Digging Into Wisconsin’s Glacial Soils

Portage County’s glacial soils support an agricultural industry that produces $372 million worth of food (mostly vegetables like potatoes, sweet corn, and peas annually as of the 2022 census. The 951 farms in the county provide 74 percent of the state’s crop sales.

While more than 50 farms in Portage County top 1,000 acres, the typical farm size here is smaller—roughly 287 acres, or two-thirds the national average.

“We have a lot of very small-scale farming, an active farmers’ market, and a lot of local growers,” Scharenbroch said. “It’s something that’s really cool and unique about our area.”

To show students the range of farming styles in the region and how they impacted the soil, Scharenbroch took them to visit a handful of local producers during their practice week. There, students saw how farming practices like machine tilling caused soil layers to be tighter and less permeable, making it harder for water to penetrate. This left soil on the surface vulnerable to blowing away during winds and storms.

Farms that used techniques like compost application and cover cropping had deeper, darker-brown top layers that were better at absorbing moisture and less at risk of erosion. “One of the biggest things is to keep the soil covered,” said Joel Gebhard, a soil scientist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) who helped plan the contest. “If soil is bare, it’s going to get removed somehow.”

At Lions Camp, soggy students wrapped up their analyses of each pit. “Pit monitors”—mostly employees or alums of UWSP—collected their scorecards and walked them inside to a cafeteria where the coaches had gathered for grading. First, they needed to align on the correct answers for each scorecard. In a room full of soil science academics, this was more contentious than you might imagine. Every coach had their own opinion, and matters that may have seemed trivial (say, whether students need to place a dash through empty boxes, or leave them blank) were grounds for impassioned debate.

There was good reason for the pedantics. Because soil varies from state to state, region to region, and even mile to mile, and because there are over 20,000 ways to describe soils in the U.S., having an agreed-upon lexicon was essential. Once the coaches came to an consensus and reviewed (and re-reviewed) each student’s scorecards, the first day’s competition was complete. After hours in the dirt, students dumped their supplies into plastic buckets (some decorated with slogans, like “Loam is Home” and “Loess Lover”), piled into vans and headed back to their hotels to dry off and rest up for the second and final competition day.

The Role of the Soil Scientist

The NRCS, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is one of the largest employers of soil scientists in the country, though soil scientists also work in the private sector for companies focused on bioremediation, construction, and agricultural research. Originally established in 1935 as the Soil Conservation Service, the agency was created to manage erosion and steward conservation during the Dust Bowl. Today, the NRCS manages the national Web Soil Survey, an essential database for farming, community planning, and beyond. “The database gets a hit at least every second,” Stremcha said.

Many students hope to go into a job at NRCS once they graduate—but now are unsure what will be available, given the recent federal funding cuts. Until recently, the agency was on a hiring spree. Many older employees were retiring, and it needed new soil scientists to help execute its climate-smart agriculture programs, which received $19.5 billion in funding over five years as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

“Farmers trust us, but with that comes an obligation to make sure that you have well-trained employees who are going to be out there on the farms making the best scientific recommendations to make sure we get this conservation on the ground,” NRCS Chief Terry Cosby told the 2023 Trust In Food Symposium after unlocking the IRA funds, noting that the agency was struggling to find candidates qualified to advise farmers on soil conservation.

“They’re sending us even more jobs than we have students,” Scharenbroch said on a call back in October of 2024.

The promise of the field changed, however, once the Trump administration took office this year. Since January, NRCS has reduced its staff by at least 2,400 employees, while a blanket freeze on hiring remains in place across the government. The USDA has erased information on federal loans and technical assistance for climate-smart agriculture from its website (although, after a lawsuit on behalf of farmers, it now plans to restore it) and cancelled many grants that had been made through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. In response to the USDA’s 2026 budget request, Congress is proposing $45 million in cuts to NRCS conservation operations. These moves have left farmers in limbo and federal soil science hiring at a standstill.

Coaches worry about what these cuts will mean for their students and the future of soil science at large. “My fear with having potentially fewer soil scientists around is that we’re going to have more environmental disasters and agricultural disasters that we’re not prepared to respond to appropriately,” said Jaclyn Fiola, an assistant professor of soil and environmental science at Delaware Valley University and coach of the school’s soil judging team, on a call with Civil Eats.

The job market may be fluctuating, but the next generation’s commitment to soils remains steadfast.

“Where people live, where agricultural and economic power is, how people form culture . . . It’s all based on the soil,” Sky Reinhart, a junior at the University of Idaho, said during competition weekend. “Once you learn to see the soil . . . It makes all the difference for everything.”

The Significance of Soil Surveys

Beyond the farm, the surveys provide information on which soils can best support infrastructure like septic systems and roads. Sometimes, they can even inform where to bury animals affected by disease outbreaks, like during the recent avian flu. Increasingly, they have important climate implications as well.

“A lot of our carbon sequestration models are based on numbers that were collected by soil surveyors,” Fiola said. “That’s a really important reason that we need these maps to be accurate.”

The climate applications of soil attract many of today’s students to the field. “Almost 50 percent of the students I interact with are coming into soil science because they want to make an impact on climate-change issues,” Scharenbroch said.

As a result, some regional and national contests now ask students to describe soil indicators like salinization from sea level rise, identify functioning wetlands, or calculate a soil’s carbon-storage potential.

Digging Deep, Despite an Uncertain Future

During group judging day, each school analyzes pits together, aligning on a scorecard as a team. A few teams are assigned to a pit at a time, and they alternate between spending 10 minutes underground and 10 minutes above it.

Once the timer began at Scharenbroch’s, each team split off to stake their claim to a spot on the pit’s perimeter, setting up a tight circle to keep discussions out of earshot of the competition.

“You texture, I color?,” Sean Cary, a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island, confirmed with his two teammates (the smallest team of the competition—fitting, they joked, as the smallest state). By splitting up tasks, the team could spend more time on each analysis and double-check each other’s work at the end. Rhode Island’s time in the pit was spent scanning the horizons closely, as if searching for a rare library book. Outside of it, they quietly deliberated on the soil’s properties and perhaps more importantly, its practical uses.

“Having the knowledge of what soils can do and how we can fix them and use them in the correct way is one of the main reasons I’m doing this,” said Cary, who is majoring in agriculture and food systems. “It’s not something that should be taken lightly, because the future of soil can affect the future of society.”

The pit monitors gave a two-minute warning to the final set of teams. Then, the contest students had spent months preparing for was over. Cary and his teammates dumped out their muffin tins, turned in their scorecards, and swished their hands in a water cup like used paintbrushes. When asked if they were happy that soil judging was over for the year, they said they’d miss it.

Crowning a Winner

At long last, Scharenbroch asked the group to gather round. Many students remained standing at the pavilion’s edge, too antsy to sit down.

First came the individual results: “In first place, with 852 points,” Scharenbroch announced to a rapt audience, “JosiLee Scott!”

The pindrop-quiet pavilion exploded in cheers. The West Virginia University senior walked stoically to accept her prize—a plaque and, naturally, some local cheese curds. She quickly ushered her coach up for a big bear hug and a photo as a well-earned smile spread across her face.

The grand prize, which went to the school with the highest combined group and individual scores, went to The University of Idaho—the Vandal’s first win in over 35 years of competing. Six Idaho students and their two coaches looked at each other in disbelief as they ambled up to accept the trophy. Some shed tears as they hoisted it high, the applause of their fellow soil enthusiasts filling the misty air.

The University of Delaware and The University of Maryland rounded out the top three schools, bringing the 2025 contest to a close. Some students were already planning for the next one. For others, this was the last competition of their scholastic careers. And what came next was as uncertain as the weather of a Wisconsin spring.

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https://civileats.com/2025/06/23/conservation-work-on-farms-and-ranches-could-take-a-hit-as-usda-cuts-staff/ Mon, 23 Jun 2025 08:00:35 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65327 For close to a year, her job at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)—the agency division that helps farmers sustain land and ecosystems—was everything she thought it would be. Across vast expanses of arid sage and piñon-juniper rangeland, Troutman worked alongside ranchers, advising them on efficient irrigation for cattle, fencing methods for improved grazing, and […]

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In the spring of 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officially offered Gretchen Troutman, 49, a job as a natural resource specialist. Elated, she packed up her life in Pennsylvania and moved close to 2,000 miles to a small town in Mora County, New Mexico, where she imagined she’d finally do the kind of work she had long hoped to do up until it was time to retire.

For close to a year, her job at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)—the agency division that helps farmers sustain land and ecosystems—was everything she thought it would be. Across vast expanses of arid sage and piñon-juniper rangeland, Troutman worked alongside ranchers, advising them on efficient irrigation for cattle, fencing methods for improved grazing, and federal grants to offset the costs.

“Land is being lost at very quick rates for many different reasons, and so the fact that we were trying to help these people make improvements to their land, but it also improved their lives, that was my interest in [the position],” she said. “I was actually feeling like I was helping people and helping the land as well.”

On Valentine’s Day, NRCS fired her.

While her notice cited poor performance, Troutman said she had only received positive feedback from superiors. Her experience was not unique: USDA and other federal agencies sent the same notice to thousands of “probationary” employees, who had either recently started or were recently promoted. On March 31, after a court found the action unlawful and ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the employees, Troutman got her job back.

Back at her desk, though, Troutman began to feel immense pressure to take an offer called a “deferred resignation package,” or DRP. With agency leadership warning of more mass “reductions in force” layoffs, Troutman worried that she would be fired a second time, and be stuck in a small town with few job opportunities and no access to unemployment benefits.

“It was just this constant barrage of, ‘You might get fired. You might keep your job. You might get fired. We don’t know,’” she said. “It wears you down.”

So, she and the only other specialist in her NRCS office both took the offer.

In an interview in late May, Troutman sounded pained as she explained her decision. “I didn’t want to leave my team shorthanded, [and] I also didn’t want to leave the farmers and ranchers,” she added, expressing a sense of guilt. “For future [conservation] applications, it’s going to be so much harder to do, because there’s just not the staff to go out and do a site visit. There’s nobody there to do the work.”

‘Acute’ Capacity Problems

Across the NRCS, reductions in staff could jeopardize the agency’s work to protect land, water, and wildlife across vast swaths of U.S. range and farmland. According to a USDA document provided to members of Congress and reviewed by Civil Eats, of approximately 2,400 NRCS employees who accepted resignation offers between January and April, only about 30 were based in Washington, D.C. The rest were working with farmers in local offices across the country. New Mexico lost 43 NRCS employees. Texas, Kansas, and Wisconsin—major beef and dairy producers—all lost 100 or more people.

Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency has proposed shutting down more than a dozen NRCS offices nationwide, along with additional county USDA offices where NRCS staff work. In their 2026 budget requests, President Donald Trump and the USDA have also proposed eliminating an entire source of funding for farmer technical assistance from NRCS, which would result in a $784 million cut, although appropriators in Congress have reduced that in their spending bill, proposing a smaller $45 million cut instead.

“It was just this constant barrage of, ‘You might get fired. You might keep your job. You might get fired. We don’t know.’ ”

“On the ground in districts like mine, local FSA [Farm Service Agency], NRCS, and Forest Service staff are being let go,” said House Agriculture Committee ranking member Angie Craig (D-Minnesota) at a June hearing where lawmakers questioned Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. “Waitlists are getting longer, and fewer USDA staff are available to help family farmers navigate the agency’s incredibly popular and impactful programs.”

Rollins, who was asked about staff cuts several times, said that overall USDA staffing had expanded significantly under President Joe Biden—by more than 20,000 employees—and that reductions would save taxpayers money. “No one has been fired,” she said, despite the record of probationary employees being let go. Pressed on the issue, she said: “We are adequately staffed to meet our mission.”

But many farmers and others who have worked closely with NRCS for years dispute that assertion.

From 2023 to 2024, Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) assessed how well NRCS was serving the farmers who are typically excluded from USDA services. One of their main findings, said Aaron Johnson, a policy director at RAFI, was that NRCS can’t serve small, diversified farms without increased staffing in local offices. And that was before the reductions.

“In the states we work in, that staff capacity problem is pretty acute,” Johnson said. “That was the lens we came into the year with: This is already a problem. Then the staff hiring freeze, rolling layoffs, etc., happened, and everything has just been made much worse. We hear this from Congressmen who are hearing from constituents, and we hear this from most farmers we talk to.”

In response to questions from Civil Eats, a USDA spokesperson said, in an email, that Rollins is “working to reorient the Department to be more effective and efficient at serving the American people by prioritizing farmers, ranchers, and producers. She will not compromise the critical work of the Department and will continue to put farmers first.”

Farmers Lose Advisers—and Trust in USDA

NRCS oversees a suite of conservation programs authorized in the farm bill, including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), and the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). Those programs have long had bipartisan support and are so popular among farmers, there is never enough funding to meet demand. That’s because they allow farmers to do simple things to improve a farm’s long-term resilience, like build a hoop house or a manure management system—projects that might otherwise be out of reach financially. All the programs operate as a cost-share, so farmers pay a portion of a project and are then reimbursed for the NRCS portion.

But while the individual programs themselves get a lot of attention, Johnson said, the farm bill gives NRCS a toolbox containing them. “Whether and how that toolbox gets used is all up to that [local staff],” he explained. “They don’t just write you a check. “They have engineers and hydrology experts to help you manage your land and your farming systems in a way that conserves resources.”

Ariel Greenwood runs cattle on 120,000 leased acres in Mora County, New Mexico, where she’s used both EQIP and CSP over the years to reduce erosion, improve the health of wetlands, and retrofit fencing so that wildlife could move through the ranch without harm.

Across the NRCS, reductions in staff could jeopardize the agency’s work to protect land, water, and wildlife across vast swaths of U.S. range and farmland.

When Greenwood was putting together her last application, Troutman came out to the ranch and spent the day with her. She made practical suggestions and helped Greenwood navigate the process. “It’s just a special kind of person who works in that job,” Greenwood said. “Someone who has a passion for conservation and also has a brain for the really technical paperwork side of things, there’s not a lot of people like that. So when they’re good at it [and you’re] firing them, there’s no efficiency there.”

Since Troutman’s been gone, Greenwood said the staff at her district conservation office seem to be hustling to keep up, and little things have fallen through the cracks, like a form she had to resend after Troutman’s departure. But they have been able to keep services running for her so far. “That is completely to the credit to the individuals who work there,” she said.

In a very different climate, near Maine’s rocky coast, Seth Kroeck has been farming 187 certified organic acres of vegetables, small grains, hay, and wild blueberries for more than 20 years. In that time, his Crystal Springs Farm has used conservation funding for multiple projects, including improved irrigation and the planting of cover crops. Currently, he has one contract to put in pollinator-friendly plants around the edges of his fields and another to spread wood chips on his blueberry fields, to protect them from the hotter temperatures Maine is experiencing due to climate change.

Since January, many of the employees Kroeck had engaged with at his local NRCS office are no longer there. “There were two employees that were in that office that I’ve been working with directly on programs, and they’re gone,” he said. “There were two engineers that were helping us on different irrigation contracts, and they’re gone. It’s kind of a mess.” The USDA record shows 32 NRCS employees in Maine accepted the DRP offer.

Like Greenwood, Kroeck said his NRCS county director has held everything together based on her work ethic. “She’s the only employee there, where there used to be six,” he said. “She is answering the phone, she is opening the letters, she is doing all the contracts.”

The loss of the NRCS engineers could particularly hurt farmers, he said, because many depend on them to answer technical questions about project implementation.

“If the work isn’t done exactly to spec for the contract, we don’t get paid,” Kroeck said. “It really means that sometimes there’s no one with the expertise on a particular practice to reach out to, so our agent has had to reach out to other parts of the state or other states to get advice on the specifics of our projects.”

Kroeck’s trust in USDA’s support for farmers has been particularly shaken because his wood chip project was also caught in the funding freeze. By the time USDA unfroze the funding, the supply of wood chips in his area had been diminished, and he could only purchase enough to cover 4 acres instead of the planned 12.5. Now, because of the particulars of blueberry plant growth, he’ll have to wait two years to cover the remaining acres while the plants struggle amid rising temperatures.

Bracing for Future Impacts

Staffing challenges at NRCS offices have not been uniform from office to office or state to state.

At Sunset Springs Ranch, in Nacogdoches, Texas, for example, Marty French said no one in his local NRCS office took the resignation offer. As a result, he’s seen no delays on inspections or his cost-share payments for his active EQIP contract. “The only issue is they cannot hire yet for their open engineer position,” he said, due to a hiring freeze.

On the other hand, wider impacts do exist for farmers relying on conservation programs, because NRCS contracts out some of the technical assistance.

“Waitlists are getting longer, and fewer USDA staff are available to help family farmers navigate the agency’s incredibly popular and impactful programs.”

The environmental organization Point Blue Conservation Science, for example, has long provided wildlife biologists for California NRCS offices to work with farmers on wildlife protections. However, the organization had to pull those biologists when the Trump administration froze grant funding earlier this year, and the situation is still in flux, Bonnie Eyestone, Point Blue’s working lands conservation director, told Civil Eats in an email. “We understand the value and importance of the role biologists play in the field offices in assisting farmers and ranchers to carry out their conservation plans,” she wrote, “and hope to continue providing that service if our agreement is allowed to move forward.”

Farmers also said they’re worried about NRCS offices not having enough staff to help them complete the complicated paperwork involved in applying for a conservation program grant. “Most people who’ve started farms do not have a background in grant writing, and it’s such a specific language,” said Jake Mendell, who grows vegetables at Footprint Farm in Starksboro, Vermont, with his wife, Taylor Mendell. Taylor happened to have some previous experience in grant writing, he said, which helped them apply for EQIP grants to build hoop houses, infrastructure that allows them to extend their growing season and ultimately survive as a small farm. Even with that advantage, Jake said, the process was still a little daunting for him.

“We know how to grow things and maybe talk to customers, but farmers are asked to do a lot,” he said. “You have to be a small-engines mechanic and a marketer and also a biologist, and to add grantwriter onto that, it’s another thing. So to have people whose job it is to help our food system improve and help people get the financial assistance they need is such a benefit.”

In the emailed response to Civil Eats, the USDA spokesperson said that USDA remains “committed to working with producers to ensure they have the support and tools needed to address natural resource concerns and achieve their conservation goals.”

Back in New Mexico, Greenwood said that as discussions about cutting conservation spending and staff focus on how taxpayer dollars should be used, she wishes more people understood not just how NRCS conservation programs help farmers, but also the value they provide to the American public.

On her ranch just east of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, she’s used the funding to help restore land that was degraded long before her cattle arrived. Here, where every drop of water matters, she’s taken bare, hard dirt and created diverse pasture with spongy soil beneath. That soil captures water when the rain falls, allowing it to percolate through the bedrock and into the springs that the nearby communities rely on for drinking water.

She did that work with the help of NRCS and, more specifically, with the help of Gretchen Troutman. “These programs do a pretty darn good job for farmers to make improvements on ag operations that really affect the health of the land and in turn affect everybody else,” she said.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/05/28/helping-ramps-flourish-through-forest-farming/ https://civileats.com/2025/05/28/helping-ramps-flourish-through-forest-farming/#comments Wed, 28 May 2025 08:00:44 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=64660 At 71, Schwartz has learned plenty about these wild alliums since he moved here in 2006—and he’s eager to share. In early May, the woods all around him are carpeted with lush green ramp leaves, clumped so tightly together it’s hard to tell one plant from the next. At last, he finds what he’s been […]

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Near the banks of the Delaware River in northeast Pennsylvania, Steven Schwartz, his silver hair tied back beneath his hat, is searching for a seed. It’s ramp season, and finding one of the tiny black pellets is like searching for a needle in an endless green haystack. For a ramp farmer like Schwartz, the seeds are a critical indicator that the population is healthy and multiplying.

At 71, Schwartz has learned plenty about these wild alliums since he moved here in 2006—and he’s eager to share.

In early May, the woods all around him are carpeted with lush green ramp leaves, clumped so tightly together it’s hard to tell one plant from the next. At last, he finds what he’s been looking for and takes a seat on a fallen log. As a woodpecker hammers in the distance, he picks up a dried seed head, left over from last year.

“This,” he said, “is what it’s all about.”

Ramp seeds are a sign that the wild leeks are multiplying. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)

Flavor From the Woods

The ramp, a spring ephemeral that has become the most popular of dozens of wild alliums native to North America, grows across the Midwest and Eastern United States, particularly in the Great Lakes region and throughout the Appalachian range. Similar plants can be found in deciduous temperate forests around the world, including in Europe and East Asia, where the victory onion and Siberian onion, respectively, prosper. Other cousins flourish in the western U.S., especially the Pacific Northwest, including Brandegee’s onion and the swamp onion. But none have developed the ramp’s reputation as a beacon of spring.

Within their fleeting window of availability, foragers and consumers prize ramps for pickling, grilling, pesto, or any adventurous way to enjoy their gentle bite. Here in Pennsylvania, their leaves peek out in April, and by late May they have begun to deteriorate, turning yellow and dying back to make way for a flower stalk. In some regions, the season can stretch to June. The early summer blooms develop seeds by the end of the summer, which eventually fall to the ground as one of the plant’s two modes of reproduction, the other being bulb division.

“It’s the test of the hypothesis that you can eat your ramp and plant it, too. And it looks like it’ll work.”

Every spring, dozens of visitors come to Delaware Valley Ramps, Schwartz’s wooded 20-acre property in Equinunk, to pick the glossy, garlicky greens that are the first to emerge after winter’s thaw. Schwartz offers his wisdom on respectful harvesting to visitors who pay $65 to pick ramps for two hours. He asks them to take only those with three leaves, which are more mature than those with one or two, so they all have a chance to reproduce before they’re picked.

He waits until later in the season to allow harvesting, because larger plants require fewer to make a pound, leaving more in the ground to sustain the patch. He also urges visitors to take only one from each clump so that none is overburdened, and he rotates through several patches to keep them all thriving.

It’s the least he can do to protect the population he found in abundance on his property when he bought it, lured by the Delaware River’s revered wild trout fishery. Although his land has no shortage of ramps, their future elsewhere is under pressure.

In the early 1990s, after Martha Stewart first sang their praises and fine-dining chefs began putting ramps on seasonal spring menus, demand soared, especially in urban centers where they often sell for $25 per pound or more. Eager foragers fanned out into the woods, and it wasn’t long before concerns grew about population decline.

The whole plant is delicious, but every bulb removed from the earth is one less to sustain the wild population. For years, conservationists have worried that avid harvesting of bulbs will endanger a plant whose value is as much cultural as it is commercial.

In both Indigenous and Appalachian communities, ramps are celebrated as a sign of spring with medicinal properties that can revive the spirit after a long, hard winter. Horticulturalists and ramp enthusiasts are working to better understand where and why they flourish and how humans can encourage their proliferation before it’s too late.

Can Ramps Be Farmed?

For more than a decade, Schwartz’s land has been a “living laboratory” for research conducted by Eric Burkhart, an ethnobotany and agroforestry teaching professor at the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, where he studies the conservation and management of forest products. His conclusions are in a paper, published last fall in the journal Wild, about the habitats most favorable for ramps: rich, deep soil on north- and east-facing slopes, with an abundance of sugar maple or bitternut hickory nearby to supply calcium and moisture for growth—much like Schwartz’s land along the Delaware River.

Although ramps grow wild, they’re often tended by property owners and harvesters, like Schwartz, who practice forest farming, which Burkhart describes as the cultivation and management of non-timber products under a forest canopy. Ramps and other forest foods are “the crack people can look through to get excited about their forests, rather than just seeing them as a source of timber revenue,” he said. And unlike most forest products, consumers already crave ramps, so expanding their supply can help harvesters meet demand while ensuring the plant population isn’t depleted.

Steven Schwartz takes notes while observing the characteristics of ramps growing in one of six test plots. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)

Schwartz’s land is a suitable place to explore the potential of forest farming, because his methods are clearly working: His land now produces more ramps than ever. He’s seeing new patches flourishing on the property where none had grown before, which means their range is expanding, possibly due to the seeds being dispersed more widely by turkeys and other wildlife.

Today, his property includes a half-dozen 6-by-8-foot plots dedicated to studying whether ramps can be successfully regrown after they’re harvested by replanting the base of their bulbs. The study, designed and run by Schwartz in collaboration with Burkhart and still funded by a Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education producer grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, aims to help balance productive yields with long-term conservation.

“It’s the test of the hypothesis that you can eat your ramp and plant it, too,” Schwartz said as he surveyed the ramps in one of the study plots. “And it looks like it’ll work.”

Rooted in Culture

Ramps have long been an important wild food for Indigenous cultures, often consumed therapeutically to treat colds, earaches, and infections. They are welcomed as the first green vegetable in the spring to replenish vitamins and nutrients after a winter of dried and preserved foods.

Karelle Hall, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a member of the Nanticoke Tribe of Delaware, visited Schwartz’s property this spring as part of a broader effort to relearn ancestral traditions and get more people in her community to engage with ramps and other culturally significant foods, she said. A cousin who joined her that day operates the Native Roots Farm Foundation, focused on reconnecting Indigenous communities with their plant relatives.

Although she’d purchased them before at farmers’ markets, it was Hall’s first time harvesting ramps herself. It felt particularly significant to do so right beside the headwaters of the Delaware River, which supported the Nanticoke and Lenape tribes in pre-colonial times, she said. With her harvest, she made soups and stews, ramp butter to eat with a venison roast, and ramp salt that she’ll share with relatives to strengthen her community’s connection to the plant.

The approach to harvesting that she saw at Delaware Valley Ramps echoes the practices central to Indigenous relationships with the natural world, she said. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, for example, advocate taking just the leaves so bulbs can continue to propagate.

The gentle manipulation of a landscape can help a plant species feel more at home, encouraging it to grow into the space it’s allowed, Hall explained, as long as one rule is always followed: “Never deplete it to the point that it can’t repopulate itself.”

Jeanine Davis, an associate professor in horticultural science at North Carolina State University, has kept that principle in mind for more than 30 years, ever since a botanist in her state government asked for her help studying ramps as concerns grew about their declining population.

Within a decade, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, straddling North Carolina and Tennessee, made ramp harvesting illegal; three national parks in West Virginia followed suit in 2022. Although studies on the subject are scant, Burkhart said populations have diminished over time, but in Pennsylvania, at least, the issue is not overharvesting but the fact that favorable ramp habitats have been developed for other uses.

“Someday, if we continue doing this, we won’t have ramps. It would be one more piece of the forest that’s gone.”

Back when she started studying ramps, Davis said the general consensus was that they couldn’t be cultivated, but she helped show they can indeed be grown, given the right conditions—including slightly acidic, moist soil and sufficient shade. She’s now researching how different harvest practices—say, the number of leaves or portion of a bulb taken—affect a population.

In addition to her work with the plants themselves, Davis has studied the role they play in the mountain communities that have celebrated ramps for generations. There, she said, they are “like a spring tonic,” rich in nutrients and minerals, including vitamins A and C. A 2000 study, she noted, found that thanks to their naturally high quantities of selenium, ramps have the potential to reduce cancer in humans.

Davis remembers the “mind-boggling” volume of ramps she saw the first time she attended one of many annual festivals in Richwood, West Virginia, about 25 years ago. “Pickup truck after pickup truck full of them,” she recalled. She was impressed by how the festival was truly a community effort, with the entire town seemingly involved in some way.

In time, though, as ramps gained broader popularity, “What we’d always thought of as a food for country people, hunters, and fishermen was suddenly a gourmet item,” she said. Although she’s enjoyed seeing more people appreciate the plant, its success poses a challenge for conservation efforts.

Sharing an Ecosystem

On Schwartz’s property, ramps are part of a spring understory populated by fiddlehead ferns, morel mushrooms, and flowering trilliums and bloodroot—the type of biological diversity that indicates a healthy forest ecosystem, according to James Chamberlain, a retired research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service who studied ramps for 25 years. Given the ramp’s fickle growth habits, its presence in a landscape suggests a stable and supportive tree canopy and healthy soil.

Steve Schwartz considers himself an accidental forager. Eighteen years ago, he bought a property in Equinunk, Pennsylvania, to gain access to the Delaware River’s vaunted wild trout fishing. Then he discovered ramps growing abundantly on his property and has been selling them since 2008. (Photo credit: Ben Seal)

But Chamberlain worries that ramps may soon go the way of ginseng, another plant once abundant in the Appalachians that he said has been “genetically extirpated from the forest” by unsustainable harvest practices.

“Someday, if we continue doing this, we won’t have ramps,” Chamberlain said. “It would be one more piece of the forest that’s gone.”

However, a 2019 paper that Chamberlain co-authored in Biological Conservation suggested wild cultivation and good stewardship practices could reverse that trend in ginseng and other wild-harvested plants like ramps. He believes forest farming can be part of supporting the sustainability of ramps and other wild plants, when done right. But doing so requires careful and respectful management of a patch that allows it to sustain itself.

“We get up in arms about cutting old-growth timber,” Chamberlain said, “but think nothing about harvesting old-growth ramps.”

For his part, Burkhart wants more people to engage with the landscapes around them, particularly through forest farming, which he believes can harness the woods’ “tremendous potential” to support our food systems. In a state like Pennsylvania that’s nearly 60 percent forested, managing a greater share of the land in an intentional way and utilizing its products can create income sources while promoting conservation, Burkhart said. He also studies ginseng as well as goldenseal, used in herbal medicines.

“We have a whole suite of wild species that people either forage or forget about, but they deserve close examination and consideration as new crops,” Burkhart said.

Despite conventional wisdom about how to sustainably harvest ramps—some suggest taking only the leaves, while others limit themselves to one-tenth of a patch—there is still little actual evidence to guide foragers and forest farmers. The study on Schwartz’s land, which began in 2023, aims to deliver that evidence. This was his second season observing the growth of ramps whose bulbs were replanted in the ground after being harvested.

Using variables including the number of leaves at the time of harvest, the point in the season when harvest occurred, and the amount of bulb that was replanted, he’s studying how well they bounce back year over year. So far, the most mature bulbs appear to have the strongest rate of return.

“What’s going to be best for this plant, for the forest, and for all the other beings sharing the ecosystem?”

Once the study is complete, Burkhart wants to expand it to other locations across the state to develop more certainty about the findings and their implications. Schwartz says replanting bulbs in the past has helped him develop new ramp patches, suggesting that further understanding of favorable sites and successful conservation techniques can make a meaningful difference.

For Hall, the Indigenous anthropologist, the vibrant ramp patches in Equinunk hold the promise that more members of her community can engage with the plant and share some of the same excitement she felt. But when it comes to the conservation and management of a food found on the forest floor, she offers a reminder that there are always deeper layers to consider.

Hall’s work focuses on language revitalization, including the conversion of the Nanticoke language into writing. She’s still working on a full translation of the ramp’s name, pumptukwahkii ooleepunak, but she says it conjures the process of a plant popping out of the ground. Like the names of many other plants with a bulb or root system, it’s referred to in Nanticoke as a living being—a who rather than a what. We should remember this as we harvest ramps, she said.

“It’s not just about what’s going to be best for us in this situation,” said Hall. “What’s going to be best for this plant, for the forest, and for all the other beings sharing the ecosystem?”

The post Helping Ramps Flourish Through Forest Farming appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/05/28/helping-ramps-flourish-through-forest-farming/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/05/19/livestock-producers-seek-to-defend-packers-and-stockyards-rules-from-industry-attack/ https://civileats.com/2025/05/19/livestock-producers-seek-to-defend-packers-and-stockyards-rules-from-industry-attack/#comments Mon, 19 May 2025 08:00:47 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=64543 It’s one small example of the many ways that the country’s powerful meat companies have exerted control over the farmers that raise the animals they sell. In the chicken industry, farmers looking for economic opportunities have long been locked into contracts that require them to pay for expensive facilities, compete with other farmers for pay […]

The post Livestock Producers Seek to Defend Packers and Stockyards Rules from Industry Attack appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Back in the 1990s, when Craig Watts was still raising chickens for Perdue, the fourth largest poultry company in the U.S., his contract included a provision that prohibited him from sharing the document with any third party. If he encountered a problem with the company, for example, he couldn’t solicit legal help to understand what options the contract provided to him.

It’s one small example of the many ways that the country’s powerful meat companies have exerted control over the farmers that raise the animals they sell. In the chicken industry, farmers looking for economic opportunities have long been locked into contracts that require them to pay for expensive facilities, compete with other farmers for pay even though the quality of chicks and feed is dependent on the companies, and make costly upgrades whenever companies say so. And as the meat industry has become more consolidated over the last few decades, the companies have continued to gain power over farmers.

In February 2024, after decades of advocacy, the USDA finalized the first of three rules related to the Packers and Stockyards Act, a century-old law that was intended to protect farmers from abuse by meat companies.

However, that contract privacy provision is also an example of something that has recently changed in favor of farmers.

“We had to get that done away with so I could show [the contract] to my accountant, so I could show it to a lawyer, so I could show it to my wife,” Watts, who became a famous poultry industry whistleblower after leaving the business, said. “Technically, I couldn’t even show it to her.”

In February 2024, after decades of advocacy that Watts played a key role in, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) under President Biden finalized the first of three rules related to the Packers and Stockyards Act, a century-old law that was intended to protect farmers from abuse by meat companies. In addition to requiring that chicken companies disclose much more information with farmers in terms of the income they can expect, the first rule protected the farmer’s right to discuss the terms of the contract with family members and legal and financial advisors.

The other two rules, now also finalized, created enforceable definitions of discrimination, retaliation, and deception and put limits on how much of a farmer’s pay could be based on the competitive ranking system that companies use.

All three rules were historic, because the Packers and Stockyards Act had no enforceable regulations until the Biden administration. Watts, who now works with the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project to help struggling chicken farmers, was “elated” by the progress, but said it’s too early to tell whether the rules will make a big difference; some provisions haven’t even gone into effect yet.

Even so, meat industry trade groups are already working to stop or overturn these rules.

In October, several groups—including the National Chicken Council and the North American Meat Institute, which represents the country’s largest meat companies—sued the USDA to overturn the second rule, called “Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity.” In the initial complaint, the groups claim the rule is unlawful and that it will harm meatpackers by forcing expensive “compliance and recordkeeping obligations” on them and that companies “may be forced to modify contracting practices merely to avoid the possibility of litigation.”

Now, a critical moment in the legal fight has arrived.

Four groups that represent farmer interests—the Alabama Poultry Growers Association, R-CALF, Latino Farmers and Ranchers International, and the Western Organization of Resource Councils—have asked the court to allow them to intervene in the case to defend the rule. They’re doing so at a time when they’re unsure if the USDA itself will choose to fight back, since during Trump’s first administration the USDA worked to weaken and eliminate Packers and Stockyards protections. To date, there has been no indication from the current leadership as to how they’ll approach the issue.

“Some of these groups have been working on improving these rules since the 1990s. It’s literally been decades, and finally, actual rules were finalized that have meaningful protections, and it’s just too precious a fight,” said Tyler Lobdell, an attorney with Food & Water Watch who is representing the farmer groups in their effort to intervene. “It simply makes sense that they’re at the table.”

Adding to the weight of the case is the fact that the industry’s argument challenges a fundamental piece of Packers and Stockyards enforcement across the board—whether every farmer that brings a case against a company should have to prove that not only were they harmed, but that the company’s actions caused broader “harm to competition.” In other words, while the lawsuit only targets one of the rules, the outcome of the case could impact the others as well.

In response to questions from Civil Eats about the lawsuit but also the agency’s broader approach to the rules, a USDA spokesperson said, “We will not comment on matters relating to litigation.”

A Meat Institute spokesperson declined Civil Eats’ request for interviews on behalf of both the Meat Institute and the National Chicken Council, saying “the lawsuit [to overturn the second rule] speaks for itself.”

What’s at Stake—In Court, and On Farms

R-CALF, which represents independent cattle producers, is one of the groups that has spent decades pushing for rules that would enable the USDA to properly enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act. Bill Bullard, R-CALF’s CEO, told Civil Eats they want to intervene in the case to defend the Inclusive Competition Rule because of its particular importance in the highly concentrated beef industry, where four companies now control 85 percent of the market.

“We think that it is essential in order to reduce the abuse of market power,” he said. “There’s a huge disparity in bargaining power between the producers and the meatpackers.” Producers—the farmers and ranchers who are responsible for raising the animals that meatpackers slaughter and bring to market—are also often susceptible to unfair practices, he said.

The rule in question explicitly defines the kind of unfair practices the Packers and Stockyards Act prohibits on three fronts: discrimination, retaliation, and deception. For example, it states that the prohibition on discrimination means a company cannot treat a grower differently based on race, religion, or sex. It says companies cannot retaliate against farmers for participating in associations or for speaking up about their rights under the law. Under “deception,” it prohibits companies from “employing false or misleading statements or omissions of material information” when entering into contracts, ending contracts, or refusing to contract with a farmer.

Among ranchers selling cattle, Bullard said, fear of retaliation is real. Because if a producer complains about a packer and that packer decides to retaliate, alternative buyers are few and far between.

“Pushing back on this rule sounds so ridiculous, because what they’re saying is, ‘We don’t want this rule because for our model to work and our industry to survive, we must be allowed to discriminate. We must be allowed to retaliate,” Watts said. “You know it’s bad when you have to prohibit retaliatory practices in a regulation, but here we are.”

In the lawsuit, which the Meat Institute spokesperson asked Civil Eats to quote from in lieu of interviews, the lawyers write that meat companies “maintain robust controls to prevent such discriminatory practices, root out such discrimination where it exists, and ensure that it finds no home in their industries.”

Why the Rules Matter to Chicken Farmers

The provisions related to deception are of interest to Thong Nguyen, a mild-mannered farmer who goes by Jak. In 2015, his wife spotted a farm with 10 chicken houses for sale on YouTube, where slick videos commonly attract farmers with promises like “A true money-maker for years to come!”  Nguyen went into debt to buy the approximately $2 million property in Summers, Arkansas, and soon after began raising chickens for Simmons Foods, a major chicken processor in the region.

“The contract poultry system will never work for the farmer until contracts are done in a way that there is good-faith bargaining, and even then the companies will always still have the upper hand.”

Nguyen realized quickly how little control he had over the entire endeavor, he said. If he didn’t immediately do something a Simmons field tech requested, his next flock of birds might be delayed. “Every time when we thought we have some savings, they would come in to tell us to make updates,” he said. “Either we do it, or we lose the contract.”

Nguyen ran into worse trouble in 2022 when his brother lost his contract raising chickens for a different regional company and went bankrupt. Because Nguyen had put his farm up as collateral for his brother’s property, he took on his brother’s debt as well. In the meantime, his wife’s chronic kidney disease was getting worse.

“I told the manager [at Simmons] in hopes that they would help me out. I told them about my wife’s condition,” he said. “The only way for me to get out is to sell the farm so I can pay off my farm debt and my brother’s as well and hopefully start somewhere new.”

To sell the farm, Nguyen needed Simmons’ cooperation if he wanted to get a fair price for the property. Even though Nguyen financed and built the chicken houses, about three-quarters of an industrial chicken farm’s property value is tied to having an active chicken contract, according to an industry insider who has been working with and for both chicken companies and growers for more than 20 years and has intimate knowledge of farm real estate. (Civil Eats granted the source anonymity because talking to the press could significantly damage their business interests.)

Nguyen’s family members at home on the farm. (Photo courtesy of Jak Nguyen)

So, if a grower like Nguyen wants to sell a farm, he needs the company to provide a letter of intent confirming they will contract with the new owner to grow chickens. In Nguyen’s case, Simmons was also requiring upgrades that any buyer would have to agree to make in order to secure that contract.

Throughout process, Nguyen felt Simmons was putting up roadblocks and delaying the sale. He believes the company was dragging it out until his contract ended.

“They’ve been giving us false promises. After everything happened, from the start to the end, it seemed like they don’t want me to sell my farm,” he said. “The last time I called and talked with the manager, he told me that he would not let anybody buy my farm or let me renew my farm. They don’t want anything to do with my farm anymore.”

Simmons did not respond to Civil Eats’ request for comment on these claims.

When Simmons decided it wouldn’t provide a new contract to a buyer, the value of Nguyen’s property dropped from close to $2 million to less than $500,000, so selling the property won’t come close to covering his debt.

“There’s a huge disparity in bargaining power between the producers and the meatpackers.”

It’s impossible to know whether having stronger rules against discrimination, deception, and retaliation could change Nguyen’s situation or others like his. But the industry insider said a big reason many situations play out this way is that in the end, companies like Simmons have “little to lose.” If rules on the books made them liable to USDA investigation or lawsuits, that could change.

As Bullard put it, “This rule protects the producer’s ability to address some problems they may have with a packer. Without it, they would have no recourse.”

Nguyen is incensed that the industry is trying to get the rule thrown out. “That’s just going to make things worse for the farmer,” he said. “The farmer should have more protection than the integrator because they are the one that’s putting their all into it . . . sweat, tears, money. They’ve been out in the cold, the heat, the rain. It’s hard work. It’s no joke. And we’re doing this to support our families.”

Why the Meat Industry Opposes Packers and Stockyards Regulations

In the lawsuit, industry lawyers write that the rule would create “a wide-ranging antidiscrimination enforcement power” at the USDA.

That’s illegal, according to their argument, which boils down to this: Because the Packers and Stockyards Act’s primary purpose is “to assure fair competition and fair trade practices in livestock marketing and in the meatpacking industry,” any violation of the act has to threaten not just an individual producer’s livelihood, but competition in the industry.

In other words, the USDA can’t regulate discrimination under the law unless that discrimination somehow makes the whole system less competitive for all growers.

Some courts have upheld that interpretation over the years. However, the USDA, under both Republicans and Democrats, has always maintained the opposite: Individual harm is enough to activate Packers and Stockyards protections. As the farmer groups seeking to intervene in the case wait to see how the agency’s new leadership will handle the lawsuit, a big question is whether that will still be the case.

“If Secretary Rollins changes the agency’s position on harm to competition, it will be a shocking move.”

“If Secretary Rollins changes the agency’s position on harm to competition, it will be a shocking move,” Lobdell, the attorney for the farmer groups, said. “What it would amount to is a massive handout to the largest corporate interests in our agriculture and food system, directly in opposition to the interests of farmers and ranchers.”

For now, everyone’s waiting to find out how the USDA will proceed, and whether the court will grant the farmer groups’ motion to intervene.

In the original complaint, the meatpackers say they will suffer “concrete and imminent harm” if the law remains in place. “The Final Rule . . . requires a wholesale reevaluation of contractual relationships and communications between regulated entities and producers,” they write.

That kind of wholesale reevaluation is exactly what many farmers want. “The contract poultry system will never work for the farmer . . . never, until contracts are done in a way that there is good-faith bargaining, and even then the companies will always still have the upper hand,” Watts said. The most they can hope for, he said, is that the new rules will “be a deterrent to curb some of the most onerous practices companies use against the farmers they contract with and make income at least a little more predictable.”

For Nguyen—and so many others with strikingly similar experiences—it’s too late for that. He’s working through bankruptcy paperwork and driving for Uber to pay his bills while he figures out his next steps. At one point, he had family around to help care for his wife, but they’ve all moved to find work. Looking out at the 10 empty chicken houses with no way to pay off the debt or sell them for what they’re worth, he cries a lot. Thankfully, his wife and his two daughters, especially a “very cheerful” eight-year-old, he said, keep him going.

He thinks maybe, if he tells his story, it will help make the case that more regulation of the industry is needed. That farmers need more protection, not less. “If we give up, no one’s going to be standing up,” he said. “We want to pave the way for other farmers to fight back.”

The post Livestock Producers Seek to Defend Packers and Stockyards Rules from Industry Attack appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/05/19/livestock-producers-seek-to-defend-packers-and-stockyards-rules-from-industry-attack/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/05/14/a-queer-couple-in-texas-organizes-for-farmers-mental-health-and-well-being/ Wed, 14 May 2025 08:00:41 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=64363 Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Nicole J. Caruth is a 2025 Pulitzer Reporting Fellow. In February, she opened Griot Gardens, her restaurant in Houston, going into business with her mother, a seasoned restaurateur. But growing food in Hempstead, a remote agricultural town outside the city, has proven tougher than she […]

The post This Queer Couple Supports LGBTQ+ and BIPOC Farmers’ Mental Health appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Nicole J. Caruth is a 2025 Pulitzer Reporting Fellow.

Ariana Dolcine moved to Texas with two dreams: to establish a thriving farm with her partner, Kennady Lilly, and open a farm-to-table Caribbean restaurant celebrating her Haitian roots. In her vision, she would cook dishes with malanga, a starchy root vegetable, calabaza, a pumpkin-shaped squash, and other “cultural crops” that she and Lilly cultivated themselves.

In February, she opened Griot Gardens, her restaurant in Houston, going into business with her mother, a seasoned restaurateur. But growing food in Hempstead, a remote agricultural town outside the city, has proven tougher than she and Lilly anticipated, with numerous losses in the past year.

LGBTQ+ people in farming are over three times more likely to experience depression and suicidal intent and about two and a half times more likely to experience anxiety than the general population.

First came Hurricane Beryl, knocking down trees and two 50-foot sunflower beds that Lilly planted solely for the joy they added to her kitchen window view. Shortly after, the winds from a tornado-strength derecho damaged their well, and then the generator broke down, leaving them without water for six months. A rare snowstorm wiped out their winter greens just a few months ago. To add to their woes, a beloved cow and its calf died during labor.

Speaking about her mental health, Dolcine named isolation, burnout from the daily grind of farming, and the “heartbreak” of their repeated losses among her challenges. “I’ve felt really hopeless at a few points this year in a way that I haven’t felt before,” Lilly said, as she expressed feeling “lonely” and “depressed” while struggling financially. Living in a remote town, and in a world rife with homophobia, she and Dolcine never know if revealing their queer identity will jeopardize their safety, adding another layer of stress to their lives.

They’re not alone in this experience.

A study released last year by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign revealed that LGBTQ+ people in farming are “over three times more likely to experience depression and suicidal intent and about two and a half times more likely to experience anxiety than the general population.” According to the researchers, not conforming to the gender and sexuality norms of farming culture while navigating potentially hostile social environments increases stress and may lead to poor mental health outcomes.

For Dolcine and Lilly, community building and cultivating a sense of belonging are crucial for maintaining their mental well-being. In October, the couple hosted the “South Side Queer Farmer Convergence,” the Queer Farmer Network’s first gathering of queer and transgender Black, Indigenous, and people of color in Texas.

For three days, 50 farmers camped out at Lillyland Farm in Hempstead, invited to shift their focus from caring for the land to tending their own mental and emotional health. Dolcine and Lilly found the gathering “healing,” both for them and those who attended.

A lot has happened in the months since then that threatens to diminish the mental health benefits they experienced.

With President Trump back in office, multiple reports have called attention to the mental health risks for LGBTQ+ Americans amid his efforts to revoke their rights, signing executive orders that recognize only two sexes, end discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people, restrict access to gender-affirming care, and attempt to erase queer and trans people from public life and history.

On social media, Trump’s newly appointed Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, praised the termination of grants meant to support queer and trans as well as BIPOC farmers and consumers, implying this funding represented “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

None of this is stopping Dolcine from organizing another queer farmer gathering this year.

“People are struggling in this line of work,” she said, highlighting the additional difficulties that queer Black, Indigenous, and people of color face in accessing farmland and resources. “I want them to be connected and know they’re not alone in this journey.”

Building Community in the Trump Era

In 2018, in the midst of Donald Trump’s first term, a group of friends in Iowa got together and created the Queer Farmer Network (QFC), a national nonprofit devoted to building community and reducing isolation for rural and queer farmers. That same year, they organized the first Queer Farmer Convergence, a now annual gathering informally known as “the QFC.”

It was created “to provide a space of respite for farming and rural queers who may experience isolation . . . and who may be particularly vulnerable to the mental health struggles well known to both farmers and LGBTQ+ community members,” its website states

The 2024 South Side Queer Farmer Convergence focused on rest and restoration for LGBTQ+ farmers and land stewards. (Photo courtesy of Lillyland Farm).

First held at Humble Hands Harvest, a worker-owned cooperative farm in the northeast corner of Iowa, the QFC has branched out over the years to include gatherings in Virginia, Michigan, and New Hampshire. The QFC took place at locations in Texas and Wisconsin for the first time last fall, both of which focused on bringing together queer farmers identifying as Black, Indigenous, or people of color—a change Dolcine suggested when she attended her first QFC two years ago.

Originally from Miami, Dolcine was living in Iowa temporarily, working as an independent insurance adjuster. That’s where she met Lilly, a Des Moines native who co-founded the now-closed urban farm Radiate DSM. “On a whim,” Dolcine joined her at Humble Hands for the QFC and found a glaring lack of racial diversity. Organizers told her the network had reserved one-third of tickets for BIPOC farmers, waiving their registration fees and providing travel stipends to attend the QFC, but had limited success.

To Dolcine, moving the gathering to a region with greater diversity and organizing a BIPOC-centered event where people of color would feel safe attending seemed like viable solutions.

But BIPOC gatherings had been a long-term plan of the Queer Farmer Network. Securing a grant for farmer mental health and well-being allowed the network to finance the gatherings and assemble a team to organize them. Dolcine joined that team and agreed to organize a QFC herself, naming it to reflect its location in the South and her own Southern origins.

On the first day of the South Side QFC, farmers hailing from Houston, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Florida, Tennessee, Atlanta, Iowa, Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey gathered at Lillyland Farm in a welcome circle that lasted “hours and hours,” Lilly said. As the farmers went around introducing themselves, Dolcine and Lilly heard many express gratitude for the chance to be on land where they could “be themselves and be queer,” not having to mask their identities or code-switch.

“It seemed extremely needed,” said Dolcine, who co-organized the event with Cyd Keel, a queer trans farmer and herbalist living in Memphis, Tennessee.

For the rest of the weekend, the group followed a loosely planned itinerary that included printmaking, natural plant dying, beading, and yoga while leaving space for spontaneous activities like a nighttime dance party around a bonfire and communal nap in a field. Although the event was held three weeks before the election, Dolcine felt it was important not to make it all about political or environmental crises or attacks on bodily autonomy.

“At what point can we turn that all off and just say, ‘OK, I deserve peace of mind,” she explained, fighting back tears. “I deserve not to have these things on my mind for just a moment. I deserve not to think about next month. I deserve just to hear the earth as it is: the water running, the birds chirping. People deserve to just be at ease.”

Brooklyn Gordon, a queer, Black preacher, licensed therapist, and new farmer based in Dallas, attended the South Side QFC not to counsel attendees but to be in the company of other queer folks. “What was most powerful was seeing love prevail,” she wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “We dreamed together of futures for queer farmers, queer families, queer love. We dreamed of being in community with one another again and growing . . . Regardless of the mental state that everyone may have come in with, we all left better.”

Gordon has observed in her therapy practice that managing the complex interplay of racial, gender, and queer identities presents “a constant challenge to being seen, valued, and safe.” From familial and religious beliefs to social conditioning and mistreatment, “it all poses a risk for mental and emotional health,” she said. Recent studies by The Trevor Project and the Center for American Progress echo this point: Mental health risks for LGBTQ+ people stem not from their gender or sexual identity, but from stigma and discrimination.

Like Gordon, Lilly was uplifted by the gathering and the attendees’ reassurance that she was still a farmer, even though her vision of abundance hasn’t yet materialized. “I cried when people were leaving,” Lilly said. “They are my family now.” From her perspective, “family, community, and chosen family” are essential not only for the mental well-being of LGBTQ+ farmers but particularly for LGBTQ+ Black women like her and Dolcine, who face the added stress of anti-Blackness.

Living Free on Black-Owned Land

Lillyland Farm is located in Hempstead, a town roughly 55 miles northwest of Houston, with about 6,500 residents. Hempstead takes pride in its history as the top watermelon shipper in the United States. But driving there on Highway 290 conjures an uglier history: It was here that 28-year-old Sandra Bland was found hanged in a jail cell three days after being pulled over and arrested by a Texas state trooper in 2015. Bland’s name became a Black Lives Matter rallying cry, with suspicions lingering about whether she died by suicide or at the hands of police.

The Lilly family’s roots in Hempstead, Texas, date back to the 1800s. (Photo courtesy of Lillyland Farms).

“I think about it every day,” Lilly said, sitting in her camper surrounded by lush starter plants. “There is not a single day that I leave the farm that I’m not on edge. Anytime a police officer is driving behind me, I am terrified.”

Lilly feels safest at Lillyland, a 32-acre parcel that’s been in her family for eight generations. She picks up a thick stack of paper, slightly curled at the edges, that she calls “The Lilly Bible,” as it lists every member of her family, all the way back to an ancestor who arrived from Africa in 1818.

When their ancestors were freed from chattel slavery, they came across a field of lilies and adopted the flower as their surname, rejecting the family name of those who enslaved them.

A local university conducted the genealogical research, though Lilly’s family knowledge also comes from oral histories. She learned from her great-uncle, who also lives on the farm, that when their ancestors were freed from chattel slavery, they came across a field of lilies and adopted the flower as their surname, rejecting the family name of those who enslaved them.

As Lilly walked the property, four adult dogs and six mixed-breed puppies ran behind her. She stopped for a moment to greet Corotha, a horned cow that lives on the land, before moving through the pasture. With each step, she shared the rich history of Lillyland, a legacy that dates to the Reconstruction era, when Black families, denied the promise of 40 acres and a mule, bought whatever land they could.

Based on county records, Abraham Lilly, Sr., acquired 10 acres from Leonard Waller Groce, his former owner’s eldest son, in 1867. His father, Bowie Lilly, bought several plots in the area, amassing at least 82 more acres in the town. But, at some point, the Lillys’ property shrank to 50 acres and then to 32.

“What I’ve heard is that one of my aunts missed a payment,” Lilly explained. “Back then, they were trying to take land from Black people anywhere they could.”

Kennady Lilly and Ariana Dolcine’s dog Sugar happily feeds her six puppies. (Photo credit: Nicole J. Caruth)

Lillyland Farm provided an idyllic backdrop for the South Side QFC, its thick, prickly woods gradually giving way to open fields where cattle graze in the sun. A large pond covered with lily pads sits at the heart of the landscape, a feature added by Lilly’s great-grandfather. A partially submerged boat at the pond’s edge, left there by the youngest of his thirteen children, reads “The Other Woman” on its side.

Lilly’s grandfather grew up on the farm but left Hempstead to work for the United States Department of Agriculture in Iowa and returned after retirement. After he died, he left two acres to Lilly’s dad, which she and Dolcine now tend. Lilly’s great-uncle wasn’t exactly welcoming when they arrived. “His first words to me were, ‘I know about your lifestyle and I don’t agree with it,’” she said, walking past his house. “He still makes a point to say that all the time, but now he loves me. I’m his favorite niece.”

Texas is known for its particularly hostile stance toward queer and trans people, with recent legislation reinforcing this reputation. The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking 88 anti-LGBTQ bills in Texas, the highest number of any state in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Trans Legislation Tracker shows 128 anti-trans bills in Texas, compared to 33 in Oklahoma and three in Louisiana, its neighboring states.

“I had it in my body and mind not to be gay here,’” Lilly said, reminiscing about the summer when she and Dolcine first visited Hempstead. “It just didn’t feel safe.” But she momentarily forgot and kissed Dolcine at the town’s annual Watermelon Festival in July. “The second we kissed, I heard someone [holler].” A cowboy came up to them and shared that he had a gay brother. “Just be yourself,” he told them. “People are gonna’ hate, but you have the right to be yourself.”

Making LGBTQ+ Farmers’ Mental Health Needs Visible

Researchers believe there are over 23,000 queer farmers in the United States, though the exact number is unknown. The USDA Census of Agriculture, taken every five years and considered a comprehensive count of farmers and ranchers in the U.S., doesn’t ask about gender or sexual identity. Without visibility, queer farmers’ needs go unrecognized.

“I really wanted to understand better what’s going on with mental health for LGBTQ+ folks and how might that be related to the environment within agriculture,” said Courtney Cuthbertson, who led the study of LGBTQ+ farmer mental health at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “I was kind of surprised when I was starting to tell people about this project idea: Some of the reactions I would get were, ‘I didn’t know LGBTQ+ farmers were a group of people who existed.’”

Cuthbertson’s research team received 148 survey responses from LGBTQ+ farmers in 36 states. About 7 percent lived in Texas. “Most participants were white,” the study said, with 58 percent identifying as queer and 38 percent as trans. From this data, they surmised that poor mental health experiences for LGBTQ+ farmers may be connected to, among other things, the family farm model.

The idea of “family” being defined as a married male and female is codified in the American Farm Bureau’s 2024 policy book, which states, “A family should be defined as persons who are related by blood, marriage between a male and female, or legal adoption,” excluding all other forms of kinship. The impact of this on queer farmers includes reduced likelihood of securing loans and other support necessary for their success and survival.

When the USDA attempted to broaden the gender and sexual identity options on its census, it encountered pushback. “The survey asks questions including whether farmers identify as transgender, the gender they were at birth, and their sexual orientation,” Missouri Senator Josh Hawley posted on X in 2022. “For Joe Biden, even farming is about advancing his woke agenda.”

Cuthbertson warned that their team’s survey didn’t ask about legislation but about LGBTQ+ farmers’ experiences in general. Still, “We’ve seen historic year-after-year increases in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation,” Cuthbertson said. “I think it’s a fair thing to say that when you hear a lot of negative things about a group you’re a part of, and then there’s legislation proposed, that is going to have a personal impact.”

Although the study found high depression and anxiety rates among those surveyed, somewhat encouragingly, suicide risk was “much lower” for LGBTQ+ farmers than for the general LGBTQ+ population. The research team suggested that future studies investigate whether agricultural work offers some level of protection.

Living the Dream and Finding Hope

On a busy Sunday afternoon at the restaurant Griot Gardens, a server enthusiastically recommends “really, really good” Haitian dishes like akra, a fritter made from malanga root, and D’jon D’jon, rice with black mushrooms, eagerly writing down orders on green tickets. After a short wait, she places a deep-fried snapper with its head and tail still attached on my table next to a glass of vanilla-infused lemonade topped with a fresh Johnny Jump Up flower..

“I deserve just to hear the earth as it is: the water running, the birds chirping. People deserve to just be at ease.”

The song “Sonia” by the Haitian Canadian musical group Black Parents streams from a large portable speaker as couples and families eat and chat across tables. A uniformed police officer who moonlights as a DJ walks to each table, striking up conversations in Haitian Creole while waiting for his to-go order

This is the restaurant Dolcine dreamt of when she and Lilly moved to Texas. She opened it in February in collaboration with her mother, Pricia La France, who cooks most of the food. “I’m hoping for a good harvest this year,” said Dolcine, who still aspires to grow all the vegetables for the restaurant. For now, she sources them from Miami and Haiti.

Dolcine runs the restaurant seven days a week, while Lilly gears up to launch a personal chef business and manages the farm, where she has planted eggplant, tomatoes, okra, cantaloupe, watermelon, blackberries, sweet potatoes, lemongrass, and a variety of medicinal herbs. Lilly arrived at the restaurant in mud-covered boots, pitching in to help wait tables. Reflecting on their recent struggles, Lilly said, “There are also good things: There is also beauty and hope.”

Plans for the next South Side QFC are slowly developing. Dolcine and Lilly say their biggest obstacle isn’t the political climate, but rather finding time to organize the event with everything else they have going on. “I try not to let these shifts in power influence my state of mind and cause me to be worried or scared,” Dolcine said. “If I want to do a QFC, then I’m gonna’ do it however I can do it.”

Farmer Mental Health Hotlines & Resources

If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, we encourage you to call or text these hotlines for support:

• LGBT National Hotline: 1-888-843-4564
• Trans Lifeline: 1-877-565-8860
• BlackLine: 1-800-604-5841
• The Trevor Project: (866) 488-7386 (for LGBTQ young people, ages 13-24)
• Farm Aid Hotline: 1-800-FARM-AID. Available Monday-Friday, 8 am-8 pm CT. Has English and Spanish-speaking operators.
• AgriStress Helpline: 1-833-897-2474. Available in Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming.
• Rural Response Hotline: 1-800-464-0258
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
• National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: 988
• Crisis Text Line: Free 24/7 text service for those in crisis. Text “HELLO” to 741741.

If you are having a mental health crisis, please call 988, or 911 in case of an emergency.

For resources aimed at queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming farmers, visit:

• The Queer Farmer Network
• Trans Farmers for Trans Farmers
• The Cultivating Change Foundation

 

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/04/16/usdas-regional-food-business-centers-caught-in-federal-funding-freeze/ https://civileats.com/2025/04/16/usdas-regional-food-business-centers-caught-in-federal-funding-freeze/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:28 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=63532 July 15, 2025 Update: The USDA announced today it has cancelled the Regional Food Business Centers program. However, processing the animals in order to sell the meat locally has been a challenge: The couple currently has to haul the animals to a slaughter facility about four hours away, which is both time-consuming and hard on […]

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]]> July 15, 2025 Update: The USDA announced today it has cancelled the Regional Food Business Centers program.

For the past five years, Patra and David Wise have been growing their farm business, Native Wise, to sell vegetables, wild rice, and honey to their local community in Northeastern Minnesota. In 2021, they added a herd of bison on family land they had acquired within the Fond du Lac Reservation, a step they were particularly excited about since it represented the first time bison were returned to the tribal lands in about 150 years.

However, processing the animals in order to sell the meat locally has been a challenge: The couple currently has to haul the animals to a slaughter facility about four hours away, which is both time-consuming and hard on the bison. So, they’ve been working toward setting up their own local processing.

Last year, they got a boost when the North Central USDA Regional Food Business Center awarded them a $50,000 Business Builder Grant to pay for crucial pieces of equipment. So far, they’ve purchased an industrial cooler-freezer combo that will allow them to store meat for customers until they come to the farm to pick it up.

“We wouldn’t be able to do the farm-to-consumer processing without that type of a freezer,” said Patra Wise, adding that it would have been nearly impossible for them to afford such an expensive piece of equipment without the grant.

“You sign a contract and then you’re trusting the government that they’re going to honor their end.”

Wise was about to purchase a few smaller pieces of equipment with the remaining grant funds, which farmers and entrepreneurs receive by requesting reimbursements, when she heard, at the end of January, that all payments were on hold. She was shocked, she said, because the grant had already been awarded.

“You sign a contract and then you’re trusting the government that they’re going to honor their end,” she said. “For a small farm, that’s life or death, basically, for the business.”

Like many other U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs that support local and regional farms, the Regional Food Business Centers have been put on ice since the Trump administration took office.

In May 2023, the USDA awarded grant funding to local organizations like nonprofits and universities to run the business centers. The centers use that funding to support the local food economy, including by issuing smaller sub-grants to farmers and food businesses like Native Wise.

With $360 million awarded, the Regional Food Business Centers program represents a small slice of USDA spending, so has attracted less attention than bigger projects like the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities. (USDA canceled that program this week, but is allowing some projects to continue if they meet new criteria.)

However, the 12 centers have a wide reach, since they were set up to be hubs of business development activity within rural communities across the country. With funding paused, partnerships they’ve formed to provide technical assistance to farms and food businesses have been disrupted, as have grant dollars promised to local farmers and food businesses like Native Wise.

Because the projects were intentionally crafted to build the connective tissue that local supply chains rely on, a break in the chain has larger ripple effects. For example, one of the North Central Regional Food Business Center’s other grants went to a kitchen facility in Fargo, North Dakota. Until payments were paused, the facility was using its grant funding to expand its kitchen space, which would have enabled more farms and small food businesses to cook and process there to bring products to market.

“So, it’s not just about the awardee, it’s about everyone around them, too,” said Candice Zimmerman, a regional development planner at Region Five Development Commission, an economic development organization that runs the North Central Center, which serves Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Last week, nine of the 12 organizations running the centers sent a letter to members of Congress highlighting the impact of the work they’re doing, explaining that they are not getting reimbursed for money already spent based on their USDA contracts, and pleading for help. The letter was shared with Civil Eats.

“If there ever is a program that really deserves bipartisan support across the spectrum, it’s this program,” Paul Freedman, the director of the Appalachia Regional Food Business Center, which supports food producers across seven states from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, told Civil Eats. “Our middle name is business. Our goal here is to help businesses bring food to market so that it’s available at a fair price and so that producers, processors, and farmers can actually make a living doing this.”

A Biden-Era Project

In response to increasing food-system consolidation and the supply chain shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Biden’s USDA created a suite of new programs with the intention of building back what policy wonks call the “mid-tier” of the food system. It’s the landscape of farms and food businesses that support regional wealth and that have been the most hollowed out over the past several decades as corporate consolidation has pushed for a “get big or get out” farm economy.

“If there ever is a program that really deserves bipartisan support across the spectrum, it’s this program.”

Biden’s USDA wanted to put some of the work of building back those regional markets onto local organizations that might better understand each region’s unique needs. A former USDA official who worked on the program—who did not want to be identified because of current policy work she is engaged with—used an analogy: Just like the local agents of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service helped growers understand their particular soil profiles, the Regional Food Business Centers would help farmers understand, access, and build local markets.

The USDA tasked the centers with coordinating regional food efforts, offering comprehensive technical support, and providing small financial grants to further build local food capacity. “Success will be if we’re able to create additional market opportunities so that mid- and small-sized operators still have a chance of staying in the business,” former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told Civil Eats at the time.

Five-year grant agreements to 12 centers were finalized in 2023. In an October 2024 progress report, the USDA reported that as a result, 2,800 individuals received technical assistance, 1,500 new partnerships were formed, and 287 businesses reported increased revenue.

In the letter to lawmakers, the Northwest and Rocky Mountain Regional Food Business Center—which serves Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Oregon—reported that in its first year, its technical assistance programs helped establish 30 new companies, and 50 farms and businesses that worked with the center reported increased sales. The center cited its support of the development of Wyoming’s Food Freedom Markets, which one dairy farm reported enabled it to increase sales four-fold.

Because the Northwest Center is run by Colorado State University, it is continuing its work and honoring contract payments despite the current lack of USDA reimbursement, with staff hoping funding will resume soon.

Impacts of the Freeze

When the Trump administration took office, the USDA stopped paying Regional Food Business Center grantees for any work done after January 20. For the North Central Center, the freeze has been devastating.

“We’re not getting paid, and we’re not being told when that review will be done,” said Cheryal Lee Hills, executive director of the Region Five Development Commission.

In addition to not being able to reimburse grantees like Native Wise for work done under already-signed grant contracts, Hills had to cancel 31 subcontracts to organizations working with the center to provide technical assistance across Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota. That assistance might look like helping farmers market their foods, meet food safety requirements, or access capital to grow.

Some of those organizations have had to lay off staff as a result, Hills said. Now, with more than three years left on their contract, the organization is essentially treading water and isn’t getting any information from the USDA as to what might happen.

The USDA did not respond to questions about the freeze, its impacts, or whether the Regional Food Business Center program might be cancelled.

“I don’t have a good answer of how long we can hold out,” Hills said. “I’m hoping that they just either pay us . . . or terminate the thing so that we can all move on with our lives, because right now, it’s like we’ve been cut by a knife, and we don’t know how bad we’re going to bleed or for how long.”

One of the explicit aims of the project was also for the USDA to reach farmers and food businesses that historically had trouble accessing its programs and services. That could mean small, diversified farms that don’t fit the commodity mold, or Black farmers who faced past discrimination. With the pause and confusion, Hills said, many of those who are new to working with USDA grants are now demoralized, and even for those who have long accessed USDA’s services, confidence in the agency is plummeting.

When the Trump administration took office, the USDA stopped paying Regional Food Business Center grantees for any work done after January 20.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to apply for another USDA grant,” she said.

The Appalachia Center was not as far along in its work. Last fall, it closed the first round of its Business Builder Grants, selected 62 as awardees, and then sent the list to the USDA early this year for approval. Among those on the list are grain farmers who want to sell more of their grains directly to their communities and a food business working to more effectively process pawpaws. Now, they’re all in limbo.

Since the grants hadn’t been finalized, none of the farmers have spent money yet, so are not waiting for payments. Still, Appalachia Center Director Paul Freedman said the grants are time sensitive. Many of the applications included detailed cost estimates that depend on equipment pricing that changes over time. And the farmers are starting the season without knowing, now, if they’ll be expected, later, to start the projects and honor the contracts. Freedman has also paused a second round of Business Builder Grant applications and has stopped paying the Center’s 17 partner organizations for technical assistance.

“The longer it goes, at some point, more and more staff and more and more [of those] partners fall off,” he said. In other words, the longer his center is unable to get reimbursed for its work, the harder it is to keep supporting local farms and food businesses—who may have to call it quits on working with the center. Freedman said that moment feels imminent.

It’s a shame, he said, because one of things he thinks makes the Regional Food Business Centers effective is that each region is able to come up with its own “unique solutions to unique problems.”

In Ohio, that might mean helping an orchard get into cider production to boost revenue. On tribal lands in Minnesota, it might mean building the infrastructure to process bison.

What the centers have in common, said Freedman, is that they’re all working to counter the extractive forces like corporate consolidation that have long pushed farmers to hang up their hoes. “[The Regional Food Business Centers help] to overcome that and make small farms viable, and by doing so you’re getting more local food, which makes us more resilient, whether there’s a natural disaster, another recession, another—heaven forbid—a pandemic. It isn’t a blue or red issue.”

April 17, 2025 Update: This story has been updated to include the status of the Northwest and Rocky Mountain Regional Food Business Center’s work.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/04/16/usdas-regional-food-business-centers-caught-in-federal-funding-freeze/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/03/31/farmworker-unions-on-the-rise-in-new-york-joined-by-the-united-farm-workers/ Mon, 31 Mar 2025 09:00:51 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=62847 Meanwhile, at an apple orchard in upstate New York, immigrant farmworkers signed the first United Farm Workers (UFW) union contract in the state, joining the legendary California-based union founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Most of the orchard workers were Jamaicans who are granted entry to the country through the government’s H-2A […]

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On January 30, President Trump’s announcement that his administration would begin deporting immigrants to Guantánamo Bay prison made big news.

Meanwhile, at an apple orchard in upstate New York, immigrant farmworkers signed the first United Farm Workers (UFW) union contract in the state, joining the legendary California-based union founded in 1962 by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Most of the orchard workers were Jamaicans who are granted entry to the country through the government’s H-2A visa program for just a few months each year during harvest season. But going forward, the new contract will offer protections for all of the orchard’s approximately 150 workers, regardless of where they come from or what their legal status might be.

“There is a lot of fear. There is a lot of worry. There are also conversations happening around, ‘How do we build solidarity?’”

“It doesn’t matter if they crossed through the desert or if they came through a [guestworker] program,” said UFW organizer Gabriella Szpunt, who helped organize the workers. “At the end of the day, they’re all looking for the same thing: something better for their families.”

UFW leaders say the contract is significant for several reasons. First, during the process, farm groups in New York filed a lawsuit challenging the right of guestworkers to unionize. But the court affirmed that right, creating a precedent at a time when the number of workers coming to farms on H-2A visas has grown exponentially. While the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) first organized H-2A workers in North Carolina in the 1990s, very few guestworkers to date have union protection.

It also marks the historic farmworker union’s first of many steps toward expanding its reach beyond its headquarters in California: UFW already has eight additional New York contracts in the pipeline.

A worker at an apple orchard in New York. (Photo credit: United Farm Workers)

And it’s part of a broader organizing push that involves other unions and worker groups, still moving forward in the face of an aggressively anti-immigrant administration in Washington, D.C. For instance, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem recently launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in which she tells immigrants, “We will hunt you down.” Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested and detained farmworker and activist Alfredo Juarez Zeferino, who helped create an independent farmworker union in Washington state about 10 years ago.

“There is a lot of fear. There is a lot of worry,” said Fabiola Ortiz Valdez, the director of organizing at Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition of labor groups across the food system. Valdez said that while she doesn’t want to minimize the impact the immigration crackdown is having on food and farmworkers, moments of crisis can also provide opportunities. “There are also conversations happening around, ‘How do we build solidarity?’” she said.

The Rise, Decline, and Return of Farmworker Unions 

Today, to mark Cesar Chavez Day, more than 5,000 UFW workers, allies, and supporters will march in Delano, California to call attention to the role immigrants play in putting food on American tables. They’ll end at the UFW union hall at 40 Acres, where grape growers gathered in 1970 to sign their first UFW contracts.

In those early days, UFW founders Chavez, Huerta, and Larry Itliong built a movement that at its peak saw 60,000 unionized farmworkers planting and harvesting across California’s abundant fields and orchards.

A march to Sacramento in 1966 from Delano, California. (Photo credit: Harvey Richards)

Over the last several decades, their numbers have dwindled, alongside a much larger decline in unionization across all industries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1983, the first year similar data was available, the union membership rate in the U.S. was 20 percent. By 2024, it had been cut in half to less than 10 percent. Compared to other industries, agriculture had one of the lowest rates of all, at 1.4 percent.

Immigration status is one reason farmworkers have lagged behind other workers in organizing unions. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that about half of farmworkers lack legal authorization to work in the U.S, while temporary H-2A workers depend on their employers for legal status. Fear of deportation, or of not being called back the following year, is a constant.

In addition, federal laws that prohibit employers from firing or retaliating against workers for joining a union exclude farmworkers. Since 1975, California has extended those protections to farmworkers.

New York has only recently followed suit. In May 2019, farmworkers backed by the Workers’ Center of Central New York (WCCNY) and the Worker Justice Center of New York (WJCNY) won a court case in which they argued that New York’s state constitution guarantees farmworkers the right to organize. Two months later, former Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill into law that prohibited employers from firing or retaliating against farmworkers who organize; the bill also granted farmworkers overtime pay, one day of rest each week, and other protections.

That prompted a surge in organizing, although the pandemic initially created a delay. In September 2021, Local 338 RWDSU/UFCW, a union that represents workers in grocery stores and other industries, certified the first union contract for New York farmworkers. Twelve workers at Pindar Vineyards on Long Island were the first, and Local 338 has since organized workers at two additional Long Island vineyards.

Organizing in New York’s Apple Orchards

Armando Elenes, the secretary treasurer of UFW, told Civil Eats that when the union began looking at New York, the team decided to focus on the western part of the state because of the density of larger farms, primarily apple orchards. After the pandemic delay, they began reaching out to hundreds of workers and educating them about the protections the new state law afforded them.

In spring of 2022, Szpunt, the UFW organizer, started meeting with workers at Cahoon Farms, an apple orchard that also does its own processing to sell, fresh, frozen, and dried apples in addition to apple juice. “When I first related this possibility to these workers, they were just in shock that anybody cared and that anybody had a mechanism for them to advocate for themselves,” she said. That changed quickly once they understood the opportunity, she said.

“I was excited, because it’s a chance for us to get some fair treatment.”

Martin Griffiths is from Jamaica and started coming to the U.S. in 2018, as he puts it, “bottom line, to make things better for yourself.” Griffiths ended up at Cahoon through the H-2A program, where he climbed ladders of various heights with a picking bag to harvest apples. Depending on whether the apples would be sold fresh or processed, he said, he’d have to work carefully, to avoid bruising, or faster, to prioritize volume.

Management counted the bins of apples filled at the end of a shift to make sure workers met productivity standards. He said the hours were long, usually 7 a.m. until 5 p.m., and the work was hard. Primarily, he said, he felt like he and his fellow workers had a hard time standing up for themselves with management. When UFW showed up and proposed organizing a union, “I was excited, because it’s a chance for us to get some fair treatment,” he said.

The process of organizing was slow, partially because workers like Griffiths go home to Jamaica in the off-season, so meetings had to be arranged remotely, over WhatsApp and Zoom. Then, organizers hit another snag, when Cahoon, a few other allied farms, and the New York State Vegetable Growers Association filed a lawsuit that claimed the new union protections should not apply to guestworkers.

“We weren’t expecting them to challenge the right of H-2A workers to organize, but they did,” Elenes said. The farmers’ lawsuit put a freeze on the efforts for about six months, but the state ultimately prevailed with its argument that the law applies to guestworkers as well.

“That was important, because we believe that every worker, no matter what your status is, should have the right to organize,” Elenes said. “We don’t want to be in the game of playing undocumented workers against citizens or undocumented workers against H-2A workers.”

When the UFW contract was finally officially certified in January of this year, it included wage increases and bonuses, a retirement plan, nine paid holidays, and several other provisions. One provision that is especially important to Griffiths requires Cahoon to recall guestworkers each year based on seniority, so they can return season after season, which will provide some job security he and others previously lacked. Also, receiving 401(k) benefits is key, Elenes said, since guestworkers are not eligible to receive Social Security benefits when they retire.

But Griffiths kept coming back to something less tangible the union gave him: a sense of empowerment. “Now, since the contract, we feel a little more safe,” he said. “It’s never been about the money. It’s about respect.”

Cahoon Farms did not respond to a request for comment.

The Future of Farmworker Organizing

With that momentum, Elenes and Szpunt are now organizing farmworkers at eight other New York farms, primarily apple orchards, but also vegetable farms. Things have certainly gotten harder since Trump’s election, Szpunt said. “Just a simple act of visiting a worker at their home: They’re more afraid to even just open a door,” she said.

But UFW also points to recent successes in California, including a new contract at a sweet-potato farm in Merced that covers 1,200 workers. Today’s march in Delano also signals a network of support for the union.

Valdez, at Food Chain Workers Alliance, said that while the new legal protection from retaliation is critical, immigrant farmworkers in New York have been organizing in other ways for many years. In early 2019, for example, a coalition was able to get a law passed allowing undocumented workers to get drivers’ licenses, giving more agency to farmworkers who were once isolated on farms. Farmworkers have also organized for their rights through worker centers and committees and tribunals.

“Unions are such a key part of the labor movement, but they’re not the only piece,” Valdez said.

“I think the best thing is for farmworkers to decide what model and what structure works for them.”

Griffiths, who will return to Cahoon to start the apple harvest in August, feels confident about his decision to become a member of the UFW. “It was definitely worth it,” he said, even though during the organizing process, he lost out on work before the union was able to prove he was retaliated against for organizing.

“Basically, I say the contract is definitely a good thing, and I would encourage any worker not to be afraid to do it,” he said.

The post Farmworker Unions on the Rise in New York, Joined by the United Farm Workers appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/03/14/a-new-path-for-small-farmers-in-the-southeast/ Fri, 14 Mar 2025 09:00:15 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=62279 Getting to this current size wasn’t easy, however. In their first attempt to scale up and acquire 640 acres, the brothers turned to the Farm Service Agency (FSA), a loan-making entity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). “When we got to the FSA, it was just bad,” says Nelson. “It seemed like they were […]

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In 2016, Willis Nelson and his three brothers—third-generation Black farmers—started a farming venture with 40 acres in rural Sondheimer, Louisiana. Located on the western bank of the Mississippi River, the family farm now spans roughly 4,000 acres and produces corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat, and milo.

Getting to this current size wasn’t easy, however. In their first attempt to scale up and acquire 640 acres, the brothers turned to the Farm Service Agency (FSA), a loan-making entity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“When we got to the FSA, it was just bad,” says Nelson. “It seemed like they were looking for any reason not to give us a loan.” Nelson and his brothers were repeatedly told that the farm’s paperwork was incorrect and asked to produce what they say was an unnecessary amount of financial documentation.

Despite having a signed contract with the USDA and an agreed-upon work plan, the bank’s launch is now on pause alongside many other USDA programs as they each await review.

“We couldn’t even get a guaranteed loan from other banks, because they kept saying we didn’t have enough cash flow,” says Nelson. This continued for four years until Nelson and his brothers were approached by First Southern Bank after their farm got a writeup in The Christian Science Monitor. The community-oriented bank gave the Nelson brothers their first loan to fully fund their farming venture.

A new effort seeks to jumpstart and sustain small farmers and other agricultural-based businesses in the southeastern United States. The Southern Farmers Financial Association (SFFA) is a cooperative, mission-driven bank designed to lower the barriers to accessing credit for small farmers, especially those in high-poverty and low-resource areas. Historically, limited-resource farmers, often Black farmers and farmers of color, have faced systemic barriers and discriminatory practices when seeking financial support from traditional lending institutions, including governmental agencies.

“This [bank] is about making sure that agriculture works for all and that our rural communities survive,” says Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports Black farmers, landowners, and cooperatives with various land retention and advocacy efforts across the South. As the leading partner of the SFFA, the Federation will help the new bank build upon its existing infrastructure across the region and support it with its outreach, education, and technical assistance.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided the SFFA effort with $20 million in initial funding to be dispersed through the USDA—and the bank has had plans to open its doors towards the end of the first quarter of 2025. However, with the Trump administration’s sweeping executive orders and recent crackdown on alleged “radical and wasteful programs,” as well as programs related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) and climate change, things are now uncertain.

“While we hadn’t used that language around the bank and don’t consider it to be DEIA, we’re in jeopardy for being labeled as such because of their way of looking at this,” Blanding says. Despite having a signed contract with the USDA and an agreed-upon work plan, the bank’s launch is now on pause alongside many other USDA programs as they each await review.

After review, the SFFA will either be modified to fit new guidelines or completely terminated.

“We’re hoping for the best case and that it will be some kind of modification,” says Blanding.

How the Green Bank Took Root

Farmers of color have long encountered discrimination at the hands of the USDA. They have been consistently denied small loans and access to grant programs, subsidy payments, and other assistance the agency would typically guarantee, resulting in substantial economic losses. The Pigford v. Glickman class-action lawsuit, filed by Black farmer Timothy Pigford against the USDA in 1999, was the culmination of years of discrimination.

SFFA leaders gather for the press conference launch of the green bank in late October of 2024. (Photo credit: Federation for Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund Archives)

The concept of a mission-driven—or green—bank started over a decade ago after an informal convening of farmers in Atlanta, Georgia. “Many of the folks who were a part of that convening had been working on the Black farmer lawsuit since 1999, and it was the center of those conversations,” Blanding says.

Those involved in the convening realized that access to credit—which provides the startup capital that most farmers seek to purchase supplies, seeds, and technology—continued to be one of the most significant barriers to low-resource farmers in the region. As a result, they formed committees and dedicated working groups where, eventually, the idea of a cooperative green bank took root.

“When you look at the data, the majority of Black farmers, the majority of low-resource farmers, [and] a majority of farmers of color are located in the Southeast,” Blanding says. This disparity was a significant factor in the decision to base the SFFA in the Southeast region. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, the bank will serve Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas with virtual hubs.

What sets this bank—intended for farmers, landowners, and agriculture-based businesses—apart from a standard bank is its strict focus on agriculture and strengthening rural communities. In the eyes of many traditional lending institutions, a low-resource farm may not be bankable. The SFFA will have a different approach to collateral.

“It’s not about tying up the assets of a farmer or landowner to the point where they can’t survive or don’t have other options,” says Blanding. “It’s about getting to ‘yes’ and working with folks from where they are.”

In partnership with community-based organizations, the SFFA is designed to figure out alternative ways to get those who own land, farm, or run other ag-based enterprises to the point where they are financially viable. The bank is intended to serve as a revolving loan fund that offers reasonable interest rates—and will ideally grow to have assets, enabling it to continue providing financial resources to a farm long after its initial disbursement.

While it is not a grant-making institution, Blanding sees the cooperative green bank as having multiple arms that can have grant-type resources and provide gap financing—a short-term loan or credit line that covers the difference needed for an immediate financial obligation.

To help ensure it remains aligned with the needs and priorities of the farming communities it serves, the SFFA also plans to have various classes of membership for its borrowers. As in a traditional cooperative, members will get a share of earnings and will receive dividends.

Class A membership will give member-owners the highest voting power and the ability to invest more significant sums of money in the cooperative, explains Ben Burkett, longtime farm advocate and the Federation’s Mississippi state coordinator, who, alongside Blanding, was a part of the initial conversations that conceptualized the SFFA. Class B and C cooperative members can invest some capital but have limited to no voting rights.

For low-resource farmers and others in the Southeast, the SFFA would be a safety net that has never existed before. “There are many community-based organizations doing a lot of work with Black farmers and socially disadvantaged farmers,” Blanding says. “This [green bank] is not intended to replicate any of that, but to step in the middle and provide things there weren’t available until now.”

A History of Injustice

Though its future is uncertain, Blanding believes that the SFFA would be another step in the right direction for justice.

The Pigford lawsuit eventually led to the most robust civil rights settlement in U.S. history, totaling just over $1 billion. However, payouts did not begin for another 15 years, and were only partial. In 2023, the USDA launched the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program and a year later issued payouts to farmers, ranchers, and landowners who had experienced discrimination. “It doesn’t repair what happened historically, but it acknowledges it,” Blanding says.

“When you look at the data, the majority of Black farmers, the majority of low-resource farmers, [and] a majority of farmers of color are located in the Southeast.”

Despite this progress, discrimination remains. Even as recently as 2022, Black farmers had the highest USDA loan rejection rate of any demographic group: 36 percent of Black farmers who applied were approved for direct loans, compared to 72 percent of white farmers, according to an analysis by National Public Radio.

And while Burkett has been a successful farmer for decades, he still experiences the bias that lending institutions hold toward Black farmers. Last year, for example, Burkett financed a tractor with a cooperative credit institution that Burkett has been a member of for over 30 years.

“They took that tractor for collateral, and then they took another one of my tractors and a piece of my equipment,” Burkett says.

The SFFA aims to address the patterns of injustice by, most importantly, acknowledging the historic hurdles low-resource farmers and farmers of color have faced. “No farmer would be discriminated against at this bank, no matter the situation he or she is coming from,” says Blanding. Secondly, farmers have faced injustices simply based on their lack of access to credit. That is the specific problem that the bank is trying to solve.

“We think we can reverse those patterns by addressing those two issues,” says Blanding.

Supporting Small and Mid-Size Farms Through Big Challenges

Nelson, whose farm is in the northeast corner of Louisiana, sees a desperate need for the SFFA’s reinvestment in smaller operations. Small farmers near him have faced many problems in recent years, such as climate-change impacts, land loss, and being denied financial assistance.

Willis Nelson and son Wil’laddyn Nelson standing in a soybean field on the Nelson & Sons Farm. (Photo credit: Willis Nelson)

“I’ve been seeing with all the farmers that there is difficulty in making their cash flow,” says Nelson, who is also a current member of the Federation and a board member of the National Black Growers Council. “It’s been a rough four years for the Southeast.”

Considering the high cost of starting and scaling farming operations, many farmers never see investment returns, says Blanding. And farms that are smaller in acreage are more vulnerable to a number of issues that can quickly become financially burdensome.

Climate change—specifically extreme drought and floods—causes many issues for small farmers in particular. With the more intense heat, drought, and storms brought on by the changing climate, “It’s not the original growing seasons that we’re used to,” Nelson says. His farm has been working to keep its yields up and keep up with inflation.

Lenders often want to see the farm’s profitability alongside other factors such as income, credit score, and business plan. Because of the extreme weather, farmers with smaller operations suffer more substantial losses than larger farmers—making it more challenging to get the capital they need to stay afloat.

Alongside climate change, the changing demographics of the farming community creates another challenge. “Some of us [farmers of color] are still losing land,” Nelson says. Additionally, most land in the area is passed down through succession, from one generation to the next, but the youth no longer have as much interest in farming or they lack the resources to start. In many places, people have sold their land or private entities have taken it over. “It’s not family farming anymore,” Nelson says.

“Agriculture is a huge and important part of what this country is. The more people who are part of it and succeeding in it, the better off we are as a nation.”

Burkett also sees medium-size farming operations, or those with gross sales between $100,000 and $400,000 annually, facing outsize problems. “Mid-size farmers—what I call true family farms—are totally being squeezed out” as many farms in the area have had to cease operations or downsize, he says. Farms can either get really big or stay small, says Burkett.

“It just costs so much to do business now with the cost of equipment, labor, industry requirements, safety, rules and regulations,” Burkett says. “You’ve got to have a full-time man or woman just to keep up with those targets.”

Nelson believes a cooperative green bank could help family farmers navigate challenges like these. On his farm, a bank loan would help him carry out certain upgrades, such as installing underground irrigation to prepare for drought.

In the absence of a bank like the SFFA, Nelson had to go through the USDA’s cost share program, known as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), to get the equipment he needed to drain the water from his land after a recent flood. The program covered 70 percent of the cost, but Nelson still had to put up 30 percent, impacting other farm needs. And while programs like EQIP are helpful, the funding is limited, not guaranteed, and can require a lengthy wait.

Additionally, some EQIP funding has been paused since the start of the new administration while the USDA conducts a review of grant contracts to determine if they align with President Trump’s executive orders rolling back climate projects and work that prioritizes equity or diversity. While a court ordered the funds to be unfrozen, the agency has only released small batches of that money.

EQIP was one of several programs that got a bump in funding from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act for farm projects that prioritized climate goals, so some farmers’ contracts may also be at risk of cancellation. As funding through EQIP and the vast suite of farm programs the USDA runs becomes more uncertain, SFFA could become an even more vital resource—assuming it continues.

Nelson sees the SFFA as a key to rebuilding the farming community from the ground up. With backing from the green bank, reinvestment can look like community-led gardens and agricultural programs that lower the entry point for new farmers. This could mean enabling new or existing small farms to acquire small amounts of acreage, helping them become financially viable and putting them in a position to scale up.

“We [farmers in the area] don’t have to have 1,000 acres to start [farming]—we can get back to the 40- or 100- acre farms, and the rest will follow,” Nelson says.

Growing Excitement

Nelson believes a localized lending institution like the SFFA would be an enormous first step in rebuilding the assets of farming communities like his across the Southeast. Alongside the lending, Nelson wants to see the cooperative green bank offer financial workshops to teach farmers how to fill out balance sheets, create basic budgets, and manage profit and loss—all skills critical to their survival.

“I’m willing to give my time because we have to make something out of this,” Nelson says.

Late last year, the first portion of the IRA funds were released—just over a million dollars. These funds have already been used to hire a permanent CEO and set up the bank’s infrastructure. Now, the bank founders are waiting to hear from the USDA to learn if and when they will receive the rest of the funding needed to move forward and whether the program will be modified—or, worst case, terminated.

In the meantime, they have been in conversation with aligned organizations like the Native American Financial Services and entities that work with low-resource farmers, such as the Farm Credit System, to spread the word across the Southeast to make sure that farm-adjacent people fully understand what the cooperative green bank offers, and that they can trust it.

The response to the forthcoming cooperative green bank has been overwhelmingly positive. The main question that Blanding and SFFA leadership have heard over the past few months is, “When will it open?”

Since the SFFA’s initial conceptualization, the Federation for Southern Cooperatives has kept its membership abreast and in touch with people inside and outside their farming community.

“Agriculture is a huge and important part of what this country is,” Blanding says. “The more people who are part of it and succeeding in it, the better off we are as a nation.”

The post A New Path for Small Farmers in the Southeast? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/02/12/is-there-enough-evidence-of-health-risks-for-the-epa-to-ban-paraquat/ Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:00:23 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=61209 April 15, 2025 Update: Syngenta, manufacturer of the weedkiller paraquat, which has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, has entered into an agreement to potentially settle thousands of lawsuits against the company. The mounting research, however, has so far failed to convince federal and state regulators to ban its use in the U.S. It is illegal […]

The post Is There Enough Evidence of Health Risks for the EPA to Ban Paraquat? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> April 15, 2025 Update: Syngenta, manufacturer of the weedkiller paraquat, which has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, has entered into an agreement to potentially settle thousands of lawsuits against the company.

Farmers use the herbicide paraquat, often sold under the brand name Gramoxone, to clear fields before planting. One of the most popular herbicides in the U.S., paraquat is cheap and effective, able to rapidly kill grasses and perennial weeds, but a growing body of research has connected it to Parkinson’s disease, thyroid cancer, and harm to birds, amphibians, reptiles, and plants.

One of the most popular herbicides in the U.S., paraquat is cheap and effective, able to rapidly kill grasses and perennial weeds, but a growing body of research has connected it to Parkinson’s disease, thyroid cancer, and harm to birds, amphibians, reptiles, and plants.

The mounting research, however, has so far failed to convince federal and state regulators to ban its use in the U.S. It is illegal in more than 70 countries, including the European Union, as well as the U.K. and China, where it is manufactured.

Parkinson’s disease is the world’s fastest-growing neurodegenerative disease. Epidemiological studies linking it to paraquat are at the root of roughly 7,000 lawsuits filed in federal court against Syngenta, the company that manufactures paraquat.

At the same time, environmental groups are engaged in a 2021 lawsuit against the EPA for re-approving paraquat. As these two separate lines of legal action move forward, it remains to be seen how the scientific research will be considered. Studies linking paraquat to Parkinson’s disease haven’t moved regulators to outlaw the pesticide, but lawsuits seeking damages for the neurological disorder will almost certainly depend on them.

The EPA’s Delay

Paraquat was first registered for use in the U.S. in 1964. The registration process, which involves a risk assessment of the pesticide’s potential human health and environmental impacts, with data from the manufacturer, must be done every 15 years to ensure that no new science proves the pesticide poses “unreasonable” risks to people or the environment.

In 2021, to mitigate risks as part of the re-registration process, the EPA implemented some interim paraquat safety measures—including limits on aerial spraying and a respirator requirement. However, the agency allowed paraquat use to continue, claiming it hadn’t found a clear link between paraquat exposure and adverse health outcomes such as Parkinson’s disease and cancer.

Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to abandon its newly established mitigation measures for paraquat applications, which included limits on aerial spraying and a respirator requirement.(Photo credit: mladenbalinovac/Getty Images)

Environmental groups sued, saying the protections were inadequate. “EPA is so focused on the limitations of individual studies, they didn’t meaningfully consider the broad consistency of evidence across multiple lines of evidence,” says Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, senior attorney for toxic exposure and health at Earthjustice, which sued the EPA over its 2021 interim decision.

On January 17, EPA took two actions. The federal agency abandoned their 2021 interim protections and required the manufacturer, Syngenta, to conduct tests to better understand how the pesticide volatilizes—becomes airborne as a gas—and drifts beyond the application site. And now, with chemical industry insiders recently appointed to steer the EPA’s regulation of chemicals, the future of restrictions on paraquat is in question.

On February 10, Kalmuss-Katz filed a legal response to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, requesting the court deny both of EPA’s January 17 actions. Abandoning interim safety measures, the motion stated, “Not only prolong risks but potentially make them more severe by weakening the safeguards that EPA itself found were necessary to address paraquat’s unreasonable adverse effects.” As well, the motion pointed out that the EPA did not state how they would meet the October 2026 re-registration deadline while waiting years for volatilization studies.

“It’s the tired old industry tactic of delay, delay, delay,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of several advocacy groups that sued the EPA over its 2021 interim decision.

The EPA did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or to emailed questions about its paraquat decision, sent before publication.

California’s Evaluation of Paraquat Studies

The EPA’s decision last month to abandon protections and order more testing cited a recent preliminary report published in California, one of the nation’s largest users of paraquat. The report, which EPA said it had not had time to evaluate, was released by the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), and is the initial stage of the state’s own comprehensive evaluation of recent science to determine whether to continue allowing the use of paraquat in California.

“EPA is so focused on the limitations of individual studies, they didn’t meaningfully consider the broad consistency of evidence across multiple lines of evidence.”

The report, which followed an initial review of 4,000 public comments and 150 scientific studies, highlighted research indicating paraquat can cause thyroid cancer and have ecological impacts on wildlife. However, DPR stated that, so far, its “review of existing human health studies, including epidemiological studies, does not indicate a causal association between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s Disease.”

When asked for comment, DPR Deputy Director of Communications and Outreach Leia Bailey wrote in an email to Civil Eats, “DPR considered epidemiological studies along with all other toxicology studies to determine areas of risk that can lead to restrictions on pesticide use.”

She further noted that epidemiological studies span several decades. “It is expected that the legal label restrictions for paraquat use currently in place at the federal and state level would significantly reduce exposures compared to exposures that study subjects recall experiencing in the past,” she wrote.

In other words, the epidemiological studies span decades of paraquat exposure before 2021’s more stringent application rules for the herbicide, which lowered exposure—and presumably the risk.

California DPR’s review continues, with a final decision due by 2029.

California’s Central Valley: A Parkinson’s Laboratory

Over 1 million people suffer from Parkinson’s disease in the U.S., and each year, 90,000 new cases are diagnosed. Parkinson’s disease can develop when the nerve cells that produce the chemical dopamine die; dopamine controls critical body functions such as memory, mood, and movement.

In recent years, it’s become clear that Parkinson’s is largely caused by interactions between genetics and environmental factors, including exposure to metals, solvents, or pesticides. According to a recent study that offered free genetic testing for Parkinson’s disease to more than 10,000 participants with the disease, only 13 percent were predisposed genetically.

Said another way, 87 percent of the Parkinson’s cases analyzed had no known genetic risk factor. As a result, researchers are investigating how genes and environmental exposures interact to create hot spots of Parkinson’s disease.

California’s Central Valley, which produces one-quarter of the nation’s food, is one such hotspot. “I call California’s Central Valley my personal lab,” says study co-author Beate Ritz, a Parkinson’s disease researcher at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a retained expert consultant in lawsuits against Syngenta. “The levels of Parkinson’s disease there are outrageous.”

In 2021, California dedicated $8.4 million to fund and expand the California Parkinson’s Disease Registry, one of 14 state registries. Registries provide data sources that help researchers identify high-risk groups, determine accurate prevalence rates, and improve links between the disease and risk factors such as pesticide exposure.

In addition, a number of Parkinson’s studies have focused on California, because it has the most rigorous reporting of pesticide usage in the country; in 2023, California farmers bought over 92,000 pounds of paraquat.  Between 2017 and 2021, over 5.3 million pounds of paraquat were sprayed in California, according to the Environmental Working Group. These data makes it possible to begin identifying correlations and better understand how pesticides impact the health of agricultural communities.

“I call California’s Central Valley my personal lab. The levels of Parkinson’s disease there are outrageous.”

It’s not just farmworkers or those who apply pesticides who face risks. Ritz and co-author Kimberly Paul, also a Parkinson’s disease researcher at UCLA, published a 2024 epidemiological study that shows that people who live or work within 500 meters of fields on which paraquat has been applied for at least two decades had double the risk of Parkinson’s disease compared to the rest of the region’s population.

A separate Ritz and Paul study also identified 10 additional pesticides that kill neurons and result in Parkinson’s disease. And a new paper by Brittany Krzyzanowski, a researcher at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, found that people who live near sunflower, winter wheat, and alfalfa fields—where paraquat is just one of dozens of pesticides used on these crops—have increased risk of Parkinson’s disease.

One of the biggest oversights, many scientists agree, is that the EPA only considers one pesticide at a time. Farming communities are often exposed to multiple pesticides at once, so the EPA’s assessments don’t reflect real-world exposures, says Paul.

What the Science Shows, and How It’s Selected

For many scientists, numerous studies, both epidemiological and in-vitro cell studies conducted over decades around the world, leave little doubt that paraquat exposure is associated with Parkinson’s disease. Paraquat is, after all, a neurotoxin that can damage the central nervous system and kill lung, liver, and kidney cells when ingested or inhaled. One teaspoon can cause extreme respiratory and gastrointestinal distress—and even organ failure or death. The EPA’s website says: “One small sip can be fatal and there is no antidote.”

“Studies from researchers around the world link paraquat exposure to Parkinson’s disease in humans and laboratory animals,” says Ray Dorsey, a professor of neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York and co-author of the 2020 book Ending Parkinson’s Disease: A Prescription for Action.

The financial benefits of reducing pesticide-related Parkinson’s disease are striking. Global sales of paraquat are $400 million each year, yet the economic burden of Parkinson’s disease, in terms of health care costs, is $52 billion a year, according to Dorsey. “Even if paraquat was responsible for just 1 percent of Parkinson’s disease cases, the economic value of preventing its use is $500 million per year,” says Dorsey.

Meanwhile, Syngenta has been aware of possible long-term health impacts of paraquat for decades. A trove of Syngenta’s internal documents—dubbed the “paraquat papers” by a 2022 Environmental Working Group Investigation—detailed how as early as 1975, the company feared it could face legal liability for paraquat’s long-term health impacts. “One company scientist called the situation ‘a quite terrible problem’ for which ‘some plan could be made,’” The Guardian reported.

“[Syngenta’s] own researchers demonstrated that paraquat exposure led to features of Parkinson’s disease in three different mammalian species in the 1960s,” Dorsey says. “I am not sure what additional evidence is needed to conclude that paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease.”

The most recent lawsuits could cost Syngenta and co-defendant Chevron USA—the successor to the company that distributed paraquat in the U.S. until 1986—roughly $1 billion to settle cases, predicted one of the plaintiff’s lawyers.

The EPA gives the greatest weight to studies that demonstrate paraquat causes direct harm in lab mice. The agency places lesser value on in-vitro cell studies or epidemiological studies. In the cell studies, paraquat introduced to cells sharply increased the amount of damaged proteins inherent to Parkinson’s disease; it is these damaged proteins that clog brain cells, causing them to deteriorate.

It’s all about how you interpret correlation versus causation, Donley says. “EPA is looking for a level of confidence for causation that is nearly impossible to achieve in public health research,” he adds.

Ideally, the EPA wants studies that test the blood and urine of people who have been exposed to paraquat for years, explains Donley. “Those studies cost millions of dollars—yet federal funding for academic research is plummeting,” he says. Donley has never seen the EPA require the pesticide makers to produce that data.

The question of cause is already proving contentious in the Parkinson’s disease lawsuits; judges have ruled that they won’t allow testimony from an expert on whether paraquat is capable of causing Parkinson’s disease in the lead up to the first trial, scheduled to start in October. As a result, epidemiological studies that demonstrate links to paraquat exposure and cell-based studies revealing how paraquat damages dopamine cells may be even more important.

“In every other country, industry has to bring a chemical to the regulatory agency with proof that it’s safe,” says Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “In the U.S., it’s more like, ‘Here’s the chemical. [EPA] has 90 days to prove it’s dangerous.’ It’s totally backwards.”

What’s Next

For the time being, it will be business-as-usual with paraquat until October 1, 2026, when EPA is legally required to finalize paraquat’s re-registration review—a timeline that doesn’t allow for the four years needed to conduct volatilization studies.

In California, Paul and others plan to use the Parkinson’s disease registry to continue their research using a state-wide database of patient information to better identify risk factors. Unfortunately, she notes, the registries often can’t get data on everyone potentially affected. “One of the most vulnerable populations are migrant workers,” she says. “Many of those will be missed.”

That’s increasingly likely in the future, given the Trump administration’s new restrictive immigration policies, which may make migrant workers less willing to participate in any kind of government study—even at the state level.

Reporting for this piece was supported by the Nova Institute for Health.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/02/10/despite-cuts-to-dei-initiatives-food-and-farm-advocates-say-they-will-continue-to-fight-for-racial-justice/ https://civileats.com/2025/02/10/despite-cuts-to-dei-initiatives-food-and-farm-advocates-say-they-will-continue-to-fight-for-racial-justice/#comments Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:00:01 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=61195 She did exactly that at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, created by the state in 1890 to provide agricultural education to Black Americans while maintaining segregation. And she worked on equity in food systems at North Carolina State University, the state’s primary educational institution for farmers, which didn’t allow Black students to enroll […]

The post Despite Cuts to DEI Initiatives, Food and Farm Advocates Say They Will Continue to Fight for Racial Justice appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]>

Shorlette Ammons comes from a family of tenant farmers in eastern North Carolina. Her grandfather raised hogs and grew row crops. In high school, she worked summers in tobacco and cucumber fields. Working with farmers, she said, was her calling.

She did exactly that at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, created by the state in 1890 to provide agricultural education to Black Americans while maintaining segregation. And she worked on equity in food systems at North Carolina State University, the state’s primary educational institution for farmers, which didn’t allow Black students to enroll until the 1950s.

In both positions, she connected Black farmers to technical and financial resources and helped to eliminate the barriers that they continued to face in getting access to programs and funding.

So she was honored, she said, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) tapped her to serve on the its Equity Commission. The commission was created in 2021 through the American Rescue Plan to address the agency’s history of discrimination, after former President Joe Biden issued an executive order to prioritize equity across all government agencies.

“People of color, farmers of color—we’re still here. This effort to erase us hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work this time around . . . . The work doesn’t stop just because the report’s crumpled up and thrown in the trash can.”

“I didn’t go in there with the mindset that we were going to flip the USDA upside down,” said Ammons, now the co-executive director of Farm Aid, a nonprofit organization and festival that supports small family farms. “But we knew that we could make some strides and kind of create a path so that some of those past and historic wrongs were on the way to being made right.”

Past lawsuits and reporting have found that, for decades, the USDA purposefully and systematically denied farmers loans and other support based on race, contributing to a massive decline in the number of Black farmers in the U.S.

In February 2024, after three years of research, public meetings, and subcommittee meetings, the commission—which included civil rights advocates, diverse farm group representatives, and rural development experts—presented its final report to former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. It included 66 detailed recommendations laid out over 87 pages, the first of which was simple: “Institutionalize equity within the Department.”

Instead, within President Donald Trump’s first two weeks in office, USDA officials scrubbed the report and information on the Commission’s work from the agency’s website.

It’s one of several initiatives at the USDA that has already hit the cutting-room floor as a result of Trump’s executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”

At the end of January, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo directing the USDA to analyze its programs for anything that involves diversity, inclusion, accessibility, environmental justice, or equity. Career employees who previously worked on equity programs have already been put on leave. Employees within the agency say the sweep continues, with no clear sense of which programs might be next on the chopping block.

In addition to ending initiatives Trump considers related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within all federal agencies—including those that touch the food system, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—the order extends beyond the agencies themselves, requiring recipients of federal grants to certify they don’t operate “any programs promoting DEI.” The order also encourages the private sector to end DEI programs.

That puts into question the future of the USDA’s many grant programs that focus on supporting and feeding underserved farmers and communities. (Most of those programs are authorized and funded by Congress, but Trump has already defied laws meant to maintain checks and balances on other fronts. His abrupt firing of the independent inspector generals is one example.)

On January 31, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) posted a list on X showing more than $110 million in “contract cancellations” related to DEI at the USDA. But it’s unclear what the list refers to, and the USDA did not respond to detailed questions about the number or other points in this story by press time.

What constitutes “DEI” is also still unclear. In the original order, Trump argues he is putting an end to “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) that can violate the civil rights laws of this Nation.” As laid out in the order, that might apply to a wide range of varied efforts, from “equitable decision-making” requirements to “promoting diversity” to “advancing equity.”

But advocates like Ammons and other individuals and groups across the country who have been working for decades on racial justice in the food system say it’s just another example of the age-old effort to erase the country’s still-recent record of slavery and race-based discrimination and stall progress toward a fairer future.

In conversations with Civil Eats over the past few weeks, advocates, organizers, and nonprofit directors were exhausted. They worried about funding for organizations that serve farmers and rural communities. They were concerned about funding for organizations that provide food aid to communities of color—cuts that might happen in conjunction with Republicans’ promised cuts to the country’s safety net. They feared the ripple effects of the federal order spreading and hurting groups working on food justice in local communities from coast to coast.

But they were also undeterred.

“People of color, farmers of color—we’re still here. This effort to erase us hasn’t worked in the past, and it won’t work this time around,” Ammons said. “Part of the reason those folks were brought together for the Equity Commission is because it’s work they’d already been doing. The work doesn’t stop just because the report’s crumpled up and thrown in the trash can.”

Similarly, in an email to the group Black Professionals in Food and Agriculture shared with Civil Eats, President Kent Roberson acknowledged that members might already feel worn out by the attacks on equity work. “I believe the present age is what our organization was founded for,” he said, “not for the times when we have Black leadership across government, in our corporate organizations or associations, but for the times when we are under attack and fighting for the rights and respect of Black people in food and agriculture.”

Impacts Beyond the Beltway

As the Biden administration prioritized equity across federal agencies over the last four years, the MAGA movement within the Republican party, led by Trump, began demonizing DEI and attacking various efforts to acknowledge and repair past discrimination within the food system.

In 2021, after Democrats in Congress included a pot of money in the American Rescue Plan to compensate Black farmers for historic discrimination, for example, conservative groups filed multiple lawsuits to block the program, claiming discrimination against white farmers. The largest suit was filed by Sid Miller, the Texas secretary of agriculture and a close Trump ally. Rather than fight the suits, lawmakers later rescinded the program and wrote a new one into law that was race neutral, allocating money based on discrimination of any kind.

“The purpose of DEI initiatives is to broaden the pool of qualified candidates, knowing that historically some of the most qualified were overlooked and dismissed.”

A zeitgeist took hold in which political points could be scored by opposing any effort on behalf of marginalized communities. In the fall of 2024, the Atlanta-based Fearless Fund was forced to shut down a venture capital fund for Black women entrepreneurs after conservative activists sued the group for racial discrimination. Several food companies were among those supported by the fund, including Fresh Bellies, Air Protein, and Partake Foods.

In Aurora, Colorado, a small nonprofit called Food Justice NW Aurora spent two years proposing and fundraising for a project that would have renovated three city-owned greenhouses that had been empty since 2010 and were in danger of collapsing from disrepair. The group proposed restoring them and turning them into spaces for food production, job training, and educational programming in a low-income neighborhood where fresh food is hard to find.

The group was selected as a top contractor for the project and raised the funds to make it happen. But at their final meeting with the Aurora City Council last summer, during which they expected the council to sign off on the project, they were shocked when council members denied them the contract, Food Justice Executive Director Caitlin Matthews told Civil Eats in an interview.

According to Matthews, members of the council then shared the reason: Conservative council members spotted a statement on the group’s website that acknowledged the American food system had been built on Indigenous land theft and the enslavement of Africans.

“All work to imbue racial justice in food work is under threat,” said Shakirah Simley, the executive director of Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in San Francisco, told Civil Eats in between emergency meetings to discuss whether her organization might be impacted by pauses or cuts to federal funding.

Volunteers at the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center in San Francisco. (Photo courtesy of the Booker T. Washington Community Service Center)

“What we’re seeing is a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion, a lot of disruption, which I think is meant to distract us from something more nefarious,” said Simley, who is also on the Civil Eats advisory board. “But these decisions make direct, immediate harm to our most vulnerable communities.”

The Booker T. Washington Center was created more than 100 years ago to serve Black soldiers returning from service in the first World War and their families. Today, it provides affordable housing, food sovereignty, and nutrition programs, including feeding about 1,500 residents each week.

Simley said she was especially worried about funding to food justice organizations being stalled at a time when Republicans in Congress are also discussing cuts to federal hunger programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid.

“If things dry up or disappear or are held up, then that trickles down to a local level,” she said. “It’s just cruel and inhumane.” For example, she said that when one pandemic-era assistance program was ended last year, the Center saw around a 30 percent increase in enrollment in its programs that provide food assistance.

The pandemic, she said, also provides a model for responding to disruption. “It feels a little bit like déjà vu. From an organizing and justice perspective, there’s a lot of good conversation around saving ourselves, focusing on mutual aid, focusing on community care. I think a lot of this stuff is going to have to stay local,” she said. “We can’t respond to every fire. We have to triage and think about where our energies are most directed. We have to be adaptive and nimble, and we have to look out for each other.”

Continuing the Work in D.C.

Many advocates also said they will continue their work to uproot racism in federal food and agricultural policy, even if their tactics might change, and that collaboration is already in the air.

Ammons spoke to Civil Eats from a farm conference in D.C., where she said many conversations focused on the fact that “we’ve been here before” even as the groups present fretted over funding cuts. “We’re not just thinking about ourselves, we’re thinking about all these organizations that have received funding to do a range of work that are on the chopping block now,” she said. “We’re here to support them as best we can.”

As Agriculture Secretary nominee Brooke Rollins sailed toward confirmation in the Senate last week, Nichelle Harriott, policy director at the HEAL Food Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 farm, food, and environmental organizations, sent out a statement.

“If things dry up or disappear or are held up, then that trickles down to a local level. It’s just cruel and inhumane.”

“Her history demonstrates a disregard for and lack of commitment to supporting Black, Indigenous, and other farmers and ranchers of color, as well as small and family farmers, farmworkers, and the working people who sustain our food system,” Harriott said. “Despite this, we call on this new Secretary to prioritize disaster relief for farmers facing climate-related disruptions, invest in small farms and those practicing traditional, cultural, and ecological farming methods, ensure protections for food and farmworkers, and safeguard vital nutrition programs like SNAP to reduce hunger nationwide.”

On February 3, a coalition of groups that includes the restaurant worker union ROC United sued to stop the executive order on DEI from being implemented.

At the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), the policy team is busy working on developing proposals for an upcoming farm bill or other legislation that they believe could help solve land access challenges for young farmers from diverse backgrounds, a priority that they feel holds sway on both sides of the aisle because of growing concern over the aging of American farmers—regardless of anti-DEI rhetoric.

Michelle Hughes, a former hog farmer and now the co-executive director of the NYFC, also served on the USDA Equity Commission. She said throwing out the Commission’s report and the dismantling of equity throughout USDA is “the reason to invest in advocacy and federal policy change work. It’s a setback, for sure, but do I think that it’s going to stall the movement? No. If anything, it should ignite people to do the work themselves.”

Ammons was also adamant that Trump’s executive order misconstrued racial justice efforts as programs that reward and promote less-qualified individuals. (Others have called out the fact that while Trump says his intention is to create a merit-based system, several of his cabinet nominees lack experience in the subject areas covered by the agencies they’re now leading, including Rollins at the USDA.)

In the order, Trump said that DEI initiatives shut hardworking Americans “out of opportunities because of their race or sex” and that they threaten American safety by “diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society.”

Ammons said that she believes efforts to acknowledge race-based discrimination and make hiring and programming more equitable do the opposite of what Trump claims.

“Many of the people on the Equity Commission come from a lineage of people who literally help build this country. We come from people who are some of the hardest-working people—who grow our food, get it safely and efficiently on our plates, in our stores, into our homes,” she said. “The purpose of DEI initiatives is to broaden the pool of qualified candidates, knowing that historically some of the most qualified were overlooked and dismissed.”

She added that when diversity is prioritized in food and agriculture in a thoughtful, intentional way, it benefits all farmers and rural communities.

In the end, the NYFC’s Hughes said that while she still believes the Equity Commission and its report was something to be celebrated, there was always going to be more work to do. “I don’t see the federal government as the be-all, end-all for equity work. I don’t even think they’re a major player. I think they’re a major player in inequity,” she said. “I’m not scared, and I don’t really feel like there’s anything that could happen that would make me back down from advocating against injustice. I see it as a long-term movement and effort that I have completely committed myself to.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/02/10/despite-cuts-to-dei-initiatives-food-and-farm-advocates-say-they-will-continue-to-fight-for-racial-justice/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/02/04/for-farmers-fitness-programs-can-improve-mental-health-too/ Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:00:39 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=61086 “It wasn’t until I got into strength training that there was a shift in my mindset,” she said. With a new perspective on farming, Flores began to prioritize self-care and be more mindful of her body. As her interest in fitness grew, she started competing in Strongman events, where athletes face off in Herculean challenges. […]

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Cynthia Flores was a farmer for twenty years, and despite doing intense physical labor every day, she never thought of herself as an athlete.

“It wasn’t until I got into strength training that there was a shift in my mindset,” she said. With a new perspective on farming, Flores began to prioritize self-care and be more mindful of her body. As her interest in fitness grew, she started competing in Strongman events, where athletes face off in Herculean challenges. (You can see her on Instagram pulling a horse trailer with nothing but some ropes and her own body weight.) Now a certified personal trainer and licensed massage therapist, Flores works with farmers and farmworkers across the country. “Are you farmers or athletes?” she often asks to kick off her workshops. “You’re athletes, just in overalls,” she answers.

“Are you farmers or athletes? You’re athletes, just in overalls.”

Farmers usually don’t have the same access to specialized trainers and coaches as professional athletes do, so it can be hard for them to get the guidance they need to move safely, build strength, and bounce back from injuries. That appears to be changing, though, partly due to the online fitness boom that emerged during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Flores, who studied kinesiology and outdoor education before becoming a farmer, is one of a small but growing group of fitness professionals dedicated to helping farmers and others in agriculture stay fit and healthy so they can do their work with more ease and less pain.

In 2020, Flores founded Labor-Movement, a small business devoted to helping farmers, fishers, and industrial athletes improve how they move, increase efficiency, and extend their longevity. “A lot of my friends were farmers and they were asking, ‘How do I not get hurt?’ Flores said, explaining that no one she knew wanted to end up hospitalized or unable to help feed their communities during the pandemic. “With the elevation of farmers as essential workers, they began to understand a little more how important their work was,” she said.

Cynthia Flores at Goranson Farm in Dresden, ME. (Photo credit: Kelsey Kobik/Labor-Movement)

Labor-Movement started with just a few online workshops during quarantine and has since grown into a full-time endeavor for Flores, who also has an associates’ degree in psychology. Last year, she reached 900 farmers across 18 U.S. states and British Columbia through online and in-person services, including two-hour movement workshops and winter strength training sessions for farmers.

While Flores specializes in body mechanics and movement patterns, other farm fitness specialists are offering everything from high-intensity interval training to Pilates posters and yoga classes.

Many say their programs not only enhance physical strength but also mental well-being, helping those in agriculture better manage the stresses of their lives.

The Link Between Physical and Mental Health

Farmers experience some of the highest levels of job stress and related health issues in the nation, including heart disease and high blood pressure. Persistent stress has been linked not only to chronic diseases and susceptibility to injury, but also to mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Suicide rates for farmers are two to five times greater than the national average.

Mental Health Resources for Farmers

This article discusses issues of stress and suicide within the agricultural industry and efforts aimed at improving mental health. If you or someone you know is struggling, we encourage you to take advantage of these resources for support:

• Farm Aid Hotline: 1-800-FARM-AID. Available Monday-Friday, 8 am-8 pm CT; operators speak English and Spanish.
• AgriStress Helpline: 1-833-897-2474. Available in Colorado, Connecticut, Missouri, Montana, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming.
• Rural Response Hotline: 1-800-464-0258.
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255.
• Veterans Crisis Line: 1-800-273-8255 (press 1) or text to 838255.
• Crisis Text Line: Free 24/7 text service for those in crisis. Text “HELLO” to 741741.

For more resources, visit Farm State of Mind from the American Farm Bureau Federation. If you are having a mental health crisis, please call 988, or 911 in case of an emergency.

 

Research shows that engaging in regular physical exercise can help counter these issues for the general population—and that includes farmers. “There’s really good evidence that vigorous physical exercise dissipates anxiety and anger, and it helps to take one’s mind off of troubling circumstances,” says Michael Rosmann, a farmer and clinical psychologist who serves farm communities. “Farmers who are in good physical shape, or who exercise to get in shape, are linked with longevity, lower cardiovascular problems and less obesity. When you feel good, you’re not suffering, and your mental health is more positive.”

In Flores’ signature workshop, “Athletes in Overalls,” she not only teaches participants how to safely handle farm tasks and perform key movements like squatting and bending. She also covers nutrition, hydration, sleep hygiene, and stress management. “That’s your foundation,” she recently said to a room of about 12 farmers at the Flowering in the North Conference in Maine. “If those things aren’t intact, it doesn’t matter how well you move or how good a farmer you are, things start to fall apart.”

Standing barefoot in black sweatpants and a forest green hoodie, Flores rattled off a list of potential mental and emotional stressors, such as physical stress, money worries, and weather forecasts. She wrapped up her segment on stress management by encouraging her audience to visit websites like Farm Aid to gather resources before they or someone they know is in a mental health crisis.

Flores doesn’t claim to be a mental health expert, but her past as a dairy and vegetable farmer has given her firsthand insight into the pressures of farm life and its impact on both body and mind. Even something as small as leaving the farm for a few hours can be a stressor, she said. That’s why she designed Labor-Movement to be mobile, allowing her to deliver strength training sessions, both in-person and through a digital app, and travel to farms to facilitate her workshops live.

“Initially, I wondered, ‘Can I teach farmers how to move?’ And it turns out farmers are interested in it.” That enthusiasm isn’t universal, though, as some farmers believe their daily routines provide all the movement and exercise they need.

Not All Farm Work Is Exercise

“A lot of times farmers think, ‘Well, I do physical labor, so I’m in good shape,’” said Aaron Yoder, an Environmental, Agricultural, and Occupational Health professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Yoder points out that the physical activity involved in modern farming, particularly at large-scale operations, doesn’t necessarily equate to physical fitness.

“Farmers used to walk everywhere,” said Yoder. “Now they hop on something with wheels and a motor on it and drive all kinds of places, so they’re getting less exercise.” Meanwhile, the work they do perform may lack the benefits of focused exercise for building strength, improving heart health and relieving stress.

People unfamiliar with modern farming may find this hard to imagine, as many still have a mental image of agriculture that involves iconic scenes from Hollywood movies of lean farmers and ranchers riding horses, herding cattle, and tending to the land using manual labor.

“Farmers used to walk everywhere. Now they hop on something with wheels and a motor on it and drive all kinds of places, so they’re getting less exercise.”

“That’s really not what agriculture is today, and it can’t be that, or we can’t feed the people we need to feed,” says Tara Haskins, highlighting how modern American agriculture relies on automation to grow food at scale.

Haskins is the behavioral health lead at AgriSafe, an agricultural health care network formed by rural nurses in 2003. She directs the Total Farmer Health Program, launched in 2019 to provide wellness coaching on everything the agriculture business touches, from family to finances to personal fitness.

In visiting producers, she finds that, depending on the scale of their operation, they might spend most of their time driving equipment and running their business from behind a computer. Consequently, they may struggle to get the 150 to 300 minutes of weekly heart-pumping activity recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“It’s hard to convince a producer when they’re putting in a 12-hour day that they need to find time to exercise,” said Haskins. “The challenge is helping people figure out what they can work into their schedule that doesn’t create more anxiety and burden.”

With this in mind, Amanda Nigg, a personal trainer and fitness influencer with over 100,000 followers on social media (where she goes by @farmfitmomma), designs short and sweaty routines. Research suggests this may offer greater health benefits than longer moderate-intensity workouts.

Nigg’s program launched in 2021 and is all about getting fit right on the farm by making use of tractor tires, grain bin stairs, and other readily available equipment. Her clients engage in a mix of strength, calisthenics and high-intensity interval training for 15 to 25 minutes a day, five days a week and on the best days for them.

“We’re not just giving you workouts that are gonna humble your ass in that time,” she said, “but it’s gonna fit into your schedule because the biggest thing is that farming is a 24-hour job.”

In addition to the physical training, Nigg and the two coaches on her team provide emotional support, using skills like those taught in the “Mental Toughness” course at the National Academy of Sports Medicine, to affirm their clients’ ability to overcome challenges.

AgriSafe’s coaches also take a holistic approach but don’t prescribe specific exercise regimens. Instead, they offer educational resources, like “Ready to Farm,” a collection of free posters and videos that show how to stretch and strengthen muscles used in farming and ranching to prevent injuries. As Haskins explained, losing the ability to work due to injury increases stress, causing financial worries, sleep loss, elevated cortisol levels, and a further decline in overall health. “We try to emphasize that an investment in your physical and mental health is an investment in your business,” Haskins said.

Injuries Take a Mental Toll

Even though not all farmers today are as active as they used to be, they are all still at high risk of getting hurt. Imagine muscle strains and sprains from lifting heavy grain bags or reacting swiftly to animals. Arthritic joints or unrelenting back pain from the repetitive motions involved in picking fruit and stacking hay bales. Cramped muscles or a frazzled circulatory system from absorbing combine vibrations all day during harvest season. Any of these ailments can slow or stop production, exacerbating existing stressors and causing a downward spiral.

Before founding Labor-Movement, Flores tore her meniscus while running after her dog on a farm. At first, she tried to handle the injury on her own but eventually decided to get cortisol shots and then surgery. “It took a lot mentally for me to admit that I was hurting and for me to ask for help,” she said. Her recovery was quick, but when she later tore her rotator cuff, recovery felt “monumental.” She refers to that time as “my dark days.”

A movement workshop for farmers at Glidden Point Oyster Farm in Edgecomb, ME. (Photo credit: Kelsey Kobik/Labor-Movement)

“Farmers who are injured have more behavioral health problems,” said Rosmann. “They often turn to self-medicating to deal with pain, not just physical pain, but more likely psychological pain.” He adds that the possibility of self-harm increases when the person injured can no longer participate in agriculture, which for some is more a way of life than a job.

According to pre-workshop surveys that Flores distributed last year, three out of five farmers reported having been injured, with each person averaging about 2.8 injuries. “I don’t know anyone who has ever been in pain who has been happy,” she said. While she’s not entirely sure if all the reported injuries are farming-related, she knows many farmers she works with deal with recurring injuries because they didn’t go through proper rehabilitation. With Labor-Movement, she wants to change that. “What if we never had injuries?” she told her workshop audience at the Flowering in the North Conference. “We don’t think about the injuries we never get.”

As they gathered around her in the empty conference room, there was an instant sense of camaraderie as Flores captivated the farmers with her charisma and humor. “What do you want to learn about the body?” she asked, prompting quick responses and callouts: arms, wrists, elbows, bending, crouching, repetitive movements, and back pain. Giggles filled the room as participants twisted from side to side, practicing mobility exercises and correct posture for squatting and lifting to reduce injury potential.

Another helpful resource is the Farmer Daily Stretching Program, a downloadable brochure on the Nebraska outpost of AgrAbility, a USDA-funded project that supports farmers and ranchers with disabilities in 23 states. While AgrAbility mainly focuses on severe disabilities, the program also provides educational resources to reduce common injuries like back pain, which affects about 40 percent of farmers.

In the brochure, a bluejean-clad model demonstrates 18 stretches to target muscle groups and joints important for agricultural work. For Yoder, who’s also on the team at Nebraska AgrAbility, it’s important that these images don’t feature a young, muscular fitness model but a heavyset male in his mid-to-late 50s, who, Yoder says, is meant to resemble the average farmer.

For those who need more motivation than a brochure, Yoder finds that it helps to share relatable stories: One farmer he met would occasionally hop off his tractor in the field to do squats, a convenient way to squeeze in exercise, keep the blood flowing, and prevent injuries. “The lack of mobility from sitting a long time can lead to injuries like slipping and falling when getting out of the tractor,” Yoder explained. He recommends that farmers do the stretches in the brochure to loosen up the body before starting the workday.

Knowing that many farmers played sports in school, he, like Flores, reminds them that they’re still athletes. “Athletes just don’t go and perform all the time,” he said, “they do other things to help strengthen their performance.”

Yoga for Farmers and Ranchers

On the Yellowstone River, south of Billings, Montana, Katahdin sheep rancher Alexis Bonogofsky sits cross-legged on her floor, backlit by a fire in an old-school black wood stove. A shaggy black-and-white dog peeks into the room, curious, and quickly walks away. Bonogofsky looks at her camera and explains belly breathing to viewers as she begins her online class, Yoga for Farmers and Ranchers.

In this five-episode YouTube series, created in 2020 in collaboration with the Quivira Coalition, an educational organization promoting regenerative land stewardship, Bonogofsky teaches yoga postures and mobility exercises that help strengthen and stretch body parts involved in farming and ranching. She focuses on building strength, balance, and mobility in the core muscles—the abdominal wall, glutes, hip flexors, and inner thighs—to create more ease in everyday tasks, like pulling a calf during a difficult birth, stepping up on a tractor, mounting a horse, repairing fences, or lifting heavy objects, a common cause of low-back injury.

Bonogofsky has taught the ancient Indian practice for 13 years, almost as long as she’s been a rancher. She says many are “hesitant” to try yoga because they believe “it’s only for young women who wear yoga pants and are flexible,” a fiction she wants to dispel. Yoga was transformational in her life, giving her a space away from work to nurture herself, and she wanted to give back. “I just thought, ‘How can I bring some of what I’ve learned over the years to people that I think could really benefit from it?’” she said.

Numerous studies have highlighted yoga’s effectiveness in addressing conditions like depression and addiction, offering individuals an outlet for coping through movement and breathwork. Unlike the Western viewpoint that segregates the mind and body, yogis see them as intricately linked to one another.

“If you go to work every day and your body hurts and you’re struggling, it’s not a good place to be mentally,” said Bonogofsky. “I think that part of the mental health issues in rural communities, especially with farmers and ranchers, can come from physical pain.”

Bonogofsky finds that while many ranchers in her orbit live with low-back pain and achy joints, taking time out of the day to tend to their bodies isn’t a cultural norm, she said. Yoga has proven to be a powerful tool for initiating discussions about the effects of stress and caring for the body. “I try to gently say certain things, hoping it makes people stop and think or feel like, “Oh, I’m not the only one experiencing this.”

Farmworkers May Have Different Needs

Laszlo Madaras, who serves as the chief medical officer at the Migrant Clinicians Network and is a former distance runner, said prescribing exercise for farmworkers isn’t always the best advice. Many of the ones he sees in his practice face a different set of stressors than farm owners, he said, especially being required to pick by hand in extreme temperatures, which makes their work physically taxing. In this case, exercise might not relieve stress but create more of it.

A farmer in California. (Photo credit: Maguey Images/Getty Images)

“If I’ve been sitting in a combine for 12 hours, yeah, I’m going to go out for a run or walk or bicycle,” he said. “But for the people who are already doing that all day long, I think it’s good to have a different approach.” In an ideal world, Madaras said he would prescribe farmworkers a combination of nutrient-rich food, sufficient hydration, a break during the hottest part of the day, access to an air-conditioned space, and a massage—or any culturally relevant form of relaxation, as long as it provides a mental break from work.

With Labor-Movement, Flores is not just coaching to prevent injuries on farms but to create a holistic culture of care where it’s understood that every body has different needs. Recently, she launched a new nine-month Farm Movement Advocate Program for farms that want to embed injury prevention into their daily operations to keep their crews safe.

“What I feel Labor-Movement is really doing is holding the door open to a conversation about movement health and wellness for people in agriculture,” said Flores. This approach is counter to traditional U.S. farm culture, she says, where the message is that farming is “backbreaking” and getting hurt is simply part of the lifestyle.

“In farming, there’s often an expectation that we must sacrifice our bodies, minds, and overall health for this work, believing that this is what makes us strong,” wrote a client of Flores who wished to remain anonymous. “But Labor-Movement has helped me realize that true strength lies in setting boundaries, being adaptive, and making my well-being a priority alongside my work . . . . [We] farmers must prioritize our health if we want to sustain this work, rather than burning out or wearing down our bodies.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/01/14/farming-is-hard-a-new-generation-of-advocates-is-being-trained-to-offer-support/ https://civileats.com/2025/01/14/farming-is-hard-a-new-generation-of-advocates-is-being-trained-to-offer-support/#comments Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:04 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=60470 Alvarado hoped they could turn the acreage into a blueberry farm and make a decent profit. But their fresh start quickly turned sour. The family found themselves in deep financial trouble after learning how different and complicated North Carolina’s loan regulations were from those in their home state. And, still struck with grief, he and […]

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In 2007, fourth-generation farmer Luciano Alvarado Jr. and his family were looking for a fresh start. Their business had been booming in Florida, where they farmed citrus and vegetables. But after a family member died, they decided to pack up and head to land they owned just outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina, to process their loss in a new place.

Alvarado hoped they could turn the acreage into a blueberry farm and make a decent profit. But their fresh start quickly turned sour. The family found themselves in deep financial trouble after learning how different and complicated North Carolina’s loan regulations were from those in their home state. And, still struck with grief, he and his family struggled to make sound financial decisions.

In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pledged $30 million to establish the Distressed Borrowers Assistance Network (DBAN), an initiative designed to help financially distressed farmers and ranchers.

It was by a stroke of luck that Alvarado learned about North Carolina-based Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI), a nonprofit which helps farmers in tough situations free of charge. “Well, I’ve got nothing else to lose,” Alvarado recalls thinking.

He called the number he had been given and soon was connected with a farm advocate named Benny Bunting. Farm advocates, often farmers themselves, help their neighbors navigate codes and regulations—pertaining to things like zoning, food safety, and property rights—that can save their operations.

Bunting, now 79, runs a family farm with his son in Oak City, North Carolina, where he once raised poultry and hogs and now grows hemp and corn. During his first day helping the Alvarados untangle their messy financial situation, he sat at their kitchen table for eight hours straight, drinking coffee with them in the morning and sharing dinner with them that night.

If not for that help, “I don’t think we would be having this conversation right now,” Alvarado said. “We could have ended up with nothing.”

Though farm advocates like Bunting have made a massive difference for the farmers they’ve helped, a good number have aged out of the work or died, leaving a void for farmers in need of guidance. For a while, a lack of funding for these positions—and a shortage of people willing to take up the emotionally taxing and sometimes unpaid work—made it difficult for organizations to recruit these advocates, and the profession was at risk of disappearing altogether.

Luciano Alvarado Jr. shows his son Ruben a successful blueberry crop on their North Carolina farm during the first week of harvest in 2024. Farm advocate Benny Bunting helped the family navigate the financial trouble they faced when they first established the farm after moving up from Florida. (Photo credit: Ruben Alvarado)

Now, a new federal effort is looking to create a fresh team of helpers. In September 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) pledged $30 million over three years to establish the Distressed Borrowers Assistance Network (DBAN), an initiative designed to connect financially distressed farmers and ranchers with personal assistance to help them regain their footing. A large part of this work consists of recruiting and training a new generation of advocates to help farmers struggling with complex financial and legal issues.

Through a series of cooperative agreements, the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) is facilitating the network, along with a handful of farmer support organizations and land-grant universities: RAFI, Farm Aid, the University of Arkansas, the University of Minnesota, and the Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Policy Research Center at Alcorn State University in Mississippi.

“It’s a high-stakes kind of work,” said Margaret Krome-Lukens, RAFI’s policy director. “Our goal here is to be able to train folks without having the mistakes that are part of the learning process be those that impact farmers. I have so much admiration for the farm advocates who just sat down and started figuring it out, and I want to give the next generation of farm advocates the benefit of that hard work, experience, and hard-won lessons and knowledge.”

As one of the last experienced farm advocates remaining, Bunting has valuable knowledge that the organizations working to create DBAN hope to capture and pass on to the next generation.

“I don’t feel like I’m overstating in saying that I think Benny is a national treasure,” Krome-Lukens said. “He has a good, strategic mind. He can quote the Code of Federal Regulations to you, chapter and verse. Knowing all that in his head enables him to put the pieces together in a way that sees possibility and if there could be unintended consequences. He also just brings so much compassion.”

The Life of a Farm Advocate

Bunting first got involved with farm advocacy because of his own financial struggles and was recruited by RAFI in the early 1980s. He’s been with the organization ever since, serving as lead farm advocate for the last 20 years. When Bunting is not out working his own fields, he’s advocating for others out of his home office, which is full to the brim with crates and binders of loan regulation information and farm finance manuals.

Over his four decades in the farm advocate profession, Bunting has used his vast knowledge to save many farms—and sometimes, farmers’ lives. On average, he counsels between 75 and 100 farmers each year, devoting around 60 hours to each client. Between 2010 and 2013 alone, he helped preserve an estimated $50 million in assets for farm families, according to RAFI.

While the job once sent him to farms all over the country, Bunting now works within North Carolina, still making home visits. Many people he has helped consider him family. “When we go in with a farmer, most of the time that farmer would call me up after a meeting and say they got the first good night’s sleep that they’d had in months,” Bunting said.

Krome-Lukens said the RAFI team frequently hears that Bunting offers farmers reassurance that was previously out of reach for them. “What happens is, they are very freaked out about their situation, and they talk to Benny, and Benny is not freaked out about it,” she said. “He can help them figure out a plan and next steps, and that takes a farmer from a place of, ‘I have no idea what to do; everything is crashing and burning,’ to seeing potential pathways through.”

The Birth of Farm Advocacy

The role of farm advocate arose during the farm crisis in the 1980s, when farming was in a state of frightening flux, particularly across the South and Midwest. Drought was worsening, interest rates were skyrocketing, and oil prices were increasing, resulting in thousands of foreclosures.

Attorney Sarah Vogel represented North Dakota family farmers in the landmark class-action case Coleman v. Block in 1983, which saved an estimated 16,000 farms from foreclosure. Vogel told Civil Eats that farmers often had to seek finance information themselves and help one another in order to get by.

“One way to think about farm advocates is that they exist to help keep people alive, keep them on the farm, and preserve a chance for the future.”

At the outset, farm advocacy work was often spearheaded by women. In traditional farm households, men would often work longer hours during times of financial stress in hopes of solving their problems, while their spouses would field the delinquent bills piling up on the kitchen table.

It was some of these women, like Oklahoma-based Mona Lee Brock and Minnesota-based Lou Anne Kling, whose activism became legendary. Brock was commonly referred to as “the angel on the end of the line” for setting up an independent 24/7 hotline to talk farmers through mental crises.

And Kling traveled all over her home state saving farms from foreclosure after studying federal regulations and helping one of her struggling neighbors. These women died in 2019 and 2017, respectively, and the farm community feels their absence keenly.

At the peak of the profession, there were probably hundreds of people serving as farm advocates across the U.S., says Jennifer Fahy, co-executive director of Farm Aid, which runs a farmer assistance hotline and financially supports agencies like RAFI that employ advocates.

The role even became institutionalized as some states hired people to work as farm advocates in state programs. Despite this formalization, the profession died out with the end of the farm crisis, Fahy said, and today, only a handful of farm advocates remain.

The need for their services continues, however. Though the debt situation generally has improved for farmers since the 1980s, their security remains vulnerable to market swings, inflation, and other economic factors—as well as weather and climate change.

“There are weather disasters all the time now,” said Krome-Lukens at the end of the 2024 growing season. “We’ve had multiple hurricanes impacting farmers that we work with this season. That was on top of . . . flooding and drought. And you add that commodity growers can’t really have an impact on the prices they’re getting for their crops. Put it all together, and there are a lot of reasons why there are a lot of farmers in financial distress.”

Additionally, farm ownership continues to change. The USDA reports that the number of farms in the U.S. has been declining since the early 1970s. And, while small family farms were the norm in the 20th century, many of those operations have been swallowed by corporate operations or disappeared altogether.

One of the biggest needs today, said Zach Ducheneaux, a former farm advocate and now the administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, is helping farmers prevent foreclosure. “Agriculture isn’t getting any simpler, and neither are the safety net programs designed to support them,” he said. “Access to capital and fair rates, terms, and conditions remain the biggest challenges producers face today.”

Farm advocacy is a tough trade to learn, and, as in Bunting’s case, most of the knowledge is developed through personal experience rather than formally taught by institutions.

In four decades, Bunting has seen many successes but also tragedies. Sometimes he’s called in early enough to save farms from foreclosure, but other times, it’s too late, and a family has to leave their home and their fields behind. In a few instances, Bunting has seen stress mount to the point of death—“from causes that were undiagnosed, let’s put it that way,” he said.

According to the National Rural Health Association, farmers are three and a half times more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and many identify extreme financial stress as the main cause. Farm advocacy, in turn, often extends beyond the financial and legal realms, into the more emotional and personal.

“One way to think about farm advocates is that they exist to help keep people alive, keep them on the farm, and preserve a chance for the future,” Stephen Carpenter, an attorney from the Farmers Legal Action Group (FLAG) in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote in an article for the Clinical Law Review journal.

Even as Bunting ages, he’s still meeting North Carolina farmers at their kitchen tables and connecting remotely with those outside the state, shepherding them through complicated financial matters, including administrative reviews, mediations over loan disputes, and appealing adverse decisions by various agencies.

The job requires patience and an aptitude for reading records. Regulations change all the time, and Bunting has to keep up with them to stay on his game. Often, by the end of a session, the documents he’s been reviewing are scrawled all over with notes.

“Frankly, it takes a high level of altruism,” Carpenter told Civil Eats. “Nobody’s getting paid very much money. It also takes a lot of substantive knowledge and really, really great skills in dealing with people in terrific crisis.”

Training a New Legion of Advocates

Though federal funding for advocacy instruction has increased in recent years through programs like the USDA’s Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network, the training is intensive, and organizations like RAFI have difficulty recruiting and retaining advocates.

Fahy of Farm Aid hopes the influx of federal funding for DBAN, with the FSA’s help, will create “a new legion” of folks who can support farmers in the difficult and essential task of obtaining farm credit.

“It’s a tremendous investment,” she said. “Over the past four years, FSA has made incredible progress in increasing the accessibility and availability of credit for farmers, which is so essential. And this is another step in that process of doing that. Recognizing that navigating their own system via a third party could be helpful is really wonderful. It’s groundbreaking.”

RAFI is in the process of creating two tiers of advocacy curricula. In the first, they will educate people serving in less official and involved capacities, such as helping farmers prepare documents for meetings with FSA loan officers and accompanying them to those appointments to take notes and help remember questions.

The second tier will involve training a smaller set of advocates to a higher level, using resources like a series of recorded Zoom sessions Bunting created for farm advocates during the pandemic. These people might eventually become professional advocates like Bunting, or work for state governments or farmer support agencies. RAFI plans to start this tier by training a cohort of seven advocates in the southeast.

In September, RAFI and Farm Aid held a full-day pilot training for 75 aspiring farmer supporters in Saratoga Springs, New York, and in November, they conducted a second introductory training in Kansas. They plan to offer more trainings in the spring and seek out other promising candidates for the farm advocate job.

Ducheneaux, the first Native American FSA administrator, believes the investment in farm advocates will be vital for all farmers—and for socially disadvantaged farmers in particular. Whether it be for reasons of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, these farmers face additional barriers because of systemic discrimination.

“Marginalized producers, regardless of how or why they are marginalized, are inherently less resilient to externalities, and often receive less favorable terms from lenders, vendors, and suppliers alike,” he said.

Additionally, because they do not have as much access to working capital, they often must work off the farm to keep their operations viable. “Financial and business consultants are certainly out of reach,” Ducheneaux said, “and a robust ecosystem of farm advocates can fill in some of those gaps.”

Saving the Farm

Like many farmers across the country, the Alvarados still struggle financially, but through Bunting’s help, they feel they’ve learned from past experiences and better understand how to navigate a complicated system. What’s more, they feel like they have a new member of the family, someone who can help them through future crises.

Last year, for instance, the family faced a shorter-than-usual blueberry season. Bunting helped them develop a plan to increase blueberry acreage while also diversifying their crops and planting blackberries. Now, they feel more hopeful about sustaining their farm.

“We gained a lot,” Alvarado said about Bunting’s help with the farm. “We gained a good friendship, a good bond—so for that, we’re really grateful.”

Bunting, too, finds fulfillment in the work. “Some of my best friends are people that we’ve worked with,” he said. “It’s gratifying to see them come out from being on the brink of the family dissolving, the operation dissolving, everything going down the tube—to see the family and financial operation getting stronger.”

This story was reported as part of U.C. Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program, and through a grant from The SCAN Foundation.

Christina Cooke contributed to the reporting of this story.

The post Farmers Need Help to Survive. A New Crop of Farm Advocates Is on the Way. appeared first on Civil Eats.

A preacher and a farmer, the elder Brown knew the chemicals would likely leach into the sandy loam and clay soil of Warren County, located in North Carolina’s northeastern Piedmont region, up near the Virginia border. He knew they could contaminate the water and make residents sick—and like hundreds of his fellow protesters, he believed that his community was being targeted because it was one of the poorest in the state, populated mostly by people of color.

“That’s my dad right there,” says Patrick Brown, 41, pointing on his phone to a black-and-white photo of his father being arrested. Around 55 at the time, Arthur wears a suit, tie, and round spectacles, and he is being carried away by three helmeted police officers, one holding him under each arm, another under his legs. Looking straight ahead, he appears dignified, calm, and self-assured.

Ultimately, the protest was not successful. The state dumped 7,097 truckloads—40,000 tons—of toxic soil in a Warren County landfill. Though the community was forced to live alongside hazardous waste, their actions gained the attention of prominent civil rights and environmental leaders—and ignited the national environmental justice movement.

It raised awareness that polluting industries and toxic waste facilities are often sited in communities of color and established how ordinary citizens can organize to fight back. Many national and international climate-justice actions today, in fact, grew directly out of the model established in Warren County.

The protest also shaped the legacy inherited by the child born a few months later. “That’s how I got my name, PCB—Patrick Chandler Brown,” Patrick says. “I was named after what happened.”

Patrick’s connection to his land in Warren County—and his commitment to building sovereignty for his family and community—stretches back two generations past his father, to his great-grandfather Byron, who was enslaved nearby until the end of the Civil War. Patrick currently operates Brown Family Farms on the land that Byron worked as a sharecropper once he was freed.

In the rural Hecks Grove community—less than a mile from where Robert E. Lee’s daughter Annie Carter Lee was buried after dying at 23 of typhoid fever—the land has a long and complicated history. Patrick Brown, who was named North Carolina’s Small Farmer of the Year by North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University this year, grows almost 200 acres of industrial hemp for both oil and fiber, and 11 acres and several greenhouses of vegetables—beets, kale, radishes, peppers, okra, and bok choy. He also cultivates 75 acres of wheat, 83 acres of soybeans, 65 acres of corn, and 45 acres of hardwoods and pine trees.

On a cloudy morning in April, Brown stands outside the incubation house that holds trays of vegetable starts, each marked with a popsicle-stick label, mapping out the work for the day. The clouds hang dark gray in the sky, and tender new leaves emerge from the towering willow oak  behind the brick ranch farmhouse at the center of the farm’s production area.

At 6 feet, 1 inch, he has large round eyes and a dark beard peppered with gray. He’s serious, measured, and focused, but also kind. Today he wears a dark gray button-up work shirt with two patches on it—one says “Brown Family Farms & Produce, Est. 1865,” the other “Patrick / Owner”—tucked neatly into a pair of black cargo pants. The white soles of his well-worn leather work boots are covered in dirt.

“Ideally, we’d get this sweet corn in the ground today,” he says, indicating a bag of organic seed and a nearby half-acre plot of loose brown soil. In about a month, the second or third week of May, he will plant almost 200 acres of hemp, the cornerstone of his operation.

In this work with the land, Brown is carrying out acts of reclamation, finding ways to push back against the systems designed to oppress people of color. In a county that was intentionally poisoned—and a world suffering from a changing climate—he is reviving the soil under his feet by transitioning away from pesticide-dependent row crops like tobacco to industrial hemp, which is known to sequester carbon and remediate soil, and using earth-friendly organic and regenerative methods.

And in a region where many residents suffer from diet-related illnesses and do not have easy access to grocery stores selling fresh foods, Patrick offers vegetable boxes through a community supported agriculture (CSA) program, as well as by producing hemp-derived CBD products meant to reduce chronic pain by holistic, non-pharmaceutical methods.

“He is incredibly business-oriented and entrepreneurial, but he is grounded, he’s literally grounded in the earth and the values of Black family life,” says Jereann King Johnson, a Warrenton organizer and cultural historian who has long known the Brown family and hosted Patrick on a public panel discussion about Black land ownership and land loss a couple of years ago. “The values that have been instilled in him from his family—of being a good steward of the land, caring for the community, being a good businessperson—that whole legacy of the Brown family—when you see him and talk to him, he is enshrined in those values.”

In addition to admiring his approach to farming, Johnson respects the way he thinks beyond his own operation and advocates for policies that benefit others, especially young farmers and farmers of color—those the system excludes. “He is a guiding light for young farmers,” she continues. “It’s not just the practice of farming that he is engaged in, but also exploring ways to best pursue resources through America’s bigger farming system.”

On top of farming, Brown works full time for the social justice nonprofit Nature for Justice, which helps communities at the front lines of the climate crisis work toward solutions. As director of farmer inclusion, his job is to distribute $1.7 million over five years to farmers of color in North Carolina in order to help them implement regenerative farming methods that sequester carbon and restore soil and ecosystem health. And he serves as chair of the board of the Eva Clayton Rural Food Institute, founded in January 2023 to help deliver healthy food to communities in rural North Carolina.

In 2021, he carried out the ultimate act of reclamation, purchasing the plantation house and surrounding 2.5 acres where his great-grandfather Byron had been enslaved. “Now, I own it,” he says, holding in his palm the weighty set of skeleton keys that unlock the doors of Oakley Grove house and the outbuildings surrounding it.

Over the next few years, he has plans to create a family museum, event venue, and education center for young farmers and farmers of color—ways to honor his family, make extra income, and serve farmers like him. While his ancestors were forced to inhabit this place, he is choosing to, and transforming it into a space that serves his needs.

Farming Through Four Generations

Driving his white farm truck from the plantation house through the former Oakley Grove territory last year, Brown emphasizes its size. From the main house, we drive at 45 mph for 10 minutes, and we’re still on former plantation land. “All of this, on the left side of the road, is all plantation, all the way down here,” he says as we descend a hill. “It was huge. It was huge.” He shudders to imagine the amount of backbreaking work it would have taken to manage all that land without the help of modern-day farm equipment.

After Lafayette died in his early 40s in 1841, his son Jacob managed the plantation alongside his mother—and at one point inherited a young woman of color named Lucinda Fain, who is said to have had very light skin. Exploiting the unequal power dynamic, as was common on Southern plantations, Jacob arranged for Fain to work as a cook in the big house and had multiple children by her. Byron, the first of nine, was born in 1850. Because his skin was fair, he worked in the house, where his grandmother Mary Browne groomed him to become an overseer.

Jacob went on to have many more children by a white woman. While his white descendants spell “Browne” with an “e” on the end—and inherited all of his land and wealth—his descendants of color, as was often the case, were forced to drop the last vowel, and inherited nothing. During our visit, Patrick takes me to a Browne family graveyard tucked back in the woods, which holds the white descendants of Lafayette, Mary Ann, and Jacob. “Watch out for copperheads,” he says, as we make our way through the tall grasses to the granite headstones. “This is where I found out I had a lot of cousins.”

In 1865, when he was 14, Byron was walking through the woods when he ran across a Confederate soldier, who told him that the Civil War had ended and he could no longer be forced to work for free. He returned to the plantation house to share the news with his mother and sister Flora, then fled on foot to the southeast side of Warren County, to the township of Shocco. He found work there as a sharecropper, on a farm down present-day Lickskillet Road.

When the owner of the land where Byron was sharecropping died, he willed Byron at least 10 acres. By the time Byron passed away in 1931, he had accumulated 2,000 acres, on which he grew timber and raised livestock. “My great-great-grandfather looked Caucasian, so he carried himself as if he was,” Patrick says.

When Byron died, he willed 200 acres of land and increments of cash to each of his children, but most of them had migrated north because they “wanted to get as far away from Warren County as they could,” Patrick Brown says. His grandfather, Grover, was the only one who elected to stay and farm—and as a result (to the dismay of his siblings), he inherited a sum of more than $100,000.

Grover established a peach orchard in 1935, and cultivated grain and raised livestock until the late 1970s. On the side, he ran a general store that contained a butcher shop—and even had part ownership of a bodega in Brooklyn, New York.

“My grandfather was a stubborn old man,” Brown says, pointing out a black-and-white photograph of Grover, sitting next to Arthur on a picnic table bench, wearing a suit and tie with his mouth turned down into a sour expression. “He was very business oriented. He never smiled. When he was in the field, he had suits on. He was a people’s person with respect and honor and dignity, but small talk and stuff like that? That wasn’t him.”

Brown’s father, Arthur, was born in 1927. Though two of his fingers were webbed on each hand, he never let that get in the way—and, in fact, played catcher for semi-pro baseball teams. “He never used it as an excuse,” he says.

As a preacher, Arthur—known as “Reverend Doctor A.A. Brown,” or simply “A.A.”—served more than six congregations over 60 years. “Everybody knew him—he was a patriarch in this community,” he says. “He preached a lot of funerals, a lot of weddings; he would preach on Sundays and go to convalescent homes in the evenings. Monday through Friday, it was all farming; Saturday and Sunday was taking care of members of his church, providing some type of support to the community. He just did a lot.”

Larry Hedgepeth, a 70-year-old Black farmer with a white mustache and two gold teeth, rented and farmed Arthur’s land for 15 years after Arthur retired. He still grows soybeans in neighboring Vance and Franklin counties. He describes the reverend as a quiet, gentle man who always looked out for others. “He’d plant watermelons and take them to a person’s house, and if they weren’t home, he’d leave them on the porch. Same thing with butter beans, string beans, and tomatoes,” he says. “He was a community man.”

He was also an activist. In addition to asserting the right of his community to maintain a clean environment by protesting the toxic waste landfill, he was involved with voter registration projects alongside Eva McPherson Clayton, a friend of the Brown family and the first African American woman elected to Congress from North Carolina, serving five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and holding a post on the Agriculture Committee.

“He was a standout person,” says Clayton, 89, over the phone while tending tomatoes in her backyard garden. “He was not only an advocate for justice, but he was an example of what you do trying to be responsible to have justice. He exemplified good citizenship, he exemplified good business, and he carried on his father’s tradition in farming.”

On the farm, Arthur raised some livestock and vegetables but mostly grew row crops like tobacco. Patrick’s mother, Celeste, was an educator. She served as a high school principal for 11 years and then worked two decades in the schools’ central office.

In 1998, after 52 states and territories signed a settlement agreement with the four largest tobacco companies in the U.S. to resolve lawsuits associated with the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses, Arthur accepted a buyout, distributed by the Golden LEAF Foundation, to help him transition away from the crop. He used the money to pay off the farm loans he had with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A year later, however, he began having strokes—two while atop the riding mower out on the farm—and had to stop working. He began leasing his land to Hedgepeth, who grew tobacco, soybeans, and wheat.

In August 2020, Celeste went to the hospital for a heart valve replacement and died unexpectedly the next day from complications. Arthur passed away in February 2023 at the age of 95. Their joint tombstone, featuring a dove, a cross, and an oval portrait of them together, sits in the cemetery of the brick Union Grove Baptist Church, overlooking the family farm—and, on many days, their son out working the field, following in the footsteps of the three generations before him.

“I see it,” Clayton says. “He is aware that he has the honor, as well as the responsibility, of carrying on the tradition of his parents and his family.”

The PCB Protests—and the Birth of a Movement

In the summer of 1978, however, a trucking firm hired by the Raleigh-based Ward Transformer Company took a shortcut in disposing of them. Tasked with recycling 31,000 gallons of PCB-contaminated oil, they instead dripped it—under the cover of darkness—along the roadsides in 14 North Carolina counties, including Warren.

Soon after, under the leadership of Governor Jim Hunt, the state government released its plan to dispose of the contaminated soil scraped up from the roadsides: It would establish a toxic-waste landfill in Warren County. At the time, the population of Warren County was 64 percent Black, the highest percentage of any county in North Carolina. The community most immediately surrounding the landfill site, Shocco Township, was 75 percent Black.

Over vehement community protest, the state moved forward with the plan. As the dump trucks advanced toward the new hazardous-waste landfill with contaminated soil, protestors—including Arthur—lay face up on the pavement of Sulphur Springs and Limer Town roads to block them.

During six weeks of protests, law enforcement officers arrested 523 people.

“I’m very proud of all that he did,” Brown says. “He didn’t have to do that. We’re on this side [of the county], where the dumping wouldn’t really have too much of an effect, but it was an effect for the members of the community that he knew.”

“The protestors of Warren County put the term ‘environmental racism’ on the map,” wrote Dr. Robert Bullard, recognized as the father of the environmental justice movement, in his seminal work Dumping in Dixie, published in 1990. In the early 2000s, the state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency collaborated to have the landfill site detoxified, for just over $17 million.

Brown sees the government’s dumping of toxic waste in Warren County as connected to the county’s role as a center for Black life. In 1969, Durham attorney and civil rights leader Floyd McKissick developed a plan to transform an old Warren County plantation into a utopian metropolis called Soul City, dedicated to economic equality and empowering Black people.

On the empty stretch of red clay an hour north of Raleigh—11 miles from the Brown family farm and 8 miles away from what would become the PCB landfill—McKissick planned to build a whole new city: houses, businesses, a school, a health center, tennis courts, etc. He envisioned that by the year 2000, the city would hold a population of 50,000 people and offer 24,000 jobs.

The project started out with a lot of promise. In 1972, President Richard Nixon granted it a $14 million loan guarantee to prepare the land for development. But once North Carolina elected conservative Jesse Helms to the U.S. Senate the same year, things took a turn. A series of articles in the Raleigh News & Observer falsely accused McKissick of corruption and fraud, and the feds withdrew support from the project in 1979. Now, aside from a three-story concrete monolith proclaiming “Soul City” in modern sans serif script at the intended entrance to the community, the place is nearly a ghost town.

“Jesse Helms got elected and stopped the funding from coming in, because he found out that it was mostly for a community for Blacks,” Patrick says. “It was almost like, ‘I’ve got something for y’all—I’m going to dump this toxic waste on you.’ We were already on the map. There’s 100 counties in the state of North Carolina, but you chose our county to continue to pick on.”

Growing up in Warren County—a place that has endured slavery, a utopian dream denied, and the dumping of toxic waste—shaped who Patrick has become. “My environment doesn’t define me,” he says. “It makes me more resilient, and proud.”

Tracy McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Black farmers and landowners in the South, says that as the homeplace of Soul City, Warrenton and Warren County feel special. And, she says, “I see that Patrick, in his own way, is moving the spirit of Soul City forward.”

Early Days in the Tobacco Fields

When he was slightly older, he would also help the fieldhands top the tobacco, or break the flowers off to encourage the plant to grow wide rather than tall. “You’d get this tobacco wax all over your hands,” he says.

On Saturday mornings, he would join his father at the tobacco auction in Henderson. The two would load a trailer and the bed of their red Chevy with giant sacks of cured tobacco leaves wrapped in burlap. Because the truck and trailer were so full, their German shepherd Nicki would scramble atop the truck’s cab and ride on the roof all the way to the tobacco house.

“Everyone knew that was my dad, because they’d see his truck and his dog,” he says.

They’d drive into the warehouse, where farmers would have their tobacco on display, and unload and unbundle the tobacco, laying it out in piles on open burlap sacks.

The white owner of the tobacco house exuded money and power, Brown remembers. He’d wear brimmed hats, khaki pants, and wide suspenders, and he always had a cigar in his mouth. Patrick enjoyed the scene. At the same time, he saw his father lose out, over and over: The house would buy his tobacco wholesale at a low price, and then Arthur would look on as the auctioneers, with their rhythmic incantations, would drive up the price they were paid by companies like Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds.

The money they were able to take home was just enough. Nevertheless, he says, “Tobacco is what fed and clothed us.”

Periodically through his childhood, Arthur would drive Patrick north across the rural county toward the town of Littleton and park the truck in the driveway outside the locked metal gate of the Oakley Grove plantation where his great-grandfather had been born. Together, they would stare at the abandoned but majestic two-story house through the white oak, black walnut, sycamore, and spruce pine trees on its lawn.

“He was educating me,” Patrick says of his father. “He would say, ‘This is where our family ancestry originated, this is the plantation that we came from.’” But while Arthur wanted Patrick to know where his family had started, he did not mention the circumstances of Byron’s tenure at the house. Only at the annual family reunions he attended after high school did Patrick learn from his other relatives that his great-grandfather had been enslaved at Oakley Grove.

“My dad didn’t really talk about slavery much; that’s just something that he didn’t focus on,” he says. “He understood slavery and everything that people had gone through, but his image was his father—and his father was a no-nonsense type of guy that really felt superior to slavery. Grover couldn’t relate to slavery in a way, because he felt like he was born into progress. His father [Byron] was wealthy, and all his kids were entrepreneurs. They didn’t want any association with that property over in Littleton,” says Patrick of his father and grandfather. “While they knew the history, they didn’t relate to it.”

Patrick, however, takes a different view. “Even if that plantation didn’t relate to me and my success in life, I would not be who I am today if my great-grandfather didn’t have to go through that portion of his life,” he says. “I pay homage to all the generations, and I focus to catch up on the things I didn’t focus on as a young person.”

Plus, he says, he feels solidly in a position where he can look at the painful parts of his family’s past straight on. “Now it’s OK to talk about, because now we actually have a little bit of ownership in the process,” he says. “It’s like full circle.”

Breaking Away From the Farm

After high school, Brown studied business administration and played football at the nearby Fayetteville State University, then secured a job outside Washington, D.C., as an account executive in the real estate market for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited. He made good money, but rather than putting it into the farm, he splurged. “I was young, I was in my 20s. I hadn’t made any money like that ever in my life. I was flying to Vegas, I was going to the Caribbean and traveling the world and hanging out with friends,” he says. “I felt independent, but I made dumb decisions.”

At the end of 2008, he was laid off during the recession. He spent just over half a year back at the farm and then got a position as a contract agricultural advisor in Afghanistan. Unlike most Americans in the country, who lived on military bases, he lived among locals in Afghan villages and taught residents how to grow, trellis, and sell grapes—to give them an alternative to growing poppies for the opium trade.

“I wouldn’t say it was a waste of time,” he says, “but I really put my life in jeopardy for something that really wasn’t going to make a difference.” He and his team would return to villages six months after they had left, and the Taliban would be back in control and the villagers back to growing poppies.

After a year in Afghanistan, Brown earned a high-level security clearance and was able to get a job with the Department of Defense, which he held for 16 years, until June 2023. The whole time he worked for the government in the D.C. area, Patrick would commute to North Carolina every weekend to help his parents with the farm.

He soon realized that on the farm, he felt alive, and comfortable, in a way he didn’t elsewhere—in a suit, at meetings, jet-setting across the world. “Coming here, where no one knows I’m here—I’m just out here working on my tractor—I’m just enjoying the landscape and the atmosphere and the environment.”

He secured his present job in June 2023, as director of farmer inclusion for Nature for Justice, and has flipped his schedule. Now he spends his weekdays in North Carolina on his farm and traveling the state to speak with other farmers, connecting them with incentives, and his weekends in Virginia with his family, where his wife and their son, born in 2013, still live. It’s a two hour and 52-minute drive from doorstep to doorstep, he says.

While for the last two decades he worked a career job to get by and support his family, “I’m 100 percent ag focused now,” he says. And his full-time Nature for Justice job gives him an advantage that his father, who depended solely on the farm for income, did not have. He can experiment with different crops and approaches and purchase modern equipment to help him do the work.

He realizes he has a huge opportunity in the land that his ancestors stewarded and passed down to him. “I’d be a dummy—which I was for the last 20 years—by not taking advantage,” he says. And the knowledge and experience he developed in college and while working for the government have made him savvy at navigating the system to his own benefit, and the benefit of others working the land.

Opting Out of a Discriminatory System

Yesterday, while he was harvesting a field of wheat, the belts in Brown’s John Deere combine seized up, and the giant machine jammed. This morning, while he waits for help, he reaches a pitchfork up into a back compartment of the machine to pull out the straw that got stuck. “Oh, what a day,” he says. “I can’t cut wheat until I get that fixed.”

Meanwhile, across the yard, in the shade of the willow oak, Brown’s two nephews, Justice and Isaiah White—his older sister’s kids, both in their mid-20s, both full-time employees on the farm—sit on overturned buckets in the back of a low trailer amidst a sea of purple kale leaves. The trailer is still hitched to the old orange tractor they used as they harvested two long rows from a nearby field.

Across the road, peacocks shriek. They must be pets? Justice and Isaiah don’t know for sure, but, “If you scream loud enough, they’ll scream back,” Isaiah says, reaching down to select a handful of the deep purple leaves, then clipping their stems and fastening a rubber band around the bundles. A FreshPoint Sysco truck will be picking up as many boxes as they have packed tomorrow morning, so Patrick has asked them to work quickly.

Patrick takes  his position as the steward of his family’s land seriously. “My primary mission is to make sure this land that I inherited has the capacity to generate income in agriculture for future generations—whether it be my nephews, their children, my son, or his children,” he says.

Previous generations relied mostly on commodity crops for their income, but Patrick takes a different approach. One of his key tenets is planting a diversity of specialty crops that can both supply his community with fresh vegetables and create a variety of income streams—and to sell CSA shares at the beginning of the growing season to offset the farm’s upfront costs.

While his predecessors—and most farmers—take out loans or rely on credit to run their businesses, borrowing against their expected harvests to purchase equipment, seeds, and other supplies, Brown has never borrowed money or relied on loans or grants. He has seen firsthand the harm that debt can cause farmers, especially farmers of color.

The USDA has a long history of discrimination in its allocation of farm loans—confirmed by numerous agency-commissioned studies. In the 1980s and ’90s, North Carolina farmer Timothy Pigford and other Black farmers filed a class action lawsuit against the USDA, saying the agency—via its local county committees—would deny Black farmers loans or force them to wait longer for approval than nonminority farmers. Additionally, the suit says, the agency failed to investigate and respond to allegations of discrimination.

Patrick saw his father experience the USDA’s discriminatory lending practices. The agency was frequently slow to approve Arthur’s request for loans and disperse the money. “They would continue to ask for more information, more documentation, in order to feel comfortable giving him a loan each and every year,” Patrick says.

The delays in payment could be devastating. With tobacco as his principal cash crop, Arthur needed to purchase fertilizer before December and prepare the land for planting by February or March. When the loan money was delayed, he would have to fertilize and plant late, and the farm would operate under stress all year, often experiencing low yield—and reduced profits—as a result.

In 1999, a $1 billion settlement was negotiated in the Pigford cases. Claimants were supposed to receive payments soon after, but because of confusing paperwork and processing issues, very few did. Congress appropriated money for an additional round of payouts in 2010 but similar issues abounded.

Last July, the USDA issued $2 billion in financial assistance to farmers it had discriminated against through its lending programs; before that, however, most Pigford claimants had received payouts of $50,000 or less, just a tenth of what an average midsize farm spends in a year, and fewer than 3 percent—425 farmers total—had received the debt relief they were entitled to as part of the lawsuit.

The older Black farmers who were involved with the Pigford cases regret having gotten entangled with the industrial agriculture paradigm and the USDA, says McCurty of the Black Belt Justice Center. “The elders refer to the USDA as the last plantation,” she says. “It really is modern-day sharecropping. It’s entrapment, so they can never have economic autonomy.”

In large part due to the systemic discrimination, the number of Black farmers in the U.S. has fallen precipitously over the last century. Between 1910 and 2017, the percentage of Black farmers declined from 14 percent of all farmers to less than 2 percent. Today, the approximately 40,000 Black farmers remaining in America own less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland. “I can count on one hand the number there are in Warren County that’s still row cropping, not just backyard gardening,” Patrick says. “There’s hardly any of us left.”

And the disparities continue: In 2022, the USDA granted direct loans to only 36 percent of applicants who identified as Black compared with 72 percent of applicants who identified as white, according to an analysis by National Public Radio. That’s why Patrick has opted out of the loan system. “I don’t want to have to be praying and hoping that in order for me to have a good crop in the ground this year, I’ve got to wait for money from USDA to plant on time,” Patrick says. “I saw my dad deal with it. And I promised I would never operate this farm like that.”

In this often hostile environment, the farmers of color who do remain support each other, sourcing produce from one another to fill out their orders and helping each other with broken equipment and other issues.

Hedgepeth comes over in the afternoon to help Patrick fix the combine, which is still clogging up every time Patrick tries to run it down a row of wheat. Patrick adjusts the bolts that control the straw-release door on the back of the machine so it’s open 6 inches wider than it was, and then he and Hedgepeth climb the five-step ladder up front.

Patrick enters the glassed-in cockpit and fires up the machine, releasing a groan and a plume of smoke into the air. As he advances down a new row, Hedgepeth hangs off the side of the deck to see if the combine is releasing the straw onto the ground like it should. He gives Patrick a thumbs up.

Finally, the combine is fixed, and—after a day’s delay—the harvesting can continue. Hedgepeth enters the cockpit and takes the seat beside Patrick. Up high over the field, the two farmers—one older, one younger, both with an intimate knowledge of this land—sit side by side as they run up and down several more rows, leaving a row of freshly cut straw in their wake.

On the ground at the end of the run, Hedgepeth picks up a harvested kernel and examines it closely. He nods approvingly. “I believe that’s as good as you’re gon’ get,” he says.

Farming for Climate

“Normally by this time of year, by the second week of August, we’d have fall crops in the ground,” he says. But the fields remain empty. “We’re too afraid that if we put fall crops in the ground like we’ve done the last 15 to 20 years, we’d lose them to heat.”

When Patrick took over the farm, he decided to take it in a new direction. Concerned about the changing climate, Patrick is trying to use his land as a force for good—through strategies that also make financial sense. A key to this approach is growing hemp, which the federal government legalized in 2018 after prohibiting its cultivation for several decades, spurred by the war on drugs and its association with marijuana. (To note: Hemp contains only .3 percent of psychoactive THC and does not produce a high.)

A fast-growing and high-yield plant, hemp suppresses weeds, thrives without fertilizer and pesticides, and requires less water than many other crops. Plus, it sequesters carbon: “Over 90 to 100 days, an acre of hemp sequesters just as much carbon as a pine tree would over 20 years,” Patrick says.

Because North Carolina was among the states that allowed hemp cultivation prior to its federal legalization, Patrick started planting hemp in 2015 for the oil in its flower, used to produce CBD—and he patented a company called Hempfinity, which produces CBD teas, gummies, salves, lotions, and tinctures.

“We wanted to try to figure out an alternative to slow down the use of pharmaceutical drugs, like Oxycontin,” he says. Then in 2018, he began growing industrial hemp for the fiber of its stalks, which can be used to create everything from fabric to building materials. He sells the hemp to BioPhil Natural Fibers in Lumberton, which processes it into woven materials, textiles, and clothing.

Patrick also partners with Patagonia and VF Corporation (owner of The North Face, Vans, Timberland, and JanSport)—which are both interested in developing domestic supply chains for industrial hemp and have commissioned him to help with the research and development of its cultivation. Each year, he sends the companies data on his fields, capturing information on things like plant genetics, stalk densities, soil composition, and the amount of carbon the plants are sequestering.

Because hemp fiber only recently became legal to grow across the U.S., the industry is still in its infancy, and parts of the supply chain—like processing plants—are still few and far between. While Vans sources the majority of the cotton for its canvas shoes from the U.S., most of its hemp comes from China, says Emily Alati, Vans’ director of materials innovation and sustainability.

The company would eventually like to source more of its hemp fiber domestically, from minority farmers in particular, with the hope of increasing the diversity of the farmers in its supply chain. (Most of its cotton growers are white males and around 65 years old, Alati says.)

Brown is proving instrumental in helping the global company figure out how to make this transition and identify gaps in its supply chain, says Alati, who visits Patrick on his farm about once a year. “What I love about Patrick is his willingness to jump into anything new and try it,” she says. “Working with Patrick is helping us understand how we can support and potentially fund minority farmers to embrace regenerative hemp or regenerative cotton, so that we can start to shift our supply chain over time. We don’t know what we don’t know, and Patrick has been so critical in helping us understand.”

Brown and I drive less than a minute up the road to visit the closest hemp field to the main farm, the one right downhill from the cemetery at the home church. At full height, the deep green stalks of his hemp plants stand 16 feet tall and pretty thin, about the circumference of a thumb. But because Patrick cut most of this field two days ago, the stalks lay flat and are browning on the ground—drying naturally in a process called dew retting, where the cellular tissue and gummy substances rot away, causing the fiber to separate from the stem. After a week and a half, he will rake the stalks into 4-by-5-foot bales and send them off for processing.

So far, he’s pleased with the new crop. “Hemp puts more into that land than it takes out,” he says. “Every year, my yields are better, and I’m putting less and less into the land. I’m building the soil.” That’s hard to do with a crop like tobacco, because of the amount of chemicals it takes to produce it, he says. With synthetic fertilizer costing up to $900 per ton in 2022 and 2023, the natural feeding of the soil has the added benefit of saving him money and making his farm more profitable, he says.

Beyond growing climate-friendly hemp, he employs numerous farming techniques that benefit the soil and sequester carbon. While he has not invested in obtaining the official USDA certification (which is not worth it financially, he says), he farms his hemp and veggies by organic methods. He fertilizes with compost tea, a mixture he creates of compost and water.

Where he can—in his hemp, wheat, and soybean fields—he does not till the soil, a practice that disrupts its composition and releases carbon. He rotates his crops rather than planting the same thing in each plot every season, which builds soil nutrients and organic matter. And he plants cover crops each winter—barley, cereal rye, hairy vetch, red crested clover, and wheat—rather than leaving fields bare, which can prevent erosion, fix nitrogen, and sequester carbon.

In his shift to climate-friendly ag, Brown has tried to bring other farmers along with him. In 2022, he applied for a USDA Climate-Smart Commodities grant, a project that would connect Black and historically underserved farmers—prioritizing the legacy farmers involved with the Pigford case—with retailers and historically Black colleges and universities. Following the model he has established with his own farm, the idea was to help these farmers transition to climate-smart agriculture and hemp production.

While the USDA did not end up funding the proposal—instead directing a good portion of the grant money to big-ag players like Tyson Foods, which received $60 million—McCurty said the legacy farmers appreciate Patrick’s vision. “The Black farmers, the elders, they love Patrick. I mean, it makes them proud to see the next generation running with the baton. And not just that, but that he reached back to them to show them a pathway out,” she says.

“There can be no justice for Black farmers without justice for the Pigford legacy farmers and what they endured,” McCurty continues. “And what I appreciate is that Patrick went back and really sat with the elders to try to incorporate them into this larger vision he had of restoring the Black agricultural land base through industrial hemp.”

Brown’s day job with Nature for Justice (an organization that did receive Climate-Smart grant money)—which consists of incentivizing Black farmers, 75 so far, to adopt many of these regenerative practices—marries his interests in mitigating climate change, making farming more profitable, and staving off land loss among Black farmers.

Former Rep. Clayton admires Brown’s tenacity and his concern for others, especially new and nonwhite farmers. “He’s willing to push buttons to get things done; he’s willing to advocate at the highest levels open to him,” she says. “He’s getting more new farmers in because he’s willing to fight the battles of equity.”

Purchasing the Plantation

One day, when he was visiting with his young son Clayton, the owner was there, and he and Brown got to talking. The doctor had been collecting family history from the white side of the Browne family. “He was surprised I knew my family history like I did,” Brown says.

Realizing that Brown had a stronger connection to the house than he did, the doctor eventually offered to sell him the house. In May 2021, he purchased it and the 2.5 acres surrounding the house in a private sale. “I was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I purchased it,’” he says. At the same time, he came face to face with the ugly realities. “When I first got these keys and documents from the other side of the family—the ledgers, the wills—I saw how they were willing off people like they were merchandise.”

Jerreann King Johnson visited the plantation with Patrick in 2022 after hosting him on the Black-land-loss panel. “When I got out of the car and walked onto the land, under that huge stand of oak trees, I got chills. I could have cried, because I felt like that land was coming back to where it belonged,” she says. “I felt so happy and joyful, knowing that the land, the house, and the property were in Patrick Brown’s hands. I felt so hopeful and encouraged, that this young Black man had the consciousness and foresight to acquire the property.”

The house was built on a high brick foundation and in two parts. The original, humbler part, now the back, was built in 1800. And the more elaborate second part was added in 1859 and attributed to the renowned architect Jacob Holt.

“This is where the Browns started,” he says as we cross the shaded lawn to approach the house. The white paint has worn off of most of the siding, giving the house a distressed look, and while two rows of boxwood bushes line what was once a front walk, the front porch and stairs are missing.

We circle around to the back and climb the rotting wooden staircase to the back porch. I carefully place my feet on boards that look like they won’t collapse under my weight. Brown uses the giant gold skeleton keys to open the door. The light inside the house is filtered and subdued.

While the few rooms that had been partially renovated by a previous owner have finished drywall, in most of the house, the original wall interiors—made of lath, or narrow strips of wood, and plaster—are exposed. Boards and long pieces of molding are stacked on the floor and lean against the walls for future use. “All the wood in this house is original,” he says.

Back on his own farm later in the day, Brown reflects on the centuries of people and events that have led him here, to the gently sloping acreage on the far side of the county, to the tractor parked in the side yard, to the hemp growing by his parents’ graves. “I’m thankful for my dad and his father and my great-grandfather for working at what they did so long, to be able to give me access to the land,” he says.

After nearly two decades working mostly off the land, he now feels he’s doing what he was meant for—in the planting, in the harvesting, even in the fixing of the jammed combine. “This is my passion,” he says. “This is where I belong.”

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