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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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.

The post Immigrants Find a Home in This Rural Minnesota Town appeared first on Barn Raiser.

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.

The post How a South Carolina Town Transformed into a Southeastern Arts Hub appeared first on Barn Raiser.

On Saturday, April 20, U.S. Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan attended a listening session on the pending $3.6 billion acquisition of an Iowa fertilizer plant by Koch Industries, as leaders from the Iowa Farmers Union, the National Farmers Union and State Innovation Exchange joined more than 100 farmers urging the FTC to block the sale.

The fertilizer plant, which opened in 2017 near Wever, Iowa, in the state’s southeast corner on the Mississippi River, received nearly $550 million in local, state and federal tax incentives to encourage its construction in the state and increase competition in the fertilizer market. Four companies, including Koch Industries, already control 75% of the U.S. nitrogen-based fertilizer market. Farmers are especially concerned about what the acquisition could mean for their fertilizer prices. In a 2023 U.S. Department of Agriculture public comment solicitation about fertilizer access, roughly nine in ten commenters described their concerns about high fertilizer prices and more than seven in ten expressed concerns about the power of fertilizer companies.

The proposed sale between Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, a Koch Industries company, and the Netherlands-based Orascom Constructions Industries (OCI), which owns the Iowa fertilizer plant, would likely only accelerate consolidation in the industry. The Iowa plant produces 3.5 million metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer annually, about 18% of the current national output. Moreover, the proposed sale comes at a time when production in the U.S. nitrogen fertilizer industry is expected to increase by over 50% in the coming years, driven largely by cheap domestic natural gas produced by hydraulic fracturing and the war in Ukraine, which has triggered natural gas sanctions on Russia, the world’s leading exporter of nitrogen fertilizer.

Despite temperatures hovering just below freezing, more than 100 farmers from Missouri, Minnesota and Iowa showed up Saturday morning in Nevada, Iowa, to voice their concerns. National Farmers Union President Rob Larew, Iowa Farmers Union President Aaron Lehman and Democratic Iowa state Reps. J.D. Scholten, Megan Srinivas and Eleanor Levin were seated at a panel near the front of the room.

The event began with opening remarks by the panelists, including Scholten, Srinivas and Levin, who had been in Des Moines until almost 4:30 a.m. wrapping up the 2024 legislative session. The three representatives were among the 30 Iowa House Democrats who sent letters earlier this year to the FTC, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, asking them to investigate the sale.

In his opening remarks, NFU President Rob Larew spoke to the concentration of the marketplace, calling capitalism without competition “exploitation.”

“We call it fairness for farmers but it’s also about fairness for consumers and really making sure that our communities can be lifted up in the way that they should be,” he said. “We’re not talking about asking for special spaces for farmers or for the markets. We’re looking for intervention in the market. What we know to be true is that when markets become too concentrated, we know that there is action manipulation, price fixing, et cetera. And that’s what this is all about.”

Khan began her remarks discussing her initial foray into antitrust work as a business journalist, where she investigated how competition in the market was working—or not working—for chicken farmers.

Since Khan’s appointment as chair of the FTC in 2021, she has helped redefine antitrust enforcement under the Biden administration. Last year, the agency succeeded in blocking several healthcare mergers and filed a high-profile lawsuit against Amazon, alleging the company engaged in monopolistic practices to unlawfully stifle competition. In March, the FTC sued to block Kroger’s $24.6 billion acquisition of its rival grocer Albertsons, the largest-ever proposed merger in the grocery market.

Public comment began with IFU President Aaron Lehman reading a letter from a union member who wrote-in anonymously due to fear of retaliation. The farmer wrote that although from 2021-2023 there was an increase in commodity prices, fertilizer prices rose, too. The letter writer requested an investigation into “possible market manipulation” of essential fertilizer inputs.

Farmers at the event echoed these concerns.

LaVon Griffieon is a fourth-generation family farmer who owns about 1,100 acres of land. With a stack of papers in hand, some bills and her own research, she began naming the big players who she “has to deal with”: Cargill, Bayer, John Deere, Syngenta, DuPont.

“Every time crop prices go up, their prices go up. We recently bought new tractor tires for our tractor and it cost us $20,000, which is what my parents paid for 80 acres in 1964.” She became emotional as she described the precarious future for her sons, the fifth-generation of family farmers. “We have the land to get our sons started farming, but we really can’t provide them with much else.”

Farmer John Gilbert asked Khan to look at the bigger picture of what’s happening in Iowa, where two commodity crops, corn and soybeans, dominate the landscape. Iowa is the nation’s largest corn producer and the second-largest soybean grower.

“I’m not going to be unkind when I say that Iowa agriculture is addicted to nitrogen. Right now, Iowa has the fastest growing rates of cancer in the country. Right now, over 700 of Iowa’s waterways are on the impaired list,” Gilbert said. “We’re having such influence from the commodity cartels and the agribusiness cabals that everybody thinks that’s all we can do, is raise corn and beans.”

Derek England, a row crop and small dairy farmer who travelled from Edina, Missouri, sourced fertilizer from the current Iowa plant that might be acquired by Koch Industries. When the plant opened, England said it had a “moderating effect on the price [of fertilizer].”

“Koch has always been the highest price [anhydrous ammonia] in our sourcing area. So this was rather worrisome when this came up, because we’re thinking, if Koch is pricing their anhydrous [highly] here, what is that plant going to be charging once Koch owns it?”

Harold Beach, a farmer who also came up from Missouri, told Khan that he would like her to be “fearless and courageous, and be a Teddy Roosevelt.” He likened her to a “referee in the ball game,” who has the ability to “call balls and strikes.”

Khan jumped in to clarify how the process will work. When an acquisition is proposed, if the FTC investigates, a company cannot go through with the sale until the investigation is concluded. She added that if the FTC determines the sale violates antitrust laws, they will file a lawsuit, but ultimately the court will be the “decision-maker.”

While Khan did not take a distinct stance on the pending sale, she noted that “if there ends up being a lawsuit,” farmers should consider “weighing in directly with the courts” as well.

In an announcement on December 18, 2023, OCI Executive Chairman Nassef Sawiris commented that the sale marked “an evolutionary step in our journey to create value for shareholders, and to enhance our focus on efforts in lower carbon initiatives.” That same day, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions president Mark Luetters announced that the purchase was “an important step forward for KAES,” as they further invest in fertilizer. They have not released any statements regarding the potential FTC investigation.

David Weaver farms 1,500 acres of corn and soybeans just northwest of Des Moines. He spoke to the strength of democracy and capitalism in the United States, but is worried about its fragility, especially as it relates to smaller farmers being able to speak up.

“When you’re a little guy you don’t want to talk,” he said. “I’m a farmer of a large enough operation. And I love this. I can tell someone to go pound sand whenever I want.”

The final commenter, farmer Tony Thompson from Elkhart, Iowa, became emotional when he began discussing his earliest memories of being in the tractor or the combine with his dad, 40 years earlier. He urged Khan to “connect the dots” between industry consolidation and farmers’ struggle to make ends meet.

Khan wrapped up the event by thanking farmers for speaking out, especially given potential retaliation. In an interview with Barn Raiser, Lehman explained that potential retaliation could look like suppliers asking certain farmers to pay higher prices than others if they do not agree with their stance. Additionally, fertilizer suppliers tend to live in the same, tight-knit communities as farmers, and being outspoken on issues can be socially isolating.

“To be honest,” Lehman said, “we know there are some big players in the ag industry who have said you won’t be offered a contract at all next time.”

However, Saturday’s event proved that farmers have allies throughout the Midwest on this issue, and may even find an ally in the FTC.

“It has been such a priority for me at the FTC to ensure that our decisions are informed not just by models and economist’s assumptions about what’s going to happen, but actually by real people’s stories,” Khan said. “I’m just really looking forward to our continued engagement.”

The post Farmers Tell FTC Chair to Block Koch Industries’ $3.6 Billion Acquisition of Iowa Fertilizer Plant appeared first on Barn Raiser.

This is the sixth installment of Barn Raiser’s 2024 election coverage series “Charting a Path of Rural Progress,” which features interviews with rural policy experts and organizers who came together in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2023 to forge a rural policy platform on which candidates can run—and to which voters can hold their elected leaders accountable. The platform that grew out of that Omaha meeting, A Roadmap for Rural Progress: 2023 Rural Policy Action Report, released last October, details 27 legislative priorities for rural and small town America, based on legislation that has already been introduced in Congress.

Erik Hatlestad, 33, works on rural energy issues with the Minnesota nonprofit CURE (Clean Up the River Environment) as their Energy Democracy Program Director. Founded in 1992, CURE describes itself as a rural-focused environmental group “rooted in the movement for rural social justice.” The group’s 12 employees are scattered in small towns across the state.

Hatlestad is currently on a six-month stint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) as a Clean Energy Benefits Advisor, where he leads the Empowering Rural America (New ERA) program, a historic investment in rural electrification that is based, in part, on Hatlestad’s 2019 report, “Rural Electrification 2.0: The Transition to a Clean Energy Economy,” which outlines the role of rural electric cooperatives in the transition to clean energy in rural America.

Hatlestad, grew up with two brothers on a small family farm, growing corn and soybeans, about 10 miles from New London, Minnesota (population 1,252), in Kandiyohi County, where he now lives.

How did you get into rural political activism?

I grew up shortly after the farm crisis of the 1970s and 80s, which shaped the hollowing out of rural communities that we’re still seeing today. We saw the end of several of our local farm cooperatives in New London and western Minnesota, because all of the members had been driven out of business.

Fighting for rural communities to regain control over their own future—a future that has been taken from them by exploitative markets and large agribusiness—is  personally important to me. And I like to continue that historic legacy of the agrarian movement from yesteryear.

I’m very, very committed to rural democracy and building democratic solutions for small towns. I’m involved with a number of community projects in New London I’ve helped run the community theater and cocktail bar, and just helped opened a food cooperative, which will be the first grocery store in our town for the last 15 years. I serve on a lot of different boards and am very involved with Farmers Union and was until recently on the board of the city council.

How does the Rural Policy Action Report address the challenges rural America faces?

The biggest problem is that rural America has faced underinvestment and disinvestment for so long.

In previous decades, we had strong rural social movements that fought for these big investments, like the original Rural Electrification Act and the New Deal, and all of these incredible programs that helped make rural America what it is—or what people like to think they remember it as. Those social movements and organizations were crushed during the 1980s farm crisis and as a part of deindustrialization, such as with NAFTA and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and the right-wing attack on organized labor. As a result, rural social movements haven’t had the political strength to put forward the alternative solutions that were historically offered to rural people to win new investments in their communities.

What the Rural Democracy Initiative—the group that sponsored the Omaha summit out of which came the Rural Policy Action Report—has done is bring momentum back to rural social movements by offering an alternative to the disinvestment and the race to the bottom and what has been the essential hollowing out of rural communities.

The Rural Policy Action Summit was held in Omaha, Nebraska, which is where the Populist Party held its first convention back in 1892. Is that ancient history?

For all of us who are involved in creating a progressive future for rural America, there isn’t a day that goes by where we don’t think about these historic social movements and what they were able to accomplish in the same communities we live in today.

For those of us in rural Minnesota and the Dakotas, we love to think about the Nonpartisan League and the Farmer-Labor Party and how they transformed the states by gaining political power—creating state grain elevators, and in North Dakota, creating the country’s only state-owned bank. And the incredible progress that was made by farmer labor governors in Minnesota.

There’s a common thread among all of them, starting back with National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry beginning in 1867 and flowing into movements that would become the Populist Party [People’s Party] and the Progressive Party. We look to them as inspiration for what we’re doing today.

The co-operative movement was really born in Minnesota. The congressman (Andrew Volstead) who co-wrote the Capper Volstead Act, which legalized co-ops in 1922, was from Granite Falls, Minnesota. Some people call it the Magna Carta of cooperatives in the U.S. The first electric co-op in the country was the Stony Run Light and Power Company, which was just south of Granite Falls, near CURE’s offices. It’s a history that is barely outside of living memory, but it’s certainly something that we think about on a daily basis.

How would a transition to clean energy affect rural communities and the rural electrical cooperatives of which 42 million Americans are members of?

A few years ago, I was one of the authors of a white paper called Rural Electrification 2.0, where we took a look at the historic and systemic barriers holding up the clean energy transition in electric cooperatives and we made some of the policy recommendations in that report.

Since then, we have been working to build support for an investment in rural electrification to clear the way for the clean energy transition, and part of that work has been through the Rural Policy Summit in Omaha and the resulting Rural Policy Action Report.

Many organizations, including National Farmers Union, Sierra Club and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association themselves have all come around to the concepts that we put forth in Rural Electrification 2.0. Reinvestment in rural electric co-ops was one of the key programs that the Biden administration listed in their rural investments portfolio when they took office. Our programs made it through every single edition of Build Back Better and were eventually passed in the Inflation Reduction Act and the implementation process has begun over the past year. Those programs are now known as Empowering Rural America, or New ERA, and the Powering Affordable Clean Energy Program, or PACE.

How accessible is the program? I heard that the application process can be a daunting for individual rural electric cooperatives.

There is an urgent need to get the program money out the door before potential cuts could be made to the program by Congress. The U.S. hasn’t done a major investment in rural electrification like this since the 1930s. So co-op staff and board members and the communities themselves aren’t accustomed to thinking as big as they’ve been given the opportunity to now. It has been problematic for rural utilities and rural communities to pursue federal grants at the same level as communities that are better resourced.

Having spent some time in small town government on city council myself, I understand how staff are already overworked and underpaid. It’s tough to ask people in similar positions, whether it’s an electric co-op or a small town team, to take on a robust federal grant making process.

So there are some challenges. But the response that co-ops gave to these programs is overwhelming. The programs have received over 140 applications from the 40 states, and there are about 900 rural electric co-ops, and they are only active in 46 states. But a number of these applications represent coalitions of co-ops or generation transmission co-ops applying on behalf of their distribution members. So we can credibly say that half of all co-ops in the country showed interest in this program.

You dated the start of the rural decline back to the farm crisis of the 1970s and 80s. Why do you date it back to then? Some people say it begins back with Earl Butz in the early 1970s when he was secretary of agriculture under Nixon and told farmers to “get big or get out.”

I would generally agree that it started with Butz and agribusiness companies and the fertilizer industry essentially concluding that the best way to protect their own profitability was to make sure that farms got bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s a historic arc similar to the attack on organized labor that happened over the last half of the 20th century, which you could summarize that as being a coordinated attack on the New Deal coalition by business interests and their political allies.

It started with Butz and the encouragement of bigger and bigger farms and culminated in the 1970s and 80s with the farm crisis, and dealt one of the finishing blows to the agricultural system of family farming, which had been a solid political block organized around the co-operative principles of the cooperative movement. You see similar kind of tropes play out with the deindustrialization in the Rust Belt, the consolidation of bigger businesses and the promotion of free trade.

Did you did your county vote for Donald Trump?

Oh, yes.

How do you think about bridging political divides within your county and rural America in general?

You don’t bridge some of those divides, you provide an alternative. For too long, people who would not call themselves Republicans have not had the ability to articulate any kind of alternative. Democrats have spent too long trying to say, “We’re just the same, we’re just not so scary.” That is part of the problem we face here: no one has provided an alternative.

People in rural communities feel—and I would certainly count a lot of Trump supporters in this as well—totally ignored. If I’m accustomed to, as a rural community, being ignored and being disinvested from, and I don’t have the kind of political institutions that used to exist, well, I’m just going to do the thing that makes the people who I know are making my life worse as mad as possible: I’m going to vote for the most insane person. I’m not going to be heard anyway, so why should I seriously participate in the process?

We need to provide an alternative that we can articulate that resonates with people. Like the Ohio referendum on abortion on November 7, for instance. Strong progress was made in a lot of rural communities in Ohio, thanks in part to organizers who were putting an alternative out there and actively talking to people.

It’s about helping rural people feel comfortable expressing the views that they have, because so many people in these places feel isolated. There’s certainly a social aspect to that, too, but it’s also a product of decades of disinvestment and disenfranchisement. Attempts to rebuild those historic political institutions around progressive policy ideals are predicated on presenting such alternatives.

Why do you think the Democratic Party has for so many years failed in that?

A lot of people struggle with that question, and I do as well. There hasn’t been much political leadership in the party coming from rural parts of the country. In part, the party has been disconnected from these communities because the people who would participate in these movements have left rural areas.  And part of it is the acquiescence of some Democratic Party leaders to mirror their opposition and buy into the ideas of so-called free trade, which has accelerated the decline and disinvestment in rural communities.

A summary answer would be: the Democratic Party’s loss of soul, the loss of its identity as an institution.

The post Electrifying Democracy in Rural America appeared first on Barn Raiser.

Thurka Sangaramoorthy initially wanted to be a medical doctor. Her family, including her parents, her sister and her mother’s eight siblings and their children, were the only Sri Lankan immigrants in their community in Rochester, New York. Growing up, she watched her parents face discrimination, particularly in healthcare, and often translated for them in institutional settings. Her journey into anthropology began during her time at Barnard College, when she signed up for a course called “Perceptions of the Alien,” which explored how immigrants are made to feel othered, or excluded, by society, both in the United States and around the world. “I thought it was about extraterrestrial life,” Sangaramoorthy says, laughing. “[But] it was essentially a class about my life.”

After earning her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, Sangaramoorthy completed postdoctoral research at the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As a professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Maryland, she recalls noticing how much of the department’s research on immigration was focused on urban environments like Baltimore and Washington, D.C., even though more than a quarter of Maryland’s residents, and a majority of its jurisdictions, are rural. As a result, she started doing fieldwork in 2013 in the Eastern Shore, a largely rural and conservative area east of Chesapeake Bay, which relies on immigrant labor, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean, for its main industries: agriculture, poultry and seafood processing. 

That fieldwork became the basis of her 2023 book Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (University of North Carolina Press), in which Sangaramoorthy examines the impact of global migration on underinvested rural healthcare systems in the U.S., and how the “exclusionary logics” of immigration policy have combined with corporatized models of care to worsen disparities in health outcomes and care delivery. By exploring the shared conditions of suffering among those who navigate these healthcare “landscapes,” Sangaramoorthy reveals the ways that immigrants and rural residents have developed alternate forms of solidarity and inclusion, and how healthcare policy might be reshaped in response. (Read an excerpt from the book here.)

Since 2022, Sangaramoorthy, now a professor of anthropology at American University, has been coordinating the response to the refugee crisis from Sudan and South Sudan with the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Barn Raiser spoke to Sangaramoorthy about the making of Landscapes of Care, the dynamics between citizen and immigrant residents on the Eastern Shore and how healthcare providers and immigrants adapt to the lack of rural health infrastructure in the region. 

In the preface to Landscapes of Care, you mention that you initially set out to learn about immigration to the Eastern Shore in Maryland, but that after speaking with people in the area, you started to focus on the connections between rural healthcare systems and immigrants. What sorts of things did you learn in your fieldwork early on that helped you see those connections?

I didn’t make the connection, I want to make that clear. It was being made for me. 

I knew that there were things that I didn’t understand, things that I needed to really pay attention to. And I think what I was seeing on the ground, for instance, in terms of rural health, was really the manifestation of something that occurred decades ago, especially in terms of market-driven changes in the 1990s. This was going on, and it’s still going on in other kinds of global spaces where I work, in terms of managed care principles, emphasis on corporate and business models, that really have structured health care in this country. But their effects, how this affected rural spaces, were very different because there are fewer possibilities for cutting costs and increasing profits in rural spaces, because these are also spaces in which there is a lot of economic decline. 

The consolidation of healthcare through a model of corporate efficiency has had a much more drastic and negative effect in rural spaces. We had a little taste of it during the Covid-19 pandemic when there was so much discussion about rural hospitals closing. And I think many people were shocked, but this had been going on for a long time. There have been drastic reductions in healthcare institutions like hospitals and clinics. There’s lowered Medicare reimbursements. There are fewer physicians—in the 10 years that I’ve worked in Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I think I’ve interacted with literally only two physicians. Many of the people that I worked with were nurses and nurse practitioners or other types of providers.’

The ACA [Affordable Care Act], or what most people call Obamacare, which was passed in 2010, was designed to provide a lot of relief. But many people that I worked with, felt like it didn’t do very much for them. It increased the number of people that can have health insurance, but it didn’t do much in terms of providing the kind of spaces where people can access care. It didn’t get at the root of some of these issues.  

What I realized, and what people were trying to tell me, is that the kinds of vulnerabilities people have in rural spaces were very similar to the kinds of challenges that immigrants have as well. And it’s only compounded for immigrants because they have other types of needs and other kinds of vulnerabilities that [citizen] residents don’t have. There are a lot of people who are working in jobs that are really dangerous, and for low pay. They don’t have  many available clinics or hospitals. They don’t have a steady stream of healthcare professionals in their area. They have very limited access to care, and if they do, they have to go during workdays, and many people simply cannot afford the kind of costs that come even in  safety net programs to get treatment or to even be seen. 

Rural [citizens] in the Eastern Shore would say to me, “We understand what [immigrants] are going through, because we face it ourselves.” So it’s this kind of shared condition around vulnerability and security that really brings people together outside of these very formalized healthcare settings, in which very little care is actually there. 

Something that stuck out to me was the fact that there are forms of solidarity between citizens and immigrants that I think gets lost in national conversations about immigration and rural places.

It’s so complicated. There’s this shared sense of insecurity that is constant. And I think that’s what really kind of brings people together. I’m not saying there’s not racism or xenophobia. I’m not saying that people are on the same sort of political platform, but there’s care happening outside of what one might call healthcare. And that’s what I really wanted people to understand. I think this is what people were trying to tell me, is that this is how we’ve always existed. We’ve always had to know how to care for each other. We know how to get by. And if you’re going to understand immigration, you need to understand that. And I think sort of that was the message that I just didn’t understand, because I didn’t understand the context of what it’s like to live in “flyover country.”

In the book you talk about how, in the face of the abandonment of rural areas by businesses and state institutions, immigrants are seen as the solution, but they’re also blamed for the decline. How does that dynamic play out specifically in the Eastern Shore? 

I think this is so important because I think so much of our discussions around immigration are either about integration or feeling pushed out. I think it’s so much more complicated than that. There’s a huge tension, because immigrants are essentially keeping some of these industries alive where many people don’t care to work because the work is so difficult and pays so little. But these tend to be the only kinds of jobs that are available in rural areas. And so immigrants are there, doing this kind of work, keeping those kinds of rural economies going. 

These are spaces that are experiencing population decline in a real way. Many of their children want to leave or have left. So they appreciate people who can stay, and then there are more people around and more resources. Several people said to me, “I really appreciate the diversity. It was never like this when I was growing up. I’m so glad that my children have different kinds of friends, and they’re learning so much about a global world and the different kinds of people that are there.” But rural spaces are not necessarily experiencing a rebirth, so to speak. 

Oftentimes there is so much stress around the decline of these communities. Immigrants become an easy target to blame for deep-rooted causes that stem from the structural abandonment by state institutions and the federal government, taking away much of the social safety net. And so immigrants become the targets, or proxies for these issues. 

There’s also racial tension. Maryland was a slave holding state. You still have a lot of generations of African-Americans that have moved there, that have lived there for a very long time, that are from the area, who have been underpaid or unpaid for their labor. Now there’s competition that pits different groups against each other. So there’s also a dynamic where immigrants are seen as people who will undercut African Americans for lower paying jobs. So it’s really complicated. 

What industries on the Eastern Shore rely on immigrant labor? And what are the different demographics that make up that labor? 

Like many rural regions, when you think about immigrant labor, most people often think about farm work. There’s definitely that. Cotton and tobacco were the major economies historically in this region. Now it’s mainly fruits and vegetables. There’s a lot of tomatoes and other kinds of vegetables and fruits that are grown on the Eastern Shore. 

The demographics are really varied here: Latin America, Mexico mainly. There’s also this long tradition of Haitian and other current-day Black immigrants [primarily from the Carribbean and other countries]. There used to be African-American migrant labor forces that traveled from Florida up through the East Coast. Haitians and other Black immigrants have largely replaced that labor force.  

Poultry is huge. There’s quite a bit of poultry processing on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and particularly in Delaware. It used to be a heavily African American labor force, but now it’s much more of a mix of people from Mexico and Latin America. But it’s predominantly Haitians that are working in poultry. 

Seafood processing, particularly crabbing, is unique to the Eastern Shore because of its location on the Chesapeake Bay. This is a labor force that was almost entirely poor African American women, who lived in this area. Now, it is almost entirely Mexican women on H-2B visas. 

On a national scale, often what gets focused on, in terms of immigration, comes down to one type of immigrant, namely undocumented immigrants. It’s interesting how so many other types of immigration interact with rural spaces, and how the dynamics of it are way more complicated. 

It’s important to me to highlight what is happening in rural spaces, because the growth [of immigration] in rural areas is really drastic. We tend to think of immigrants as somewhat placeless, in a sense. One thing that I really want to highlight is that immigrants have always had so much influence over geography and placemaking. They’re not placeless people. They actually have an impact on the very places in which they are living, even if they’re mobile. 

I think this comes out of my own sense of being a brown immigrant, but also from my entry into immigration research, which was really through Black immigrants. And that is so different. And I think in some ways, researchers and academics haven’t done much better than policymakers by rendering immigrants into one particular kind of experience.  We’re also to blame. So much of the conversation is about legality and whether you’re legally supposed to be here or not, which is only one way of understanding it. 

It really flattens our understanding of how different things are on the ground and how many variations there are. People’s experiences are not just about legality. For Black immigrants, legality is important. But being racialized  so profoundly shapes how they experience their life in the U.S. And it is something that I think we forget because of this archetype of an immigrant as undocumented and Mexican. And as a result, our policies are about making that the very thing the state responds to. I don’t agree with that. We have to understand that there are different dynamics at play, that legality is not the only way to understand the experience of immigrating to this country. 

Near the end of the book, you talk about how both medical providers and immigrants adopt an “insurgent politics of care” to adapt to the lack of available healthcare infrastructure. Could you unpack that term a bit? What are the ways that a “politics of care” manifests itself? 

What I’ve been trying to explain is the informal way that rural healthcare works. For instance, on the Eastern Shore, it’s literally a few people that are holding up any sort of semblance of what we call a safety net. It’s not even really a net. It’s just people who are doing this work and do it in various ways. 

There’s this unbearable but very common way that healthcare works, which is a transactional relationship. You go in, you have insurance, you pay—it’s monetary, it’s corporatized, in that sense. There’s this rendering of what your risks are, what the insurance will pay for, etc. 

But in rural spaces, care often cannot get doled out this way. Otherwise, no one would get care, or very few people would get care unless they had a serious emergency. 

This is why the book is called Landscapes of Care because it’s really a varied sort of space, haphazard and much of it informal. 

For instance, bartering. I’ll use that as a prime example. Bartering happens all the time in these spaces. I had a provider who, when people couldn’t pay, they would come with some of their harvest, they were too proud not to pay. They were not only farmers, but also immigrants who were farmworkers, who were paying with watermelon or other kinds of produce for their care, as a way of thanking the provider. The same provider, this was like in different cycles, they would have crab because it was a fisherman or watermen who couldn’t really pay either the co-pay or the cost of treatment. So like, these are the ways that people manage. 

And I think in some ways it’s pushing back against how corporatized our healthcare system has become. It doesn’t work for a vast majority of people. And I think this shows us how you can care for people outside of these formalized environments, because that is essentially how people are caring for each other all over this country. 

But this is how people are getting by. Because there’s no one else to take care of them, right? There isn’t. And so this is how people are taking care of themselves. And to me, that’s really powerful. 

Read an excerpt of the book here.

The post Practicing an ‘Insurgent Politics of Care’ in Rural America appeared first on Barn Raiser.

Around 20% of U.S. agriculture products are exported to other countries, making the nation’s seaports a critical part of the crop and meat industries.

Soybeans and grain are the most significant agricultural exports at more than 58 million tons combined, according to the USDA’s “U.S. Agricultural Port Profiles” report from 2023.

Meat, mainly pork, accounts for 3.6 million tons and has been an increasing export over the past few decades.

The New Orleans Port Region, which includes multiple ports along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, funnels 35% of all U.S. agricultural exports, more crops and meat than any other port.

The Northwest accounts for more than 20% of exports, but that’s a combination of four ports near Seattle and Portland, including the Port of Kamala in Washington state, which is the second largest port for agricultural exports.

Much of the nation’s agricultural exports head to Asia, with China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan accounting for the top four country destinations. Growing pork exports to Asian markets has also increased traffic through ports along the West Coast.

The post GRAPHIC: Ports in New Orleans and the Northwest account for most agricultural export traffic appeared first on Investigate Midwest.