate the abuse.   

“I know what it’s like, how much my people suffer,” said Rosales. “We’re not recognized as essential … but without us, there would not be food on the tables across this country.” 

 The floodwaters have long since receded and many farms are once again producing crops, but labor advocates like Rosales say the region’s farmworkers still have not recovered. Federal and state disaster assistance helps those with damaged homes, businesses, or personal property, but does not typically support workers. Under federal law, if agricultural workers with a temporary visa lose their job when a flood or storm wipes out a harvest, they are owed up to 75 percent of the wages they were entitled to before the disaster, alongside other expenses. They aren’t always paid, however. “Last year, there were emergency funds because of the flooding here in Massachusetts that never actually made it to the pockets of workers,” Rosales said. 

The heat wave that recently scorched parts of Massachusetts likely reduced worker productivity and is poised to trigger more crop loss, further limiting workers’ ability to make ends meet. “Climate-related events impact people economically, and so that then means limited access to food and being able to afford basic needs,” said Rosales, forcing workers to make difficult decisions on what they spend their money on — and what they don’t.  

The impossible choice between buying food or paying other bills is something that social scientists have been studying for years. Research has shown, for example, that low-income families often buy less food during cold weather to keep the heat on. But climate change has given rise to a new area to examine: how extreme heat can trigger caloric and nutritional deficits. A 2023 study of 150 countries revealed that unusually hot weather can, within days, create higher risks of food insecurity by limiting the ability to earn enough money to pay for groceries. 

It’s a trend Parker Gilkesson Davis, a senior policy analyst studying economic inequities at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, is seeing escalate nationwide, particularly as utility bills surge. “Families are definitely having to grapple with ‘What am I going to pay for?’” she said. “People, at the end of the month, are not eating as much, having makeshift meals, and not what we consider a full meal.” 

Federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are designed to help at times like these. More than 41 million people nationwide rely on the monthly grocery stipends, which are based on income, family size, and some expenses. But one national survey of nearly 3,700 farmworkers found just 12.2 percent used SNAP. Many farmworkers and migrant workers do not qualify because of their immigration status, and those who do often hesitate to use the program out of fear that enrolling could jeopardize their status. Even workers with temporary legal status like a working visa, or those considered a “qualified immigrant,” typically must wait five years before they can begin receiving SNAP benefits. Just six states provide nutrition assistance to populations, like undocumented farmworkers, ineligible for the federal program.

The expiration of COVID-era benefit programs, surging food costs, and international conflicts last year forced millions more Americans into a state of food insecurity, but no one can say just how many are farmworkers. That’s because such data is almost nonexistent — even though the Agriculture Department tracks annual national statistics on the issue. Lisa Ramirez, the director of the USDA’s Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement, acknowledged that the lack of data on hunger rates for farmworkers should be addressed on a federal level and said there is a “desire” to do something about it internally. But she didn’t clarify what specifically is being done. “We know that food insecurity is a problem,” said Ramirez, who is a former farmworker herself. “I wouldn’t be able to point to statistics directly, because I don’t have [that] data.” 

Without that insight, little progress can be made to address the crisis, leaving the bulk of the problem to be tackled by labor and hunger relief organizations nationwide.

“My guess is it would be the lack of interest or will — sort of like a willful ignorance — to better understand and protect these populations,” said social scientist Miranda Carver Martin, who studies food justice and farmworkers at the University of Florida. “Part of it is just a lack of awareness on the part of the general public about the conditions that farmworkers are actually working in. And that correlates to a lack of existing interest or resources available to build an evidence base that reflects those concerns.” 

The lack of empirical information prevented Martin and her colleagues Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan from creating a tool that would identify the vulnerabilities local farmworkers experience before and after a disaster. “What we’ve found is that the tool that we dreamed of, that would sort of comprehensively provide all this data and mapping, is not feasible right now, given the dearth of data,” she noted.

However, Martin and her colleagues did find, in a forthcoming report she shared with Grist, that language barriers often keep farmworkers from getting aid after an extreme weather event. Examining the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia, they found cases of farmworkers in Florida trying, and failing, to get food at emergency stations because so many workers spoke Spanish and instructions were written only in English. She suspects the same impediments may hinder post-disaster hunger relief efforts nationwide.

Martin also believes there is too little focus on the issue, in part because some politicians demonize immigrants and the agriculture industry depends upon cheap labor. It is easier “to pretend that these populations don’t exist,” she said. “These inequities need to be addressed at the federal level. Farmworkers are human beings and our society is treating them like they’re not.” 

∴

Tackling hunger has emerged as one of the biggest priorities for the Pioneer Valley Workers Center that Claudia Rosales leads. Her team feeds farmworker families in Massachusetts through La Despensa del Pueblo, a food pantry that distributes food to roughly 780 people each month.  

The nonprofit launched the pantry in the winter of 2017. When the pandemic struck, it rapidly evolved from a makeshift food bank into a larger operation. But the program ran out of money last month when a key state grant expired, sharply curtailing the amount of food it can distribute. The growing need to feed people also has limited the organization’s ability to focus on its primary goal of community organizing. Rosales wants to see the food bank give way to a more entrepreneurial model that offers farmworkers greater autonomy. 

“For the long term, I’d like to create our own network of cooperatives owned by immigrants, where people can go and grow and harvest their own food and products and really have access to producing their own food and then selling their food to folks within the network,” she said. 

Mónica Ramírez, founder of the national advocacy organization Justice for Migrant Women, is developing something very much like that in Ohio. Ramírez herself hails from a farmworker family. “Both of my parents started working in the fields as children,” she said. “My dad was eight, my mom was five.” Growing up in rural Ohio, Ramírez remembers visiting the one-room shack her father lived in while picking cotton in Mississippi, and spending time with her grandparents who would “pile on a truck” each year and drive from Texas to Ohio to harvest tomatoes and cucumbers all summer. 

The challenges the Ramírez family faced then persist for others today. Food security has grown so tenuous for farmworkers in Fremont, Ohio, where Justice for Migrant Women is based, that the organization has gone beyond collaborating with organizations like Feeding America to design its own hyperlocal food system. These hunger relief efforts are focused on women in the community, who Ramírez says usually face the biggest burdens when a household does not have enough money for food.

Migrant women, she said, “bear the stress of economic insecurity and food insecurity, because they are the ones who are organizing their families and making sure their families have food in the house.” 

Later this month, Ramírez and her team will launch a pilot program out of their office that mimics a farmers market — one in which farmworkers and migrant workers will be encouraged to pick up food provided by a local farmer, at no charge. That allows those visiting the food bank to feel empowered by choice instead of being handed a box with preselected goods, and they hope it will alleviate hunger in a way that preserves a sense of agency for families in need.

Although federal lawmakers have begun at least considering protecting workers from heat exposure and regulators are making progress on a national heat standard, so far there’s been no targeted legislative or regulatory effort to address food insecurity among farmworkers. 

In fact, legislators may be on the verge of making things worse.

In May, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee passed a draft farm bill that would gut SNAP and do little to promote food security. It also would bar state and local governments from adopting farmworker protection standards regulating agricultural production and pesticide use, echoing legislation Florida recently passed. The inclusion of such a provision is “disappointing,” said DeShawn Blanding, a senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy organization. He hopes to see the version that eventually emerges from the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it remains stalled, incorporate several other proposed bills aimed at protecting farmworkers and providing a measure of food security.

Those include the Voice for Farm Workers Act, which would shore up funding for several established farmworker support initiatives and expand resources for the Agriculture Department’s farmworker coordinator. This position was created to pinpoint challenges faced by farmworkers and connect them with federal resources, but it has not been “adequately funded and sustained,” according to a 2023 USDA Equity Commission report. Another bill would create an office within the Agriculture Department to act as a liaison to farm and food workers.

These bills, introduced by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, would give lawmakers and policymakers greater visibility into the needs and experiences of farmworkers. But the greatest benefit could come from a third proposal Padilla reintroduced, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act. It would reform the 1938 law that governs the minimum wage and overtime policies for farmworkers while exempting them from labor protections.

“As food prices increase, low-income workers are facing greater rates of food insecurity,” Padilla told Grist. “But roughly half of our nation’s farmworkers are undocumented and unable to access these benefits.” He’d like to see an expedited pathway to citizenship for the over 5 million essential workers, including farmworkers, who lack access to permanent legal status and social safety benefits. “More can be done to address rising food insecurity rates for farmworkers.”

Still, none of these bills squarely addresses farmworker hunger. Without a concerted approach, these efforts, though important, kind of miss the point, Mónica Ramírez said. 

“I just don’t think there’s been a fine point on this issue with food and farmworkers,” she said. “To me it’s kind of ironic. You would think that would be a starting point. What will it take to make sure that the people who are feeding us, who literally sustain us, are not themselves starving?” 

∴

For 68-year-old Jesús Morales, the Campesinos’ Garden in Apopka is a second home. Drawing on his background studying alternative medicine in Jalisco, Mexico, he’s been helping tend the land for the last three years. He particularly likes growing and harvesting moringa, which is used in Mexico to treat a range of ailments. Regular visitors know him as the “plant doctor.” 

“Look around. This is the gift of God,” Morales said in Spanish. “This is a meadow of hospitals, a meadow of medicines. Everything that God has given us for our health and well-being and for our happiness is here, and that’s the most important thing that we have here.”

He came across the headquarters of the state farmworker organization when it hosted free English classes, then learned about its garden. Although it started a decade ago, its purpose has expanded over the years to become a source of food security and sovereignty for local farmworkers. 

The half-acre garden teems with a staggering assortment of produce. Tomatoes, lemons, jalapeños. Nearby trees offer dragonfruit and limes, and there’s even a smattering of papaya plants. The air is thick with the smell of freshly dug soil and hints of herbs like mint and rosemary. Two compost piles sit side by side, and a greenhouse bursts with still more produce. Anyone who visits during bi-monthly public gardening days is encouraged to plant their own seeds and take home anything they care to harvest. 

“The people who come to our community garden, they take buckets with them when they can,” said Ernesto Ruiz, a research coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida who oversees the garden. “These are families with six kids, and they work poverty wages. … They love working the land and they love being out there, but food is a huge incentive for them, too.” 

Throughout the week, the nonprofit distributes what Ruiz harvests. The produce it so readily shares is supplemented by regular donations from local supermarkets, which Ruiz often distributes himself.  

But some of the same factors driving farmworkers to hunger have begun to encroach on the garden. Blistering summer heat and earlier, warmer springs have wiped out crops, including several plots of tomatoes, peppers, and cantaloupes. “A lot of plants are dying because it’s so hot, and we’re not getting rains,” said Ruiz. The garden could also use new equipment — the irrigation system is manual while the weed whacker is third-rate, often swapped out for a machete — and funding to hire another person to help Ruiz increase the amount of food grown and expand when the garden is open to the public.

Demand is rising, and with it, pressure to deliver. Federal legislation addressing the low wages that lead to hunger for many farmworkers across the country is a big part of the solution, but so are community-based initiatives like the Campesinos’ Garden, according to Ruiz. “You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s always the right thing to feed somebody. Always.” 

The post Who is Feeding America’s Farmworkers? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Two years before the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was researching a book idea about rewilding—a subculture of the better-known land conservation movement where people pursue a preindustrial or even preagricultural, hunter-gatherer existence. My interviews included survivalists living on a tropical island, primitive skills enthusiasts creating forest schools and subsistence homesteaders. 

I’ve lived in cities my entire adult life, so it doesn’t take a psychologist to unpack my personal attraction to the idea of backpedaling from the increasing overwhelm of life in the twenty-first century: the incessant infiltration of technology and media; social isolation and loneliness; disconnection from nature, especially its troubling impact on our kids; escalating global conflict; and accelerating natural disasters validating our fears that the endgame of climate change is not only inevitable but happening now. 

Still, as time went on, I became a little weary of the doomsday pre-occupation. More importantly, I was unsure of its helpfulness. Everyone can feel the tumult of these times, but very few of us, myself included, have the wherewithal or the chutzpah to toss aside everything they’ve ever known and hunt and forage from a cabin in the woods. 

Some of the solutions being touted in the world of rewilding were inspiring, but I wished for a doable purpose in the here and now; preferably one where I would feel more alive and useful than I did rhapsodizing in front of a computer.

I also had a concurrent realization: In my longing to reclaim the ways of the past, it was traditional food culture that most lit my fire. And so, six months into COVID lockdown in Los Angeles, my husband and I decided, “enough with the daydreaming,” and sold everything we owned and moved with our two young daughters to Central Oregon, where I serendipitously stumbled into the area’s local food movement and subsequently enrolled in a groundbreaking farmer training program. The immersive internship was centered around regenerative agriculture—a new (but actually ancestral) and holistic approach to growing food that restores soil and biodiversity and sequesters carbon in the ground.

I’ve covered the ills of our industrialized food system for more than a decade, so regenerative farming was a field I was closely following. High-profile books and documentaries were pointing to its promise while sounding the alarm on the finiteness of intensive agriculture—warning of vanishing groundwater and the world’s dwindling supply of usable topsoil. Yet, until I encountered the training program in Oregon, it never occurred to me to actually take matters into my own hands and consider small, sustainable farming as a viable career path.

A week into my first farm job, I realized it was the most joyful and fulfilling work I had ever experienced. After two months of being outside all day, nearly every day, I felt the best—both physically and mentally—that I ever had in my life. But the real transformation occurred as I began to meet and learn about the new and driven farmers, graziers and food activists emerging all over the country. They hadn’t grown up in farming families; they came from backgrounds vastly underrepresented in agriculture; and many of them were far younger than I was, not to mention decades younger than the average American farmer. I was awestruck by their intention and ingenuity. They hadn’t turned to this way of life as some back-to-the-land fantasy. They had chosen sustainable agriculture as a tactile way to affect environmental activism and food justice; for cultural reclamation; to reconnect to nature, food and community; to live aligned with their values; to do “something that means something.”

And during the environmental and societal reckoning of the pandemic—not to mention the collapse of the industrial food supply chain—the work of these regenerative farmers became more meaningful than ever before. They filled the void amid empty supermarket shelves and miles-long food lines and fed millions of Americans not just food but the most delicious food many of us had ever tasted. They witnessed hundreds of thousands of people needlessly dying of COVID due to diet-related disparities and pushed ahead for funding and food sovereignty. So I started to wonder: How could we scale a “greatest generation” of sustainable small farmers?

What would this country look like transformed by a vast network of resilient local food systems that restore the environment and ensure healthy, fresh food is accessible to all?

These two questions launched me on the journey to write this book. But it was only later that I learned of their urgency. In the coming decade, 400 million acres of American farmland—nearly half of all farmland in the United States—will become available as the older generation of American farmers retires or dies. Meanwhile, the groundswell of new growers eager to steward that land are up against seemingly every obstacle: access to affordable land, access to capital, a livable income and the billionaires and corporations now grabbing farmland at a staggering pace. 

And yet, there’s hope: Big Ag may be the norm in the United States, but small growers globally produce around a third of the world’s food on farms of five acres or less.

Mapping research shows up to 90 percent of Americans could be fed entirely with food raised within 100 miles of where they live. Project Regeneration highlights regenerative agriculture and other nature-based farming methods as critical strategies in the plan to reverse global warming. And the human power exists: The number of new, beginning and young farmers has been increasing for the past 10 years, a trend unparalleled in the last century. 

I came to farming as an outsider, and that’s exactly the point. Two hundred years ago, nearly all of us lived and worked on the land that fed us (although not all of our own free will). Even a hundred years ago, one-third of us did. Today, that number stands at one percent. Yet, right now, so many of us are yearning for something we can’t name, an intangible we don’t even realize has been lost. It’s our connection to our food, that most fundamental of human needs, and it is that which ties us to everything else.

These are the stories of a new, diverse generation of agrarians unfolding an alternate vision of the future, if only more of us would join the call.

The post How Can We Mobilize New Farmers? appeared first on Modern Farmer.