AGRIBIZ 2
oops ca agribiz 2
see dead zone
see tariffs
subsidies
global warming
SEE GLYPHOSATE ATRIZINE MONSANTO GMO RFK MAHA 7 25
see ducks unlimited trump gets wetlands tax writeoff for golf course?! farmers? (flood fields?)
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AN 10 26
I've got to hand it to Washington's Republican policymakers. They've come up with a truly remarkable way that, they promise, will vastly expand the number of small businesses in America. Great!
This is personal for me, for I grew up in a family that had a Main Street business in small-town Texas, so I know how hard it is for little guys to battle the raw monopoly power of corporate chains. Thus, I cheered the GOP ... until I learned that their small business proposal is just another big business scam.
Far from actually increasing the number of small enterprises, Trump bureaucrats are merely redefining "small" to include BIG. For example, the Small Business Administration has long categorized a business as small if it had less than $25 million in yearly sales. But they've now jacked that definition up by 1,000%! Indeed, even some billion-dollar giants can now -- HOCUS POCUS -- qualify as small.
This is much worse than a statistical ruse, for it means that very large outfits with Wall Street backing, Washington lobbyists and slick corporate lawyers will suddenly take the grants, contracts and other government benefits intended to advance genuine Main Street innovators and competitors. In short, the GOP's cynical scheme is using the small business label to overpower those very enterprises. It's a deliberate rigging of the rules by today's right-wing government officials to help big business grab public money -- increasing the power of corporate elites to eliminate competitors... and further monopolize our economy.
Remember this deceit when Republican congress critters run corporate-financed election ads this fall claiming to "looove" small business. Yeah ... love it to death.
TWO-LEGGED HOGS TRYING TO RULE AG POLICY
Warning: This is a sob story that might bring you to tears. Or make you upchuck in disgust.
It's about hogs -- both the four-legged species and the more piggish, two-legged breed of agribusiness executives. The latter have long profited from cruel abuse of millions of hogs caged in their monopolistic system and now the agbiz giants have launched a lobbying campaign called SOB -- "Save Our Bacon." It's not a plea to save the abused animals, but to save the abusers' profits!
It turns out that most consumers don't like animal abuse, so states are passing laws to prevent such corporate practices. This has led to a vibrant new market for humanely raised pork, already gaining more than a fourth of national pork sales.
"Ouch," squealed the factory farm giants, feeling the pinch of real competition. Rather than clean up their methods, though, the monopolists have raced to Washington, demanding that Congress "save their bacon" by artificially and autocratically rigging the market. Their Save Our Bacon act would usurp states' rights to set their own standards for animal welfare.
This is not an "academic free market issue." In recent state ballot initiatives, voters have overwhelmingly endorsed ethical standards for animal agriculture. Moreover, responsible family-farm producers have quickly responded to this growing new market, upgrading their facilities to meet the new state standards of humane production.
Yet, rather than embracing this success for animals, farmers and consumers -- here come tiny cliques of corporate profiteers like the National Pork Producers Council. They're wielding their Big Money lobbying muscle, trying to overrule the public interest ... and the political will of America's majority.
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Ars Technica
Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into
Aug 14, 2026Warren's letter noted other donations to Trump-aligned entities from Taylor Farms and said the contributions totaled into the millions.
As Americans cook their vegetables to at least 158°F to kill a diarrheal parasite that has sickened over 24,000 people and killed two this summer, one US Senator is turning up the heat on Health Secretary Robert F. Kenney Jr. over the government’s “calamitous response” to the record outbreak.
In a letter sent Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the federal response to the Cyclospora outbreak “botched” and “marred by missteps.” She pointedly questioned whether corruption and incompetence within the Trump administration and its clear ties to Taylor Farms—the mammoth produce distributer that sold Mexican-grown iceberg lettuce linked to the outbreak—played a role in the federal government’s failures.
“[P]olitical contributions and direct White House lobbying from Taylor Farms… raise urgent questions about the role this influence-peddling may have played in loosening federal food safety oversight and hampering the federal government’s response to the outbreak,” Warren wrote in the letter.
As Ars Technica has previously reported, Taylor Farms made a $1 million donation to a Trump-backing super PAC, MAGA, Inc, in March 2025. That donation came just days after the Food and Drug Administration announced it was delaying implementing a food traceability rule that would have made it easier to trace and respond to outbreaks, like the Cyclospora outbreak.
Warren’s letter noted other donations to Trump-aligned entities from Taylor Farms and said the contributions totaled into the millions. She further pointed out that Taylor Farms has hired former Trump White House official Trent Morse to lobby on behalf of the company. Morse reportedly brokered a direct call between Taylor Farms and the White House after the FDA had linked the company’s lettuce to the outbreak. In the call, Taylor Farms allegedly made an “urgent plea” to delay a recall of the tainted lettuce.
Clear delay
Warren also noted a significant lingering question about the federal government’s response. Local media outlets reported that Taco Bell restaurants in Michigan and nearby states began pulling iceberg lettuce from their menus as early as July 7. Notices at the restaurant said they were unable to sell the produce “due to a nationwide recall.” But at the time, no recall had been reported by federal agencies.
On July 14, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the outbreak as being from an “unknown source.” The CDC and the FDA did not identify lettuce at certain Taco Bell locations as a source until July 17. The same day, Taylor Farms issued a recall, and the FDA published the recall notice on July 18. The recall notice did not include details or clear information about how much lettuce was being recalled or where it had been shipped. An FDA report identified this week found that Taco Bell’s parent company received just 2.5 percent of the tainted lettuce, with the rest going elsewhere. Walmart received 46 percent of the recalled cases.
Warren’s letter also questioned confusion about the FDA reporting that Taylor Farms’ lettuce had tested positive for Cyclospora, only to retract the claim the next day, calling it a false positive. Taylor Farms then claimed the FDA had apologized to it, which the FDA quickly denied.
Warren posed a series of questions to Kennedy, including whether Taylor Farms or a Trump political appointee pressed the FDA to reevaluate the test result, leading to the retraction. She is also seeking transcripts, summaries, and notes from communications between federal agencies and Taylor Farms.
“[T]he specter of corruption—and quid pro quo politics—casts a darker shadow” over the outbreak response than simply dangerously bad food safety policies from the Trump administration, Warren wrote.
In a statement to The Hill, a Taylor Farms spokesperson said that the company “acts in the interest of science and consumer health, not politics. We categorically reject suggestions that we attempted to receive or received favorable regulatory treatment due to political contributions or other improper influence. Any such allegations are false.”
A Health Department spokesperson told the outlet that the federal government’s investigations into the outbreak “were not impacted by staffing changes or reductions in force. Political contributions or relationships have no bearing on FDA or CDC outbreak investigations.”
Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter
Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.
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an 7 26
Ahead of the pivotal 2026 midterm elections, Politico reports that a consistently red state is being pushed away from Republicans, all because of a longstanding environmental crisis resulting in cancer-causing water.
Once considered a swing state, in the last several election cycles, Iowa has emerged as a solid red state, breaking for President Donald Trump in all three of his races. Despite that trend, there remains a hope among Democrats, backed up by recent polling data, that they might be able to pull off wins in the state this November, given how toxic Trump and the Republican Party are becoming with voters. This is especially true in Iowa, where the president's economic agenda has caused major pains for the state's many farmers.
On top of all that, Politico on Sunday released a report revealing that a long-term ecological crisis is also triggering a "political reckoning" in the Hawkeye State, and it could end up being a disaster for Republicans.
Chris Jones, the Democratic nominee for Iowa's secretary of agriculture, told Politico that his "decade as a research engineer, monitoring the state’s rivers and streams," led him to pursue public office, to address the alarming things he discovered about the state's rivers and lakes. As the report explained, "Iowa’s lakes and ponds are often murky and fetid from algae blooms fed by fertilizer runoff, a byproduct of the state’s vast agricultural industry’s reliance on farming chemicals."
"Iowa has a long-simmering water problem that has finally begun to boil over — and it’s changing Iowa politics," Politico explained. "People are angry and worried about the quality of the state’s water, the health risks it poses and its increasingly undeniable tie to the state’s signature industry: agriculture."
It continued: "In recent years, Iowa’s cancer rate has climbed significantly above the U.S. average. It now stands as the nation’s second highest, and Iowa is one of only three states where the rate is rising. The situation has put a spotlight on nitrates, which are linked to a growing body of science to kidney, brain and ovarian cancer. Nitrates are a key component in the deluge of chemical pesticides and fertilizers used by the state’s farmers, some of which washes off farm fields and into waterways. A second culprit is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, the world’s most common weedkiller, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared 'probably carcinogenic' in 2015, an assessment rejected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency."
While candidates on both sides have long been wary of tackling issues stemming from Iowa's all-important farming industry, things are different this year. Voters are "steaming mad" about the impact these chemicals are having, and as a result, candidates from both parties have taken aim at the industry, and found success doing so. In a development that is "scrambling" the common understanding of Iowa's politics, "some of those winning candidates are Democrats."
"In the Republican primary for governor, a businessman, farmer and political operative named Zach Lahn shocked the political establishment by edging out Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra for the nomination," Politico explained. "Lahn won, in part, by openly acknowledging the state’s water crisis and connecting the dots between agriculture and cancer. Lahn was also the first candidate for statewide office endorsed by MAHA Action, the main PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement. MAHA voters supported Kennedy and President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential elections, but have since rebelled against some of their moves, especially the Trump administration’s open support for glyphosate."
It continued: "As for the Democrats, they have their best shot in a decade or more of winning statewide offices in November’s election. Democrat Josh Turek is neck-and-neck in recent polling with Republican Ashley Hinson in the open race for U.S. Senate. And Lahn’s Democratic opponent, Rob Sand, bested him by one percentage point, within the margin of error, in recent polling in the governor’s race."
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AN 3 26 FARM
'Lost all hope': Trump policies are crushing food industry in Republican heartland
Trump-loving farmers threaten 'to quit' as president’s war spikes fertilizer prices
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maha?
health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. raised his concerns about widely used herbicides containing glyphosate and atrazine, linking them to chronic disease, in a Thursday report by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission.
Why It Matters
The report highlights two commonly used weed killers—glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, and atrazine, another widely used herbicide for weed control.
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans." But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has reviewed and reevaluated its status, said in 2020, "glyphosate is unlikely to be a human carcinogen." There are conflicting opinions about the toxicity of pesticides and their potential health risks, as well as their impact on the food system and environment. Herbicides are classified as a type of pesticide.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in February establishing the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which pledged to produce a report within the president's first few months back in office. The assessment, released Thursday, aims to lay the groundwork for understanding what Kennedy calls the "magnitude of crisis" in American children's declining health and the factors driving it.
As the nation's top health official, Kennedy has repeatedly raised concerns about chemicals in food and the environment and their connection to chronic disease. The report's first section focuses on the rise of ultra-processed foods, while the second addresses the "cumulative load of chemicals in our environment."
What To Know
The 69-page assessment took issue with common herbicides, saying that children are exposed to them through food, water, dust, lawn treatment and household sprays.
"The cumulative effect of multiple chemical exposures and impact on children over time is not fully understood," the report says, adding that data and research on the "complex mixtures of chemicals" children encounter have yet to be fully explored.
Kennedy has long opposed pesticides, having helped win a 2018 lawsuit filed against Monsanto, the original producer of Roundup.
Pesticides are widely used in farming across the U.S. In April, a group of 79 Republicans, including some Senators like Chuck Grassley of Iowa, wrote a letter to Kennedy, saying that "regular testing by DFA and USDA finds that more than 99% of all pesticide residues meet extremely conservative limits established by EPA."
As of 2017, the United States Geological Survey reported, "about 1 billion pounds of conventional pesticides are used each year" throughout the country.
Read more Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Is the FDA Doing Enough About Food Additives?
The MAHA Commission's assessment received expected blowback from agricultural and farming associations, which largely rely on pesticides for their livelihood.
What People Are Saying
The National Corn Growers Association said in a statement:"The Make America Healthy Again Report is filled with fear-based rather than science-based information about pesticides. We are deeply troubled that claims of this magnitude are being made without any scientific basis or regard for a long history of EPA expert evaluations of these products."
American Soybean Association said in a statement: "The American Soybean Association strongly rebukes the May 22 Make America Healthy Again Commission report for being brazenly unscientific and damaging to consumer confidence in America's safe, reliable food system. Should the administration act on the report—which was drafted entirely behind closed doors—it will harm U.S. farmers, increase food costs for consumers, and worsen health outcomes for all Americans. ASA calls on President Trump, who has long been a friend of farmers, to step in and correct the Commission's deeply misguided report."
Dr. Michelle Perro, pediatrician, author and activist for children's health, told The New Lede: "While I support and applaud the MAHA focus on chronic diseases affecting our children, it is disheartening that it took us decades to get here. The environmental toxic impacts on our children's well-being has been known for decades, but not acted upon until now."
The National Council of Farmer Cooperatives said in a Thursday statement:"We have serious concerns over the assessment's allegations about pesticides. The report includes statements that do not reflect the wealth of evidence developed over decades by federal agencies such as the EPA and USDA on the safety of crop inputs and food production methods. These institutions have consistently reaffirmed the safety and efficacy of the systems that help feed our country and the world."
American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall said in a statement:"It is deeply troubling for the White House to endorse a report that sows seeds of doubt and fear about our food system and farming practices, then attempts to celebrate farmers and the critical role they play in producing the safest food supply in the world.
Farmers are identified as 'critical partners,' yet were excluded from development of the report, despite many requests for a seat at the table. The report also expresses a desire to ensure farmers continue to thrive, but undermining confidence in our food system directly contradicts that noble goal. The report spotlights outlier studies and presents unproven theories that feed a false narrative and only then does it acknowledge a mountain of evidence about the safety of our food system." zippy
What Happens Next
The report pledges to support "gold-standard scientific research" as part of its effort to address chronic disease. The assessment marks the first step toward developing the commission's strategy, which is due 180 days after Trump's February executive order establishing the panel.
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Sustainability Now! Sunday, April 13th, 5-6 PM
Big agriculture is Big! And it appears to be getting Bigger, as the leading companies in four critical sectors—equipment, seeds, fertilizers and chemicals—consolidate in order to dominate their markets and the farmers who buy their products. Join Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with Dr. Jennifer Clapp, who has just published Titans of Industrial Agriculture—How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters.Clapp is Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
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an 4 25
Anna Pesek saw a federal program supporting local food purchases as much more than a boost to her Iowa pork and poultry farm.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture grant program that allowed schools and food banks to buy fresh products from small farms helped her forge new business relationships. It allowed her to spend more with local feed mills and butchers, and was starting to build a stronger supply chain of local foods.
But now that the Trump administration has yanked the funding, she worries that rural economic boost might end too.
“With the razor-thin margins on both sides, those partnerships are just really hard, if not impossible, to sustain,” she said.
The co-owner of Over the Moon Farm, Pesek said her operation was never entirely reliant on the local food programs; it represented about 10% of her business. While she knew the federal money wouldn’t last forever, she was planning on the funding lasting through 2028 — but then the Trump administration last month nixed more than $1 billion for local food programs.
The federally funded Local Food Purchase Assistance and the Local Food for Schools programs, both begun during the pandemic, focused on small, local farms in aims of building stronger domestic food supply chains. Grants allowed schools and food banks to buy meat, dairy and produce from small farms — including many healthy products that are often too expensive for those institutions.
USDA’s local food programs specifically aided some of the nation’s most disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, including newcomers, small farmers and those who have faced racial discrimination.
Federal cuts squeeze already-struggling food banks, school lunch programs
The local food programs were initially funded by 2021’s American Rescue Plan Act but were later expanded by the Biden administration. The Trump administration, though, has cut the funding that went to thousands of small farms, saying that it’s instead “prioritizing stable, proven solutions that deliver lasting impact.”
Pesek noted that the federal government has subsidized commodity agriculture like corn and soybeans for more than a century.
“It’s not a novel idea, right? This is how the relationship between the federal government and farmers has looked,” she said. “And so all this program did was allocate some of the funds to go to different kinds of farmers versus just commodity farmers.”
Just after cutting the local food programs, USDA announced it was expediting $10 billion in direct payments to commodity farmers through the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program, which helps farmers offset high input prices and low sale prices for crops. The White House isreportedly considering billions more in farm subsidies as President Donald Trump escalates global trade wars.
Andy Ollove, food access program director at Fresh Approach, a California nonprofit that works on building a healthier and more resilient food system, said the government’s long-standing farm subsidies flow to some of the nation’s biggest operators. Conversely, the local food programs benefited small farmers and communities directly.
“The economic multiplier to this program just seems way more impactful than the traditional subsidy model of the USDA that the administration is continuing to invest in,” he said. “It’s just a giveaway.”
Fresh Approach has helped administer the food bank program in California. While implementation delays mean farmers won’t lose access to the program as quickly as in other states, he expects elimination of the program to put small farmers out of business across the country.
Some states have launched their own local food programs, but nothing on the scale of the federal investment. That’s left advocates for small farmers, local foods and food banks pushing for reinstatement of the federal program or getting it included in the next round of farm bill negotiations, when Congress outlines a five- or six-year spending plan for the nation’s food policy and agriculture sector.
Ollove expects philanthropists will fund parts of California’s program after federal money is depleted. But it won’t have the same reach.
“I do feel confident that these types of programs will continue in California … sporadically and piecemeal,” he said. “But not in the way that we’re administering it, in a way that I think is changing a lot of things and improving the food system.”
A mixed response from states
The noncompetitive USDA local food grants allowed many new farmers to break into markets. And the aid for food hubs, which link small producers to larger markets, helped farmers distribute products to schools and food banks.
In Wisconsin, for example, more than half of the nearly 300 farmers who benefited from the food bank program were early career farmers,according to state officials.
In Illinois, the state prioritized funds towardsocially disadvantaged farmers, such as those who have faced racial or ethnic prejudice.
“Attacking this program was really an attack on Illinois’ most vulnerable, whether it’s a socially disadvantaged farmer or the food recipient,” said Kristi Jones, deputy director of the Illinois Department of Agriculture.
Her department administered the federal food bank program, which helped beginning farmers get their businesses off the ground.
“A lot of these farmers, they’re living their dreams,” she said. “They are living their goals because of this program.”
Illinois had been planning on nearly $15 million from the next round of funding for the food bank program. Jones said farmers already had begun planning and spending on seeds and equipment.
“You just don’t put something on the ground and have the product the next day,” she said. “ … So that uncertainty was incredibly challenging for farmers who already deal with enough uncertainty.”
Democratic leaders have bashed the Trump administration’s decision: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, for example, called it “a slap in the face to Illinois farmers and the communities they feed.”
But conservative leaders in other states have downplayed the cuts.
In Texas, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller characterized USDA’s decision as “a reassessment.”
He said the state was not dependent on the federal funds and would continue its Farm to School and Farm to Food Bank programs, which encourage the local purchase of Texas agricultural products.
“There’s always room for refinement, and we may see a revised version of the policy down the road that is even better for agriculture producers,”he said in a statement last month.
Texas funds programs to help distribute excess food to schools, food banks and charities. But it does not have a grant program like USDA’s to help those organizations purchase local food, said Marshall Webb, spokesperson for the state agriculture department.
Iowa’s agriculture department recently started its own local food program.
The Choose Iowa program has made about $300,000 available to support local food purchases — though the statelost out on about $11.3 million because of the federal cuts.
Don McDowell, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Agriculture & Land Stewardship, said the agency would continue to ask lawmakers to expand funding for the Choose Iowa program.
“Programs designed to forge relationships between Iowa farmers, food hubs, food banks and schools are important to our farmers and communities,” he said.
Iowa Farmers Union President Aaron Heley Lehman said his organization, which represents family farmers and ranchers, would like to see the state step in to fill the void.
“But we don’t anticipate that that’s going to be an easy thing for the state of Iowa to do,” he said. “So not only is it local farmers that are feeling like they’ve had the rug pulled out from underneath them, but the state of Iowa has, too.”
Creating a new food system
In Southern California, Dickinson Family Farms has worked to gather produce from dozens of small farms across the region, allowing even the smallest operators without distribution capabilities to sell to local food banks.
Democrats and Republicans take on soda, but they’re using different tactics
Andrew Dickinson, who owns the farm with his father, said the federal local food program also helped reduce food waste. Farmers were able to get fair market prices for vegetables with cosmetic damage or fruits deemed too small or large for grocery store shelves.
Dickinson said the federal program has provided a reliable marketplace for small operators that otherwise depend on more inconsistent sales streams like farmers markets.
“It will create a vacuum,” he said.
About 60 miles east of Los Angeles, sixth-generation farmer Anna Knight said the federal funds were much more than a handout to farmers. To her, they were about creating a new kind of food system.
She said supporting local producers creates more supply chain resilience — something many people didn’t appreciate until the pandemic.
“We don’t want to go back to that world,” she said. “When we invest in our local food system, we’re really investing on onshoring our food production system, on making new food systems local and increasing their resiliency in moments of crisis.”
Old Grove Orange, her California farm, has been supplying citrus to some local school systems for years. But she said the federal funds were the “single biggest changemaker” for pushing schools to buy local for the first time.
To her, that’s key in promoting lifelong healthy eating: Local produce like her freshly picked oranges pack more of a nutritional punch and just taste better than produce that takes weeks to ship from abroad.
“When you are giving a child a delicious piece of fruit, you are really cultivating their palate for life,” she said. “You are setting this expectation of what a fruit is supposed to taste like, and you are sparking this love for fruits and vegetables for the rest of their life.”
Knight said the nation doesn’t have to choose between big and small farms. But small farms are vanishing all around her.
“This is a ticking bomb,” she said. “The clock is running out if we don’t really find a way to help make these small, medium-sized farms sustainable.”
*Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.
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Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
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an 3 25
New research suggests corporations are using bird flu as an excuse to jack up prices — and their profits rose before the disease even reached their flocks, the Guardian reported Tuesday.
The cost of a dozen large eggs reached a record high of almost $5 in January. Bird flu has certainly contributed to rising prices; about 12.7 million birds are affected by the disease, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 166 million poultry have been culled since 2022. But bird flu is not the only reason for skyrocketing prices.
“Bird flu does not fully explain the sticker shock consumers experience in the egg aisle … corporate consolidation is a key culprit behind egg price spikes,” Amanda Starbuck told the Guardian. She is the lead author on a new report from Food and Water Watch.
READ MORE: 'Highly inappropriate': Concerns surround Joni Ernst’s relationships with top military officials
“Powerful corporations that control every step of the supply chain – from breeding hens to hatching eggs to processing and distributing eggs – are making windfall profits off this crisis, raising their prices above and beyond what is necessary to cover any rising costs,” she added.
“The egg production industry – like the retailer sector that producers mostly sell to – is highly concentrated," writes the Guardian’s Nina Lakhani. "This gives a handful of big corporations the opportunity to influence prices outside the impact of shocks like avian flu and the Covid 19 pandemic on supply and demand."
Cal-Maine, the largest egg producer in the U.S., saw gross profits increase by 7 between 2021 and 2023, shooting up to 1.2 billion. During this time, their flocks had not been hit by bird flu and their sales only increased by a small amount. They “issued shareholder dividends totaling $250m in fiscal year 2023 — 40 times more than the previous fiscal year. The Mississippi-based company sold 7% more eggs in 2024 compared to 2021 and tripled its profits over the same period, according to company filings,” Lakhani writes.
In some geographic areas, prices went up before bird flu reached them as well. For example, in the South, prices followed national increases, even though egg production rose and bird flu didn’t reach flocks until January.
There were more eggs, but higher prices, in 2023. “Between April and December 2023, national retail inventories of eggs each month exceeded the five-year average by as much as almost 13%. Yet the average egg price for consumers was higher than the five-year average each month,” Lakhani writes.
According to a study from the University of Arkansas, bird flu accounts for a 12-24 percent increase in prices.
Angela Huffman, co-founder of the nonpartisan group Farm Action, thinks the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice should investigate egg prices. “Based on publicly available data, we’ve observed that egg price increases far exceed what would be expected based on hen losses and the industry has not increased the number of laying hens as expected during a period of high prices. This strongly suggests potential antitrust violations,” she said. “The FTC and DOJ have the authority to investigate beyond what is publicly available… we urge them to exercise this authority.”
“The working class is struggling to afford groceries while companies like Cal-Maine are raking in huge profits and rewarding their shareholders,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told the Guardian. “The Trump administration has the power to lower grocery bills, but instead they are imposing blanket tariffs on allies, firing federal workers who are trying to prevent the bird flu, and putting billionaires over ordinary Americans.”
READ MORE: 'Horror movie': German tourist remains in ICE detention center after over a month
Meanwhile, the conditions at factory farms are ideal for the flu to spread. “These same companies exacerbate the bird flu outbreak by raising their birds on factory farms, crammed together in hundreds of thousands or millions, creating the perfect breeding ground for disease,” Starbuck said.
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an 12 24 mojo
I was a rotten high school student, a shirker and smart-ass of the first rank. I even found myself purged from a typing class for bad behavior—an event I regret to this precise moment, since touch-typing is obviously a convenient skill for someone in my profession. Afterward, I had to choose another "elective." Naturally, I seized upon home economics—in which, I hoped, I'd spend my time amusing girls with wisecracks and whipping up desserts from boxed mixes. If memory serves, that's exactly how it played out—especially the bit about the just-add-water confections. Mmmm, instant cake.
In other words, I retained just as much from my home ec class as I did from my failed stint as a student of the keyboard: which is to say, nothing. Yet Ruth Graham's recent Boston Globe essay "Bring back home ec! The case for a revival of the most retro class in school"strikes me as spot on. Graham isn't talking about the home ec of my misspent '80s youth, nor that of quaint stereotypes featuring "visions of future homemakers quietly whisking white sauce or stitching rickrack onto an apron."
She means a revitalized, contemporary home economics for all genders, one capable of at least exposing youth to basic skills that so many adults (i.e., their parents) lack: "to shop intelligently, cook healthily, [and] manage money." And I think such a reimagined home ec should move from the shadowy margins it now occupies—the field has been rebranded as "Family and Consumer Science," Graham reports—and become mandatory for all high school kids, and—why not?—even elementary school ones.
I have witnessed firsthand the vexed state of basic cooking skills among the young. When I helped run the kitchen at Maverick Farms for seven years, I noticed that most of our interns couldn't chop an onion or turn even just-picked produce into a reasonably good dish in a reasonable amount of time. And these were people motivated enough about food to intern at a small farm in rural North Carolina. If I had their cooking skills, I'd be tempted to resort to takeout often, just to save time.
It's true that in my home ec class nearly a quarter century ago, we weren't taught how to handle a knife or follow a simple recipe for a from-scratch dish. But home ec wasn't always so vapid. Graham points to New York Times reporter Michael Moss' great 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat, which contains a brief history of the home ec trade in US public schools.
The convenience food industry that's so powerful and entrenched today was just taking root in the 1950s. And as it began to aggressively market its products to a growing US middle class, it "faced one real obstacle," Moss writes: the "army of school teachers and federal outreach workers who insisted on promoting home-cooked meals, prepared the old fashioned way."
Home ec teachers explicitly battled against the industry's claims of convenience, Moss shows. In 1957, he writes, the American Home Economics Association conducted a demo pitting a commercial cake mix against a homemade batter, Moss reports. "As reported in the association's journal, the homemade cake not only cost less and tasted better, it took only five more minutes to prepare, cook, and serve." Plus the batter could be made in advance and stored, "for quick parceling out when a cake was needed." Home-ec teachers also schooled their charges in frugal shopping, teaching them to "avoid buying things they didn't need."
Graham drops a bit more history:
If any single person could be said to be the founder of home economics, it is the formidable Ellen Swallow Richards, a Bostonian who was the first woman admitted to MIT. She served as the first president of the American Home Economics Association and was instrumental in coming up with the term "home economics," officially adopted at a conference "for the betterment of the home" in 1899, just in time for the dawn of a scientifically minded century. Though it may now seem impossible, the discipline was originally rooted in progressive and even feminist thinking. The idea was to bring scientific rigor into the home, and to professionalize women’s domestic work, bringing dignity and efficiency to both.
To rebuff this cadre of holdouts within America's schools, the food industry mobilized in two ways, Moss reports. First up was rolling out a school marmish figure called "Betty Crocker"—invented by the marketing department of the company that would become General Mills to extol the wholesomeness and ease of processed crap. The other move was a kind of leveraged buyout of the home ec trade itself: first by pouring money into grants and fellowships for the American Home Economics Association—$288,250 in 1957 alone, Moss writes—and then by "sponsoring candidates for the organization's top leadership posts, candidates who would bring a decidedly pro-industrial view to home economics."
And that is how home ec became the piece-of-instant-cake elective that I so idly enjoyed in the '80s.
But imagine a home ec that taught basic skills like how to prepare a simple pureed vegetable soup, whip up a quick, easy, and much-cheaper-than-bottled salad dressing, or stock up a pantry with inexpensive bulk staples?
Food isn't the only sphere in which millions of American adults—and the kids they are raising—find themselves swimming in a sea of ignorance, at the mercy of an industry peddling dubious wares. Another one is personal finance, as Helene Olen shows in her indispensable 2013 book Pound Foolish. Over the past two decades, what Olen calls the "personal finance industrial complex" has fooled Americans into such follies as leveraging their futures with deceptively pricey credit cards, dumping hard-earned savings into that casino called the stock market, and buying houses they can't afford and too often can't hold on
In doing so, the industry has made personal finance into something that seems impossibly complex—what the hell is a variable annuity?—and then presented gurus who simplify it along lines convenient for itself. All of that is nonsense, Olen shows. After an interviewingher about what he sees as the "financial industry's most basic dilemma," that the "best advice fits on a 3×5 index card and is available for free at the library," University of Chicago social scientist Harold Pollack actually scribbled out that card. Check it out—it's mostly about saving as much as possible and avoiding the fees of Wall Street charlatans. If those simple principles could be drummed into the heads of high school students, imagine the misery that could be avoided. And what better forum for it than new-wave home ec? After all, the home ec curricula of yore included lessons on household finance.
A revived curriculum could be broader than just food and money, Graham notes. "Even sewing is gaining a certain relevance, as consumers grow increasingly wary of disposable garments made in unregulated factories overseas," she writes. "An ambitious class could also include things like basic household plumbing or car repair." I certainly could have used those skills (though auto mechanics have gotten so complex that I think "How to choose a reliable car you can afford—or get by without one altogether" might be a better theme.)
The main obstacle between where we are now and home ec nirvana is funding, as Graham notes. Public school systems are so strapped that they're already slashing equally worthy classes like art, music, and PE. But producing generation upon generation of people who don't know how to feed themselves healthily or manage their finances is generating massive, cascading societal costs—and the pennies we pinch by not revitalizing home ec seem like a classic false economy, much like those boxed cakes the food industry was already peddling by 1957
https://usrtk.org/bill-gates/radical-menu/
no lnx many
Bill Gates’ radical menu for food systems: ultra-processed foods, patents, monocrops
Posted: May 26, 2021 by Stacy Malkan
If Bill Gates has his way, the food in our future will little resemble what’s on our plates today. Gates and his agribusiness industry partners are proposing to transform our food and how it is produced.
To the techno-food industrialists, hunger and climate change are problems to be solved with data and engineering. The core ingredients of their revolutionary plan: genetic engineering — and patenting — of everything from seeds and food animals, to microbes in the soil, to the processes we use to make food. Local food cultures and traditional diets could fade away as food production moves indoors to labs that cultivate fake meat and ultra-processed foods.
Gates says rich countries should shift entirely to synthetic beef.And he has the intellectual property rights to sell them. As a food that can help fix the climate, Gates touts the Impossible Burger, a plant-based patty made from genetically engineered soy and textured with engineered yeast. Its manufacturer, the Gates-funded Impossible Foods, has two dozen patents and more than 100 patents pending to artificially replicate cheese, beef and chicken and permeate these products with manufactured flavors, scents and textures.
Ginkgo Bioworks, a Gates-backed start-up that makes “custom organisms,” just went public in a $17.5 billion deal. The company uses its “cell programming” technology to genetically engineer flavors and scents into commercial strains of engineered yeast and bacteria to create “natural” ingredients, including vitamins, amino acids, enzymes and flavors for ultra-processed foods. According to its investor presentation, Ginkgo plans to create up to 20,000 engineered “cell programs” (it now has five) for food products and many other uses. Axios reports that the company plans to charge customers to use its “biological platform” like Amazon charges for its data center, and will take royalties like apps in the Apple Store. Ginkgo’s customers, the investor pitch makes clear, are not consumers or farmers, but rather the world’s largest chemical, food and pharmaceutical companies.
If techno-food products are not high on most consumers’ shopping lists, this is a menu investors can get behind. The market for genetically engineered products has the potential to reach $2-4 trillion in the next 20 years. And Bill and Melinda Gates are positioned to reap the rewards. The Gates back “a multitude of agrifood tech startups,” reports AgFunder News, either through private investment vehicles or through the Gates Foundation Trust, which funds the foundation’s charitable activities.
Gates and the tech start-ups pitch their products as solutions for our most challenging environmental and social issues. But are they really?
Doubling down on monocultures
Gates’ “winning strategy for food and farming,” according to a Fortune magazine article by Shawn Tully, “is finding ways for farmers to produce more corn and soybeans on every acre … while substantially lowering carbon emissions.” Gates believes that “genetically modified seeds and chemical herbicides, in the right doses – and not land-intensive organic farming – are crucial to curbing carbon emissions.”
Since 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent over $5 billion on efforts totransform African agriculture; its flagship program, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, works totransition farmers to high-input industrial agriculture and scale up markets for commercial seeds and agrichemicals. Gates says these methods can boost production and lift farmers out of poverty.
Many critics, including African faith leaders and hundreds of civil society groups around the world, say the foundation’s agricultural development strategies are failing to deliver on promises and benefitting multinational corporations over small farmers and communities in Africa. The foundation did not respond to our requests for comment.
“Gates has influenced the direction of agriculture to benefit the corporates,” said Million Belay, coordinator of Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a coalition of 50 Africa-based groups. “His foundation has contributed hugely in weakening our seed, biosafety and agrochemical related regulations … it will take years to undo what they have done.”
Gates also influences how governments and academic institutions think about the future of agriculture in Africa, Belay said. “The narrative now is you need to use agrichemicals, high-yield varieties, GMOs and a host of other farm management techniques to feed yourself,” he said. “It will also take years to convince our elites the future is agroecology. As one of the most rich and powerful people on the planet, the doors of our governments are open (to Gates) while it is ajar for African citizens. He has to be called out and has to change direction.”
Leading experts in food security and nutrition are calling for a paradigm shift away from green revolution-style industrial agriculture and toward agroecology, which promotes biodiversity instead of monocultures, integrates animals to rebuild soils, and advocates for political and economic reforms to address inequities and social divisions. Diversified agroecological systems are more resilient, they say, and have a greater capacity to recover from disturbances including extreme weather events, pests and disease.
Recent science suggests that chemical-intensive industrial agriculture is a key driver of climate change, soil erosion and the worldwide decline of insects.Corn and soy monocultures are especially problematic; they deplete the soil and rely on synthetic fertilizers that emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere. These are problems Bill Gates is hoping technology can fix.
A climate solution?
Fortune describes Gates’ plans to intensify corn and soy production as a “pivotal campaign in the war against global warming.” How so? Syngenta, the world’s second largest agrichemical company, is “deploying big data, gene editing, DNA analysis, and other groundbreaking technologies in pursuit of growing bumper harvests while lowering CO2.”Bayer, the leading chemical and seed firm, is making a similar pitch, and claims its new sustainability technologies will “empower 100 million smallholder farmers around the world.”
For 30 years, agrichemical companies promised GMOs could feed the poor and help small farmers, but it hasn’t yet worked out that way.Most GMO crops in the ground today areengineered to survive weed-killing chemicals or kill insects. While these crops provided short-term benefits to farmers, they provided no benefits to consumers, nor did they deliver on promises to boost yields, but they did increase herbicide use. Evidence now indicates the crops are failing as weeds and bugs evolve around the technology.
As a solution to meet the climate crisis, and enable “sustainable intensification” of industrial agriculture, Gates and Bayer point to experimental projects to genetically engineer microbes to fix nitrogen to plants. “If these approaches work,” Gates writes in his climate book, “they’ll dramatically reduce the need for fertilizer and all the emissions it’s responsible for.” In 2017, Ginkgo Bioworks teamed up with Bayer to launch JoynBio, a microbe company that is working to create self-fertilizing plants.
This, too, is a promise Bayer has made before.As far back as 1897, Bayer promoted a product that could reportedly assimilate atmospheric nitrogen, according to Mark Finlay, a history professor at Armstrong Atlantic State University. Bayer said its product could “conceivably make all agricultural lands permanently fertile,” Finlay wrote in a 2015 book about the history of agriculture. “Although early results were disappointing, many popular press writers hailed the potential of this discovery.”
GMO 2.0: genome-editing
Gates is an evangelist for genetically engineered foods. He predicts that “GMOs will end starvation in Africa” and GMOs can “end world hunger by 2030.” If the first generation of GMO crops failed to deliver on these hopes, Gates believes new genetic engineering methods will get us there.
With CRISPR-Cas9 and other “genome-editing” techniques, scientists can nowadd or delete strands of DNA, or turn genes on or off, to produce specific traits in plants or animals — as if writing computer code. Examples include mushrooms that are “edited” to resist browning, “terminator cattle” bred to father only male offspring, or harmless strains of E Coli converted to antioxidant factories.
Gene-editing techniques, and especially CRISPR, are efficient but unpredictable. Studies show the CRISPR process can create unexpected mutations including DNA damage and other off-target effects.In 2019, a plan to release CRISPR-edited “hornless cows” to Brazil was scrapped after a U.S. government researcher discovered the cattle had two antibiotic-resistance genes that weren’t supposed to be there. The Recombinetics, Inc. cows were the “poster animals of the gene-editing revolution,” according to MIT Technology Review, until the “major screw-up in their DNA” came to light.The company’s researchers missed the extra DNA in their own studies; they reported, incorrectly, that the animals were “free of off-target effects.”
Genetic engineering, including genome-editing, “has unpredictable outcomes,” says Michael Antoniou, a molecular geneticist at King’s College in London. “You don’t know in advance what the consequences are of the GM transformation process … and because you don’t know, the only way to evaluate safety is generically,” Antoiniou said. “You basically need to conduct a long term feeding trial in animals and see what happens … and that’s just not going on anywhere in the world for regulatory purposes, at all.”
Nevertheless, experiments continue on important crops and food animals. Gates Foundation has spent over $40 million on projects to genetically engineer dairy cows, with hopes of creating the “perfect” cow. Acceligen (a division of Recombinetics) is working with a Gates Foundation grant to engineer multiple traits into dairy cows to maximize productivity and durability in hot climates.
The foundation is also a leading funder of gene drive experiments that can force an engineered trait through a species. This month in the Florida Keys, the Gates Foundation-backed company Oxitec released 144,000 mosquitos engineered to eliminate females in a disease-carrying species (while not technically a gene drive this is seen as a precursor experiment). Proposed agricultural uses for gene drives include reversing herbicide tolerance in plants, suppressing weeds and eradicating agricultural pests.What could possibly go wrong?
Systemic risk
One of the world’s foremost experts on probability and uncertainty, Nassim Taleb, considered that question — What could go wrong with GMOs? — for a 2014 paper he wrote with colleagues at the New York University School of Engineering. The authors analyzed GMOs in the context of what they called a “non-naive” view of the Precautionary Principle. They concluded: “GMOs represent a public risk of global harm” and should be subject to “severe limits.”
The Precautionary Principle states that if an action has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain, the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. The authors believe it “should be evoked only in extreme situations” when the potential harm is systemic and the consequences widespread and irreversible; they said GMOs “fall squarely” within this criteria.
Among the systemic risks they cited:GMOs have the propensity to spread uncontrollably, with irreversible system-wide effects and unknown downsides. The ecological impacts are not tested empirically — and therefore not understood — before the technologies are released. The researchers noted two factors that contribute to systemic risk: the engineered genetic modifications and the monocultures in which they grow.
“Instead of a long history of evolutionary selection, these modifications rely not just on naive engineering strategies that do not appropriately consider risk in complex environments, but also explicitly reductionist approaches that ignore unintended consequences,” the researchers said.”Labeling the GMO approach “scientific” betrays a verypoor—indeed warped—understanding of probabilisticpayoffs and risk management.”
Taleb summed up their conclusions in a 2015 New York Times op-ed: “The GMO experiment, carried out in real time and with our entire food and ecological system as its laboratory, is perhaps the greatest case of human hubris ever. It creates yet another systemic, ‘too big too fail’ enterprise — but one for which no bailouts will be possible when it fails.”
Ginkgo Bioworks investor pitch
Monopoly Bill
If Gates’ plans for the food system make little sense from an equity or ecological perspective, they are logical from the point of view of an economic monopolist.
“As the former CEO and largest shareholder of Microsoft, you might think that Bill Gates is a capitalist, but that’s not exactly the case,” Megan Tompkins-Stange, a scholar of philanthropy at University of Michigan, told The Ink. “Gates’ version of capitalism would better be called monopolistic. He has consistently sought to distort free markets in order to advance his own corporation’s accumulation of wealth, power, and preeminence.”
These ideologies led to the recent controversy over Covid-19 vaccines, in which Gates’ insistence on patents may have impeded vaccine access for the world’s poor. The incident raised concerns about the powerful influence Gates wields over vital issues involving public health. As Timothy Schwab wrote in The Nation, “It is increasingly urgent to ask if Gates’s multiple roles in the pandemic — as a charity, a business, an investor, and a lobbyist — are about philanthropy and giving away money, or about taking control and exercising power — monopoly power.”
Gates is playing all the same roles in our food system. “Gates has placed his investment bets in many of the key places in this emerging corporate narrative about what the food system needs: gene drives, geoengineering, fake meat, digital agriculture, carbon sequestration,” says Jim Thomas from the ETC Group, which investigates corporate concentration in the food industry. “Clearly he is set to benefit from these changes, plus his Foundation funding supports all this.”
Agribusiness companies are deploying digital apps on farms around the world to gather data on all aspects of farming: soil health, product inputs, weather, cropping patterns and more, including genetic information on the world’s most important seeds and livestock and knowledge indigenous farmers have developed over thousands of years. All this data tobe owned and controlled by corporations, run through AI algorithms, and sold back to farmers with “prescriptions” for how to farm and which corporate products to buy, with little transparency or explanation.
Thehyper-consolidated food and agriculture system has already brought numerous negative consequences to farmers and consumers. A 2019 report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems documents how corporate concentration has squeezed farmer incomes, eroded their choices, narrowed the scope of innovation and escalated public health and environmental risks. The corporate drive to control Big Data, IPES said, “stands to exacerbate existing power imbalances, dependencies, and barriers to entry across the agri-food sector.”
Gates Ag One
Impatient with the creeping progress of the techno-food revolution, the Gates Foundation last year launched a new tax-exempt nonprofit that “seeks to accelerate the development of innovations supported by the foundation’s Agricultural Development team” in two of the fastest-growing regions in the world: sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
The new “ag tech startup” will “work with partners from the public and private sector to commercialize resilient, yield-enhancing seeds and traits.” It is located in St. Louis, Missouri, former home of Monsanto and current hub of leading chemical and seed firms, and headed up by Joe Cornelius, the former managing director of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition at Bayer CropSciences.As if to underscore that uniformity and centralized control are core goals of the effort, the new nonprofit is called “Gates Ag One.”
Farm of the future?
In 2019, Cargill (a partner of Ginkgo Bioworks) opened a $50 million factory in Lincoln, Nebraska. The plant manufactures EverSweet, a substance that tastes like the sweetener stevia. To produce it, Cargill combines genetically engineered yeast with sugar molecules to mimic the taste of stevia.
Consumers would not know this by reading the website or looking at the package; the company artfully describes the process as a “centuries-old technique” involving “fermentation.” It markets EverSweet as “non-artificial.”
Cargill also pitches the product as “sustainably produced,” presumably because it moves stevia production off the land, in places like Paraguay where small farmers have been cultivating stevia for generations. But the feedstock for engineered foods made in Cargill’s new plant has to come from somewhere. Cargill would not tell us what it uses for feedstock, but the factory’s’ location in Nebraska offers a clue: it is surrounded by monocrops of GMO corn and soy.
Read more at USRTK:
What’s the controversy over the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit?
The Gates Foundation’s “failing” green revolution in Africa
Is Cargill’s new GMO stevia plant the “farm” of the future?
Why is the Gates Foundation funding propaganda campaign at Cornell?
More info:
The Long Food Movement: Transforming Food Systems by 2045, report by International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and ETC Group (3.30.21)
Tagged Bayer Bill Gates Bill Gates menu climate Gates Foundation gene drives genome editing Ginkgo Bioworks GMO JoynBio monopoly systemic risk
agribiz BS greenwash?
https://www.desmog.com/2022/10/06/aim4c-under-fire/
omg
no lnx many pix
the last call Oregon rancher Dwight Hammond Jr. made before heading to federal prison on two counts of arson in 2016 was to a man he hardly knew. Forrest Lucas, who made his fortune on oil engine additives, promised Hammond that he would do whatever he could to get him and his son, Steven, out of prison.
Early Tuesday morning aboard Air Force One, en route to the NATO summit, President Donald Trump signed an official clemency order pardoning the two men. Lucas — a 76-year-old Indiana self-made millionaire with tight ties to the Trump administration — had fulfilled his pledge.
For nearly two decades, the Hammonds had been engaged in skirmishes with the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that functions as a go-between for ranchers and the federal land they lease for grazing. They pushed back, often threateningly, on regulations regarding the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, which bordered the Hammonds’ grazing allotment, and they set unpermitted fires on BLM land. After a second fire in 2006, the pair were charged with 19 different crimes, but eventually arranged a plea deal for just two charges of arson on federal land, which carried a minimum of a five-year sentence. The judge declared that such lengthy jail time qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, instead sentencing Dwight to three months and Steven to one year and one day. The pair served their time and returned home. But the federal government successfully appealed the sentence, and on Jan. 4, 2016, the Hammonds were ordered to return to prison.
[US Department of Justice
Steven Hammond (left) and his father, Dwight Hammond, after their arrest.
The verdict brought Ammon and Ryan Bundy — who, along with their father, Cliven, had been involved in an armed confrontation with BLM officials over the management of their grazing allotment in Nevada — to Eastern Oregon. On Jan. 2, Ammon led several hundred people on a peaceful march through Burns, Oregon, in support of the Hammonds. At the end of the march, he made a declaration: Whoever wanted to take a “hard stand” against the government should follow him — thus launching what would become the 41-day armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.
The Hammonds, however, weren’t there. Nor did they condone what the Bundys and others had done in their name. When the occupation began, they were back on their ranch with Dave Duquette, Lucas’s close associate.When the Hammonds flew back to a hero’s welcome in Burns, Oregon, it was aboard Lucas’s private jet. Lucas, whose company, Lucas Oil, currently holds naming rights for the Indianapolis Colts’ stadium, has made a pro-agriculture, anti-regulation agenda his mission over the past eight years — and had decided that the Hammonds fit into his larger master plan.
To achieve his goals, Lucas has used a nonprofit he founded, Protect the Harvest— devoted to “working to protect your right to hunt, fish, farm, eat meat, and own pets” — as well as his close ties to Vice President Mike Pence, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, whose top adviser is a former employee of Lucas’s. As Duquette puts it, “the access is very good.”
“Most people wouldn’t get involved,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News in early June. “But thank god for Forrest Lucas, because he’s been willing to take on the hard issues.” Among those hard issues: fighting environmental activists, pushing back against regulation, and protecting farmers and ranchers from what they see as federal overreach. That’s why Lucas grew interested in the Hammonds in the first place. “We’re all about affordable food and land use and personal rights,” Duquette explained. The Hammond case “intersects perfectly with the Protect the Harvest mission.”
Protect the Harvest has built a positive rapport with the ag community by sponsoring scholarships and racetracks and film festivals. But the nonprofit has also benefited by inflaming the community’s anxieties that a time-honored way of life is coming to an end — while eliding the fact that its own lobbying on behalf of corporations and against regulations has hastened the destruction of that lifestyle.
For those active in the agricultural world, Lucas has primarily been known for his strong stance on animal regulation, actively opposing attempts to limit or monitor mistreatment of pets and livestock with laws that would, for example, establish minimum spacing for hen cages or veal calf pens, crack down on puppy mills, or prevent intentional mutilation of Tennessee walking horses. A particular target of his efforts has been the Humane Society of the United States — the national organization that has spearheaded the vast majority of initiatives related to animal regulation, and which Lucas has referred to as “terrorists.”
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Ammon Bundy (left), the leader of an anti-government militia, prepares to speak to members of the media in front of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters on Jan. 5, 2016, near Burns, Oregon.
But Lucas’s agenda is hardly limited to cage sizes and puppy mills, as reflected by his support of the Hammonds and, by extension, the Bundys and others opposed to federal control of public lands. And to get what he wants, Lucas has employed a highly sophisticated lobbying and messaging machine, which does everything from funding opposition to municipal spaying and neutering ordinances to orchestrating “range rights” conferences, streamed live on Facebook to an audience of thousands.
Protect the Harvest has spent millions producing web videos and memes that spread across the dozens of Bundy-adjacent Facebook pages that have popped up in the last decade. It also focuses on messaging to children: There are anti-regulatory Protect the Harvest coloring activity sheets, and a pro-ag Protect the Harvest–branded teaching curriculum available for download on their website.In 2015, Lucas began producing feature-length films — starring Hollywood actors like Sharon Stone, Jon Voight, and Jane Seymour — to promote his strongly anti-regulation agenda.
In 2015, Lucas began producing feature-length films — starring Hollywood actors like Sharon Stone, Jon Voight, and Jane Seymour — to promote his strongly anti-regulation agenda.
Lucas’s film and television production studio, the Corona, California–based ESX Entertainment, currently has five films in production — including Stand at Paxton County described as the story of a rancher and his daughter who “face off against state and local authorities who by questionable means relieve local ranchers of their livestock and way of life.”
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After Trump took office, Lucas made the short list of potential appointees for interior secretary. Although Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke ultimately got the job, he has provided an open door to both Lucas and Protect the Harvest. Meanwhile, Brian Klippenstein, who is still listed as PTH’s executive director, now works as senior adviser to Perdue. Pence’s vice presidency has been a boon for Lucas, who, according to a Protect the Harvest spokesperson, has been friends[funder]with Pence since before he took the office of Indiana governor.
In addition to Lucas’s own role as one of Trump’s agricultural advisers, public records indicate that Lucas met with Zinke in April 2017 to discuss wild horses, grazing access issues, and national monument designations. In October, when Pence flew to attend an Indianapolis Colts game, abruptly leaving when players knelt during the national anthem, he first spent time posing for photos with Lucas and Duquette. Protect the Harvest also has ties to former EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who was a featured speaker at a Protect the Harvest event in Indianapolis on Jan. 26, 2016.
Protect the Harvest / Facebook
Lucas, the Hammonds, and Duquette on Lucas's private plane back to Burns.
Lucas’s investment in the Hammonds — and the Bundys, who’ve been invited to Protect the Harvest–sponsored forums — is a means to an end. They have become symbols of the way many rural Americans feel they’ve been wronged byfederal overreach, and Lucas, much like Trump, leverages those feelings to build support for one of his overriding goals: wide-scale deregulation of big business.
This is the story of how Forrest Lucas became the behind-the-scenes architect of a multipronged political and propaganda machine — unknown to most Americans, yet with an outsize influence on the current administration and the way millions think of their rural way of life, the industries that shape it, and the government’s role within it.
“This administration has been pretty good at asking for problems,” Duquette explained. “And then addressing them.” The Hammond pardon is the first such Protect the Harvest “problem” that’s been directly addressed on the national stage. But with Lucas’s direct access to multiple wings of the administration, it’s unlikely to be the last.
Dave Duquette /Facebook
Lucas, Duquette, and Ramona Hage Morrison at the Department of the Interior.
To understand why an incredibly wealthy man like Lucas would care about the fate of a pair of Oregon ranchers, you have to consider the concept of “the harvest” as Lucas is using it: a stand-in for everything from actual crop yields to what he views as the fundamental right to make a living as one sees fit off the land. In tax filings, Protect the Harvest describes its mission as educational: “to ensure accurate information is communicated to the general public with the rise of various groups threatening to end modern agriculture and hunting in the United States.”
In practice, this “accurate information” has centered on a cluster of issues that are closely tied to Big Ag’s priorities: portraying animal rights activists and environmentalists as out-of-touch liberals bent on ending the rural way of life; characterizing regulation and federal oversight, particularly on public lands, as a means of curtailing American liberty; and advocating for and providing platforms for public figures — such as the Hammonds — to function as symbols of widespread persecution of the ag community.
That this apparatus was built in just eight years, by a man with little in the way of a visible political profile, is a testament to what a few million dollars can do in our current American ideological landscape. And while Lucas may seem like an unlikely political figure, his “all-American” rise, and the obstacles that defined it, go a long way toward explaining the ardor and anger fueling his cause.
While Lucas may seem like an unlikely political figure, his “all-American” rise goes a long way toward explaining the ardor and anger fueling his cause.
At age 76, Lucas has deep brown hair that seems to belie the natural aging process. When he speaks with the press, he tends to wear shirts emblazoned with the Lucas Oil logo of his company, or a race car jersey. He’s the sort of man who’d commission a documentary about his own life — titledAmerican Real: The Forrest Lucas Story— show it at a film festival, and then make it nearly impossible for anyone to view it again. He considers himself an embodiment of the American dream: a boy who, as he tells it, grew up without electricity in rural Indiana but then, over decades of hard work and fair dealings, scraped his way to a multimillion-dollar company.
Born in 1942, Lucas grew up on a farm in Elkinsville, Indiana — living, as he put it, “pretty much like people lived in the 1800s.” “Most people now could only read about that,” he said, “but I got to see the tail end of it. Most people think it’s kind bucolic, but it’s actually a pretty hard way to go.” According to Lucas, when he was 9 years old, he got his start as an entrepreneur by going door-to-door, barefooted, selling a supposed miracle cure called Cloverine Salve.
Lucas was, in many ways, a typical farm kid. He’d wake in the morning to take care of the cows and pigs, go to school, and return home to care for them again. At age 15, he left home to work at a cattle ranch in Harrison County, near the Kentucky state line. He graduated high school, then, as he later put it, “went to a long college called hard knocks.” By age 18, Lucas was a married man with a child — and left the ranching life to make a living for his family, hauling dirt, finding odd construction jobs, selling Singer sewing machines, and working a muffler assembly line at night.
But what Lucas really wanted was a semi. “I’d see these guys going down the road,” he said, “and maybe they were going somewhere. I wanted to get into the truck and go somewhere.” At 21, he pulled together enough money to buy his first semi — the first in what would eventually become a fleet. Two years later, the creek that ran near his childhood farm would be dammed in order to power the nearby city of Bloomington. The entirety of Lucas’s hometown of Elkinton was acquired through eminent domain. His childhood farm was gone, superseded by the needs of those in the city nearby.
Lucas didn’t make his fortune on trucks. He made it on oil additives, created using a “secret formula” that Lucas claims to have discovered almost by accident and which, his company claims, has seemingly miraculous effects on the performance of engines: It reduces wear, lengthens engine life, improves gas mileage, and makes motors run quieter, among other things. Lucas Oil is marketed to car aficionados, gearheads, and truckers with aging rigs.
Getty Images; Alamy
In the ’80s, Lucas Oil began putting its logo on race cars as a means of advertising. The Lucases bought a cattle ranch in Cross Timbers, Missouri, that has grown to 15,000 acres, with over 3,000 cattle. They opened an oil processing plant in Corona, California, and a second one in Corydon, Indiana, where they also purchased the local railroad. In 2011, Lucas acquired a television channel, MAVTV, and filled it with races featuring cars emblazoned with the Lucas Oil logo. “I realized several years ago that people were starting to [skip] commercials,” Lucas told Autoweek. “We needed to be in the TV show itself, more so than just be on the car.”
Lucas began to acquire the entire means of production: He sponsored the cars, he built or bought the tracks, he owned the broadcasting network, and when the production company he’d employed to make commercials went bankrupt, he bought their gear and trained his loading dock employees to operate it, moving to a dilapidated Sunkist factory in Corona. By 2012, at least 700 different racing teams wore the Lucas Oil logo; today, many of those teams have transitioned to wearing the logo for Protect the Harvest. It’s vertical integration, done the Lucas way: first to promote his oil brand, now to promote his ideological one.
Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
“The thing that’s interesting about Lucas — I don’t think anyone realizes what kind of reach he has,” a correspondent for Speed magazine said in 2012. Apart from the racing, Lucas’s name and brand is broadcast into millions of homes every week via nationally televised games at Lucas Oil Stadium. The $121.5 million gambit, which affixes the Lucas Oil name to the stadium where the Indianapolis Colts play until 2028, launched Lucas and his second wife, Charlotte, onto the radar of the Indiana elite. Suddenly, the farm boy was a person to know.
The Indianapolis elite began actively courting his full-time return from California, where he’d been running Lucas Oil for decades. “Forrest would be a big fish in this pond,” then-mayor Bart Peterson told Indianapolis Monthly in 2007. “He would be somebody who would be noticed, because of his roots, and the fact that he’s proud of those roots.” In 2010, the Lucases purchased a sprawling mansion, known as Le Chateau Renaissance, outside of Indianapolis, with the primary intention to use it for fundraisers and benefits. He added a 220,000-square-foot expansion to his Indiana plant, effectively making it the home base for Lucas Oil operations. Seven decades removed from an electricity-less farm in Elkinsville, Indiana, Forrest Lucas had arrived.
Like many who find their fortunes secure, Lucas decided to throw his newfound influence around. He began donating to political figures — to then-governor Pence, but also to multiple representatives in Missouri, where Lucas ran a cattle ranch. It was there, in 2010, that he took on his first major political fight against Missouri’s Proposition B, colloquially known as the “puppy mill bill.” The bill aimed to limit dog breeding facilities to 50 unspayed/unneutered animals, which would effectively eliminate the “puppy mill” industry in the states where such facilities are most concentrated.
“We’ve got to go on the offense. We’ve got to start staking out ag turf.”
For outsiders, regulating dog breeding and preventing abuses might seem like an easy call, but to dog breeders, it felt like a threat to their way of life. The fight over Proposition B became a proxy for a much larger battle, between animal rights activists — and HSUS in particular — and the agricultural industry writ large. Prop B ultimately passed with 51.59% of the vote — only to be overturned by the Missouri legislature. The struggle over Proposition B emboldened Lucas. Together with other ag producers, he constructed a blueprint for a larger organization that would promote the interests of agriculture. “We’ve got to go on the offense,” Erik Helland, then-majority whip of the Iowa House of Representatives, and one of early architects of this organization, said. “We’ve got to start staking out ag turf.”
In 2012, Protect the Harvest filed paperwork with the FEC to create a political action committee known as the Protect the Harvest Action Fund.Brian Klippenstein — the son of a longtime Missouri state senator, who’d spent the previous five years as then-senator Kit Bond’s chief of staff— became the group’s executive director. While Klippenstein comes from a long ranching heritage, he has the polish and hairstyle of someone who’s spent decades rubbing elbows in DC. According to his Protect the Harvest bio, Klippenstein has “completed over 50 marathons, including over a dozen 50-milers and four single-day 100-milers…all fueled by a high-protein diet centered around nutrient-dense red meat.”
Source: Pro Publica Nonprofit Explorer
Protect the Harvest expenditures 2012-2016
Between 2012 and 2016, the latest year for which tax returns are available, Protect the Harvest Action Fund has spent close to $4 million on influence and lobbying activities. (All tax filings are available here.) Since 2012, the vast majority of Protect the Harvest’s PAC money has been directed toward supporting “Right to Farm” legislation and combating initiatives, most of them spearheaded by the HSUS, that Lucas’s group sees as infringing upon agricultural liberty. The language of contemporary Right to Farm amendments guarantees farmers and ranchers the right to engage in their livelihoods and produce food for others. If that sounds vague, it’s purposeful: It’s less intended to address a current threat than future ones. In practice, it helps bolster the feeling that an industry is vulnerable.
You can get a sense of that perceived vulnerability in a post in ranching publication Drovers, written by cattle genetics specialist Jared Wareham: “Our industry has plead [sic] for a way to help block and then counterpunch anti-ag initiatives and the well-funded organizations that spearhead those efforts,” Wareham writes. “It is unnerving to know that if left unmonitored, these groups could lead initiatives to change the laws of a state or influence the language of those laws so something we have done for a living could be unlawful. If these organizations can win battles in one state, it could easily open the door to successes in other states.”
And who happens to be defending the industry from this alleged war? Protect the Harvest, which Wareham describes as “the shield of armor we’ve been looking for.”
Protect The Harvest / Facebook
Protect the Harvest’s first foray into the fray came in Missouri, where it offered broad media support for a 2014 Right to Farm amendment, copied from a 2012 version drafted in North Dakota. For that campaign, Lucas enlisted then–state senator Mike Parson, who is now governor, and to whom Lucas has given more than $175,000 in campaign donations. The two men first connected in 2010, during the campaign against Proposition B. After it passed, Parson, whose district included Lucas’s cattle ranch and one of his speedways, sponsored the legislation that effectively defanged the bill. From 2013 to 2015, Parson served as the treasurer of Protect the Harvest, and when Parson ran for lieutenant governor in 2016, Lucas and his wife campaigned alongside him; after he won, he framed a Protect the Harvest poster in his office.
In North Dakota, the Right to Farm amendment had sailed to an easy victory, winning two-thirds of the vote. But in Missouri, it was hotly contested. One public radio story framed it as pitting “farmer against farmer,” leaving little way for small producers to defend against the incursion and growth of larger ones. Protect the Harvest argued, “Our rights don’t come from government. They are God-given freedoms that come with our humanity. However, bureaucrats and activist judges have made it clear that they will not respect those rights unless they are codified in statutes or constitutions.” Together, both sides spent a total of $1.5 million on messaging. The amendment barely passed, eking out 50.12% of the final vote.
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A version of the amendment then migrated to Oklahoma, where Protect the Harvest was joined in support by the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, and the Oklahoma Pork Council.Their opposition, led by HSUS, the Sierra Club, the ASPCA, and the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, argued that the bill, SQ 777, would make it impossible to act if and when ag polluted or otherwise threatened a water source or the land.
“I work with family farmers from all over the state,” said Adam Price, a representative of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. “And I can say with absolute certainty that SQ 777 was not conceived with them in mind.” The “yes” argument was crystallized in a television ad created by Protect the Harvest: “Have you seen the ads attacking 777? ALL LIES. Paid for by the same out-of-state animal rights groups that oppose the right to hunt and fish.”
In the end, the Yes side lost by 20 points — the first major defeat for the new wave of Right to Farm legislation and Protect the Harvest.Brian Jones, an attorney who spent a year working for the “no” side, links the amendment’s failure to reactivated memory: “Most people in Oklahoma have an agricultural heritage, meaning their grandparents or parents were farmers,” he told BuzzFeed News. “One of the consequences of the industrialization of ag is that fewer and fewer people are involved in it. Most of what is out there, in the market right now, is Big Ag.”
During this same period in the ’90s, there was enormous consolidation in ag production — basically, big farms buying up smaller ones — that marked an end to many farming families’ way of life. “There were some fights about all this back then,” Jones said. “But 777 reraised all these questions: Where did the jobs go? What happened to the people?”
Protect The Harvest / Facebook
In Missouri, Protect the Harvest had effectively mobilized those rural anxieties, papering over the role of larger industrial and legislative forces that had ended that way of life years before. In Oklahoma, that project failed — but their defeat has only served to bolster Protect the Harvest’s argument that outsiders are determined to fight against one’s “right to farm.” (In an email to BuzzFeed News, a spokesman responded to a question about the effects of deregulation on small farms with the following statement: “Protect the Harvest supports all forms of agriculture. Our mission is to educate and inform the public about issues that impact our American traditions, heritage and way of life. There are many overreaching regulations that impact farms, both large and small which ultimately affect the American public as both large and small farms feed our nation.”)
Lucas’s design to “protect” the harvest has largely entailed fighting regulation. Like many conservative operatives, Protect the Harvest views any type of regulation, whether on the hours a long-haul trucker can legally drive or the conditions for raising chickens, as unnecessary and restrictive incursions on free enterprise, but one area of particular interest has been wild horses.
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Back in 2012, Dave Duquette attempted to bring a horse slaughterhouse to his hometown of Hermiston, Oregon, promising much-needed economic stimulus to the area, but local leaders balked at the prospect of the town being equated with a taboo industry. Fast-forward six years, and Duquette is the “equine specialist” for Protect the Harvest.
Duquette, who is rarely without his cowboy hat and a cowboy shirt embroidered with the Protect the Harvest or Lucas Oil logo, has spearheaded Protect the Harvest’s efforts to change the messaging around wild horse management from cruelty to benevolence.
“It was really scary to be targeted by that machine.”
“American wild horses are suffering due to overcrowding, which has led to starvation and death,” the opening to a four-part series on Protect the Harvest’s homepage claims. “We have the opportunity and obligation to protect them from long and painful suffering by controlling their numbers.” A 15-minute PTH-produced video, titled “Horses in Crisis,” features an array of sick and starving horses, as well as ranchers and others condemning “horse advocates” for their lack of knowledge about horses on the range. “It’s time to bring facts, reason, and a special perspective to an issue dominated by emotion,” a solemn-voiced narrator says. The overarching message: Those who deal with wild horses on the land should dictate how to manage horses on the land, and not faraway regulators.
That was Duquette’s message in 2015, when he visited Nevada in support of a rancher named Kevin Borba, who had repeatedly and progressively flouted rules governing the treatment of wild horses on his grazing allotment. Duquette posted a picture of Borba in a Protect the Harvest–branded four-wheeler, out to “document” the “lies” spread by Laura Leigh, who was heading up an experimental fertility control program on the horses. Protect the Harvest created a series of videos framing Borba as a victim of the BLM, whose “mismanagement hurts both the horses and the ranchers whose livelihood are being taken away.” According to Leigh, an initial version of the video, later taken down, included her name, prompting immediate harassment. (Protect the Harvest disputes this claim.) “I was getting a dozen death threats with my morning coffee,” Leigh told BuzzFeed News. “It was really scary to be targeted by that machine.”
George Frey / Getty Images
Wild horses are held in a BLM holding/adoption facility after being rounded up from BLM land in the western United States on June 1, 2017, in Delta, Utah.
Lucas has repeatedly referred to HSUS and animal rights activists as “terrorists” intent on “passing laws to ruin America” that deliberately impugn the small-time farmer’s way of life. Lucas’s political donations and Protect the Harvest’s messaging around ballot initiatives underlined that ideology. But to make those ideologies even more robust and persuasive required something more effective than political ads. They needed propaganda.
Propaganda is anything from a pamphlet to a television program that attempts to make an argument for a particular political stance, whether on the right, left, or center — but much of it can be heavy-handed, simplistic, or misleading. When it comes to agriculture and animal rights issues, both sides of the issue produce propaganda. But only one side has its own film studio.
When Lucas first started producing television programming for his television channel, the focus was vehicles to broaden his company’s name recognition. “We got into the entertainment business to sell oil,” Lucas once said. “And nothing is more entertaining than fast cars, trucks, planes, and boats.” By 2015, his intentions had expanded. “For me, venturing into the film business is not about money, glamour or fun,” Lucas said. “It’s about being able to deliver messages and having a viable vehicle to do so.”
“For me, venturing into the film business is not about money, glamour, or fun. It’s about being able to deliver messages and having a viable vehicle to do so.”
But what sort of “messages” did Lucas want to transmit? Protect the Harvest messages.
Last year’s Pray for Rain, starring Jane Seymour, suggests that corrupt environmentalists, in league with shady gangsters, are prolonging the terrible drought afflicting Central California and threatening the livelihoods of desperate local farmers.Running Wild, also from 2017 and starring Sharon Stone — who also coproduced — depicts a wild horse advocate, whom Laura Leigh believes is loosely based on her, as an evil villain trying to shut down a horse rehabilitation program. The 2016 film The Dog Lover, featuring Lea Thompson, involves a young woman who volunteers with an animal protection group to go undercover at a puppy mill — only to discover that the organization is far more dangerous than the “mill” itself, which, turns out, is actually a kindhearted breeding operation.
ESX films are regularly panned by critics, do not receive theatrical releases, and go straight to video or VOD. But profits, according to Lucas, are secondary. They’re reaching an audience: ag families who don’t feel that their way of life is represented accurately onscreen, and those who may not know a thing about agriculture but will be called upon to vote or think about the issues represented in the films. Watch The Dog Lover, for example, without much understanding of the dog breeding industry, and it’s easy to believe that “puppy mills” are an idea concocted by manipulative animal rights activists who have no idea what they’re talking about.
ESX Entertainment
The feature films are only one arm of Protect the Harvest’s messaging apparatus. Back in 2014, Lucas commissioned a documentary about his life (produced by advertising company MARC USA), which screened at the Heartland Film Festival. (Earlier that month, Lucas’s wife, Charlotte, had drawn national attention for a Facebook post, later deleted, that declared, “I’m sick and tired of minorities running our country! As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think that atheists (minority), muslims (minority) or any other minority group has the right to tell the majority of people in the United States what they can and cannot do here. Is everyone so scared that they can’t fight for what’s right or wrong with this country?”)
The day after the Facebook post, Lucas — who has previously acknowledged that his workforce is largely composed of immigrants — issued a full-page apology in the Indianapolis Star for his wife’s post, explaining that it did not “reflect the feelings in her heart,” and underlining that Lucas Oil “is proud to have employees, friends, customers, and business partners reflecting ethnic and racial diversity.”
Apart from the films, Protect the Harvest maintains a robust Facebook presence: Its page currently has 258,000-plus followersand posts links, petitions, editorials, and memes five or six times a day. The Protect the Harvest website features links to civics workbooks that can be suggested as additions to local curriculum; at the bottom of the first page, a logo declares, “You could be forced to give up your freedom to hunt, fish, and own animals. Learn more at ProtectTheHarvest.com.” For class activities, the workbook suggests observing the judicial branch at work in movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, My Cousin Vinny, or Protect the Harvest’s own The Dog Lover. For kids, there’s a section of downloadable coloring sheets bordered with “PROTECT YOUR PET! PROTECT AMERICA! PROTECT THE HARVEST.COM!”
In Range magazine — an independently owned quarterly publication full of beautiful rural landscapes and essays about how “the U.S. government has inflicted 40 years of abuse on Nevada’s Hage family” — Protect the Harvest now occupies about half of the ad space, promoting Protect the Harvest films and the Hammond pardon. Partnering with Range, Protect the Harvest has helped fund three “Range Rights” conferences — in Layton, Utah; in Bellevue, Nebraska; and in Modesto, California.
The two-day conference was founded in 2015 as a way to harness the energy following the Bundys’ Malheur occupation; attendants include a mix of Malheur devotees and local ranchers. In Modesto this April, the attendance hovered around 40, and half the attendees were speakers themselves — but the real range rights audience was online, where each of the speeches was streamed in full.Rep. Devin Nunes,once part of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, attacked the press; the local sheriff emphasized that his officers knew to look the other way when local ranchers had an unlicensed firearm. The daughter of LaVoy Finicum spoke about the legacy of her father, the rancher who was killed by Oregon State Police in what have become heavily contested circumstances, effectively rendering him a martyr for the Bundy movement. Finally,Ammon Bundy preached the latest chapter in the family’s gospel, emphasizing that environmentalists are “an enemy to humans” practicing their own heretical religion.
The entire event was hosted by Trent Loos, a Nebraska farmer, member of President Trump’s Agricultural Advisory Committee, and one of Protect the Harvest’s most visible activists, united with Lucas in his fierce opposition to HSUS. (When HSUS began using Michael Vick’s role in dogfighting and other forms of animal abuse to make the case for tougher legislation, Loos wrote that Vick was being persecuted for “not ... treating his dog like a kid.”) With his bushy mustache and ranching vest, Loos — who pleaded no contest in 2005 to charges of cattle fraud — looks the part of the cowboy, and will play one in a forthcoming PTH film.In Modesto, Loos took the stage with Nunes. “As a member of the ag committee, we have a certain level of frustration that we haven’t drained the swamp quicker, that we still have old-school bureaucrats in the positions of decision-making,” he said. “So how do we get that fixed? Because obviously there’s a bigger plug in the swamp than anticipated.”
Juice Images Ltd / Getty Images
At that point, Protect the Harvest had been working to “unplug” the swamp for well over a year. When journalist Michael Lewis began investigating the transition officials appointed by the Trump administration, he zeroed in on Brian Klippenstein’s USDA role. In an interview with Fresh Air, Lewis described Protect the Harvest as an organization that sees its job “as essentially trolling the Humane Society,” and is “hypersensitive to animal rights people and tries to respond to animal rights activists wherever it can.” USDA employees found Klippenstein’s appointment odd because, as Lewis put it, “one of the things the USDA does is stand up for the rights of animals in animal-people disputes.”
Dogfighting, circuses, animal slaughter, animal testing — the USDA is charged with documenting and monitoring those operations. In the subsequent weeks, Klippenstein alone took on the responsibilities of a transition team that usually would’ve been entrusted to a team of at least 20. Through his briefings, he became intent on figuring out which of the existing Department of Agriculture employees had been researching climate change and its ramifications.
The request was denied, but Klippenstein made his mark in other ways. He now serves as a senior adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, who has overseen the removal of USDA documents detailing past animal inspections, enforcement actions, and annual reports on 7,800 different facilities. The removal was prompted by a lawsuit, filed during the Obama administration, alleging that a report identifying Tennessee walking horse owners as “violators” of anti-soring regulations impinged on their rights to due process and privacy. To address the suit, Perdue has removed all records.
According to Duquette, Lucas first brought up the idea of a pardon to then-governor Pence before Trump’s election.
The move was celebrated by Tennessee walking horse groups, but it has broader beneficiaries: practitioners of industrial agriculture, whose husbandry, living, and slaughter practices are also monitored by the USDA. The lack of publicly accessible monitoring records will make it increasingly difficult to prosecute, legislate, or otherwise regulate current agricultural practices.
“We’re lucky with the things this administration has been doing,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News. “It’s been really good to deal with, and find problems to fix. That’s probably been the best thing to happen for animal agriculture, the pet industry, and the food supply.”
This sort of access and influence helps explain how the Hammonds’ appeal made its way to President Trump’s desk. According to Duquette, Lucas first brought up the idea of a pardon to then-governor Pence before Trump’s election. When Lucas and Pence had dinner in May, Lucas brought up the case again, making the argument for a commuted sentence. Soon after, the case was moved to the office of Pence’s chief counsel.
“You know, it’s ‘a squeaky wheel gets the grease’ deal,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News. “And I know the president needs help from people to highlight injustices.” Since late May, Protect the Harvest’s social media accounts have been in overdrive eliciting popular support for the Hammonds’ cause. Protect the Harvest has also moved to distance itself and their cause from the Bundys, who’ve been grouped with the Hammonds since the days of the standoff.
Indeed, Duquette believes that if the Malheur occupation hadn’t happened, the Hammonds would’ve been pardoned long ago. “I don’t disagree with [the Bundys’] issues, but the tactics are...” he said, pausing for a moment. “I understand the tactics because of their frustration with what they’ve had to deal with over the years.”
During the occupation, Duquette and Trent Loos posed for a photo with Ammon Bundy;while a representative from Protect the Harvest has denied offering material support to the occupiers, Todd Macfarlane — a lawyer, Bundy supporter, and standoff spokesperson — blogged that Protect the Harvest had made “its people, resources and checkbook available.” Protect the Harvest counters that a representative “went to Malheur Refuge one week into the occupation to do an interview with Ammon Bundy.”
But as the Hammond petition made its way to the White House, Duquette told BuzzFeed News that he called Ammon Bundy to let him know that Protect the Harvest would be publicly distancing itself from the Bundy family. Still, the Bundys threw themselves behind the pardon petition, posting multiple links to it. When the news was announced, the Bundy Ranch Facebook page’s post alluded to the connection: “Thank you @POTUS for carrying out justice and pardoning Oregon ranchers Dwight & Steven Hammond. Many ranchers in the West have suffered under the heavy hand of the federal government. These men are great patriots.”
Pardoning the Hammonds suggests not only that this particular case was mistreated, but that fears of government are warranted.
Duquette acknowledges that a Hammond pardon will be treated as a win for the Bundys and their supporters. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, he said. “The president would have an outpouring of support in the West, and throughout the Midwest, from all the people that are his base for doing this. It would show a good sign of goodwill for all the people out there.”
To pardon the Hammonds is to ratify that their case, like so much of what Protect the Harvest lobbies against, is an example of federal overreach — engineered by ignorant outsiders who resent and misunderstand the people who make American life possible. As Montana Rep. Greg Gianforte phrased it in a public statement, “President Trump’s decision to pardon Dwight and Steven Hammond is a win for property rights and our way of life.”
But like so many of the issues on which Protect the Harvest’s advocacy pivots, the reality is far less stark. The Hammonds were sentenced for committing arson on federal land. An appeals court vacated that sentence because it did not satisfy the mandatory minimum sentencing requirements, and resentenced them for the mandatory minimum for that crime. Apart from the back-burning, the Hammonds have a long history of taunting BLM management and flouting their regulation. Like the Bundys, the Hammonds have long believed that the federal, public land they pay pennies on the dollar to graze should be considered their own, to manage as they please — including setting fires. The federal government, at least for the time being, disagrees.
Pardoning the Hammonds suggests not only that this particular case was mistreated, but that fears of government overreach are warranted — and that Trump will continue to act in a way that acknowledges those fears.
[Protesters on horseback ride above a rally site in Bunkerville, Nevada, April 12, 2014.
All over ag country, Oregon to Arkansas, small schools are closing their doors. Part of the reason is that the consolidation of agriculture — larger farms gobbling up smaller ones to stay alive — has made it impossible for those onetime small farmers to remain. The population of the small town dwindles, and the schools close, which makes it even less desirable for others to move to that town, provide services, attract jobs, or maintain the “way of life” associated with rural America.
When you look at the Protect the Harvest logo, you don’t see a family. You don’t see a way of life. You don’t see a person at all. You see a combine harvester — one of the primary advances in farming technology that led the agricultural industry to the place it is today. “All of their imagery is of big, beautiful tractors churning through a commodity crop, essentially dripping Lucas Oil,” Ryan Bell, a journalist and close observer of fights around the agricultural way of life, told BuzzFeed News.
Protect the Harvest and Lucas Oil logos are displayed at Dover International Speedway on May 6, 2018, in Dover, Delaware.
“But that tractor, that’s what took the community away from ranching. It undercuts a long-term, sustainable agrarian society,” he said. “There’s no need for a big family to work the farm, and no need for the family you have to stick around. Today, a man might have a thousand acres of corn, and he’s tilling it all alone with a $250,000 combine. His kid’s gone. And oddly enough, this is exactly the type of person who’s pretty susceptible to Protect the Harvest rhetoric.”
There are dozens of intersecting reasons for the end of the agrarian way of life. Some of them stem from bad legislation, improper federal regulation, and advocacy from groups with little sense of the larger effects of a disruption in the food chain. There is an impending food crisis in the world’s future. To solve it, however — while also preserving the Earth long enough for our descendants to confront that crisis — all sides of the issue need to spend less time creating bogeymen of the others; less time on “offense” or “defense.”
The production of food may be an industry, but it’s not a game. Whether in the form of government subsidies or a vaunted position within the American imaginary, the harvest has been protected for centuries.
Taken separately, Protect the Harvest’s initiatives — the feature films, the fight against HSUS, the move to root out those studying global warming, the Right to Farm advocacy, the Hammond pardon — none of it seems, on its face, like a means of protecting business interests. It’s only when examined together, as part of a larger, motivating whole, that Lucas’s actual passion becomes clear. It’s not the small-time farmer. It’s certainly not the harvest. It’s not dogs, or hunting, or horses. Forrest Lucas prides himself on his identity as an all-American man. And nothing is more all-American than unfettered industry, and the profits that flow from it.
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in Missoula, Montana.
Contact Anne Helen Petersen at anne.helen.petersen@buzzfeed.com.
Ken Bensinger
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Contact Ken Bensinger at ken.bensinger@buzzfeed.com.
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The impact of agriculture on climate change is significant. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the agriculture sector is responsible for 10 percent of the total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, after transportation (29 percent), electricity production (25 percent), industry (23 percent), and commercial and residential usage (13 percent).However, according to Peter Lehner, managing attorney for EarthJustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm, the EPA estimate is "almost certainly significantly quite low."
Lehner argues that most analyses exclude five unique sources of emissions from the farming sector: soil carbon (carbon released during the disturbance of soil), lost sequestration (carbon that would still be sequestered in the ground had that land not been converted into farmland), input footprints (carbon footprint for products used in agriculture, like the manufacturing of fertilizer), difficult measurements (it is harder to measure the carbon emissions of biological systems like agriculture than it is to measure the emissions of other industries that are not biological, like transportation), and potent gases (like methane and nitrous oxide).
Regarding that last source: Focusing on carbon dioxide as the main greenhouse gas often ignores powerful planet-warming gases that are emitted by agriculture and that are even more potent than carbon dioxide. Methane, which is emitted by the burps and farts of ruminants like cows and sheep, has up to 86 times more global warming potential over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide (and also impacts public health, particularly in frontline communities). Nitrous oxide, a byproduct of fertilizer runoff, has 300 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide (and also harms plants and animals).
"Most other studies, including by the [United Nations (UN)] and others, say that agriculture contributes much closer to 15 or 20 percent or more of world greenhouse gas emissions," Lehner points out.
Disappointingly, agriculture was not a central topic of discussion at COP26, the international climate summit that recently concluded in Glasgow, Scotland. "Despite [the] huge impact to ecological systems and climate," writes Suzannah Gerber, a nutrition scientist and fellow of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture—a research agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture—"specific high-level talks about agriculture comprised less than 5 percent of all official negotiations and less than 10 percent of side events, favoring the less controversial topic of renewable energy."
And while renewable energy supporters cheered the fact that the Glasgow Climate Pact is the first UN climate agreement to explicitly mention "coal" and "fossil fuels"—something that the fossil fuel industry fought hard against in previous summits, and that China and India managed to water down in the current agreement—the pact makes no mention of the words "agriculture" or "food."
Meat Is Murder—for Animals and the Environment
Forests continue to be clear-cut to make room for farms, such as factory farms—which supply humans' appetite for meat—and plantations that produce the world's most used vegetable oil: palm oil. And while deforestation and methane emissions were main topics at COP26 (resulting in pledges to reduce both), agriculture—which is intimately linked to deforestation and land-use change—was relegated to a sideline topic. "Unlike forest, finance and transport—that got the feted 'title of a day' at … [COP26]—agriculture was taken up as part of 'Nature Day' on a Saturday," reported Richard Mahapatra for Down to Earth. "Outside the venue, thousands protested against a gamut of things, including step-motherly treatment to food systems that have been a major source of greenhouse gas… emissions."
Within agriculture, producing meat is the main climate problem: Plant-based foods account for 29 percent of the global food production greenhouse gas emissions, while animal-based food accounts for almost twice as much—57 percent—with beef being the main contributor. "Every bite of burger boosts harmful greenhouse gases," said the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). "Research shows that if cows were a nation, they would be the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter," according to UNEP. "As humans, meat production is one of the most destructive ways in which we leave our footprint on the planet."
And many, many more human footprints are on the way. By 2050, the human population is expected to reach a staggering 9.9 billion people. (Today, there are 7.7 billion people on the planet; just 50 years ago, the global population was less than half that number.) To ensure global food security in 2050, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said that food production must increase by 60 percent.
A More Sustainable Future Is Plant-Powered
Animal-based agriculture is ultimately a poor way to feed a skyrocketing human population. "Farming animals is notoriously inefficient and wasteful when compared to growing plants to feed humans directly, with the end result that 'livestock' animals take drastically more food from the global food supply than they provide," writes Ashley Capps, a researcher specializing in farmed animal welfare for A Well-Fed World, an international food security organization advocating for the transition to plant-based agriculture.
"This is because in order to eat farmed animals, we have to grow the crops necessary to feed them, which amounts to vastly more crops than it would take to feed humans directly," writes Capps. "To give one example, it takes 25 pounds of grain to yield just one pound of beef—while crops such as soy and lentils produce, pound for pound, as much protein as beef, and sometimes more."
Switching to plant-based agriculture would help prevent food shortages, hunger and even famine at a time when climate change is creating food insecurity across the globe. Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, had warned during the Saudi Green Initiative Forum on October 24 that failure to stem the climate crisis "would mean less food, so probably a crisis in food security."
A Well-Fed World points out that "[c]limate change is a hunger risk multiplier, with 20 percent more people projected to be at risk of hunger by 2050 due to extreme weather events. Unfortunately, the world's most food insecure populations are also those disproportionately harmed by climate-related events, including increased heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis and flooding."
Climate, Conflict and COVID-19: A Perfect Storm
"A perfect storm of conflict, climate crises, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising costs for reaching people in need is causing a seismic hunger crisis," warns the World Food Program, the food assistance branch of the UN. The agency has recently launched a public appeal to the world's billionaires to donate $6.6 billion to save 42 million people across 43 countries from famine.
"Concurrently replacing all animal-based items in the U.S. diet with plant-based alternatives will add enough food to feed, in full, 350 million additional people, well above the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food waste," according to a 2018 study by an international team of researchers published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The authors note that the results of their study "highlight the importance of dietary shifts to improving food availability and security."
The dietary shift from meat to plants is something that UNEP has underscored as a way to combat climate change and increase the efficiency of our food system. In their Emissions Gap Report 2021, the agency noted that—in addition to switching from the combustion of natural gas to renewables—"behavioral changes such as reduced consumption of cattle-based foods and reduced food waste and loss" present a significant opportunity to reduce methane emissions. "[F]ast methane action, as opposed to slower or delayed action, can contribute greatly to reducing midterm (2050) temperatures," the report states.
COP26's Missed Opportunity
In many ways, this behavioral change is already underway, as veganism is on the rise. "It can be difficult to get an accurate picture of how many vegans there are in the U.S., but one survey found a 300 percent increase in vegans between 2004 and 2019, amounting to about 3 percent of the total population or nearly 10 million people," notes Sentient Media, a nonprofit animal rights journalism organization. Still, even though there has been a steady increase in plant-based diets, meat consumption is hitting record levels, aided by carnivores in low- and middle-income countries where incomes are on the rise, like India and China.
Considering the growing interest in plant-based eating, the COP26 negotiators missed an opportunity to make dietary and agricultural changes a main thrust of the global climate solution. "Without positions and main messages from COP26 leadership, the need to address the climate change contributions from diet will not be able to gain ground," writes Gerber. In the UN-managed "Blue Zone" at the Glasgow Science Center, for example, while COP26 attendees were presented with mainly animal-based food choices, only 38 percent of the menu was plant-based, as opposed to the earlier promise of ensuring "50 percent plant-based offerings within the Blue Zone."
In order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels (which will help avoid the worst impacts of climate change), the world must achieve net zero emissions by 2050. To meet this goal, the COP26 organizers listed four distinct strategies: accelerate the phase-out of coal; curtail deforestation; speed up the switch to electric vehicles, and encourage investment in renewables.
They would have done well to add a fifth: transition the world to a plant-based diet.
prolly shd call it agriCHEMbiz
"Big 6" pesticide and GMO corporations are BASF, Bayer, Dupont, Dow Chemical Company, Monsanto, and Syngenta. They are so called because they dominate the agricultural input market -- that is, they own the world’s seed, pesticide and biotechnology industries.[1][2]
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), corporate concentration of the agricultural input market "has far-reaching implications for global food security, as the privatization and patenting of agricultural innovation (gene traits, transformation technologies and seed germplasm) has been supplanting traditional agricultural understandings of seed, farmers' rights, and breeders' rights."[3]
For more information, see the Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA) resource here.
raga pacific legal? takings? david bacon kpfa
https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/06/supreme-court-california-farmworker-unions-property-rights/
no lnx
Supreme Court limits California union recruiting in favor of property rights
BY KATE CIMINI JUNE 23, 2021UPDATED JUNE 24, 2021
Crew workers carry picking ladders over unsold citrus in a field near Rocky Hill Drive and Spruce Road in Exeter on Monday, June 14, 2021. Ron Holman / Visalia Times-Delta
IN SUMMARY
Commercial growers celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision in Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid, but farmworker unions say this will make it harder for them to access workers and advocate for their rights.
In a blow to labor, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a decades-old California rule inspired by César Chávez that allowed union organizers to meet with farmworkers at their place of work. Commercial growers applauded the conservative court’s ruling to uphold property rights while union representatives vowed not to be deterred.
Two agricultural producers filed suit after organizers with the United Farm Workers sought to access their property to speak with farmworkers. The plaintiffs in Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid, Cedar Point Nursery and Fowler Packing Company, argued the California regulation requiring them to provide access up to three hours a day, 120 days a year was unconstitutional and unnecessary.
Dorris-based Cedar Point Nursery grows strawberry plants for commercial growers near the Oregon border; Fowler Packing Company in Fresno ships grapes and citrus.
Today’s 6-3 ruling fell along ideological lines, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority agreeing with the growers. They held that the access regulations allowed “physical invasion” of the land without compensation.
While growers celebrated the decision, labor activists say it will now be harder to access workers and advocate for their rights. As the decision was announced they vowed it won’t stop them from growing their ranks.
Win for property rights, loss for farmworker unions
Monterey County Farm Bureau Executive Director Norm Groot, who runs the private nonprofit association of farmers and ranchers on California’s Central Coast, characterized the court’s decision as a big win for ag, landowners and farm operations.
Groot said the decision championed property rights while prioritizing private farm operation security and food safety.
“It’s good for food safety that you don’t have visitors making incursions into fields to talk to employees while they’re on break, at lunch or working,” he said.
The Western Growers’ Association, a private organizationthat advocates for produce farmers in California, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, also applauded the decision, calling it a “simple property rights case” and union organizers “trespassers.”
Not all California farmers are impacted by the decision.
John D’Arrigo, CEO of D’Arrigo Brothers in Salinas, said the Supreme Court decision wouldn’t change the way he works with the United Farm Workers (UFW). The company sells produce under the brand name Andy Boy.
His workers have been unionized through the organization for about 40 years. The contracts explicitly allow union reps access to the property and the farmworkers.
“We haven’t really had a problem at all because we’re used to it,” D’Arrigo said. “We’ve got a system, everybody understands the rules, and, quite frankly, we’ve been getting along famously with the UFW for many years, now.
“If you don’t have a contract and aren’t used to (organizers accessing your property), I could see it upsetting people. But for us, it’s a way of life,” he said.
Labor organizers absorbed the blow and said that the decision wouldn’t stop them from working with farmworkers.
UFW Vice President Lauro Barajas was disappointed to hear the Supreme Court had ruled against labor, but not frustrated.
“There’s always something that inspires or pushes us to continue our work,” he said. “The frustration is like giving up, and we can’t give up.”
Barajas said the Supreme Court decision favored growers, who he said historically have had all the power in the employer-worker relationship. The recent ruling, he said, gives growers even more power.
“It’s not good news, but normally we don’t live with good news,” Barajas said.
Union rule stems back to farm labor movement
Agricultural employees working on farms have been excluded from federal labor law since 1935.
Following efforts by Chávez and other farm labor leaders, California created the 1975 California Agricultural Labor Relations Act. Among other things, the regulation allowed organizers to access farmer property a maximum of three hours a day, 120 days a year, in order to speak with their employees and drum up support for unionization.
Businesses are supposed to be notified before organizers arrive, and organizers are then allowed to come during nonwork times such as lunch and before and after work. It is rare that organizers use the regulation –– California said organizers took advantage of it just five times in the 2019-2020 budget year and 24 times the prior year.
Cedar Point Nursery and Fowler Packing Company challenged the regulation as unconstitutional and outdated, given that unions can now reach workers in many ways, including smartphones and radio.
The UFW told the justices that the regulation is more necessary now than ever. The union said farmworkers are increasingly indigenous workers from Mexico and the only effective way to communicate with them is in-person, at their job sites, as many don’t have cell phones and speak only indigenous languages.
“A lot of these workers are living in labor camps owned by the employer, are transported to and from their worksites and these folks are isolated,” UFW Director of Strategic Campaigns Elizabeth Strater said. “They never leave their employers’ property. In some instances, they are isolated by design.”
Implications of Supreme Court ruling for property rights
The access regulation is unique to California. But unions and others had argued that ruling for the businesses could threaten regulations that allow the government to access private property to conduct workplace health and safety inspections, among other things.
Calling the farm labor system racist and unequal, Strater said she found it ironic “that Supreme Court justices who pride themselves on supporting local and state rules over federal rules have decided that farmworkers should lose under both.
“The Supreme Court has failed to balance a farmer’s property rights with a farmworker’s human rights,” she said.
During March court arguments heard by telephone, the Associated Press reported Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the court had decades ago considered how to balance the rights of unions and property owners. The court concluded that there could be “no access unless you can show that there are no alternative means of communication that exists,” he said.
The ruling is the latest hit to unions by the court under Roberts.
In 2018, the court’s conservative majority overturned a 41-year-old pro-union decision that allowed states to require that public employees pay some fees to unions that represent them, even if the workers choose not to join.
Still, it’s unclear how much will change as a result of the court’s ruling.
Michael Droke, a senior partner at law firm Dorsey & Whitney in its Food and Agriculture group, advises California agriculture corporations and co-ops. He suggested agricultural employers review policies and practices regarding on-farm access, and clearly mark their property, in order to ensure they can establish property lines for purposes of union access.
“Unions are still allowed to contact employers off the grower’s premises,” he said. “It is often easy to see where the grower’s employees are located, because employee cars are parked at the side of the field. However, bussing workers to the job site may create wage and hour risk under generally-applicable California law.”
For the record, this story has been updated to correct Norm Groot’s title with the Monterey County Farm Bureau.
This article is part of the California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequality and economic survival in California.
GG
https://theintercept.com/2020/10/10/new-documents-reveal-how-the-animal-agriculture-industry-surveils-and-punishes-critics/
ANIMAL AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY GROUPS defending factory farms engage incampaigns of surveillance, reputation destruction, and other forms of retaliation against industry critics and animal rights activists, documents obtained through aFOIA request from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveal. That the USDA possesses these emails and other documents demonstrates the federal government’s knowledge of, if not participation in, these industry campaigns.
These documents detail ongoing monitoring of the social media of news outlets, including The Intercept,which report critically on factory farms. They reveal private surveillance activities aimed at animal rights groups and their members. They include discussions of how to create a climate of intimidation for activists who work against industry abuses, including by photographing the activists and publishing the photos online. And they describe a coordinated ostracization campaign that specifically targets veterinarians who criticize industry practices, out of concern that veterinarians are uniquely well-positioned to persuasively and powerfully denounce industry abuses.
One of the industry groups central to these activities is the Animal Agriculture Alliance, which represents factory farms and other animal agriculture companies — or, as they playfully put it, they work for corporations “involved in getting food from the farm to our forks!” The groupboasts that one of its prime functions is “Monitoring Activism,” by which they mean: “We identify emerging threats and provide insightful resources on animal rights and other activist groups by attending their events, monitoring traditional and social media and engaging our national network."
[ Agriculture Alliance website]
- Indeed, the Alliance frequently monitors and infiltrates conferences of industry critics and activists, then provides reports to their corporate members on what was discussed. As The Intercept previously noted when reporting on**felony charges**brought against animal rights activists with Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, for peaceful filming and symbolic animal rescues inside one Utah farm that supplies Whole Foods and another owned by Smithfield — an action that showed how wildly at odds with reality is the bucolic branding of those farms — the Animal Agriculture Alliance issued a statement denouncing the activists for (ironically) harming their animals and urging law enforcement and “policymakers” to intervene on behalf of the industry against the activists.
In the emails obtained by the FOIA request, the Alliance and its allies frequently encourage their members to alert the FBI and Department of Homeland Security regarding actions by activists. In response to a project by DxE to create a map tracking factory farms, Lyle Orwig — chair of the agricultural company Charleston/Orwig, Inc. and a member of the Alliance board — proposed the retaliatory step of “taking photos of every DXE [sic] member” and posting them to the internet while accusing them of being “opposed to feeding the hungry.”...
[pigs suffocate covid surplus, she objected]
What alarmed Dr. Heath most was the emergence online of anonymous flyers which contained a “BEWARE” warning at the top, along with her photo and a string of accusations, some of which were false, that claimedshe harbors “an agenda that doesn’t include anything positive for our profession” and “expresses fondness” for “domestic terrorist organizations.” It warned that even allowing her access to the social media pages of veterinarians could be dangerous, and thus urged that she be blocked from all online forums, personal profiles, and social media groups....
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Turns out letting ‘efficient’ monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea
Claire Kelloway / Washington Monthly
For many Americans, grocery shopping has become an intensely stressful experience. To maintain social distancing, people must queue before entering stores. Once inside, they must scramble to find increasingly scarce…
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/donald-trumps-war-on-food/
no lnx
Donald Trump’s war on food
Written by Ali Noorani / Washington Monthly March 6, 2020
President Donald Trump’s approach to immigration policy—particularly to legal immigration–stands in between you and your favorite burger.
Last year, the administration announced the United States would resettle a maximum of 18,000 refugees over the course of fiscal year 2020, the lowest limit since the program started four decades ago and a 40 percent drop from 2019. Then, in January, the administration expanded the travel ban to suspend immigrant visas for people from Eritrea, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, and Nigeria, and to restrict diversity visas for citizens of Sudan and Tanzania.
These actions—coupled with myriad other moves to build a “virtual wall” that keeps newcomers out of the country — will intensify an already significant drop in legal immigration: 940,877 people obtained lawful permanent residence in fiscal year 2018, compared to 1,063,280 in fiscal year 2016, an 11.5 percent decrease.
So, what do hamburgers have to do with this? A lot, it turns out.
More often than not, immigrants are the conduit between the lettuce in the field, the cow in the pasture, and that burger on your plate.They are crucial contributors on farms in California and Idaho, and in beef-processing factories in Nebraska. In many cases, they’re the ones picking, processing, and preparing your food, and ultimately delivering it to your table. In fact, almost three-quarters of farmworkers are foreign-born. Half of the workers on dairy farms are immigrants—another important consideration if you like cheese on your patty.
Earlier this year, I was in Storm Lake, Iowa—population 13,000. I had the opportunity to sit with staff at the Tyson plant that processes pigs for markets around the world. One of the workers, Abel Saengchanpheng, came there as a Laotian refugee and was born in a camp in Thailand. Along with his Hispanic, Asian, African, and white co-workers, Abel makes Storm Lake—a town where 29 percent of residents are foreign-born—a stronger community. Downtown Storm Lake thrives because of Latino-owned stores like the Better Day Café and, as a result, local leadership addresses the best of all problems facing rural America: growth. If you take immigrants and their families out of the equation, the town starts to suffer.
Case in point: Look at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Perry, Iowa—population 7,500. Once a thriving workplace, it might not meet demand now due to a shortage of available workers, according to local press reports. Refugees from Eritrea and Myanmar—two countries included in Trump’s new entry ban—are frequent hires at Tyson’s Perry plant. Of the 1,368 workers Tyson employs there, 800 arrived as refugees.
In essence, we see a tale of two towns in rural America, putting food on our tables: One is thriving because of a diversity of foreign-born labor. The other town is worried about its future because its pipeline of foreign-born talent has been shut down by the Trump administration.
In Iowa alone, refugee- and immigrant-owned businesses contribute $4 billion to the state every year, and immigrant households pay nearly $522 million in local and state taxes. These hardworking people in the meatpacking, agricultural, manufacturing, and other industries stem the tide of population loss, keeping communities afloat, and add to the cultural vitality of Iowa and other states.
That matters right now, as cities attract more and more people from the heartland—hastening a demographic crisis in rural America. For instance, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested dozens of undocumented immigrants in 2018, companies are struggling to hire. Two states away, in Indiana, immigrants are responsible for 25 percent of the state’s population growth since 2000.
In short, the strength and dynamism that immigrants and refugees bring to rural America—and our agricultural sector—is at risk.
Which brings us back to your hamburger.
A new MSNBC Show, “What’s Eating America”—executive produced by chef and humanitarian José Andrés—explores “immigration, the food industry, and more by examining the stories of people working to raise, process, and harvest what we eat.” As Andrés explains, many Americans, including our president, don’t seem to understand that immigrants and refugees are integral to our food system.
Every time Trump takes action to limit immigration or makes a derogatory comment about immigrants, farm owners and CEOs at food processing plants hear the message. They prepare for a shrinking workforce, lowered production targets, and slimmer profits.
The reality, however, is what President Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, recently admitted: Our country is “desperate” for immigrants to “fuel economic growth.” When it comes to the food we eat, immigrants aren’t a part of the equation in the United States—they are the equation.
Ali Noorani is the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, host of the Only In America podcast, and author of There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration.
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madrid
https://www.ecowatch.com/us-growers-defend-large-scale-farming-2641596692.html
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-monopolization-of-milk/
no lnx
The monopolization of milk
Written by Claire Kelloway / Washington Monthly November 21, 2019
Earlier this year, both The New York Times and National Public Radio reported that Chinese retaliatory tariffs in Trump’s trade war were accelerating the loss of U.S. dairy farms. In the first half of 2019, dairy exports to China were down 54 percent from the previous year, at a time when dairy farmers rely on exports to market a surplus of milk that’s driven milk prices below most farmers’ break-even point for nearly four years.
Meanwhile, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture has told dairy farmers that the only way to stay afloat in these tough times is to get big, or get out, while promising new markets for U.S. dairy products in the yet-to-be-ratified U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement.
These declarations reflect a powerful conventional wisdom about the plight of America’s farmers, namely, that agricultural consolidation is inevitable, and that American farmers must export their way to profitability. But that conventional wisdom, which is shared even by some leading voices in the Democratic Party, is seriously out of focus. Although trariffs and technology play a role, they are hardly the main factors in the dairy crisis.
One critical reason dairy farms feel pressure to consolidate is because milk retailers, buyers, and, processors have spent years consolidating around them—and neither the Trump nor previous administrations have done much to stop it. Now, a merger between major milk monopolists threatens to deal another blow to ailing dairy farmers, and its not clear if federal enforcers will do anything to stop it.
Last week, America’s largest dairy processor, Dean Foods, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced that it was in advanced talks to sell to America’s largest cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA). These two goliaths are a case study in how unchecked mergers beget abusive monopolies that harm both farmers and consumers. But because Dean has filed for bankruptcy, this otherwise questionable union could avoid antitrust scrutiny under the failing firm defense, which allows for mergers when one firm would otherwise go out of business. In other words, two monopolists may soon join forces to create an even bigger monopoly.
DFA is the amalgamate of a three-way cooperative merger in late 1997 and Dean Foods rose to prominence by buying up regional milk brands since the 1980s. Today, DFA has a near monopoly in many regional markets, and controls roughly 30 percent of all raw milk in the U.S., handling more than two and a half times as much milk as the next largest co-op. At the same time, Dean sells 12 percent of all fluid milk and claimed to be five times larger than its next competitor in 2013.
As detailed by Leah Douglas in the Washington Monthly last year, these giants have been accused of colluding against the interest of dairy farmers and consumers for years. Two groups of farmers have settled multi-million-dollar antitrust claims with DFA, and another has spun-off a case to seek more damages in court. On the consumer end, Dean Foods reached an antitrust settlement with grocery chain Food Lion in 2017 over allegations thatthe firm avoided competing with DFA-owned National Dairy Holdings to raise retail milk prices.
A Dean Foods-DFA merger would make this otherwise illegal collusion perfectly legal, since our antitrust laws permit collusion once it occurs within a single corporation. “The more DFA expands downstream into fluid milk processing the greater the leverage it’s going to have in a variety of ways,” Peter Carstensen, a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School and former Department of Justice antitrust attorney, told me. So-called “‘tacit’coordination becomes much more possible because … that will be an internal corporate [decision].”
The merger means that dairy farmers have even fewer processors competing to buy their milk. “As a producer, I’m concerned about DFA making this large a purchase,” said Charles Untz, a farmer and former DFA board member. “It puts a lot of the control of the fluid market in the hands of one co-op. That sends a little fear as far as the milk price goes, because they can literally dictate what they pay for milk.”...
https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-admin-repeals-protections-for-smaller-streams-and-wetlands-2640338564.html
Trump Admin Repeals Obama-Era Clean Water Protections
Olivia Rosane Sep. 13, 2019
The Trump administration repealed the 2015 Clean Water Rule rule Thursday, a rule intended to protect 60 percent of the nation's waterways from pollution,The New York Times reported.
At stake is the definition of "waters of the United States" under the Clean Water Act. The Obama-era rule expanded that definition from larger bodies of water to include streams and wetlands. Thursday's repeal will return the country to more-limited 1986 water-protection standards, The Washington Post reported. The administration will also announce a new definition within months.
"Today, EPA and the Department of the Army finalized a rule to repeal the previous administration's overreach in the federal regulation of U.S. waters and recodify the longstanding and familiar regulatory text that previously existed," Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a press release. "Today's Step 1 action fulfills a key promise of President Trump and sets the stage for Step 2—a new WOTUS definition that will provide greater regulatory certainty for farmers, landowners, home builders, and developers nationwide."
Because court rulings have suspended the rule in 28 states, while keeping it in place in 22 others, Wheeler argued that a new rule would provide regulatory certainty across the board.
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"We want to make sure that we have a definition that once and for all will be the law of the land in all 50 states," Wheeler told The Washington Post.
But environmental advocates say the repeal will endanger wetland wildlife and national drinking water.
"By throwing out the Clean Water Rule, Andrew Wheeler is acting like the former coal lobbyist that he is, putting the drinking water for one in every three Americans at risk just so he can placate corporate polluters who don't want to be held accountable," Dalal Aboulhosn, Sierra Club's Deputy Legislative Director for Land and Water, said in a statement provided to EcoWatch. "We will fight Wheeler's rollback to not only protect our communities from dangerous water pollution, but also restore order and common sense as to how we go about protecting our water in the future."
Wheeler made the announcement at the headquarters of the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the industry groups that opposed the Clean Water Rule.Critics argued it gave the federal government too much power over the actions of developers and farmers. Farmers were prohibited from planting certain crops near streams or wetlands, or using certain pesticides without an EPA permit, The New York Times explained.
"When you take private property rights from a man who's worked all his life," American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall told The New York Times, "that is very intrusive to him and it's something he just can't stand for."
President Donald Trump singled it out for repeal in a Feb. 2017 executive order, in which the President asked the EPA to start a review process that would lead to "the elimination of this very destructive and horrible rule," The Washington Post explained.
Its repeal means that farmers, developers or landowners will no longer need a permit to pollute the streams and wetlands now excluded from protection,according to The New York Times. When finalized, the new Waters of the United States definition is likely to include streams that feed into larger bodies of water and wetlands directly adjacent to them, but exclude streams that run only during rainfall or wetlands not directly connected to larger waterways.
But the 2015 rule was based on a review of 1,200 scientific studies that showed how important these streams and wetlands are to downstream waters, according to The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
"The Trump administration's wild-eyed attempts to reward polluters knows no bounds, so it is repealing these important protections without regard for the law or sound science," NRDC Director of Federal Water Policy Jon Devine said.
The Clean Water Rule repeal is the latest in a growing number of environmental rollbacks initiated by the Trump administration. Others include the repeals of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan and tailpipe emissions standards. Wheeler said Thursday that the Trump EPA had finalized 46 deregulatory actions, and that an additional 45 were in the works, NPR reported.
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919 AN
White House officials are balking at the ballooning cost of Trump’s botched farm bailout: report
Donald Trump’s trade war with China has so devastated American farmers that the administration’s bailout to try ease their pain has ballooned to an epic $28 billion, and now even some…
:{Majority of top newspapers in agricultural producing states fail to mention UN climate and land report on their front pages:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:
We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report
Cutting carbon from transport and energy ‘not enough’ IPCC finds
Sun 4 Aug 2019 04.00 EDT First published on Sat 3 Aug 2019 08.00 EDT
Sign up to the Green Light email to get the planet's most important stories
• Arctic sea-ice coverage reached near record lows for July;
• Global temperatures for July were 1.2C above pre-industrial levels for the month.
https://grist.org/article/how-cargill-went-from-corporate-climate-hero-to-the-worst/
Back in January, the environmental group Mighty Earth was ready to launch a massive campaign attacking Cargill, the world’s largest agribusiness, for failing to do enough to protect forests. They had composed a report labeling it “the worst company in the world.” They had sent out press releases to media organizations (including Grist, naturally) about the planned blitz. They had paid for several scathing bus ads which would proclaim Cargill’s guilt throughout its hometown of Minneapolis. Now, that detente has broken down in conflict.
On Thursday, Mighty Earth protesters dressed in cow costumes were ready to parade in front of Cargill’s headquarters. The organization released its report, describing Cargill as “the worst company in the world.”
“We recognize this is an audacious claim,” wrote Henry Waxman, the chairman of Mighty Earth and a former member of Congress for some 40 years. “But this report provides extensive and compelling evidence to back it up.”
The report doesn’t actually weigh Cargill against other corporations. Instead, it reads like a lawyer’s brief listing the black marks on the company’s record: sickening people with infected beef, killing fish with water pollution, buying from farmers that forced children to labor in the fields, and allegedly cheating customers with financial shenanigans.
It seemed like enviros and executives were actually making progress together for once. So why did everything go to crap? The primary reason Mighty Earth launched this attack is that Cargill failed to deliver on a sweeping promise to end deforestation by 2020, according to Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth. Cargill made this commitment back in 2014 in the lead up to the United Nations climate agreement in Paris. The company’s CEO, David MacLennan, went to the United Nations to declare that Cargill would use its influence to stop forests from falling anywhere in every corner of the globe where it conducts business.
Environmental groups applauded but also promised to hold the company to its pledge. Then Cargill began to grapple with the enormity of the challenge, and executives realized that there was no way that, before 2020, they would be able to ensure that it never bought a single grain of wheat or soybean from land that was previously forest.
Meanwhile, farmers and ranchers worldwide were tearing down forests at a faster pace. Environmental groups grew increasingly frustrated with Cargill and the other corporations that had made similar pledges to curb deforestation. Last month, during a meeting of the Consumer Goods Forum, a group of some 400 companies working to end deforestation (along with many other goals), Greenpeace activists rappelled down from the rafters holding a banner that read, “still destroying forests.”
“When [Cargill] CEO MacLennan made the announcement in 2014 it was clear to me that there hadn’t been a lot of planning that when into that,” said Rolf Skar, assistant campaign director at Greenpeace USA. “I don’t mind when CEOs are ambitious and push a bold agenda, but something has definitely not worked in the years since.”
Or as Mighty Earth put it, “Cargill dropped the ball. And then they stomped on it.”
The breakdown in talks between Mighty Earth and Cargill was specifically related to soy markets in Brazil. According to Hurowitz, MacLennan agreed to support a moratorium on deforestation in the Cerrado — a region about the size of Mexico in central Brazil — and meet with other CEOs to get them to do the same. But, as the months passed, Hurowitz was frustrated by Cargill’s refusal to get tough with soy growers. The final straw came when the company told farmers it would not support the moratorium (we wrote about that here). Instead, Cargill said it would spend $30 million looking for other ways to prevent deforestation in Brazil.
[Aerial view taken on May 29, 2019 showing a farm next to a native Cerrado in Formosa do Rio Preto, western Bahia state. Photo by NELSON ALMEIDA / AFP / Getty Images
Cargill did not respond to Grist’s requests for comment. But Scott Poynton, founder of the Earthworm Foundation, thinks he has a pretty good idea of what’s going on. His organization (back then it was called The Forest Trust) was working closely with Cargill when the corporation decided to make its 2014 pledge. Though Poynton wasn’t part of those talks, he’s seen similar fights play out over deforestation commitments in Southeast Asia. In 2016, Poynton saw companies scurry when the Indonesian government threatened the palm oil corporations that were making their own rules to govern land use to stop deforestation.
“The government said, ‘Let’s be bloody clear, this is our country and we make the rules around here, so if you guys aren’t going to play by our game, you can all bugger off,’” Poynton paraphrased. (Yes, he’s Australian.) “I absolutely guarantee that such discussions have been had, in probably quite unsavory terms, between Cargill Brazil and the government of Brazil.”
It’s risky for foreign companies like Cargill to try and control land use policy in Brazil when the country’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, supports more development of forest land. Tellingly, soy farmers in Brazil didn’t exactly react with gratitude when Cargill told them it opposed a moratorium on soy expansion in the Cerrado, on June 24. Several farmers’ associations responded by writing to the company that they had already done a great deal to protect their natural areas without Cargill’s help, and they intended to plow the land to which they were “entitled.”
“The tone has changed since Bolsonaro was elected, raising farmers expectations that they can still clear,” said Rachael Garrett, an assistant professor of Environmental Policy at ETH Zurich who has studied the conversion of land to soy fields in Brazil. Cargill understands how power has shifted, and that’s probably a major reason it decided not to support the Cerrado moratorium, she said.
In other words, the farmers know the government has their back. So Cargill has to weigh keeping its pledge against maintaining good relationships with its Brazilian producers and regulators.
“What would we expect Cargill to do?” Poynton asked. “They are walking an absolute tightrope. Does that make Cargill the most evil company in the world? No, I think it makes Cargill a company operating in a bullseye of a desperately wicked problem.”
Mighty Earth counters that one of Cargill’s corporate peers in the Brazilian soy market, the Louis Dreyfus Company, based in the Netherlands, has shown that a big company can stick to its word. Louis Dreyfus said it would stop buying soy from any farmer that destroyed native ecosystems or took land from indigenous people. “Meanwhile, Cargill has kept the bulldozers running,” Mighty Earth wrote in their report.
Statements from Cargill executives suggest that they don’t think drawing a hard line would do any good right now, because the other big grain traders, ADM and Bunge, have also refused to stop buying from farmers that plow up the Cerrado. If one of them gets tough with farmers, the soy might simply flow to another company (it’s a classic case of the prisoner’s dilemma). But environmentalists think the other companies might join the moratorium if Cargill — the biggest of them all — took the leap.
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2 mil migrant workers in san joachin vly
RR did immigration reform that included acctability for hiring illlegals, never implemented b/c big ag did not want it
john carlos frey sand and blood bk kpfa
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Big Ag Is Pushing Laws To Restrict Neighbors' Ability To Sue Farms
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An industrialized global food supply chain threatens human health – here’s how to improve it
Robyn Metcalfe, University of Texas at Austin
Globalization is making it harder to identify and trace outbreaks of foodborne illness. Technology can help, but consumers may also have to rethink their food choices....
https://www.ecowatch.com/tyson-foods-toxic-dead-zone-2504305201.html
Shana Gallagher
What comes to mind when you think of Tyson Foods? A chicken nugget? A big red logo?
How about the largest toxic dead zone in U.S. history? It turns out the meat industry—and corporate giants like Tyson Foods—are directly linked to this environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, and many others.
Industrial-scale agriculture to support America's livestock is the number one source of water pollution in the country. But while industrial agriculture to feed animals raised for meat is currently resource-intensive and ecologically destructive, it doesn't have to be. Solutions exist which, if adopted, would allow the meat industry and agricultural corporations that sustain it to reduce their impact on water and the planet.
That's why Mighty Earth has launched the Clean It Up, Tyson campaign in order to hold this industry accountable to our communities and the environment. Corporations can and should respect the health and well-being of their customers, and the landscapes that allow them to profit. Considering America's current political climate, and the increasing severity of environmental problems across the globe, collective action and corporate-targeted campaigns like this one have never been more urgent.
[Soil erosion and agricultural run-off is currently America's top source of water pollution.]
In a country with five times as many livestock animals as humans, it takes a lot of land to grow feed for the meat that ends up on consumers' plates. More than a third of America's agricultural land is dedicated towards the production of corn and soy, but humans consume less than 10 percent of this, according to Mighty Earth's campaign report. The vast majority is consumed by livestock.
What many people don't realize is that this livestock feed production is controlled by a very small number of large and powerful corporations, making huge upstream profits, but creating massive downstream pollution. These companies—ADM, Bunge, Cargill (often referred to as the ABCs)—don't have much of a public reputation, as they don't sell directly to individual consumers. Under our current regulatory system, they're also not responsible for their run-off or excess fertilizer use, both of which are classified as "non-point source" pollution. In other words, soil erosion and run-off from enormous swaths of America's crop fields are washing into the waterways, and taxpayers shoulder the burden. These two factors mean that industrial agriculture companies operate with impunity while polluting the land, riversand oceans.
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35,000 Protestors in Berlin Call for Agricultural Revolution ew 119
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new way to curb nitrogen pollution: Regulate fertilizer producers, not just farmers
by The Conversation January 20, 2019
Nitrogen pollution is produced by a number of interlinked compounds, from ammonia to nitrous oxide. While they have both natural and human sources, the latter increased dramatically over the past…
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25012019/climate-change-agriculture-farming-consolidation-corn-soybeans-meat-crop-subsidies
...consolidation of American farming, reinforced by an emphasis on just one or two main crops—corn and soybeans—has led to a system in which there's little incentive to grow much else, especially in the agricultural heartland of the Midwest.
"The industrial food system presents a barrier to realizing the potential climate benefits in agriculture," said Laura Lengnick, a soil scientist who has written extensively on climate and agriculture. "We continue to invest in this massive corn and soybean and beef-making machine in the Midwest despite all that we know about the changes we could make that would maintain yields, improve farm profitability and deliver climate change solutions."This has profound climate and environmental implications. Mega-sized farming encourages practices that degrade the soil, waste fertilizer and mishandle manure, all of which directly increase emissions of greenhouse gases. At the same time, it discourages practices like "no-till" farming and crop rotation that grab carbon dioxide from the air, store it in the soil and improve soil health.
This is happening as landmark government reports and ample academic research show that agricultural soils are critical for stabilizing the climate.
One recent government report called the trend toward ever-bigger farms "persistent, widespread and pronounced."
The report, a comprehensive assessment of consolidation published last year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, confirmed what was already apparent to small farmers: "Agricultural production has shifted to much larger farming operations over the last three decades."
While the report concluded that consolidation is responsible for improvements in productivity, it noted: "At the same time, large-scale farming operations are said to force small farms out of business, damage the viability of rural communities, reduce the diversity of agricultural production, and create environmental risks through their production practices."...
Subsidized Corn and Beans
"You come down to Iowa, it's all corn and beans, and it's neutering the land," said Chris Peterson at his family's farm near Clear Lake. The farm was nearly pushed out of business in the 1990s, Peterson said, because of consolidation in the livestock industry, but he managed to hang on by finding niche markets for the pork he produces.
Four or five decades ago, typical American farms looked a lot more like Peterson's, growing several crops and raising livestock in diversified, integrated and time-honored synchrony. Farmers sold some crops and fed others to their animals, which also foraged on grass and over-wintered on hay. Cash crops paid the bills and meat met the mortgage.
Hefty government subsidies, along with market forces and technology, have since tilted the balance to corn and soybeans, transforming much of the Midwest into a vast duoculture of those two crops. The fields get bigger and bigger.
"Subsidies give the larger producers the resources to add more ground that they can tack on to their ever-growing acreage," Hoefner said. "We directly subsidize consolidation. We reduced the risk of consolidation. Without subsidies, crop insurance and commodity payments, consolidation would have gone much more slowly."
The resulting corn-and-beans duo demands the heavy use of fertilizers—especially nitrogen synthesized from natural gas—and depletes the soils. And by neglecting diversity, the system forfeits a crucial recovery cycle that would build soil back up and improve its ability to hold carbon.
"We could do a lot to change this simply by shifting to policies that promote nature-based climate resilience," Lengnick said.
Farm to Fuel
Like subsidies, government mandates to use biofuels have pushed farmers to expand corn and soybean acreage—especially on environmentally sensitive land.
"A lot of erodible land, and some in wetlands, was converted to row crops," said Matt Liebman, an agronomy professor at Iowa State University. "If you want to soak up the surplus, putting it into ethanol is a good way to do that."
The mandates require refineries to blend a percentage of biofuels, including corn-based ethanol or soy-based biodiesel, into their fuel mix. Demand for the two crops shot up, adding pressure to shift land into producing them.
https://www.alternet.org/trumps-12-billion-bailout-farmers-hurt-his-trade-wars-has-been-massive-bust-nyt
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Farmers Are Ideally Positioned to Fight Climate Change. Here's How.
BY: PAUL HORN
Agriculture is a major contributor to climate change, and a potential solution, as this infographic explains.
see also farm bur fail on climate
https://www.alternet.org/food/trump-wants-deny-struggling-americans-access-healthy-farmers-market-food
last week’s presidential budget, the administration proposed replacing most Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits with a pre-selected box of mostly dry goods like peanut butter, pasta and cereal. They wanted to stop benefit recipients from choosing their own food, including redeeming their federal assistance at farmers’ markets such as those our organization manages across Los Angeles. That’s right, fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts or whole grains—any semblance of a product that looks like it came from a farm—were excluded. Meanwhile, the plan was introduced with Orwellian descriptors like "access to a nutritious diet" and "100% U.S. grown and produced food."
https://kpfa.org/episode/voices-of-the-middle-east-and-north-africa-december-1-2017/
seed co diversity chem corps
food ark thaw agw, syngenta swiss?
seeds of resistance coming bk mark shapiro
https://www.amazon.com/Seeds-Resistance-Fight-Save-Supply/dp/1510705767
https://www.propublica.org/article/senator-demands-answers-from-case-farms
use ICE?
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/trillion-ton-iceberg-broke-antarctica-and-all-i-can-think-about-food
July 12, an iceberg the size of Delaware broke loose from Antarctica and floated into the sea. Researchers, who had been anticipating the breakup since 2014, say that it cannot be attributed to climate change. At least not yet.
As I continued scrolling through my morning news feed, I skimmed other headlines: Donald Trump Jr., the perfect summer cocktail, net neutrality. Over the past year, I developed a habit of pausing before clicking, especially on upsetting content, because when you have a baby in the same year Donald Trump is elected president, you have little energy left to mine toxic tweets. Sometimes that self-preservation would turn into mild indifference, however, and stories with important yet triggering keywords would get ignored, flicked upward and out of sight.
But my thumb stopped on the iceberg headline. A tremulous sense of fear eventually made me click.
It didn’t matter that no scientist was ready to make a call on what caused the break. The reality is that climate change is getting worse every week, and policymakers are ignoring one of the biggest factors. The role food and agriculture plays has been almost entirely absent from written commitments in local or worldwide negotiations, according to the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University.
This is a problem. Two days before the Antarctic iceberg broke loose, a study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that, in a nutshell, confirmed some of our worst fears: Earth’s sixth mass extinction is already underway, threatening the planet’s animal populations and ecosystems. To use the authors’ words, we’re looking at a “biological annihilation” that’s largely human-caused.
Unlike the researchers assessing the iceberg, the authors of this study clearly point to climate change: “In the last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the numbers and sizes of populations. …”
Recently, a colleague and I have been collaborating on a project measuring the environmental impacts of residential lawns and the industrial food system. Our research uncovered some surprising facts, and the data, compiled in one convenient place, have been sobering.
For instance, the food and agriculture sector is the second-largest contributor to emissions, at 24 percent, barely less than the energy sector. Global meat and dairy production together account for about 15 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.
Why are meat and dairy emissions so high? Last year, in the United States alone, an estimated 90.9 million acres of corn and 89.5 million acres of soybeans were planted, and most of it went to feed livestock. (Feed crop production accounts for 24 percent of the sector’s emissions, while deforestation for feed crops and pasture accounts for 9 percent.)
One problem is the way those crops are grown, usually at an industrial scale requiring intense use of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Overuse of chemical fertilizers releases high levels of nitrous oxide, “a greenhouse gas with 300 times as much heat-trapping power as carbon dioxide,” reported Science News. Intensive monoculture farming depletes soil, pollutes rivers, and destroys habitats.
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agribiz vs climate:
https://www.ecowatch.com/great-climate-robbery-2421546595.html
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http://www.ecowatch.com/epa-pruitt-chlorpyrifos-2352337722.html
A Pen Isn't the Only Gift Trump Gave Dow Chemical
Perhaps the Senate, in its hearing on Scott Pruitt's nomination to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), should have questioned Pruitt as the chief pediatrician for America's children. As head of the EPA Pruitt gets to decide what is safe for our kids—in the air they breathe, the water they drink, the food they eat and the communities they play. Senators didn't ask—but they are finding out.
In his first big test of what kind of pediatrician he will be, Pruitt decided to reverse an earlier EPA decision to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, a potent nerve gas banned from household use years ago, but still used in farms, orchards, pastures and golf courses.
Chlorpyrifos belongs to the same family as the nerve gas sarin—suspected of being behind the appalling chemical weapon attack which occurred this week in Syria, provoking appropriate outrage from the administration. But EPA has just decided to allow the continued dousing of America's rural landscapes with a close cousin—a different chemical weapon.
Cparticularly toxic to young children and the fetus. The pesticide has come across my email screens periodically for over a decade, as organizations like the Nature Resources Defense Council slogged forward, petitioning the EPA to implement a simple requirement of federal pesticide law: that any pesticide must be shown to be safe before use. In 2015 the agency said is intended to ban it—but didn't finalize the decision. Eventually, courts ordered EPA to make a final decision on the ban—and Pruitt decided to ignore the science.
He did not do so because he asserted that chlorpyrifos was safe; he simply said that there were uncertainties, and that in that situation farmers were entitled to continue to use the chemical, exposing farm workers, their children, surrounding communities and consumers of food sprayed with the chemical, to a pesticide whose safety is at best highly dubious—in quantities up to 14,000 times the safe level.
"We need to provide regulatory certainty to the thousands of American farms that rely on chlorpyrifos, while still protecting human health and the environment," Pruitt said—not the message you would expect to hear from a pediatrician if you asked him if you should give your kids foods laced with a potent neurotoxin that has been shown to damage their mental development.
This reversal of the clear requirement of federal pesticide law—that safety come first—along with Pruitt's revealing ordering of his priorities—regulatory certainty to pesticide users first, with human health qualified by "still"—reinforces something we are learning about the Trump administration.
Candidate Trump made a wide array of promises, many of them expressed within the 140 characters of a tweet. Huge numbers contradicted each other. How the administration would resolve those conflicts was one of the great unknowns. Trump, for example, proclaimed that "I want clean air and clean water" during his campaign. But he also pledged to dismantle the EPA.
It has been a fairly consistent pattern in the first 10 weeks of the administration that a campaign promise to help the powerful was likely to be honored, while one to help the vulnerable would be an earlier casualty of priority setting. Children of farm workers don't rank as high as Dow Chemical, the main manufacturer and defender of chlorpyrifos. QED—we know how this administration will come down....carper ~ pruitt sue?
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Family-Run Paper Wins Pulitzer for Exposing Big Ag Corruption
By Nika Knight
Prestigious Pulitzer Prizes on Monday were awarded to investigations that tackled President Donald Trump, Big Ag and international offshore tax havens, rewarding reporters that took on today's powers-that-be.
The Pulitzer Prizes this year came "in the face of a combative stance from President Trump, who has called the news media 'the enemy of the American people,'" as the New York Times noted.
The prize shed light on a small family-run paper in Iowa that tenaciously challenged large agricultural corporations over water pollution. The Storm Lake Times forced documents to be released that showed powerful agricultural interests were funding a local county's attempt to quell a lawsuit over nitrogen runoff from farms contaminating drinking water.
Art Cullen, the paper's editor, slammed the close financial ties between Big Ag and county government in editorials described by the Pulitzer Committee as "impressive" and "engaging," while also highlighting the catastrophic effects of nitrogen pollution. In one editorial, for example, Cullen wrote:
Anyone with eyes and a nose knows in his gut that Iowa has the dirtiest surface water in America. It is choking the waterworks and the Gulf of Mexico. It is causing oxygen deprivation in Northwest Iowa glacial lakes. It has caused us to spend millions upon millions trying to clean up Storm Lake, the victim of more than a century of explosive soil erosion.
Everyone knows it's not the city sewer plant causing the problem. And most of us recognize that this is not just nature at work busily releasing nitrates into the water. Ninety-two percent of surface water pollution comes from row crop production.
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