This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.

“You see that new building over there with the roof and red barn?” asks Bob Walton as he guides me through the dirt roads of Isabella County in mid-Michigan, where he serves as a trustee for Isabella Township. “I know of at least three new buildings that were put up for agriculture that are being basically paid for by windmill money.”

Walton took a break from compacting soil recently planted with soybeans to show me the tall structures, blades rotating slowly in the breeze, now visible from every angle on his land and neighboring properties. The silver towers look incongruous next to the red barns and outbuildings that would fit perfectly on a postcard from rural America. It feels almost as if you’ve landed on the set of a science fiction movie—or time-traveled into the future.

It took a while to catch up with Walton, a third-generation farmer, working some 400 acres, mostly on land that once belonged to his grandfather. Now in his 70s, he’s turning the business over to his daughter and son-in-law. That does not keep him out of his tractor, which is where I found him one afternoon in May.

“I feel bad for the people that think they’re so ugly,” he says, looking at the wind turbines near his home. “I just think they’re majestic. I love the red lights at night.”

It was not love at first sight. When a private firm called Apex Clean Energy came calling in 2018, Walton recalls, “Our first thought was, how can we stop this?”

Energy developers and utility companies began breaking ground on a significant number of big wind projects in Michigan in 2008, after a bipartisan agreement requiring 10% of the state’s electricity to be generated from carbon-free renewables. A new law passed last year by Democratic majorities in the state legislature boosted that requirement to 60% by 2035.

Most of Michigan’s early wind turbines were located north of Detroit, on the eastern side of the state that Michiganders call “The Thumb” (because it’s shaped like a thumb on a mitten). Walton and his neighbors got in touch with farmers and residents who had been living with—and collecting revenue from—wind farms for several years.

Eventually, they decided they liked what they heard. One piece of advice was to lock down compensation for any impact to productive farmland.

“If 10 years down the road we find out there’s tile damage, they still have to pay for it,” says Walton, referring the underground system of pipes, called drain tile, that protect crops from heavy rains or floods. “That’s the other thing we learned, you got to write everything in.”

‘We need energy!’

Walton, a Republican, does not often agree with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. He is skeptical about electric vehicles, is not vaccinated and did not agree with Whitmer’s enforced lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the strictest in the United States. Walton’s family property, in addition to hosting a windmill built by Apex, is also home to an oil derrick.

Oil deposits are dotted throughout Michigan farmland. Decades ago, it was common for land agents to canvass local farmers—as wind and solar developers are doing now—and offer lease payments in exchange for siting an oil or gas well on their property. Many of these wells have been capped, but the one on Bob Walton’s family farm is still active, with the revenue going to his sister.

Walton doesn’t see a new generation of energy projects as a threat to rural life. Instead, he sees a steady stream of wind turbine income—free from drought, flood or fluctuations in crop prices—that will help his daughter and son-in-law create a sustainable 21st century farm.

“I called my grandkids, and they all said, ‘Grandpa I think it’s a good thing,’ ” Walton says. “Because we need energy!”

Lawyering up

Walton was first elected trustee for Isabella Township in 2016. “The reason I got on,” he says, “is I didn’t want somebody moving out from the city telling us farmers what the hell we’re going to do now.”

Apex’s proposal to build wind turbines in Isabella and nearby townships surfaced during Walton’s first term. Opponents of the project, working under the banner of a group called Isabella Wind Watch, accused him of a conflict of interest. Walton signed a lease with Apex as a private landowner and also voted to approve the project as a public official.

Activists who wanted to block the turbines, says Walton, “fought us like crazy.” In 2018, he beat back three recall campaigns. “I lawyered up. We stopped them at the county” where recall petitions must be approved for clarity.

Walton stood for re-election in 2020 and won handily, along with other township officials who had backed the wind farm. “They put somebody up against all of us,” he says, “and we beat them two and three to one.” He was renominated for another term in an August 6 Republican primary and will be re-elected in the fall. Democrats are not contesting any Isabella Township positions, as often happens in rural Michigan.

“I’ve told my friend Albert, who’s a liberal, if it wasn’t for us conservatives in this county, they wouldn’t have got this,” says Walton.

That would be Albert Jongewaard, senior development manager for Apex, who is now based in Minnesota. From 2007 to 2010, Jongewaard raised money and managed campaigns for Democratic candidates in the Deep South. In Michigan, he spent several years working for Apex and burned a lot of shoe leather talking to farmers, landowners, residents and local officials in Isabella and Montcalm Counties.

Jongewaard likes to quote Rich Vander Veen, an early pioneer of wind energy in Michigan: “It takes ten-thousand cups of coffee to build a wind farm.”

Getting off the ground in Gratiot

Years of patient, caffeine-fueled persuasion has paid off for several development companies in Gratiot County, located in mid-Michigan just south of Isabella County. The first wind farm in Gratiot County began operating in 2012; there are now six of them, with over 400 turbines generating more than 900 megawatts of electricity. That’s roughly enough to meet the annual energy needs of 300,000 households.  

These big projects pay big taxes on windmills, which cost up to $2 million per turbine. Greater Gratiot Development, Inc., a nonprofit serving Gratiot County, created a spreadsheet showing $93 million in tax revenue collected from wind farms between 2012 and 2023. That’s more than $7 million a year, a significant boost for local governments in a county with just over 40,000 inhabitants.

Jongewaard and the team from Apex also hit paydirt in Isabella County—but not so far in Montcalm County, which sits just south of Isabella and west of Gratiot. In 2022 and 2023, there were 26 successful recall campaigns against local officials who backed solar and wind projects in Michigan. Eleven of them were in Montcalm County, enough to stall a proposed Apex wind project.

“It is true in Michigan there is organized opposition to these projects. That’s a fact,” says Jongewaard. “People are right to ask questions, you should be asking questions.”

The issues raised by Montcalm County Citizens United, a group opposing the project, included a decline in property values, sleep deprivation from turbine noise, “damage to wildlife, domestic and farm animals, bat and bird kills, [and] massive government handouts.”

Jongewaard insists there are solid answers to these and other objections. “These projects aren’t dangerous,” he says. “They don’t have adverse health impacts. We know that through science and lived reality.”

Such arguments carried the day in Isabella County, where Apex won approval to build 136 wind turbines spread across 56,000 acres and seven townships. In 2021, Apex sold the project to DTE for an undisclosed sum. The press release announcing the sale projects $30 million in tax payments to local units of governments over the next 30 years, along with a whopping $100 million in lease payments to some 400 farmers and landowners.

That works out to about $250,000 for each leaseholder over the next three decades, an average of more than $8,000 a year. The actual payment varies, depending on how many turbines and transmission lines are sited on each property. Don Schurr was director of Greater Gratiot while wind farms were being constructed and began operating there. As one farmer told him, the annual lease payment from turbines “pays my taxes, pays my insurance and it [pays for] a nice vacation.”

Thanks to taxes paid by Michigan wind and solar farms, rural police and fire departments are getting new equipment and adding new shifts. Schools are being upgraded, and local roads are finally getting long-needed repairs. Farmers, meanwhile, are driving new pickups, building new barns and repairing and replacing aging farm equipment.

While all households can benefit from increased public spending, private payments to leaseholders are not universally distributed. The 400 farmers and landowners receiving lease payments from the Isabella wind farm, for example, are just a fraction of the more than 4,000 households in the seven townships where the project is located.

Sarah Mills, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has closely studied the siting of renewable energy projects in rural communities. Energy developers, she says, have started to use “good neighbor” agreements, which provide at least some payments to everyone in the footprint of a project. The compensation, she says, is “for access to wind that blows over your property.”

“There are townships in the Thumb where 85% of the property owners are participants in a wind farm,” says Mills, even if some of them have no turbines or transmission lines on their land.

Big money, big headaches

The recent influx of energy developer dollars—lots of them—into Michigan’s rural communities has real benefits, but also causes real headaches. According to Colleen Stebbins, a longtime official of Winfield Township in Montcalm County, wind farm opponents “were so afraid if I put a turbine on my property, I’d make a million, while they, with a little piece of lake property, would get nothing.”

While serving as township clerk, Stebbins declined to sign a lease with the company on her personal property, seeking to avoid any conflict of interest. Seeing benefits for the township, she voted to approve Apex’s bid to site a wind farm. As a result, opponents of the project organized a recall election and won a majority to remove her from office in November 2022.

Stebbins eventually did sign a lease with Apex, she says, “after I got recalled.”

The politics of energy production in Michigan has played out differently in three adjoining counties. Isabella, Gratiot and Montcalm are all home to hundreds of small farms, averaging a few hundred acres each. The population is overwhelmingly white—88% or more—in all three counties, with a tiny share of foreign-born residents. Donald Trump won all three counties in 2016 and again in 2020.

So why did conservative township voters in Gratiot and Isabella accept renewable energy projects, while Montcalm voters joined a rebellion against them?

Farmers vs. lakers 

One factor could be geography. Montcalm has more interior lakes than either Gratiot or Isabella. That means more homeowners own lakeside, non-farm holdings and would not receive the windfall in lease revenue from wind turbines or solar farms, sometimes by choice.

“This is just not a land use they think is appropriate, and it’s not worth it to them,” says the University of Michigan’s Sarah Mills. These homeowners, who often relocated precisely to enjoy a peaceful rural environment, are especially sensitive to disruptions that may be caused by utility-scale energy projects.

Ryan VanSolkema was elected supervisor of Winfield Township in rural Montcalm County in November of 2022, during the heart of the controversy over Apex’s proposed wind project. He won a recall election during the same 2022 campaign which saw Colleen Stebbins lose her position as township clerk. He is running, unopposed, for another term this year.

“I had just moved up here and bought a house on the lake,” says VanSolkema. “I wasn’t looking to lose 30% of the value of the home I just purchased.” Nobody wants to buy a home, he says, that looks out on 600-foot-tall wind turbines—and he’s not convinced there is any need to burn less carbon while generating electricity.

“Climate change is a hoax,” he says. “It’s just a way for government to spend money and regulate. Almost 50 years I’ve been alive, what has changed? Literally nothing.”

The intense opposition to wind and solar farms that developed in Montcalm County is far from unique. “We’ve had projects blocked all over the state,” says Ed Rivet, executive director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, a group that supports an “all-of-the-above” free market approach. The group receives backing from foundations and energy developers through the nationwide Conservative Energy Network. Rivet estimates that in the past five years, as much as two gigawatts of solar energy production in Michigan has been blocked by local activists. That’s the equivalent of two nuclear power plants worth of energy. 

Pushback is by no means confined to the state of Michigan. Researchers at Columbia Law School have found nearly 400 “laws and regulations to block or restrict renewable energy facilities” in 41 different states, with hundreds of projects encountering “significant opposition.”

Turning the tide

In Michigan, players on all sides of the controversy are recognizing the changed reality created by Public Act 233, part of a package of clean energy laws passed by Democrats and signed by Gov. Whitmer last November. It puts final siting authority for large-scale solar and wind projects in the hands of the three-member statewide Public Service Commission (PSC).

“Local authorities don’t have any impact,” says Kevon Martis. “You’ll see fewer recalls of local officials.” A home remodeler and county commissioner in Lenawee County, Martis has been involved in campaigns against renewables since he blocked a wind project in his community of Riga Township back in 2009.

After an unsuccessful petition drive this year to overturn P.A. 233 by statewide referendum, Martis is ready to try again in 2026.

On August 6, he was renominated by GOP voters for a second term as county commissioner and will face no Democratic opposition in the fall. Martis’s primary opponent, Palmyra Township Supervisor David Pixley, was endorsed by Private Property Rights PAC (PPR PAC) a new independent expenditure committee, or Super PAC.  

This summer in Michigan, PPR PAC endorsed 20 local candidates in Republican primaries in Montcalm, Ionia and other counties where there has been controversy over siting solar and wind projects. Nine of their endorsed candidates won their primary elections, some by small margins.

The PPR PAC website makes no mention of solar, wind or renewable energy. The group backs candidates, it says, who support “policies that reduce excessive regulation and oppose broad governmental overreach into property rights.”

Cabell Hobbs, treasurer of PPR PAC, is also treasurer of the Apex Clean Energy PAC. He has served in similar roles for GOP candidates, including George W. Bush, Ted Cruz and John Bolton.

Apex PAC’s election filings show contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates, a $2,500 donation to the Pennsylvania Solar PAC in 2021 and a $5,000 donation to the D.C.-based Community Solar Action Fund in 2024. There is no record of disbursements in Michigan. 

Apex’s Albert Jongewaard says he is not familiar with PPR PAC, nor are his colleagues currently working on the company’s Michigan projects. An email to PPR PAC resulted in an automatic reply from Rural Economic Development PAC (R.E.D. PAC), a Texas-based super PAC which also touts protecting private property among its top priorities.

R.E.D. PAC, where Cabell Hobbs is also treasurer, has received over $1 million from Conservatives for a Clean Energy Future (CCEF). Larry Ward, CCEF’s president and CEO, is a former political director of the Michigan Republican Party. The group was formed, he says, as the advocacy arm of the Conservative Energy Network.

“We like a whole list of energy sources,” he says, including advanced wind, solar and nuclear technologies. What his organization doesn’t like, he says, is government—or angry neighbors—“telling farmers what they can and can’t do with their property.”

CCEF is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Donations to the group are not tax deductible, and it is not required to disclose its donors. “Everyone who contributes to us,” says Ward, “would rather it be that way.”

This is the topsy-turvy world of renewable energy in Michigan. Republicans backing the conservative cause of private property rights are using a dark money loophole to help farmers and landowners participate in green energy projects, a liberal priority supported by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. These strange bedfellows, plus a few others, may now be finding a way to live together.

Although the state’s PSC has the final say to site renewable projects, utility and energy developers still have the option of trying first to work directly with local authorities. That’s taking place now—in Montcalm County, of all places. DTE Energy broke ground there in June on a 554-acre solar farm.

At a public hearing on the project last December, Evergreen Township Supervisor Andy Ross observed that with P.A. 233 in place, local governments are better off getting involved with renewable projects to make sure local concerns are addressed. These include issues like setbacks from adjacent properties, noise limits and a $5 million bond secured by DTE, which guarantees funding to decommission the project.

“If we were to deny their [DTE’s] application and they went through the state siting process, our restrictions are tighter than the state’s,” he told the Montcalm/Ionia Daily News. “What we’re working together on is way better than what the state siting would be.”

“I think there is a path forward for developers to work with local governments,” says PSC chair Dan Scripps, an energy attorney and former Democratic state representative from Northern Michigan. He was appointed to the commission in 2019 by Whitmer, who named him chair in 2020.

“I’m not going to be disappointed,” he says, “if we never get a case.”

The post Signs of a Ceasefire in Michigan’s Energy Wars appeared first on Barn Raiser.

“I’m not talking about, you know, behind the Walmart,” said Jennifer Garner, describing her visits to rural communities on behalf of Save the Children, the global charity that supports families in need. “I’m talking about the town behind the town behind the town, [folks] who can get to Walmart with a group of people maybe once a month because that’s how often they can afford gas.”

Garner, the veteran actress who most recently appeared in this summer’s Hollywood blockbuster Deadpool vs. Wolverine, grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. In previous campaigns, she’s raised funds for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. This year, she brought her star power to an August 6 “Rural Americans for Harris” Zoom call.

The two-hour online session, which drew over 2,000 participants and raised some $20,000, did not have the high profile of other affinity groups that have emerged in recent weeks to back Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president. Initiatives like “Win with Black Women,” “Black Men for Harris,” “White Women Answer the Call” and “White Dudes for Harris” have attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters and added millions to campaign coffers.

But rural Democrats insist the party can’t afford to bypass their communities, which account for 15-to-20% of the U.S. electorate, or some 25 to 30 million voters. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Donald Trump won a whopping 59% of the vote in rural areas in 2016, and he did even better in 2020 with 65%. Joe Biden won in 2020 by flipping the script in the suburbs. Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton among suburban voters in 2016; Biden won them by an 11-point margin in 2020.

Opportunity knocks

Still, there are rich opportunities outside of cities and suburbs—for instance, leaders like Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, one of the organizers of the “Rural Americans” call. Her husband is a cattle rancher and she’s delighted with the choice of Tim Walz; he grew up in rural Nebraska and taught high school in Mankato, a small city in Minnesota. But Democrats first have to break what she calls “the cycle of mutual neglect.”

“We neglect to invest in rural America,” says Kleeb. “So [rural Americans] don’t hear our message, they don’t see our faces, they don’t know our platform. So they don’t vote for us—so we don’t invest in rural America.”

Walz was scheduled to headline Tuesday’s event but was named as Harris’s running mate that same day and made his first public appearance as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee with Harris at a rally in Philadelphia. In his stead was Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor, a member of the White Eart Band of Ojibwe, who could take over for Walz as the state’s governor if he is elected in November.

During the Zoom session, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat and chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who is retiring this year, pointed to her party’s record of accomplishments for rural America. She ticked off increased broadband access, funds to support rural hospitals and nursing homes, and “the largest investment in rural electricity since the New Deal,” to back renewable energy projects.

The Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to an email query from Barn Raiser for information about Republican priorities for rural America. The GOP platform, approved at the party’s July convention, includes “Protect American Workers and Farmers from Unfair Trade” as a chapter heading—but the bullet points beneath make no mention of either farmers or rural communities.

Voting for values

By itself, a list of policy priorities or legislative accomplishments is not likely to move the needle for rural voters, says Dan Shea, professor of government at Colby College in Maine. He is the co-author, with fellow Colby faculty member Nicholas Jacobs, of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. The book is based on a 200-question survey completed by more than 10,000 rural residents, the largest and most detailed research ever conducted among this population.

Rural residents, he says, are looking for empathy from political leaders, and a sense of shared values. “A common assumption,” Shea says, “is that rural communities are withering away, a wasteland of alienation. We find the opposite: Rural Americans are proud of their communities. They are connected and they want to stay in the community.”

Rural communities, he says, are typically more integrated than suburbs or cities, with well-to-do families living nearby those who are less well off, often attending the same schools and churches. As a result, although rural residents have a strong belief in hard work and self-reliance, they are also highly attuned to how well—or how badly—their community is doing as a whole.

Over the past decades, rural families have suffered severe economic shocks, first from the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, then from manufacturing job loss connected to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and unrestricted imports from China. As more family farms disappeared, rural factory jobs became an important source of income—until they weren’t.

“In many communities,” Shea observes, “there was just one factory, and it defined the identity of the town.” When that plant closed “NAFTA ghost towns” were left behind.

Even prior to the collapse of rural manufacturing, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory in 1980, the prairie populists who could once win over the heartland electorate began to lose steam. Democratic senators like Idaho’s Frank Church, Iowa’s John Culver and South Dakota’s George McGovern lost their seats, and rural voters are now “overwhelmingly conservative.”

His students are shocked, says Shea, when he tells them that probably the most liberal Democratic presidential nominee ever—McGovern—was from South Dakota.

“My best guess,” he says, “is that the worry and anxiety that all Americans have about the future is dramatically heightened in rural parts. Rural Americans are anxious for something different.” He’s not surprised to see the Harris-Walz ticket focused on a forward-looking message. “It’s by design they’re saying, ‘We’re not going back.’ “

Neighbor-to-neighbor

Several speakers on the “Rural Americans for Harris” Zoom event warmly remembered time-tested values of mutual support that are still a source of strength for rural communities. Jennifer Garner recalled how her mother, a schoolteacher, was often not around when she came home from school.

“I would go right down the street to Marge,” she said, “and I would know that she would have a key for me. And Mrs. Moore would have a snack for me, and I knew I was taken care of in my community.”

Trae Crowder, a comedian from Celina, Tennessee, and co-author of The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Outta the Dark,” remembered what happened after the death of his father 10 years ago. “I had two babies, and I was living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “After the funeral is over, I go back to the office to check how am I going make these payments. And the guy goes, ‘Oh you don’t owe us anything. Everybody in town chipped in … so it’s covered.’ ”

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat who represents northern New Mexico in Congress, talked about the irrigation channels—acequias—that are vital to farmers in her district. The acequias “make sure that the snow that falls on the mountains in the winter can flow down to nourish our fields in the summer.”

Shared ownership of a vital resource, she explained, is a unique feature of this centuries-old system “The farmers each own a little share of the water,” she said, “and we protect and take care of those ditches together because without them we would not survive.”

“The acequias are older than America,” said Fernandez, “but there is something American about them, that shared belief and commitment to something that’s bigger than each of us.”

Tough losses, tough fights ahead

Several speakers acknowledged that running for office as a Democrat in rural communities—and in states with a significant rural population—isn’t easy.

Brandon Presley, who is the cousin of Elvis Presley, nearly pulled off an upset during a run for Mississippi governor in 2023, winning 47% of the vote. Mandela Barnes lost a U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin in 2022 by just 26,000 votes. Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, pointed out that Biden lost North Carolina by 74,000 votes—“42 votes for every precinct in every county in the state of North Carolina.”

Rural Democrats are also focused on the need to run candidates in as many races as possible. One goal is to erase GOP supermajorities in all-red state legislatures, which allows the party to write its most extreme policy planks into law. And in swing states, said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the pro-democracy activist group Indivisible, down ballot races can make a big difference.

“I know some of you are thinking, hey Ezra I’m in the heart of Trump country we can’t elect a dog catcher,” he said. “That might be true. You might not be able to elect a dog catcher. But you sure as hell can run a dog catcher; you sure as hell can get votes out for that dog catcher, and get votes out for the state rep, state senator, U.S. rep, city council person.”

“You can get votes out for those candidates. They might win, they might not win. But regardless they’re going to get votes out for themselves and the top of the ticket for Harris for Walz, for Democrats running statewide. We need those votes.”

“When I ran [for state legislator] in 2022, 40% of the seats in Missouri were uncontested,” says Jess Piper, a teacher with a large social media following, and currently chair of Blue Missouri. “Because of all the work we’ve been doing, 18% of the seats are going uncontested. So we are making progress.”

“I was running in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat in 32 years,” Piper said. “Because I was raising money, that Republican had to stay in his district. I forced him to talk about abortion bans and the fact that we don’t have shoulders on our roads and that 30 percent of the schools in Missouri are on a four-day week. I forced him to talk about that when he was wanting to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

“The road to democracy,” Piper said, “is going right through rural America.”

The post Can Tim Walz Help the Democrats Win Back Rural America? appeared first on Barn Raiser.

The cool morning spring breeze hit Saundra Traywick “like a punch to the face.”

Walking through her wooded 38-acre donkey farm in central Oklahoma, Traywick suddenly found it hard to breathe as the air smelled “toxic” and “like death.” 

Less than a mile away, a truck was spreading a chunky dark fertilizer on a hay farm, a familiar ritual in this rural community just beyond Oklahoma City’s northeast suburbs.

But this fertilizer was putting off a smell that Traywick had never encountered. She soon discovered the fertilizer was made from processed sewage.

Converting sewage to fertilizer saves cities money on landfill costs, is a cheaper nutrient-rich fertilizer for farmers, and has become a billion-dollar industry for a handful of companies. However, biosolid fertilizer has been shown to contain chemicals that can harm the environment and human health. 

“Essentially anything that goes down the drain ends up on these fields,” said Traywick, who, months after first learning about biosolid fertilizer, urged the nearby town of Luther to ban it, which city leaders did in 2020. 

Scientific studies are increasingly warning about the PFAS chemicals found biosolid fertilizers. PFAS — short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called “forever chemicals” — can be found in many water- and heat-resistant products, personal hygiene materials, medication and industrial waste.  

But while some states have recently restricted or banned biosolid fertilizer entirely after finding it contaminated farmland and groundwater, Oklahoma lawmakers and environmental officials attempted to take steps this year to protect cities and corporations from liability if new health problems are found. 

The EPA estimates that as much as 3.5 million dry metric tons of treated sewage waste is spread as fertilizer across the country yearly — enough to cover the entire state of Missouri. 

Oklahoma has one of the most extensive biosolid fertilizer programs in the nation, as more than 80% of the state’s wastewater sludge ends up on crop fields, according to Investigate Midwest’s analysis of state records. 

Synagro, a Goldman Sachs-owned company that spreads most of the biosolid fertilizer in Oklahoma and across the country, has lobbied against new regulations over “forever chemicals” in its fertilizer, even as it faces lawsuits from farmers claiming its product has devalued their land and created numerous health problems. “Biosolids are a nutrient-rich end-product of the wastewater solids treatment process that have been treated to ensure safe use in agricultural land application,” the company said in a statement. 

The issue has also taken center stage in an Oklahoma state House race, as a longtime lawmaker who uses biosolid fertilizer on his land risks losing to a challenger who wants to end the practice. 

“I’d say it's one of the main issues,” Traywick said about the upcoming state House election. 

While scientists have discovered PFAS chemicals already exist in the blood of nearly every living person and animal on the planet, recent studies have raised concerns about increased PFAS exposure through its presence in biosolid fertilizers, which impacts the air, water and food.  

• Air: UCLA researchers found that microplastics in biosolid fertilizer are highly suitable to wind, “thereby increasing … inhalation health risks,” such as lung tissue damage, according to a study published in January. 
• Water: Groundwater near biosolid fertilizer-applied fields often have elevated rates of PFAS, sometimes at higher rates than what is deemed suitable for human consumption, according to a 2024 study published by the American Chemical Society. 
• Food: In 2022, beef from a Michigan farm was contaminated with high levels of PFAS that officials said came from biosolid fertilizers. 

“The scientific community has put a lot more focus (recently) on PFAS and how dangerous they can be even at low levels,” said Jared Hayes, a policy analyst with the Environmental Working Group who specializes in “forever chemicals.” 

In response to growing health concerns, the Environmental Protection Agency recently announced it will require municipal water systems to remove nearly all PFAS substances. These regulations, some predict, could cost as much as $3 billion in new equipment nationwide. 

However, the new rules don’t change the current standards of PFAS exposure in fertilizer. 

“There are a lot of unknowns of what we are going to do with the biosolids,” Hayes said.  

Biosolid fertilizer rankled a town and a state House election

Driving down a rolling two-lane road in central Oklahoma, Jenni White lifted her right hand off the steering wheel of her silver Honda CRV to point to another field that uses biosolid fertilizer. 

“That field is one of the worst; I mean, I was hacking up a lung when it was spread, I could not catch my breath, it’s so strong,” said White, pointing through her bug-splattered windshield. 

As she passed the next field, White recalled that the farmer had recently stopped using biosolid fertilizer when his neighbors complained. “I think he just thought it wasn’t worth the hassle,” White said.

White was mayor of Luther in 2020 when Traywick, the area donkey farmer, approached the town with concerns over biosolid fertilizers. White was already aware of its use but believed Traywick’s activism warranted discussion among Luther’s five elected trustees. 

A ban in Luther wouldn’t impact many farmers, as the town is less than five square miles and most of the area farms are outside its boundaries. But the discussion drew a visit from two officials from Synagro. 

One of the officials, identified as Layne Baroldi by the Luther Register, gave a presentation on the benefits of biosolid fertilizer. 

Baroldi said California had some of the strictest environmental regulations in the country — you “can’t cough without getting cited,” so the fact that biosolid fertilizer is allowed there should be reassuring to folks in Oklahoma. “Putting it on the ground was (the) best practice,” Baroldi told the trustees. 

But the presentation wasn’t enough, as the trustees voted to enact the ban. 

(Investigate Midwest spoke to five Oklahoma farmers who use biosolid fertilizers but none would speak on the record due to local opposition. Most said their fertilizer costs would increase significantly if biosolid fertilizer were unavailable. “I got an extra hay cutting this year after using it,” one Oklahoma farmer said. )

While the Luther ban only impacted a few farmers, White, whose term as mayor ended in 2021, believes it was an important message from a community where agriculture remains a vital part of the local identity. 

“We’ve been called a bunch of crazy environmental activists, but I don’t know how it’s crazy to make sure your food and water aren’t contaminated for your kids,” said White, a Republican who drinks from a Donald Trump-themed thermos while driving. 

“A Democrat or a liberal is going to drink the same tainted water that a Republican or conservative is. Everybody is screwed, it’s not a selective screwing,” she added.

But biosolid fertilizer is rankling local Republican politics as it’s become a central issue in the race for House District 32, which is near Luther. 

Incumbent State Rep. Kevin Wallace appeared to be a lock for reelection. He has represented the heavily conservative seat for five two-year terms and has risen up the ranks of Republican politics, including as chair of the high-profile House budget committee. 

However, Wallace’s use of biosolid fertilizer on his land has drawn criticism from voters. During a June 4 candidate forum, Wallace was confronted by some constituents who asked why he wouldn’t come out against the fertilizer, what they called “humanure.” 

“The biosolids sludge is regulated by the Department of Environmental Quality, I have used it twice … it has been legal to use in this state for eight years now,” Wallace said at the forum.

Wallace acknowledged he had received complaints from his neighbors, but “property rights is what I’m for … (and) I’m not breaking the law,” he told the audience. 

Two weeks later, Wallace finished second in the Republican primary, advancing to an Aug. 27 runoff against challenger Jim Shaw, who opposes the use of biosolid fertilizer. 

Wallace declined an interview request but in an emailed statement said biosolid fertilizer was “heavily” regulated at the state and federal levels. 

"I have had the Department of Environmental Quality into the district in the past to answer questions at a forum and the state of Oklahoma has worked directly with top administrators at the EPA in Dallas on this issue to ensure environmental standards are met,” Wallace said in his statement. “The bottom line is, the only alternative to current disposal of biosolids is for more of it to be dumped in landfills, which will create more landfills in rural Oklahoma."

More than 44,000 metric tons of biosolids were applied on Oklahoma fields in 2023, according to records from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, which issues permits to apply biosolid fertilizer. Around 40% of all biosolid fertilizer in the state was processed by Oklahoma City waste. 

Oklahoma has limits for 10 pollutants in fertilizer, including mercury and arsenic. State laws also require fertilizer to have a solid consistency of greater than 50%, be tested for viruses and to raise the pH level, which is most often achieved through the use of lime. 

But Shaw, the District 32 challenger who finished first in the June Republican primary, said if he were elected it would send a message that “the majority of people out here are saying no to this practice.” 

“I would say the awareness of (biosolid fertilizer) has significantly increased in recent months, especially during the campaign,” Shaw said. “I’m all for property rights but my right to swing my fist stops where it hits your nose, … and once (the fertilizer) is applied it does reach beyond the four corners of your property.” 

Federal regulations spurred a biosolid industry controlled by a few companies

When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1974, cities and towns faced stricter rules on how to process sewage. New biosolid materials needed to be disposed of and a handful of companies launched in an effort to fill the need. 

Business picked up over the years as new rules were set, including a federal ban on dumping biosolid material in the ocean. 

Established in 1986 in Texas, Synagro contracted with hundreds of cities to handle its biosolid waste, including land application as fertilizer. In 2000, the company purchased BioGro, another large biosolid firm, becoming the largest biosolid handler in the nation. 

Synagro is a privately held company, so its valuation isn’t publicly available. However, in 2013 a European investment firm purchased the company for $480 million. 

Since then, Synagro has acquired several other companies, entered the Canadian market and nearly doubled the number of municipal and industrial wastewater facilities it contracts with. 

In 2020, Syangro was sold for an undisclosed price to West Street Infrastructure Partners III, an investment fund managed by Goldman Sachs.

Today, the company operates 24 facilities in the U.S. and Canada and handles 6.5 million tons of biosolid material annually, according to a 2023 company report. 

“Biosolids provide multiple benefits to overall soil quality and health, including improved moisture absorption ability, recycling of micro and macro nutrients, carbon avoidance, reduced nutrient leaching, and lower use of industrially produced chemical fertilizers," a company spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to Investigate Midwest. "U.S. EPA and state environmental agencies have approved and regulated biosolids for decades and multiple risk assessments and scientific studies have found that biosolids recycling presents little to no risk to human health and the environment.”

Synagro handles much of the biosolid material produced by Oklahoma City’s wastewater system, although it doesn’t contract directly with the city. 

Oklahoma City contracts with Inframark to manage its wastewater system. Inframark then sells the biosolid material to Synagro. 

“The City of Oklahoma City (does not) have a direct contract with Synagro,” said Jasmine Morris, a spokesperson for the city, when asked why Investigate Midwest was unable to get a Synagro contract through an open records request. “Under contract with (Oklahoma City), Inframark is responsible for the disposal of biosolids. Under said contract, what Inframark self-performs, or who they subcontract to, is at their discretion. Currently, they are using Synagro South LLC for this activity, but the terms of their contract with Synagro are not disclosed to (the Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust).”

Amid the increased focus on PFAS chemicals in waste and fertilizer, Synagro has also lobbied to ensure cities and companies are not held liable. 

In 2022, the company created a nonprofit business association called the Coalition of Recyclers of Residual Organics by Practitioners of Sustainability (CRROPS). Synagro’s CEO, Bob Preston, serves as chairman of the organization, which has spent $220,000 on federal lobbying since its founding, according to lobbying disclosure forms. 

Last year, as the EPA considered new rules on PFAS levels in drinking water, the coalition urged lawmakers to shield companies and cities from legal liability. 

“We write to urge that any legislation … include a specific provision to ensure that the organizations we represent are explicitly recognized as ‘passive receivers’ of PFAS and afford these essential public services a narrow exemption from liability under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA),” CRROPS wrote in an Aug. 24, 2023 letter. 

But as Synagro attempts to someday prevent lawsuits, legal challenges have already arrived. 

Earlier this year, five Texas farmers sued Synagro, claiming their properties were “poisoned by toxic chemicals” in the biosolid fertilizer the company spread on nearby farms. Some of the plaintiffs also claim they began suffering from respiratory problems and skin irritation when the biosolid fertilizer was spread. 

Many of the plaintiffs also claim their groundwater has elevated levels of PFAS, with one farmer stating that a serving of one fish from his pond would exceed the EPA's recommended PFAS exposure by 30,000 times.  

For the past five years, Synagro has contracted with the city of Fort Worth to manage its biosolids programs and has spread the processed waste in 12 north Texas counties. The lawsuit claims Synagro should have issued stronger warnings about its fertilizer product. 

“Synagro knew, or reasonably should have known, of the foreseeable risks and defects of its biosolids fertilizer,” the lawsuit states, which was filed in Maryland, where Synagro is based. “Synagro nonetheless failed to provide adequate warnings of the known and foreseeable risk or hazard related to the way Synagro (Granulite) was designed, including pollution of properties and water supplies with PFAS.” 

In a statement to Investigate Midwest, Synagro denied the allegations, calling them “unproven and novel.” 

“As a matter of fact, without any response from Synagro, the plaintiffs have already amended the complaint to drastically reduce the concentrations of PFAS alleged in the complaint when it was originally filed,” the company said in an emailed statement. “The biosolids applied by a farmer working with Synagro met all U.S. EPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) requirements. U.S. EPA continues to support land application of biosolids as a valuable practice that recycles nutrients to farmland and has not suggested that any changes in biosolids management is required.”

Some push for nationwide regulations 

As Synagro lobbies for federal liability protections, lawmakers in Oklahoma recently considered a similar proposal that would protect cities and companies from lawsuits if the biosolids they produce and convert into fertilizer were later found to be harmful. 

Oklahoma House Bill 2305 stated that a waste management or disposal company, along with a public wastewater treatment facility, “shall not be liable … for costs arising from a release to the environment of a PFAS substance” as long as state laws are followed. 

The bill received overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House and Senate but failed to receive final approval before the legislative session ended in May. 

During an April 4 Senate committee hearing, Sen. Dave Rader, a Tulsa Republican, presented the bill and said he wanted to ensure cities were protected from liability since they were not responsible for producing the chemicals found in biosolid fertilizers. 

But one lawmaker asked if the bill would still protect polluters. 

“Does this create an alibi for the person who pollutes a water source and says, ‘I followed the state procedure, so it's not my fault?’ ” asked Sen. Dusty Deevers, an Elgin Republican. 

“I suppose it could,” Rader answered. 

Scott Thompson, then the director of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, was also in the room supporting the bill.

“(Cities and towns) are receiving this PFAS in the waste stream … what we are concerned about is the future liability under the federal law as they get passed,” Thompson told lawmakers. “(The EPA) is going to very tiny numbers that we have to measure and essentially creating potential liability for everyone that has to receive this and manage it.” 

Asked about Thompson’s comments, Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality officials reiterated their support.

"DEQ would support some version of federal legislation that provides protection for certain passive receivers who provide critical, public health services,” said Erin Hatfield, the agency’s director of communications and education. “As for increased PFAS standards, DEQ would like to see additional research done to further determine health impacts related to PFAS and standards based on scientific findings."

Other states have said the health impacts are already apparent and biosolid fertilizer should be banned or severely restricted. 

In 2022, the Maine legislature banned the use of biosolid fertilizer and allocated $60 million to help contaminated farms, including many dairy farms that were forced to shut down. 

In Michigan, where cattle farms have been forced to shut down due to tainted beef, biosolid PFAS standards are stricter than in most states. The state also has an aggressive investigation program to try to identify the specific source of PFAS contaminants. 

However, some environmental watch groups have scoffed at a state-by-state approach, calling for nationwide regulations instead. 

Earlier this year, the Maryland-based environmental nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, sued the EPA over the lack of biosolid fertilizer standards. 

“EPA has deemed it acceptable for biosolids containing PFAS and other known toxic chemicals to be applied directly to soil as fertilizer, where these man-made contaminants then build up in the environment, exacerbating the PFAS contamination crisis,” Tim Whitehouse, PEER executive director, wrote in a Feb. 22, 2024 letter to the EPA. “This is not protective of human health or the environment.”

The EPA declined to comment on pending litigation. 

While the EPA has made progress on congressionally-mandated PFAS rules related to drinking water, it has yet to complete a risk assessment of PFAS in biosolid, according to tracking by the Environmental Working Group nonprofit. 

“We are really hoping to see them finish that up by the end of the year and to really get a good picture of just how much of our overall exposures to PFAS is the result of PFAS in biosolid potentially contaminating our food supply and our environment,” said Hayes, the policy analyst with EWG. “In the meantime, states have been leading the charge and taking action.” 

The post Fertilizer from human waste faces scrutiny but remains a profitable industry appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

The H-2B temporary visa has traditionally been used to fill labor shortages in seasonal industries, such landscaping, hospitality and food service. But the meatpacking industry has started to hire more and more workers through the program, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. 

The H-2B’s sister program, the H-2A visa, is reserved for seasonal agriculture work, such as picking fruits and vegetables. Some agricultural industries, such as meatpacking plants and dairy farms, are not eligible for the H-2A visa because the work is year-round.

In 2015, just six meatpacking plants were granted H-2B visas by the federal government. Last year, the number was 44 — a six-fold increase. 

Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, two of the largest meat processing companies in the U.S., hired workers through the H-2B program last year, according to the latest data available. Seaboard Foods, which owns one of the largest meatpacking plants in the country and is based in Oklahoma, has used the program for several years, the data shows.

The post GRAPHIC: Hiring foreign visa workers skyrockets at meatpacking plants appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

As Jess Bray pulled up to a 21-acre farm nestled in an eastern Oklahoma valley, she instantly got a warm feeling. “This is the place,” she thought. 

After attempting to buy two other properties before being outbid by cash buyers, Bray and her husband Jon began to wonder whether their dream of owning and operating their own farm would become a reality.

“We always wanted to farm, but we aren’t trust fund kids, we didn’t grow up in agriculture … we didn’t have a farm handed down to us, so it wasn’t something that was very accessible to us,” Bray said. “This was a dream come true … but it wasn’t without challenges.”

In 2022, Bray, then 39, purchased the valley property, which they now operate under the name Blue Mountain Farm, growing a variety of vegetables, and raising pigs and a dairy cow near the town of McCurtin.

While Bray eventually realized her dream, the rising cost of farmland has priced out many other would-be farmers and ranchers or forced others into early retirement. The parts of the country where farmland prices have seen the largest increase have also been where the number of agriculture producers has declined the most.

From 2017 to 2022, the average value per acre of all American farmland grew from $4,368 to $5,354, an increase of nearly 23%, according to USDA data on the market value of farmland and its buildings.

But in the 409 counties across the country that saw a producer decline of 15% or greater over the past five years, average farmland values increased by 31%, according to Investigate Midwest’s analysis of USDA reports, land value records and other property data.

In reviewing property records and speaking with more than a dozen officials who closely track farmland values, Investigate Midwest found there are multiple causes for the decline in producers in counties that saw the most significant increase in value:

• Population growth expanding into rural communities has increased prices and reduced farmland as 11 million acres of agricultural land were converted into residential properties from 2001 to 2016, according to the American Farmland Trust.
• The push towards wind and solar energy, often backed by government subsidies, has also raised land rents much higher than for traditional agricultural use. 
• Large investment firms, such as Farmland Partners, PGIM and Gladstone Land, are paying top dollar for land and reselling some property at amounts as much as five times higher than the regional average. 
• The move towards industrial farms has also meant more corporate land buyers who can pay cash and beat many local offers. 

“The biggest competition (for farmland) used to be from the person who wanted a hobby farm but maybe wasn’t farming full time,” said Vanessa Garcia Polanco, a policy campaign director with the National Young Farmers Coalition. “Today, the biggest threat we see is from corporations and hedge funds.”

The increase in competition for farmland has been especially detrimental for young and would-be farmers. According to a 2022 National Young Farmers Coalition survey,​​ 59% of farmers under 40 said finding affordable land was “very or extremely challenging.”

Farmland ownership has received increased attention from lawmakers in recent years, especially concerning foreign-owned companies. Lawmakers in dozens of states have pushed laws limiting foreign land ownership, including from countries like Iran and China, often claiming these buyers drive up costs that push out family farms. 

However, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently called that focus misguided and said the growth in American investment firms buying farmland is a more pressing concern. 

“Do you know roughly a third of all the farming operations that generate more than $500,000 in sales are owned by investment outfits? Are you concerned about Wall Street owning farmland?” Vilsack said in response to a question about foreign-owned land while speaking at the North American Agricultural Journalists conference in April.

But Paul Pittman, the executive chairman of the investment firm Farmland Partners, said companies like his were not to blame for rising prices and were keeping many farms in production. 

“That’s populist B.S. and nothing less,” Pittman told Investigate Midwest when asked about Vilsack’s comments. “And remember, for every farmer who is whining about being outbid, there’s a farm family that owned that farm for 100 years and deserves to get the highest price possible.”

Investment firms significantly increase farmland holdings

In the spring of 2023, the Farmland Partners investment firm spent $8.85 million in cash on 1,840 acres of farmland in Haskell County, Oklahoma. The land was a highly productive swath of soybean, corn and wheat fields with an irrigation system pulling water from the nearby Canadian River.

The Denver-based firm had grown in recent years to become the nation’s largest farmland investor, with a valuation of more than half a billion dollars and a portfolio of more than 180,000 acres across the country.

One of the firm’s land buys in Oklahoma was a 174-acre property for $3 million. At $17,232 an acre, the Oklahoma purchase was five times more than the median for comp sales in the area, based on data from the land value tracking site AcreValue. 

However, the firm had shown that its high purchase prices were likely to pay off. It had recently sold nearly 2,500 acres of farmland in central Nebraska and South Carolina for a combined $16.2 million, a transaction that netted Farmland Partners a 24% return on investment, the company announced.  

According to data from the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries, investment firms increased their farmland holdings by 231% from 2008 to 2023. While traditional real estate property is constantly expanding, many investors see the decrease in available farmland as a partial driver of its value. 

Most farmland investment firms lease the land back to producers who operate the entire farming business. In a recent SEC filing, Gladstone Land, which owns 111,836 acres of farmland across 15 states, said it rents most of its land to farmers on a “triple-net basis,” which means the tenant pays the related taxes, insurance costs, maintenance, and other operating costs in addition to rent.

However, Pittman, the chairman of Farmland Partners’ board of directors, said there are signs that more farmers are struggling to afford rents.

“There’s a little more trouble out there than there was 12 months ago ... and we’re seeing it in having an occasional farmer come to us and say, ‘Hey, can you re-rent this farm to someone else?’ ”Pittman said on a May 1 investor call, according to a transcript. “When we’ve had that occur, we’ve been able to (re-rent) the farms at the same price or in some cases, a little bit higher.”

Asked about Vilsack’s comments, Pittman said declining commodity prices are pinching some farmers. 

“Starting in about 2019, commodity prices started to go up pretty fast, but here we are in 2024, and commodity prices have pulled back,” Pittman told Investigate Midwest. “This is a low margin business … so when you see a little bit of a drop in commodity price, it can challenge (a farmer) financially.”

However, Pittman said his firm’s investments remain solid because, in the agriculture sector, “bankruptcies are minuscule.”  The 2022 farm bankruptcy rate was 0.84 per 10,000 farms, its lowest rate in nearly 20 years. 

While most farmland is rented to producers, there are times when an alternative use can fetch even more money. Wind farms can attract lucrative rents and often allow the land to remain agricultural. However, the growth in solar farms, which also attract high rental rates, usually means the land can no longer be used to grow crops or raise livestock because of the large solar panels near the ground. 

“In Illinois, for example, a farm that may rent for $400 to $500 an acre a year for agriculture, rents for $1,250 to $1,500 a year for solar, and the farmer cannot compete with that,” Pittman said. “To be honest, (when I’m wearing) my fiduciary obligation to my investor's hat, if somebody offers us $1,500 an acre, it's going to go to solar. But wearing my Paul the citizen hat, I'm not sure that's a great thing.”

Industrial farm growth led to a ‘hollowing out of the middle’

In most counties that lost producers, agriculture production actually increased as the remaining farms often grew larger or were converted to industrial operations. 

Wisconsin’s Douglas County, located in the state’s northwest corner, lost 31% of its producers from 2017 to 2022 but saw net cash farm incomes more than double and sales from agriculture products increase by 45% during that same period. 

Across the state, five counties saw a producer decline of at least 15% yet also saw agriculture production sales increase. 

“Many operators continued to exit, and this happened rapidly among Wisconsin dairy farms,” said Jeff Hadachek, an agriculture professor at the University of Wisconsin. “At the same time, the farms that remained were increasing in size.”

Hadachek said the increase in farm production means the local economy may still be growing even with a loss of producers. 

“I think economists would typically say that just looking at the number of farms is not the best way to consider economic health in a community,” Hadachek said. “Certainly, for the people who own land, the increase in value is a great thing … so there are two sides of the issue for sure.”

Like most types of farming, Wisconsin’s dairy industry has seen a move towards more industrial operations to improve efficiency, which can increase profits in a sector with tight margins for smaller dairy farmers. 

In 1997, the average Wisconsin dairy farm had 55.6 cows, while the 2022 average topped 203 per farm, according to research from the University of Wisconsin.

Some farmland investors see profit opportunities in the transition to larger farms and are predicting a continued shift toward industrial agriculture. 

“An aging farmer generation, fractional family ownership structure and technological advances requiring sizable capital investment will naturally transition farmland holdings from individuals to institutions,” stated a report from PGIM, the $10 billion property asset management company run by Prudential Financial that has increased its farmland holdings in recent years.  

Hadachek said the growth in larger operations has led to a decrease in medium-sized farms, what he calls a “hollowing out of the middle.”

“The growth in the larger end reflects consolidation and the economies of scale and size associated with large farms, while the growth in the smaller end reflects growth in specialty foods, farms targeting the ‘local foods’ market, and hobby farming,” Hadachek said. 

But Pittman, the executive chairman of the investment firm Farmland Partners, said data on the decline in the number of farms across the country can be deceiving. 

From 2017 to 2022, America lost 141,733 farms, but 80% of those lost farms had less than $2,500 in annual sales. 

“You and I know those aren't really farms, I don't know why they're called farms,” Pittman said. “If you're talking about supporting a family or two families on a farm, you are talking about at least a million dollars in annual sales, which would give you about $50,000 in distributable household income to send your kids to school and pay for food and all that.”

USDA data shows the nation lost 10,537 farms with annual sales of $100,000 to $499,999, but farms making more than $500,000 grew by more than 26,000. 

Some states, nonprofits work to protect farmland from development

Construction sounds have become a constant echo in McCurtin County, Oklahoma, where cabins and resorts are being built in the pastures and forests between the Ouachita Mountains and Red River. Tourism growth, especially visitors from the Dallas metro, which is within a two-hour drive, has increased local farmland prices much faster than the state average. 

From 2017 to 2022, McCurtin County lost nearly one out of every five producers while the average value per acre soared from $1,901 to $2,601 as investors, second-home buyers, and some private equity firms snatched up land to build vacation homes or sit on the land while its value grew.

“When someone’s waving that kind of money at grandpa’s farm, they let ’em have it,” said Brent Bolin, a poultry producer in McCurtin County, who is also a state agriculture commissioner.  

In a recent report titled “Farms Under Threat,” the American Farmland Trust found that between 2001 and 2016, more than 11 million acres of farmland was converted to urban and residential use, with Texas, California, Arizona, and Georgia topping the list. 

To stall the urbanization of farmland, the American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit that says it wants to expand the “conservation agriculture movement,” has facilitated the purchase of more than 78,000 acres to protect it from nonagricultural uses. 

Some states have taken similar measures, including Oregon, where counties must protect some farmland through specific zoning restrictions. 

Bolin said zoning restrictions might be worth considering, although he’s hesitant to suggest them. 

“It’s something that would be super controversial and I don't know where I stand on it,” Bolin said. “I know there are some states that help protect farmland, but that is more regulation and we don’t like that here in Oklahoma. But I don’t know what the answer is.” 

Even if farmland is protected from being converted into another use, young farmers still struggle to compete with cash buyers. While many of those cash-buyers, including investment firms, rent the land to farmers, critics say that creates a system that lacks stability for farmers and ranchers, especially those looking to start a business for the first time. 

“The contract could be a three-year lease or a five-year lease, but that’s not much long-term security for a farmer,” said Polanco with the National Young Farmers Coalition. 

Bray, the Oklahoma farmer, said owning land was crucial for her to have the kind of control she wanted over her business. It also allowed her to make more environmentally focused decisions about land use. 

But when Bray was looking to buy land, competing with cash buyers was even more difficult because her own financial options took a long time to fulfill. 

“Not only did we have to finance but we were kind of forced into a commercial funding route instead of the state program route because the government programs take too long,” Bray said. 

The National Young Farmers Coalition has advocated for the Farm Service Agency to be made a loan-making institution with pre-approval and pre-qualification processes to give farmers needing financing a better chance at competing for land. 

“This would allow farmers to show they are eligible, especially if the seller wants an offer right away and has a cash offer from a corporation,” Polanco said. 

Even when Bray was able to purchase her current property, complications arose from the land’s previous owner, a cash buyer who made a quick purchase. 

“Moving in, it took us months and months and months to get in our property because of how it was handled before,” Bray said. “The title had never been transferred, so we had to wait for that to be transferred to the prior owner before it could be transferred to us. And there was official paper that they had run out of stock on, somebody forgot to order the official state paper for the licenses and titles and all of that, so that was another waiting game.”

During the delays, Bray’s Realtor warned them they might have to move on to another property.  

“He said, ‘Honey, if you don't get this, don't feel bad, we'll keep looking,’ ” Bray recalled. “But I said, ‘No, we will wait,’ because … I had that feeling when we got here that this was the place. This was our dream, but you know, high interest rates, the prices of the properties and the margins as a farmer, those three things don’t go together, they just don’t.” 

The post As investors pay top-dollar for land, farmers are often priced out appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Modern Farmer.

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The people who feed America are going hungry appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

Thundering equipment, pulverized terrain littered with the dismembered and dying. D-Day? Mariupol? Game of Thrones? No, it’s a sunny day in the American West, and a pair of Bureau of Land Management bulldozers are ripping pinyon and juniper trees out of the ground. To do this, they’re dragging a 20,000-pound Navy anchor chain across the forested landscape.

The Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, is the powerful Interior Department agency that administers 245 million publicly owned acres, or one-tenth of the nation’s land, as well as 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights. It describes its mission as sustaining “the health, diversity and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”

In pursuit of this lofty goal, the BLM has obliterated pinyon-juniper forests since the 1950s, “chaining” millions of acres throughout the West. The agency’s fire program tells Barn Raiser that over just seven recent years—2017 through 2023—it removed more than 1.7 million acres’ worth of trees. In doing that, the agency spent just over $151 million in taxpayer money on chaining and on followup activities intended to encourage replacement plants. The BLM calls the latter “treatments,” a mild-sounding term that encompasses harrowing, plowing, mowing, fire, herbicides and more. Eventually, 38.5 million acres of pinyon-juniper forest will be on the chopping block, says the BLM. 

Next up are 380,000 acres of eastern Nevada’s ecologically rich pinyon-juniper forest in South Spring and Hamlin Valleys, near Great Basin National Park. To save the forest, the Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project have brought a federal lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management as a whole, two of its local Nevada offices and its parent agency, the Department of the Interior. Nevada’s United States District Court is expected to hear arguments in the suit this fall.

Western Shoshone elder and systems engineer Rick Spilsbury, who joined the litigation, called the BLM’s plan “ecocide” and “a scorched earth attack on … the natural world that has supported my people for tens of thousands of years.” The Western Watersheds Project describes the BLM plan as “heavy-handed,” with “woefully inadequate” analysis to back it up. The high cost is no surprise, says Scott Lake, attorney for the environmental nonprofits. “The government is hiring contractors who are running heavy equipment for hours a day and weeks at a time.”

The BLM calls the suit the result of a “policy disagreement” rather than a matter of law. The agency has justified the practice of chaining with reasons that have morphed over the years, claiming, for example, that the ancient indigenous pinyon-juniper forests are “encroaching” into grasslands, thereby posing a wildfire hazard as well as a risk to the habitats of native species.

Others say that the BLM’s justifications are based on bad science and incomplete analysis. A 2019 review of more than 200 scientific studies by wildlife biologist Allison Jones and colleagues found that “what we see today in many cases is simply [pinyon and juniper trees] recolonizing places where they were dominant but then chained.” The recolonization “is mistaken for encroachment,” wrote Jones et al. The scientists concluded with a warning: “The pace of activity on the ground may be outstripping our understanding of the long-term effects of these treatments and our ability to plan better restoration projects.”

Checking what boxes?

The BLM must consult with tribal nations when projects affect their interests. The agency says it respects “the ties that native and traditional communities have to the land” and the way “strong communication is fundamental to a constructive relationship.” According to the agency, “This means going beyond just checking the box to say we talked to Tribal Nations when we take actions that may affect Native American communities.”

As an example of that “strong communication,” the BLM’s Environmental Assessment for the chaining project describes the agency mailing letters describing it to 5 out of 21 Nevada tribes, along with one in Utah. The document then reveals the agency has had no back-and-forth communication with any of them.

This anemic form of consultation “has been happening for years,” says Western Shoshone elder and healer Reggie Sope from Duck Valley Indian Reservation, which straddles Nevada and Idaho. “That’s the way they put it. ‘We sent them letters, that was our consultation.’ ” His tribe was among the 16 in Nevada that were not consulted, according to the list in the BLM’s Environmental Assessment.

Nor was the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians, a four-Band consortium headquartered in Elko, Nevada. Putting a letter in the post is not consultation, says Julius Holley, a council member of both the Te-Moak Tribe and one of its constituents, the Battle Mountain Band. “In our opinion, consultation is a face-to-face meeting,” he says.

The Te-Moak Tribe gets some 40 letters a week from the BLM, Holley says. These may involve matters ranging from minor, such as a mining company’s discovery of an isolated flake (a chip knocked off a piece of stone while creating an arrowhead or other tool), to major, like chaining 380,000 acres. The council continually goes through the letters to determine the important ones, Holley says, then asks for tours and/or meetings concerning them. Citing the ongoing lawsuit, the BLM did not answer questions about how the contacted tribes were chosen and whether any actual interaction had taken place since the Environmental Assessment was written.

Ancient knowledge undercuts BLM claims

The BLM’s crusade against the pinyon-juniper forests recalls the decimation of the continent’s great buffalo herds and salmon runs, undertaken in the 1800s to cripple the tribes that relied on them. For millennia, the pinyon-juniper forests have been vital to tribal nations in Nevada and other Western states. They shelter myriad animal and plant species and are the source of pine nuts—a sweet, creamy, protein- and nutrient-rich staple that was once a mainstay of tribal diets and traditions.

When rabbitbrush in Nevada’s lower elevations turns yellow in the fall, tribal members know the nuts are ripe. It’s time to trek to the mountains and harvest them. While some use long poles to knock the pinecones off the trees, others engage in an age-old tribal fire-prevention practice: removing and chopping up fallen timber and brush that could act as tinder and feed a wildfire. 

The cut wood is put to use roasting the cones and making meals for the group. The roasted pine nuts are removed from the cones and eaten out of hand or stored for future use. Ground up, cooked pine nuts are used in preparations ranging from bread to porridge to soup. They can be formed into patties with berries and ground meat—usually venison or elk, says Sope: “Like a quick snack but all natural. Very delicious and nutritious.”

When Sope was a boy, he says, he learned from his elders that long ago the Creator guided his people to a place where they would find all the food and medicine plants they’d need. “So here we remained,” Sope says. “We survived for a long time. They had ceremonies and blessings to honor the Root Nation and ensure it would be plentiful for generations to come.”

The BLM creates a serious challenge to that abundance. After its bulldozers have demolished South Spring and Hamlin Valleys, the agency plans to “treat” whatever’s left. This involves choosing among fire, herbicides and other alternatives. The agency calls this process “adaptive management,” which seems to imply benign creativity. The BLM’s court documents also instruct Nevada’s U.S. District Court to be “highly deferential” to this type of decision-making.

Not so fast, says Lake, the environmental groups’ attorney. He notes that federal courts have repeatedly directed agencies to provide site-specific, landscape-level analysis for immediate and indirect effects of such actions before moving forward. Broad guesswork and ongoing improvisation are not enough, federal courts have held. The National Environmental Protection Act specifically requires this, so it’s not just common sense, but a matter of law, argues Lake.

The BLM’s continually changing assortment of reasons for razing the trees started in the 1950s with the need to create additional grazing land for cattle. That reason has become less acceptable though, according to Lake. “The idea that we should be deforesting [to provide] cattle forage is not really that popular these days, so the rationales have been shifting.” Creating livestock range hasn’t stopped; it’s just no longer widely acknowledged.

Citing the ongoing lawsuit, the BLM did not respond to questions about its past and present goals of creating grazing land. The agency does, however, still support grazing; it offers livestock grazing permits at less than $1.50 per animal per month on 155 million of its managed public acres.

For the birds

One new BLM reason for deforestation that sounds ecologically benevolent is creating habitat for the sage-grouse, an increasingly scarce bird—and in the process demolishing the habitats of many more animal and plant species. “You have to look at the whole picture before you draw up a plan,” chides Sope.

Further, the shrubs in which the sage-grouse likes to breed, nest, forage and over-winter may take decades to establish themselves in devastated terrain. During that time, the BLM has to fend off competing weeds with fire, mowing, herbicides and other destructive methods.

One wonders how any birds will cope. The BLM’s Environmental Assessment assures us that leveling a forest is a “negligible” issue for migratory birds. While the chaining is underway, they simply fly away, the document says; when the noise is over and the forest is gone, the birds will “likely return.”

“To what?” asks Sope.

Meanwhile, tree-dwelling bats are on their own. Under the law, the BLM claims, it need only “consider” effects on them. In preparing the BLM’s court document, someone looked up “consider” in the dictionary and discovered it means “reflect on.” The BLM, according to the document, will contemplate the fate of the bats as it uproots trees, sets fires and applies herbicide.

Fire prevention is another BLM goal. We can all understand that eliminating a forest means it can’t catch fire. However, the extensive surface disturbance the bulldozers create while razing the trees has long encouraged vast swaths of highly flammable, fiercely invasive cheatgrass to spread throughout the West. Overgrazing, motorized recreation and mining have contributed to the spread of the invasive grass, unintentionally imported from Europe in the 1800s as a contaminant of straw packing material and other plant items, according to the US Geological Survey.

As a result, fires that historically occurred centuries apart in the pinyon-juniper forests, cared for by attentive tribal citizens, are now far more frequent. The BLM decries this frequency but does not acknowledge its own culpability for it. Nor does the agency appear to be pursuing multifaceted, systemic and continuously monitored remedies. Simply laying waste to the environment here and there is not supported by science, federal law or tradition.

“The Root Nation is in jeopardy,” warns Sope. “How long are we going to suffer? How long is the Earth Mother going to suffer?”

The post On the Chopping Block appeared first on Barn Raiser.

Excess phosphorus and nitrogen from municipal wastewater, urban runoff and agriculture contribute to a growing problem in water quality across the country. The issue is particularly bad in the Midwest, where 1.2 billion pounds of excess nutrients run off of farm fields and into the Gulf of Mexico each year, according to models created by the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Runoff from Midwestern farms can affect the quality of local drinking water when it leaches into wells and groundwater that municipalities draw from. Nitrate fertilizer consumption poses serious health risks, including thyroid disease, colon cancer and even death in infants. 

Those same nutrients run downstream and contribute to the expansion of the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, a phenomenon that costs local economies billions of dollars in damage to fisheries and marine habitat every year. 

The U.S. Geological Survey released an interactive map in 2020 that shows a model of the most significant sources of nutrient runoff: fertilizer, manure and nitrogen fixing plants like soybeans, alfalfa and clover, which add nitrogen to the soil naturally. 

Models from the U.S. Geological Survey’s SPAtially Referenced Regression On Watershed Attributes shows an estimate of the average annual load of nitrogen and phosphorus from major sources delivered from Midwestern states to the Gulf of Mexico. 

An estimated quarter of all phosphorus runoff and 40% of all nitrogen runoff from farming practices in the Midwest comes from just three states — Illinois, Indiana and Iowa. Commodity crops that require fertilizer and concentrated animal feeding operations contribute to this. 

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The post GRAPHIC: Top commodity crop and CAFO states are responsible for the most nutrient pollution, USGS model shows  appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

In 2006, I thought I would never forgive my father for taking me out of school without letting my teacher—or me—know that I’d be leaving town for good, with my treasured purple pencil box still inside my second grade desk. On our car ride to Worthington, Minnesota that February, all I noticed was whiteness from the snow-covered fields and the feeling of unbearable sadness.

As a young child, I didn’t question our moves. They were a normal part of our life, with my father regularly picking up jobs in another community—part of the struggle still faced by many laborers today. This time he was going to work at the PM Beef plant in Windom, Minnesota, and we were going to station ourselves about 30 miles away near my mother’s sister’s family, who had moved to Worthington in the early 1990s. 

I don’t recall much about my life at that age, other than my parents towing me around as we found a new Mexican grocery store, a new house and a new school. I attended Prairie Elementary in Worthington, and I remember it being the biggest school building ever. The floors were slick and shiny—they made my shoes squeak with every step.

At the time we arrived there, the population of Worthington was under 11,000, with a somewhat diverse makeup. I quickly made friends with other classmates who were white and of color. The diversity in the community is associated with the meat-packing plant JBS (formerly Swift and Company), Worthington’s largest employer, which sits on the east side of town. Many of my friend’s parents (mostly Latino) worked at the local plant. Other immigrant parents worked in various agricultural businesses around the area, such as PM Windom Beef, which has been bought out by other companies in the last few years as large multinational corporations have consolidated the industry.

As a young girl, I recognized the welcoming and caring attitude of my classmates and teachers, not the lack of cultural appreciation in the classroom nor the conservative politics of neighbors. In third grade, I joined the Celebration Chorus where I enjoyed time after school singing with other students. We traveled to local businesses and sang to their employees during the holidays. I also joined a local Girl Scouts chapter, where I created crafts, visited local organizations and, most importantly, hung out with friends. The opportunities for things to do in the district in grade school were endless.

Later that same year, my parents managed to save enough money to buy a house in Worthington. We were the first non-white family on our block. A few streets down, you could find a house or two occupied by Asian or Latino families, but the neighborhood was predominantly white and elderly. With our new neighbors standing in their yards or sitting on their lawn chairs, we felt like we were being watched. I recall when our next-door neighbor came to introduce himself on the day we moved in.  He wore a cotton shirt and blue jeans and bore wispy gray hair, his nose was round and plumb, just like his belly.

“Hello,” he said. “My name is Bob. Welcome.”

My mother and father immediately placed our moving boxes on the ground and extended their hands to greet him. My parents, as Mexican as can be, whisper-yelled through their smiles, telling my brother and me to come say hello, which we did. That short greeting would be our introduction to an array of welcoming activities during our first few years on Galena Street. These included neighborhood picnics where my mother would bring the famous Mexican dish of frijoles charros.

In that first week, Bob and a few other neighbors held a get-together to “welcome” us to the neighborhood. My parents believed it was as much about their curiosity—“Who are these brown people and what do they do?”—as it was about being neighborly. As young as I was, I have a vivid memory of that moment. At Bob’s house, we walked into a nice, well-kept living space with wooden furniture and the cleanest white carpet imaginable. Bob’s wife served the adults tea in China teacups—the nicest I’d ever seen. They expressed interest in learning about my brother and me and what we did for fun. Much of the conversation was part introduction, part interrogation. I didn’t have to do much translation, as my parents’ broken English was good enough for the conversational tone. It was a Hallmark moment, to say the least, but one we would experience only a few times before most of our early neighbors moved to retirement homes or passed away.

A little over a decade later, Galena Street and the rest of the blocks in the area are heavily multi-generational, with houses owned by people of color and immigrants. Our closest neighbors are all Central Americans, from El Salvador and Guatemala. As in any community where things change rapidly, there are concerns and issues that heighten a sense of distrust and result in racism, bigotry, ignorance, xenophobia and stubbornness. Much of this is fueled by the anti-immigrant rhetoric promoted by right wing politicians and media—Donald Trump, for instance, saying that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—but it’s important to remember these issues also a result from a lack of neighborly gestures and community building. For example, people would rather call the cops on their neighbor for parking on the wrong side of the street rather than walking over to their house and respectfully letting them know about their incorrect parking, which they may have been completely clueless about.

It’s human nature to be territorial and judgmental. I know my family and other families were and may still be to this day. My mother, for example, obsesses over maintaining a clean and quiet neighborhood. Where once the only noise disruption was a lawnmower roaring on a warm day, nowadays you can hear Latin music blasting or the barking of the neighbor’s dogs, or the overflowing trash bin that begins to disrupt cleanliness. There’s also the groans over the amount of cars parked on a street that makes parking no longer easily accessible—things you would expect in an urban area but not so much in a small town.

The latest census reported more than 13,300 residents in Worthington. In my 2015 high school graduating class of around 180, students of color accounted for a small but visible percentage of the student body. Since then, the school district overall has grown substantially, resulting in nearly 70% students of color. The increase in the student population prompted the community to demand a school referendum—not once or twice but six times! It finally passed in 2019, but only after an ongoing battle of nearly seven years. This referendum has led to an expansion of space for students in overcrowded schools such as Prairie Elementary. This change took years of advocacy and fighting against a dismissive xenophobic sentiment of “Those schools are filled with immigrant kids.”

Another noteworthy change in Worthington is the multitude of restaurants and businesses that are immigrant owned. A variety of shops are operated by Guatemalans, Mexicans and Asians. Newcomers now have options of where to buy their traditional household food items. There is also an opportunity to expand one’s palate, with La Michoacana offering a tasty alternative to Dairy Queen. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, food trucks began making an appearance. Longtime residents who aren’t familiar with these establishments may take a bit of convincing to patronize them, and they may well not appreciate the irony that their situation is similar to that of an immigrant or person of color feeling uneasy about entering a certain restaurant whose customers are predominantly white. A welcoming aspect is crucial for neighbors to successfully interact with one another.

The progression of multilingual individuals and their families moving into Worthington has made an impact on the city’s resources, accomplishments and identity. In 2020, prompted by the pandemic, local residents came together to develop a plan to narrow the community gap between the city and its multicultural residents. The Cross Cultural Advisory Committee (CCAC) was created by a group of individuals seeking better communication between city officials and the larger community. Advocacy within the CCAC led to the first Community Relations and Communications position for the city. Other small groups and organizations have also formed to create and expand access to resources. Sports teams from Worthington High School are helping to shape Worthington’s identity, in particular the boys soccer team, which is composed of a majority of players from immigrant households.

In less than two decades, Worthington has become home to hundreds of first- and second-generation immigrants—Latino, Asian and African—who are building homes for their families and creating a wave of people of color no longer strongly tied to their immigration background. Worthington can feel like a culture shock for visitors from an urban community who could never fathom a small town growing in ways that mirror a diverse urban area, or from rural communities that are predominantly white. In that way, Worthington may be unique. A community is only as strong as a teacher who exemplifies what going above and beyond looks, like creating a box for communal pencils, empathizing with someone’s story or creating a space for trust. Since moving to Worthington as a nine-year-old, I have had enormous gratitude for my supportive teachers, my kind neighbors and my loving  parents—they’re most likely the reason I became a teacher in the place I grew up. While Worthington grows and learns in this polarizing political climate, it is fascinating to see what the people of our community will make Worthington to be for one another.

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This story is the first in a series of travel-based dispatches from rural America. Over the next few months, Oklahoma-based journalist Kristi Eaton will travel throughout rural America in search of hidden gems. From public art festivals that morph small downtown corridors into art masterpieces, to historic architecture restored into new community hubs, Eaton will get to know the people, events and organizations that are revitalizing rural and small town communities across the country, transforming their sense of place—and ours—in the process.

LAKE CITY, S.C. – Anna Burrows refers to the last week in April and the first week of May as Christmas.

For the last decade, Burrows has owned Seven Boutique, a clothing and accessories store along Main Street in rural Lake City, South Carolina. She also owns Shade Tree Outfitters, a men’s clothing store next door.

Every spring for the last 12 years, this community of 6,000 about 60 miles from Myrtle Beach doubles in population, drawing in visitors near and far to see art from across the South as part of ArtFields, a festival and competition that has transformed this historical agriculture community into an arts destination.

“It’s phenomenal for us as far as business goes,” says Burrows.

Though Burrows doesn’t have an exact dollar amount for impact, she says this year, like many previous years, has seen a substantial increase in business. At her boutique, she says the art she picked this year to host in her business venue is “the talk of the town.”

In 2024, there were more than 450 pieces of adult artworks and 300 junior pieces of art in 50 venues, many of them local businesses, says Roberta Burns, marketing manager for ArtFields.

“It’s really fully transformed the town,” Burns says. “And I would say when people say what’s the biggest change, it’s always the town. But I think there’s some things that have stayed the same. One is the prizes and the commitment to showcasing Southern art.”

Artists compete for more than $100,000 in prizes, including People’s Choice awards voted on by event attendees. There is a jury panel for the Grand Prize, Second Place, and Merit Awards. There are two People’s Choice prizes, one for 2D and 3D artworks, that are voted on by the public. (Check out this year’s winners.)

“I think what probably surprises people more than anything else, because this is a small rural town and an agricultural region which people don’t normally associate with cutting edge contemporary anything, much less art,” says Harry Lesesne, president and CEO of The Darla Moore Foundation, which founded and funds ArtFields from its $500 million endowment.

The foundation earmarked $670,000 to the Lake City Creative Alliance in 2022 to “support a culturally-rich environment in [the] South Carolina region.” Moore’s foundation also runs a Botanical Garden, where she currently lives.

“But this community has really taken to [it], and they’re welcoming. Welcoming to people of all kinds of shapes, sizes, looks,” says Lesesne.

Darla Moore was born in Lake City before becoming president and partner of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc., and, in 1997, she was the first woman to be profiled on the cover of Fortune magazine. By 2012, she had accumulated an estimated $2.3 billion fortune. As a philanthropist, she has donated to a variety of causes, including education, land conservation, medical research and art. The business school at her alma mater, the University of South Carolina, is named for her.

“The biggest spending element [for the foundation] is for the city, by far,” Lesesne says. “It’s about supporting and sustaining economic growth here …When you walk around town, you will see what the arts are doing for the economic sustainability of the town.”

Seventy percent of the town’s residents identify as Black. More than 22% of residents live in poverty as of 2023, according to figures from the U.S. Census.

Carla Angus, a founding team member of ArtFields, recalls in a podcast about the festival what Lake City was like before the festival started.

Like many rural areas, there were very few businesses, says Angus: “a lot of storefronts that were empty … not a lot of action, not a lot going on.” For Angus, Lake City’s transformation has been “mind-blowing.” “Downtown is now a place where people go to hang out, people go to eat, people go to do things. And I really do believe with the power of art and what happened through ArtFields made that difference in our downtown.”

From boutiques to restaurants and bars and photography studios and more, Lake City is filled with small businesses.

“It’s all a strategy created around developing economic sustainability,” Lesesne says. “[It’s] giving people a reason to come here, stay, spend money, live their lives, be prosperous and productive citizens.”

In the last few years, artists have started moving to Lake City, living here year-round and producing art for themselves and others.

Roger Halligan has been a professional sculptor since the 1970s. He and his wife, fellow artist Jan Chenoweth, moved to Lake City from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2019. The couple wanted to be closer to the family and were intrigued by the tiny community. They bought a building and turned it into studio space and gallery space.

“It’s fun to see the transition,” he says of the community. “And what’s happening and who moves in.”

Herman A. Keith is a muralist who was born in South Carolina. He along with others have created large-scale public works of art seen in downtown.

Keith says there are hundreds of small communities dotting the state that were once similar to Lake City.

“[They are] almost identical, depended on the same crops, historically … on the same type of economy,” he says. “Lake City had the courage to use art as an economic driver. So even though Lake City might not have towering skyscrapers, it might not have a thousand-foot waterfall, but it uses art to stimulate the economy.”

Burns, the marketing manager for ArtFields, says there is an effort to make Lake City a year-round art destination. With galleries, new studio space and public programming, Lake City looks to attract artists like Halligan and Keith as well as visitors to the area.

“People are coming to Lake City just for the art,” she says.

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