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farm workers
US Farmworkers' Advocates Calls for Greater Protections as Bird Flu Spreads
"The focus should be on the dairy farmworker" as the government tries to stop the spread of H5N1, said one advocate.
May 30, 2024
U.S. health officials in recent months have said the avian flu that's been detected in chickens and cows in some states poses little risk to the general population and to commercial dairy products, but as a third farmworker's diagnosis with the illness was reported Thursday, advocates said officials must do more to protect the laborers who are most at risk.
A farmworker in Michigan was the second person in the state to test positive for H5N1, the avian flu that's currently circulating, and was the first person to report respiratory symptoms. A worker in Texas was also diagnosed with the illness in March and had mild symptoms.
The person whose case was announced Thursday contracted the disease after being exposed to infected cows.
As of late last week, there were 58 cow herds known to be infected across the United States.
The Guardian reported on Wednesday that there have been "anecdotal reports" of other farmworkers exhibiting mild symptoms, and last week federal officials said an unspecified number of people are being "actively monitored" for signs of avian flu, but noted that only 40 people connected to dairy farms had been tested.
Dawn O'Connell, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told reporters on May 22 that authorities are preparing 5 million doses of a vaccine against H5N1, often referred to as bird flu. Offiicals have not yet decided whether shots will be offered to farmworkers when they're deployed later this year.
Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for United Farm Workers (UFW), said that while vaccines are being prepared, authorities must ramp up a testing campaign to stop the spread of the virus and protect the country's 150,000 dairy farmworkers.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled a push earlier this month to encourage workers at affected dairy farms to get tested, offering them a financial incentive of $75.
But with undocumented immigrants who lack health insurance making up a large portion of the agricultural workforce, said Strater, many will likely feel they can't risk testing positive and being required to stay home from work for just $75.
"That's not even a day's lost work," Strater told The Guardian on Wednesday. "And that's a very bad gamble for someone that might miss weeks... They're unlikely to go to the emergency room for anything that isn't life-threatening. In fact, they're avoiding testing because they know they won't get any compensation if they're ordered to stop working."
Bethany Boggess Alcauter, director of research and public health programs at the National Center for Farmworker Health, told USA Today that farmworkers are currently being treated as "canaries in the coal mine," but "they could be trained to be frontline public health defenders," with authorities sharing far more information about the disease with them.
"Education needs to be a part of testing efforts, with time for workers to ask questions," Alcauter told the outlet.
As the third human case of H5N1 was reported on Thursday, UFW called for "protective equipment and paid sick leave" for farmworkers.
Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked states to provide personal protective equipment to farmworkers. USA Today reported this week that the response has varied from state to state:
State health departments in California, Texas, and Wisconsin, which have large dairy industries, all said they have offered to distribute such equipment.Amy Liebman, chief program officer for the Migrant Clinicians Network, criticized the federal government's current response to the spread of H5N1, and told The Guardian that "the focus should be on the dairy farmworker."
Chris Van Deusen, a Texas health department spokesperson, said four dairy farms had requested protective equipment from the state stockpile. He said other farms may already have had what they needed. Spokespeople for the California and Wisconsin health departments said they did not immediately receive requests from farm owners for the extra equipment.
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Climate Policy's on Shaky Ground in the Farm Bill
As the struggle against fossil fuels carries on in our states and communities, the quest for serious action in Washington on climate and ecological renewal will focus largely on the national push for a radically new kind of Farm Bill.
Mar 19, 2023
Members of Congress have begun drafting the 2023 "Farm Bill," and they’ll be wrangling over it through most of the year. This legislation, passed into law anew every fifth year or so since the 1930s, has had far-reaching influence on food and farming in the United States. Each version of the bill is given its own name; the previous one, for example, was called the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. Given the nature of the early debate over this bill-in-the-making, it might end up deserving to be called the Food and Climate Bill of 2023.
Over the next two years, any legislation explicitly aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions will be dead on arrival in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. By default, the Farm Bill may now be the playing field for the only climate game in town, according to Washington-watchers such as Peter Lehner, who represents the group Earthjustice. He told Politico last month, “The farm bill is probably going to be the piece of legislation in the next two years with the biggest impact on the climate and the environment.”
Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act beefed up several of the Farm Bill’s climate-related conservation programs to the tune of an additional $20 billion. And the Washington Post has reported that a task force of more than 80 “climate-conscious House Democrats” is working to further extend the bill’s green impact, with additional protection for existing forests; planting of new stands of trees; conservation of soil, water, and biodiversity; and research on protecting crops against climatic disasters, including drought.
Meanwhile, March 6–8, a coalition of 20 sustainable ag and farmworker groups under the banner Farmers for Climate Action held a “Rally for Resilience” in D.C. Their message: “The next Farm Bill needs to explicitly empower farmers to address climate change, by providing resources, assistance, and incentives that will allow them to lead the way in implementing proven climate solutions.”
Climate politics get dirtier
Because there are farmers and ag-related industries in every state, whether red, blue, or purple, Farm Bills routinely pass with broad bipartisan support. It’s typical, therefore, for Congress members representing rural red states to make common cause with those who represent populous blue states with big ag economies, such as California, Illinois, and Michigan. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly “food stamps”) and the Women’s, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition program also are parts of the Farm Bill, further extending its political base of support.
Controversy arises nonetheless, most often in debates over the bill’s conservation provisions. Agribusiness, for example, often sees protection of soil, air, water, and biodiversity in rural areas as detracting from or interfering with the Farm Bill’s focus on boosting production of the major commodity crops and keeping food prices low. And now that climate action is increasingly finding a home in the conservation section, pushback from the right has increased.
The chair of the House Agriculture Committee, G. T. Thompson (R-PA) has vowed to minimize climate policy in this year’s Farm Bill, while cutting other conservation programs in favor of traditional industry-friendly spending. According to EENews, “Some Republicans are eyeing the farm bill as a chance to redirect climate money to other agriculture programs, such as crop subsidies, while other conservative lawmakers want across-the-board spending cuts.” The hardliners may even try to rescind the $20 billion for climate mitigation that the Inflation Reduction Act has directed toward the Farm Bill.
Climate denial is alive and well in Congress. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA), who now chairs the conservation subcommittee of the ag committee, told Politico, somewhat fuzzily, that “CO2 is not responsible. Especially American-produced CO2, I mean we’re a tiny part of the whole thing.” Rep. John Boozman (R-AR) is trying to divert attention to just about any remotely ag-related issue that doesn’t involve climate protection. Pointing his colleagues toward a couple of favorite targets of right-wing hostility, he has called for investigations into the purchase of U.S. farmland by Chinese interests and for cuts in SNAP benefits to low-income families. Meanwhile, five House members led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL) got even meaner, with a letter to President Biden urging him to “enact work requirements” for SNAP recipients.
Feed people, not steers and SUVs
Farm Bill debates are often complex, technical, and littered with clumsy acronyms, commodity-market arcana, and bureaucratic jargon. Only the nerdiest Congress-watchers have the attention span and patience to go deep enough into the weeds (literally, in some parts of the bill) to understand what it’s all about. Even in Congress, only a minority of members and staff have solid familiarity with the issues. This year, nearly half the members of the House of Representatives have almost zero Farm Bill experience, as they were not in office during the last debate, five years ago. But with climate at the center of this year’s debate, members on both sides of the aisle, whether well-schooled in ag issues or not, are now wading into the fray.
Most of the policies that are needed to flip U.S. agriculture’s climate impact from deleterious to beneficial are good and necessary in their own right. Even if there were no climate emergency, the nation should be adopting agricultural policies that, along with cutting emissions, can improve soil health; prevent erosion and water pollution; curb the ongoing wipeout of biodiversity; and prevent agriculture from further disrupting the global nitrogen and phosphorous cycles.
The first step would be to stop doing things that not only generate greenhouse-gas emissions but also wreak ecological havoc of other sorts. If you don’t mind taking just a few steps into those weeds with me for a moment, I’d like to cite scientists at the University of Georgia and the University of New Mexico who have argued convincingly for deep cuts in the production of fuel ethanol and meat—especially grain-fed beef—actions that, they show, could achieve the greatest reductions of fossil energy use (and therefore of greenhouse gas emissions) in agriculture. The quantity of energy contained in the fossil fuels used to produce feed grains for cattle exceeds by an order of magnitude the amount of energy contained in the beef that’s produced by those cattle and sold. And the production and delivery of fuel ethanol, from the cornfield to the gas pump, requires as much or more energy (mostly from fossil fuels) as the ethanol will supply to a vehicle’s engine.
Beef and ethanol also have a broad range of other disastrous environmental impacts.
Therefore, the most effective action Congress could take is to stop using the Farm Bill’s conservation funds to support these and other ecologically harmful, climate-busting agricultural practices. For example, the 2018 Farm Bill supported one such practice: confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), such as cattle feedlots and factory farms for swine and poultry. These super-polluting facilities have deeply negative impacts on both local environments and the global climate. The 2023 bill should end all support for CAFOs. And rather than pursue the expansion of ethanol production, as the Department of Agriculture is requesting, Congress should flush ethanol completely out of ag policy.
We can’t get there with annual crops
Agriculture generates only 11 percent of total U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, so reducing emissions from the farm sector, important as it is, can go only so far toward driving total U.S. emissions toward zero quickly and steeply. However, unlike other sectors of the economy, farming also has the potential to help mitigate climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through nature’s preferred method of carbon sequestration: photosynthesis.
To use U.S. farmlands and forests as reservoirs for atmospheric carbon would help to reverse a massive loss of soil carbon that began long before the age of mechanized agriculture. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, native grasslands and forestlands across North America were plowed up to make way for corn, wheat, cotton, and other annual crops—replacing vast, biodiverse, perennial ecosystems with plantings of annual monocultures. Extensive root systems, alive year-round, were killed off across hundreds of millions of acres, to be replaced by the sparser, ephemeral root systems of crops that had to be resown with every growing season. For much of the year, there were now only spindly seedling roots or no living roots at all to support the soil ecosystems that had thrived before the arrival of the plow. Consequently, over subsequent decades, countless tons of carbon that had been captured by plants over millions of years went back up into the atmosphere.
Accumulating enough carbon in the soil to mitigate climate change effectively will require switching from annual to perennial crops across most of U.S. farm country, to get soils even part way back to their robust state. Fortunately, the necessity for perennial agriculture is being expressed more widely in this year’s Farm Bill discussion than in previous years, with both the scientific community and grassroots climate and sustainable-agriculture groups calling for more perennial farming systems.
For example, a coalition called Farm Bill Law Enterprise, “a national partnership of law school programs working toward a farm bill that reflects the long-term needs of our society,” is arguing that perennial agriculture must be one of the highest priorities in the 2023 bill. In its report, titled simply, “Climate and Conservation,” the group pushes for perennial forage crops; interplanting of tree crops with annual crops; “forest farming and multi-story cropping”; perennial fruits and vegetables; and perennial cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds. The group goes on to urge more funding for research and development of perennial agriculture in the U.S. Department of Agriculture itself, especially on grain crops, and for “research on the economic and social conditions critical to development of perennial agriculture systems and markets.”
Needed: A fifty-year Farm Bill
Reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture by ditching products such as fuel ethanol and grain-fed beef would mesh nicely with the use of perennial crops to capture more atmospheric carbon and store more of it in living roots deep in the soil. If U.S. farmers were to stop producing the bazillions of bushels of corn and soybeans that go into feeding cattle and biofuel plants, tens of millions of acres would be newly available for growing perennial range, hay, and pasture crops. From those, more modest quantities of grass-fed beef and dairy products could be produced. And each year, more and more of the lands liberated from annual feed grains could be sown to perennial food-grain crops.
Wes Jackson and Fred Kirschenmann envisioned this sort of grand transition in their proposal for a “Fifty-Year Farm Bill” in 2009. But at the time, the breeding of perennial food-grain crops (which would be necessary to achieve that last step in the transition) was just getting started. That process is now well underway.
Over the past two decades, efforts to domesticate and breed perennial grain-producing crops have progressed from their beginnings at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas (where I work), to be taken up by research networks worldwide. These networks now include more than 50 researchers across North America and five other continents, and solid results are emerging. Development of perennial wheat is accelerating. A perennial cousin of wheat known as Kernza® is under pilot production in the U.S. Plains, the upper Midwest, and Europe. Highly productive perennial rice varieties are being grown on tens of thousands of acres in China and on a smaller scale in East Africa as well. Breeding and ecological work are continuing, with perennial food legumes and perennial grain sorghum under development, in addition to the wheat and rice.
* * *
The need to start a precipitous phase-out of oil, gas, and coal is more acute than ever, but federal legislation will remain out of reach as long as there’s a climate-hostile House majority. So, as the struggle against fossil fuels carries on in our states and communities, the quest for serious action in Washington on climate and ecological renewal will focus largely on the national push for a radically new kind of Farm Bill.
It is essential both to purge fossil fuels and to perennialize agriculture. No two policies are more crucial to preventing ecological meltdown.
The original version of this article was published by City Lights Books as part of their ‘In Real Time’ series and appears at Common Dreams with permission.
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Undocumented Farm Workers, Republicans, and Dismantling Toxic Partisanship
The us-versus-them mentality that is gripping our country doesn't capture our deep economic and social interdependence.
Dec 22, 2022
We're living through a daunting time in our national politics. Election denial, overt racism, and pernicious attacks on the pillars of civil society—from school boards to local election officials—accompany a general coarsening of discourse and increasing threats of violence. As we head toward the 2024 presidential election, authoritarianism looms.
And yet, in the middle of all this ugliness, as racist political advertisements connecting a Black U.S. Senate candidate to violent crime blanketed the airwaves in Wisconsin ahead of November's midterm elections, and giant Trump banners waved over cornfields in rural parts of the state, I found myself traveling to talk to groups of people about the unlikely friendship between farmers and undocumented immigrants. I felt the warmth among groups of voters, many of them Republicans, toward the undocumented Mexican immigrants who do most of the work on Wisconsin's dairy farms.
Despite all the ugly, anti-immigrant rhetoric flying around in this election year, stories like Tecpile's bring tears to the eyes of listeners—Republicans and Democrats alike.
Joining me at the University of Wisconsin's Eau Claire campus, and at the tiny public library in Wabasha, Minnesota, were some of the people whose stories I collected in my book, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers.
John Rosenow, a dairy farmer from Cochrane, Wisconsin, was there with his employee Roberto Tecpile, who grew up in Astacinga, a tiny village in the mountains of Veracruz, in southern Mexico. So was Stan Linder, a dairy farmer from Stockholm, Wisconsin, who has been driving down to Mexico regularly for the last twenty years, taking van loads of other farmers to visit the families of their Mexican workers and to admire the homes and businesses the workers have built with the money they've made milking cows up north. Shaun Duvall, the high school Spanish teacher from Alma, Wisconsin, who first had the idea to take groups of farmers to Mexico, was there, too. So was Mercedes Falk, who now runs Puentes/Bridges, the nonprofit group Duvall founded to build cultural understanding between Midwestern dairy farmers and the Mexican workers who comprise more than half of the workforce on the dairy farms of the Upper Midwest.
One farmer, Chris Weisenbeck, describes his visits to the small villages of rural Mexico as stepping into a scene from his own past, when tight-knit rural communities were thriving. Watching a group of neighbors working to build a house together, he commented, "It's about neighbors helping neighbors and everybody working together. Small town Mexico, small town U.S.A.—same thing."
"It's an agrarian society," Rosenow explains. "They find working on a farm honorable, where most Americans don't consider working on a farm honorable. You'd take public assistance before you'd work on a farm."
At the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, after a panel discussion of my book, Tecpile and I spent a day speaking to classrooms full of students about the growing Mexican immigrant population in their area. In a couple of the classes, conducted in Spanish, Tecpile addressed the group directly, without a translator. It was elevating for him, speaking at a university, part of what he describes as his amazing journey of success.
He recalled how, when he was eight years old, he and his family were living in a wooden shack with a plastic tarp for a roof. A hail storm came and tore off the roof, pelting the family with hail as they huddled together. It was then, he said, that he promised his mother he would build her a better house.
Today, after working in the United States for twenty of his forty-three years, Tecpile has built a solid, cement-block house for his parents, and another one next door for his wife and children.
Despite all the ugly, anti-immigrant rhetoric flying around in this election year, stories like Tecpile's bring tears to the eyes of listeners—Republicans and Democrats alike. Most of the dairy farmers who rely on Mexican workers are Republicans. Republican politicians, taking their cue from Donald Trump, have become increasingly harsh in their attacks on immigrants this year. (Consider the political stunts by Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas, respectively, who lured Latin American asylum seekers onto airplanes and flew them to Martha's Vineyard, in Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., in a mean-spirited effort to embarrass liberals in those sanctuary communities by shamefully manipulating bewildered families, treating them like human refuse meant to litter the beach and the White House lawn.) Yet many rural voters in Wisconsin have developed a sense of kinship with the undocumented immigrants without whom they would lose their farms and way of life. National politics don't reflect the full complexity of that reality.
There is so much wrong with our politics and our broken immigration system, which forces people like Tecpile—who are carrying the entire dairy industry, among other U.S. industries, on their backs—to work without the protection of a legal visa. There is no such thing as a year-round visa for low-skilled agricultural work in this country. Yet we have depended heavily on the year-round work of undocumented immigrants for decades. It's one of many cruel and unjust policies that make the workers who sustain U.S. agriculture, not to mention food service, construction, and hospitality, extremely vulnerable.
At the same time, rural Americans have become increasingly drawn to the politics of resentment, voting in large numbers for Trump and the election deniers and xenophobes who now run the Republican Party, out of a sense of grievance, abandonment, and fear.
Wisconsin is the number one state in the nation for farm bankruptcies. When President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, it accelerated the "get big or get out" trend in agriculture. We've lost more than half of our family farms in Wisconsin since 2004. The farms that stayed in business did so by expanding rapidly and hiring Mexican workers. Contrary to the rightwing canard about a "great replacement" of U.S.-born workers by immigrants, farmers in this area tried hard—and failed—to find Americans willing to take jobs milking cows and shoveling manure every day at 4 a.m.
Thus, two groups of rural people, from the United States and Mexico, were brought together.
There are many questions raised by their stories—about migration, labor, the demands of the global economy, and the human and environmental costs of massive consolidation in agriculture. But what stands out the most to me this year, as I travel around talking about my book, is the way the relationship between two groups of rural people who were thrown together by global economic forces beyond their control feels like an antidote to toxic partisanship.
The us-versus-them mentality that is gripping our country, pitting urban against rural, white against Black and brown, conservatives against progressives, doesn't capture the deep economic and social interdependence of U.S. farmers and undocumented Mexican farm workers.
Watching people who were moved to tears as Tecpile described his journey, I thought, what a difference it makes to meet people individually, to see each other's humanity, to imagine ourselves in someone else's place. And to realize that, ultimately, we are all in the same boat.
We're going to need a lot more of that in the years to come.
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