Plank 9 – Promote Sustainable Farming, Fishing and Ranching

We spoke with Kenya Crumel, Black Land and Power Director at National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), a member-based organization fighting for Black food sovereignty, self-determining food economies, and land. NBFJA is also one of the founding members of HEAL Food Alliance!

Kenya spoke to us about how she finds inspiration in the work that NBFJA members are doing to advance and grow Black food sovereignty in their communities.

Watch a clip of our interview with Kenya 

Kenya: On a day-to-day basis, our members inspire me with the work that they’re doing together. I was just at the BUGS Conference, and the folks in Detroit, for example, are just so incredibly organized, purchasing a farm from the Municipal Land Bank and raising funds so that folks who are currently leasing land are able to own their land and don’t constantly have to worry about being literally uprooted.

And at Sankofa Community Orchard down in Richmond, Virginia, Happily Natural Day stewards five acres where aspiring farmers can learn from other more experienced farmers, apply to be a part of the Central VA Agrarian Commons incubator program, and then move on after a few years to have their own land to implement the practices that they learned.

What led to the creation of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance?

Kenya: Dara Cooper, Beatriz Beckford, and Baba Malik Yakini came together and recognized the extractive, exploitative, deeply anti-Black food system that we all live in that values profit over human life and that has disappeared Black foodways. Black people lack access to and control over production, distribution, and consumption of foods that are healthy and grown in ecological, sustainable ways. The National Black Food and Justice Alliance is working to build collective power by reframing narratives and identifying opportunities for coordinated action and collaboration and cooperation. 

We have about 60 member organizations. Our members are farmers and leaders of food co-ops – those are the two big categories. We have a couple of family-based farms that have had land for a hundred years or more, but primarily we’re working with collectives. And we have some individuals who are academics or attorneys and want to provide some knowledge, wisdom, and resources to our work.

Over the course of the 20th century, the number of Black farmers decreased by 98 percent between 1920 and 1997. Through massive land theft, white farmers and developers usurped at least $326 billion worth of land and assets from Black farmers. In this context, can you tell us more about the land justice work that you’re doing?

Kenya: We’re working toward purchasing land (or accepting donated land!) that can be removed from the speculative market. Ideally we’ll transfer the title to a community land trust, whether we have to develop one or if there’s an existing land trust that we partner with. Black-led community land trusts or other groups of folks can work together to steward the land, share the work, share the profit, and decide how the land will be best utilized to support Black food systems and eradicate food apartheid.

And the land will not be for sale after we gain title to it. Nobody could come in and purchase it. It’s not about individuals owning the land, but it’s about land that’ll be in trust so that it will remain in Black hands. 

Hear from Kenya, Dara Cooper, and Mama Savi Horne on the history of Black land loss in NBFJA’s Practical Guide to Black Food Movement Terms…

The Resource Commons is another way NBFJA has been working to secure land for Black farmers and keep existing Black farmers on their land. Could you tell us about how the Resource Commons came about and some of the successes that it’s had?

Kenya: The Resource Commons is an initiative born after years of conversations with our members, which I have helped shift from ideation into implementation. Recognizing the trauma that traditional banking and the USDA have caused and continue to cause amongst Black farmers, NBFJA members decided to create a non-extractive loan fund with a simplified application process. We’re able to do this because these are not transactions. This is not a transactional relationship. These are relationships with people that we know. 

After doing a good deal of research, we focus on funding for land purchase (whether it’s urban or rural), investments in farm equipment, and investments in infrastructure and building out regional food systems. These are all things that our members stated that they needed. 

We just piloted the first round of funding earlier in 2023 and are really happy that we could provide a little over $400,000 in this pilot round. We’re looking to increase that year over year. Right now it is exclusively for our members, but it will ultimately open up across the country for other Black farmers. 

We talked about the Resource Commons being non-extractive. Our relationship with the land also needs to be non-extractive. So we encourage and support members of the alliance engaging in practices that do no harm to the earth, like no tilling or capturing carbon. But in addition to that, there’s a lot of healing just amongst our people. There’s working well with the land, but we also have to work well with each other. We have a lot of examples of beautiful relationships. We’re really focused on holistic well-being at all aspects – financially, our practices with the land, and then the practices with one another.

You’ve previously mentioned that NBFJA aims to ultimately recover up to 15 million acres of land for Black farmers. Could you tell us about the impact that that would have in terms of creating thriving and resilient Black farming communities?

Kenya: Our vision is that by acquiring the land, training farmers and providing them the resources to steward that land – and also defending land – we can create our own food systems. That’s the larger goal. 

My colleague Dr. Jasmine Jackson works on the self-determined food economy side, our food co-ops and such. I’m on the other end of that spectrum with the land, building the ramp to get to the foodways and the cooperatives. We want to be able to grow the food – and even before that, secure seeds and lands to grow the food – so that we can package it, distribute it, put it into retail markets so that it’s affordable for Black people all over the country, and do it in a way that is hopefully regionally based so that we don’t need to fly food all over the country or the world and aren’t contributing to those issues from a climate justice perspective. 

We’re also developing a program right now to battle land loss due to heirs’ property – and other folks are doing this too, like the Federation for Southern Cooperatives and Land Loss Prevention Project. It’s still a rampant issue, so we just want to lend our support as best as we can. It doesn’t make sense for us to go out and purchase land or accept land donations and put that in a trust while folks are struggling to keep land that they’ve had in their families or in their organizations for some time. And we know there’s a variety of reasons that land comes under threat, including heirs’ property and back taxes, things that could be easily resolved but folks just don’t have the resources.

Ultimately, we want to ensure that food apartheid is eradicated and that folks are less dependent on larger corporate systems and can sustain their farming operations.

How does restoring and preserving Black-owned land advance climate justice goals?

Kenya: If we are less reliant (or not reliant at all) on large corporations in our food systems, if we’re able to protect our land from GMO seeds, and if we’re working collectively to steward land and distribute food regionally, then we can lessen the impact of some major causes that are exacerbating climate change. We don’t need planes flying our food across the country if we are working locally and supporting one another. If we’re working collectively and stewarding the land and bartering and exchanging, we have what we need. So we don’t need to call on corporate America to get food where we need it, to educate us, to get us the supplies, if we can just organize regionally to supply the food, supply our farmers with what they need, and then create that food chain. 

And there’s a lot of education that has to happen. A lot of people just have never seen broccoli growing out of the ground. They don’t know that they can grow their own string beans or peppers. You just need a pot. You don’t have to have a yard. You could do this on your windowsill with the soil and just save your seeds from the pepper that you just cut up and cooked. A lot of people just think, “Oh, I can’t do that.” But you can. We all can. 

Are there particular policies that you are working for at the moment? 

Kenya: We are working on the Farm Bill, to ensure that it’s easier for Black farmers to access funds. A lot of folks are so frustrated with the USDA that they don’t want to have anything to do with it. But we need to simplify grant applications and funding processes. And loan forgiveness has been talked about but not enacted, and non-Black folks are fighting back against it. That’s such a huge obstacle, just getting past the debt. If debt forgiveness could be accomplished, I think that would be really significant for our folks who would no longer have to worry about that burden hanging over their heads.

How can people support your work or take collective action? 

Kenya: If folks know people who have land that’s just sitting idle or are interested in providing zero interest capital for the Resource Commons fund – or even flat out donations – that would be wonderful. There’s a donate button on our website at blackfoodjustice.org. And if you want to have a conversation about land donation, reach out to me directly at kenya [at] blackfoodjustice [dot] org.

The post Recovering Black land for food and climate justice appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

Plank 9 – Promote Sustainable Farming, Fishing and Ranching

We spoke with Roberto Nutlouis, founder and Executive Director of HEAL member Nihikeya, which builds a regenerative ecological footprint through restorative farming practices and Indigenous Diné knowledge systems. Roberto is Diné (Navajo) and is of the Todichinii (Bitter Water) clan, born for To’ Tsoni (Big Water) clan. 

He shared his experience drawing on Diné knowledge to develop agroecological farming systems and build community.

Watch a clip of our interview with Roberto

Roberto: I’m not trying to make capitalism work. Of course it’s not going to work. It continues to do what it does, what it’s supposed to do, what it was built to do. 

My work isn’t trying to solve the world’s problems. Everybody has a responsibility to solve their world. Creator put me here in the community among Diné, so the work I do is more specific to my community and the knowledge that we have. The solutions we come up with may not necessarily solve the world’s problems, but this is what allowed our people to survive and thrive in ever-changing landscapes throughout eons. 

For me, it’s about building what works for us, especially as Indigenous people, as Diné, coming from a community that’s still rooted in these lifeways and time-tested ancestral wisdom. We’re very fortunate and blessed to have narratives of our evolution as Diné people on this land. Our ancestors have gone through social and ecological calamities since time immemorial, and we still have those in our narratives. 

My success and the work that I’ve done is tapping back into that knowledge and looking at our own ways of relating to the life forces that we coexist with and that enable us to live on these landscapes.

And is there a particular teaching or historical moment among the Diné that you draw inspiration from in the work you do?

Roberto: The late Dr. Herbert Benally identified a model called Hózhóogo liná, based on the relationship between the earth and the cosmos and how it manifests itself on a daily 24-hour cycle of dawn, blue twilight, yellow twilight, and darkness. Dawn represents the cultural teachings and spiritual values of our people. Blue twilight represents self-sufficiency, because our physical body is the instrument we are gifted to sustain ourselves. Yellow twilight embodies kinship and our important roles in the wellbeing of our community. And darkness reminds us to have reverence for our ecology, our sacred homeland, that is also our home — not just the physical home that we come to, but the overall larger place we call Diné Bikéyah. 

Using these four pillars of Diné knowledge in our work, we try to get a sense of how this connects to climate change, social justice, and food sovereignty. I work with a team of people on community engagement around land stewardship, and we incorporate our cultural knowledge and traditional practices to facilitate dialogue with our communities. This is appreciated by our elders, because now they understand and can give feedback, instead of us just coming in all scientific and economic. 

Read more about the four pillars of knowledge, as laid out by Dr. Herbert Benally…

You were previously with Black Mesa Water Coalition. How did you get from that work to Nihikeya?

Roberto: I helped co-found Black Mesa Water Coalition back in 2001. It was a student organization around environmental justice work, because of the use of our sole source of drinking water in the Navajo aquifer for mining purposes and transportation.

Right before the pandemic, the organization succeeded in its main goal – to put an end to the mining and the use of the groundwater. The board decided to decommission the organization, since it had done what it was created to do. We had already started restorative economy work under the model of just transition, and that work continued. But when the pandemic happened, everything halted. After the pandemic, we reorganized and launched Nihikeya to continue that work.

Nihikeya is a Diné word, which means our ecological footprint, where we call home. We chose the word Nihikeya because we want to rebuild a regenerative, ecological footprint on our landscapes so that future generations can call it home, and we want to rebuild a lot of our food systems that have been destroyed over time.

We have the capacity, our people have done it. The Indigenous people of the Western hemisphere have been managing ecologies on continental scales and made them very abundant. Now is the time to use our ancestral wisdom to rebuild systems that are resilient to these incoming changes that we’re already experiencing.

With Nihikeya, you’ve been working to establish an agroecological community farm that incorporates rainwater harvesting and edible landscapes. Can you tell us how the community farm project came into being?

Roberto: I was always fascinated with farming, because both sides of my family farmed. When I went to college, my main focus was on traditional ecological knowledge and traditional dryland farming. 

I also did research around the different farming methods on the Navajo Nation, as our ecology is very varied, from low-lying river valleys all the way to high alpine mountain country. I looked at different farming strategies of Diné people in the different ecologies. And that’s where I came across alluvial farming. This is a very common farming practice and technique, not only by the Diné people, but also by other pueblos in the region. They set up their farmland strategically around the alluvial fan where the annual flood and all of the organic debris get to water and re-fertilize these fields. I wanted to replicate that system.

Sliding Rock Farm has become a community space to organize and host workshops.  We call it Sliding Rock Farm, because there’s a rock outcrop right next to the farm that we call Tse Adahnidilwoo’í, sliding rock. Kids have played there for generations, sliding down the rock (you can see the grooves still in the rock). This area was farmed by my grandmother’s father, so it goes a couple of generations back.

We do a lot of traditional food building, edible landscaping, and native plant identification, trying to look at the traditional Diné food systems and educate the community and bring in knowledge holders.

And it has inspired people to do their own thing in their own areas and their own landscapes. So it’s achieving what it was intended to do, to inspire our communities to take action and to be self-sufficient and self-directed.

Workshop organized by Nihikeya

You’ve spoken before about combining ancestral knowledge with contemporary innovations to address the ways that climate change and legacies of extractivism have modified the landscape. Could you tell us about a time when you’ve encountered a need for both of these forms of knowledge to coexist?

Roberto: Our farm is a really good example. We developed a rainwater catchment that comes down from the surrounding landscapes. The rainwater catchment restores the watershed and slows the floodwater as it comes into our fields. 

As we rehabilitated certain areas, we incorporated different types of water catchment systems. We learned these techniques from folks in a community called Big Mountain that have been working on these conservation practices since the ’80s. Their community resisted the Peabody Coal Mine when it first started. And they resisted relocation during the so-called Navajo-Hopi land dispute. They really pushed for the importance of self-determination and food sovereignty, even before it was a thing. We brought some of those young people over to our area and they showed us different techniques of how you put the rocks together and use some wires and fencing or whatever you find around to wrap what’s called a rock apron. We also cement the rocks together to make a rock retaining wall. 

Last year we experienced a 50 or 100 year flood. Our system withstood it pretty well, but the main dirt roads got washed out. Climate change and extreme weather impact our homeland, and the infrastructures we build now have to be able to withstand some of these extreme effects. 

We’re ready to be able to export some of these techniques to other communities that want some assistance. And we’re always open to other techniques people are using or developing.

Read more about how US policies created and exacerbated the Navajo-Hopi land dispute… 

And how do you employ agroecology on your farm?

Roberto: I like the term agroecology because the work isn’t just the farm itself; it’s tied into the larger ecology. In a lot of peasant farms in the Third World majority, they have systems that are built in sync with local ecological processes, and all of the seeds they grow are designed to fit into that ecology. 

In the social movement space around agroecology, they uplift farmers and land users who have a wealth of knowledge but don’t necessarily have diplomas or scholarly status. A lot of our work is around uplifting local knowledge that’s often overlooked. Especially in this country, it’s been demonized. Part of our work is to heal ourselves and believe in ourselves again. 

Our communities have been put into this impoverished state intentionally. Poverty is not who we are. It’s not part of our culture. But this system has put us and keeps us in poverty. We were forced to forfeit billions –  if not trillions – of dollars that could have been invested in social development for our community, so that these towns and cities could have cheap electricity and cheap energy. That’s how we still find ourselves in poverty, even though they’ve been mining our lands. That’s what capitalism is. But it’s our responsibility to build a new system, and that’s our work.

And it’s through agroecology that we are going to find a solution to create landscapes in these changing ecologies and make the landscape lush and thriving again. We have the ability. If you go to our cornfield, you see that we’re reversing the impact of climate change. We’ve captured moisture and put it back into the soil. The land is so lush. Imagine doing that through the whole watershed. We could reverse the aridification that’s happening.

We have the capacity, our people have done it. The Indigenous people of the Western hemisphere have been managing ecologies on continental scales and made them very abundant. Now is the time to use our ancestral wisdom to rebuild systems that are resilient to these incoming changes that we’re already experiencing.

In your view, why are land access and Land Back important for climate justice?

Roberto: In our community and our region, we’ve been impacted by how the United States government asserted control over our homelands. We were deemed incompetent in the early years of this country, and that made its way into policy. All of those policies still have a strong say over what can and cannot happen on these landscapes. 

Right now, you have to have a permit from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to produce agricultural products. In our region, all the agricultural permits were invalidated because of the so-called Navajo-Hopi land dispute in the ‘70s. To this day, nobody has permits in our region. I don’t have a permit, but I got permission from my clan mothers. Our activities are probably deemed illegal under federal laws. And that’s what continues to hinder a lot of our people from accessing resources and  entering into working with the land. 

So part of our Land Back, at least in our own way, is beginning to bring the clan mothers back into this conversation, because we’re a matriarchal society. Land Back is really important for us to use our own knowledge on the landscape. Those of us that still have the knowledge and still practice cultural lifeways have the responsibility to do what we need to do. So we’re not trying to push BIA to recognize or give us the approval – we’re going to go and do it. 

The government has fragmented land status across the Navajo Nation, so it makes it very difficult to do food system restoration at the Navajo Nation-wide level because of the different land statuses. We also live in three different states – Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico – that each have their own level of hatred against us. I’ve learned that our traditional food system does not even qualify as a farm under USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) guidelines, which are created by the state. Those were intentionally created so that corporate and industrial farmland could get all of the benefits down south in Arizona. 

Land Back really means giving us the ability to heal the land that we currently live on. We’re going to assert our right to use our land and our knowledge and do what we feel fulfills our obligation to take care of the land. It’s both decolonizing work and re-indigenizing work simultaneously.

And it is expensive. It’s expensive to have livestock. Even though we may be losing money to maintain it, there are deeper values behind our agricultural practices, beyond monetary gain. It’s about our community, it’s about ourselves, it’s about our own healing. It’s about the healing of land and our connection to the life forces.

Additional readings and resources:

Theory and Practice: The Case of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute

Black Mesa Water Coalition Green Economy Project, Piñon AZ 

Millions lack access to running water. Is the solution hiding in plain sight? (features a quote from Roberto and brief description of Nihikeya’s work) 

An Edible Landscape: Hungry for Food Sovereignty (feature on Roberto)

Diné Roberto Nutlouis — Water, Corn and a Just Transition for Sacred Beings

It’s time to center climate justice and real climate solutions in the Farm Bill! – HEAL Food Alliance (featuring Roberto and Nihikeya)

The post Drawing on Diné knowledge for Sustainable Food Systems appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

Plank 9 – Promote Sustainable Farming, Fishing and Ranching

We spoke with Mai Nguyen, a farmer and co-founder of HEAL member Minnow, which works to secure land tenure for farmers of color in California.

Trained as a geographer, Mai began their career studying soil and the atmosphere as a climate scientist. After working in labs and on climate models, they grew tired of documenting how we’re destroying the planet and made a shift to actively working on climate mitigation through farming, advocacy, and organizing California’s first worker cooperative farms. They shared with us their experiences farming with hope amid the climate crisis, and the success they’ve had nourishing their community while building ecological food systems.

Watch a clip of our interview with Mai

Mai Nguyen: As a farmer, I’ve experienced floods as well as successive seasons of wildfires, trying to harvest in thick, toxic smoke, trying to get my grains to the grain cleaner in the smoke, only to have a giant fire start by the grain cleaners and have my crops rot in the warehouse as they deal with closures because of epic, unprecedented fires.

What gives me hope is that I know that it is a long game. I’ve seen how my work has come to fruition on the farm. Over the past 10 years, I’ve been trialing different heirloom varieties of wheat, rye, and barley, these rare seeds that aren’t available through our corporate-dominated and propertied seed system, and adapting them to California’s climate. Rather than pumping from our already depleted water sources, I rely only on rainfall. I build soil nutrients through rotations with sheep for grazing and  intercropping with legumes to build the nutrients on site, rather than importing synthetic fertilizers, or even organic fertilizers that can seep into our waterways and create toxic imbalances for our riparian systems.

These varieties are six feet tall, compared to commodity grain, which is only about a foot tall. That means they capture six times more carbon than commodity grain. That grain stock is all carbon from the atmosphere being captured. Additionally, they send down deeper roots into the soil, such that we can hold more water in the soil, while capturing more carbon and building more soil organic matter.

When we experienced these periods of extreme drought in 2021, I was one of the few grain farmers in the entire western United States who had a crop. I had the same yields and the same quality, while other producers who were using conventional systems had to totally cut down their crops.

I am really proud to be able to provide food during our multiple overlapping crises, both of climate change and of the pandemic, when there were shortages and lack of distribution of flour into our grocery stores. I was able to get my flour out to communities via my flour share and the small-scale mills and businesses that I work with. It’s examples like that that help me feel optimistic in this time of climate doom. 

Read more about Mai’s farming work… 

Photo courtesy of Minnow

What are some of the unique challenges in growing and processing these heirloom wheat varieties, while also competing in a cereals market dominated by large commodity corporations?

Mai Nguyen: One challenge of growing grain for our foodshed is the lack of a robust regional supply chain. After I harvest my grain, I need it to be cleaned. When I started farming, there were five seed cleaners in the state that could take grain. In the past 10 years, we’ve been reduced down to just one. That is because of the corporate consolidation of seeds and not allowing farmers to save seed. For the one cleaner, it takes six hours round trip to get there and get the product back. And there are so many people relying on that place, that they have a backlog. Even when I received stuff back, I’ve had to get things cleaned twice, because they’re not built for grain cleaning. 

We have two mills functioning in the state that can service coastal California, and only one of them produces whole grain. And there’s only one mill in the whole state that will produce whole grain flour, and it’s in Los Angeles. 

Even just to get the grain to customers, or to bakeries that might have their own small mill for their own in-house production, it’s so challenging to get a thousand pounds or 5,000 pounds of grain somewhere, because corporate consolidation has destroyed all the smaller-scale distribution mechanisms. If you’re small, just trying to get those volumes somewhere efficiently and economically is really challenging.

At this point, I’m trying to create my own vertically integrated system on the farm. What I really need in order to do that is land. I have been leasing for the entire time that I’ve been farming, but at this stage I need to have secure land tenure that enables me to continue trialing the 70 varieties of seed that I have. I also need the space to have a facility that’s rodent-proof and weatherproof, to clean the grain, store the grain, and mill the grain, and to modify those facilities to be appropriate for those operations.

It’s clear to me what I need, and for me to get there seems like a great gulf that we are trying to address through Minnow, People’s Land Fund, and with our partners. 

You’re a co-founder of Minnow. Can you share how that came about? 

Mai Nguyen: Minnow started as a land justice organization that I co-founded with Neil Thapar. I came from a journey of farming and having my own land insecurity issues, as well as developing immigrant-owned agricultural cooperatives. I found that the successful farms in those cooperatives were ones that owned land. The ones that faced the greatest business challenges were the ones with land insecurity, though they were greatly helped by being in a cooperative. They had all this experience farming, but without land and land security, it was challenging for them to use their agricultural practices for the benefit of the land or to make long-term decisions. It also affected them and their families and their family planning, because of not knowing if they would be able to stay in that land, or even in that community.

We have so many of the answers to our societal issues, climate change, and social inequality, but we, especially farmers of color, need to be a part of our political infrastructure in ways that give us place and power to influence these issues. 

Building that power is really key for us to transform our conditions. Through interacting with farmers and doing co-op development work, what I was hearing again and again is that people needed land.

As the child of refugees, displacement and resettlement and making a home in a new place have been long standing questions for me. In these forums that I was in, representing farmers and democratic communities, I was constantly hearing people say, “Yes, we know that people need land, and it’s so challenging, and I don’t know how we’re going to do racial equity and also address Indigenous sovereignty,” and people would just step away. I was like, “We keep saying that we see the same problem, and we can no longer ignore it.” That’s how Minnow came to be. We wanted to address this challenge head on and no longer be afraid of it, and to try to forge a way forward where we all have place, we all have food, and we all belong.

Photo courtesy of Minnow

What policies have you and your partners and Minnow been working on around land tenure, supporting farmers of color, and promoting regenerative farming?

Mai Nguyen: First and foremost is this recognition that this land has been stolen, and that the original inhabitants are still here. We are working on land rematriation. One of our projects, Kai Poma, was focused on engaging with the state of California, in particular with Caltrans, the transportation authority for California, to return land that they were managing back to Indigenous tribes.

Minnow played a part in that, thanks to the support of First Nations Development Institute and the California Tribal Fund who invited us in to provide legal support to write legislation. That is the first time the state of California is returning land to tribes. That sets a historical precedent for our state to continue this process of land return. 

In terms of work with farmers of color, the California Farmer Justice Collaborative passed the Farmer Equity Act in 2017, which created a state definition for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers. This was the first time the state recognized these groups of people as distinct. By creating that policy, it’s now possible for other policies to create set asides and programs for farmers of color. That policy work is a precursor to Minnow, and it has been essential for being able to even have any policies that specifically benefit farmers of color.

The Farmer Equity Act has also been influential in getting other states to try to adopt that language, especially as federal policies that we relied on for those definitions have been politically contentious and threatened. It’s really important for the state level to also have this definition. We use that in trying to advance policies and support different government advising entities that have been formed, such as the Farmer Equity Advisory Committee to the California Department of Food and Agriculture 

You also support farmers directly with land access. Can you tell us about that?

Recognizing that policy comes after grassroots action, our work has been more focused on trying to get people land however we can. With the People’s Land Fund, we   purchased over a hundred acres in Watsonville for a group of farmers. 

The People’s Land Fund is a collaboration of six organizations that proactively fundraises to help farmers purchase land. We initially came together at the beginning of the pandemic to create the California BIPOC Farmer and Land Steward Relief Fund – which redistributed short term, emergency relief funds to farmers of color. 

I had talked to over 130 farmers in that immediate shutdown time. Everyone was freaking out about loss of markets, loss of labor, and loss of money – but we knew that this relief work was temporary and what we really needed to do was to support farmers in their long term stability – and long-term stability requires land. 

We know that farmers are not going to be able to throw down a down payment for a $2 million property the way that a venture capitalist can. How can we leverage our connections and resources to enable farmers to have that competitive advantage? That’s how the Land Fund came about. We had this opportunity in Watsonville, thanks to connections that HEAL Member Kitchen Table Advisors, one of the members of People’s Land Fund had, to purchase land off-market, and for us to then hold the land and connect with the farmers to be on it.

And the transaction itself was made possible through funding from the Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Fund, which lowered the purchase price, and using a portfolio of capital from grants and loans allowed a group of farmers, who were previously farm workers, to own that land together.

We’re trying to leverage our collective power and our privilege of being connected to philanthropic and investing organizations to build that financial power for farmers. For racial equity, which means a redistribution and activation of power, there is a financial piece and an ownership piece, and it’s linked to policy and sociopolitical power that we need to build.

For folks who are in California, or are farmers and specifically farmers of colors, what action or collective action can they take in support of your work and land justice?

Mai Nguyen: We talk about the foundations of land justice being about land return. First and foremost, we need to give back land that has been stolen from Indigenous peoples. That is dependent on our government interacting with tribal governments.

In addition to the learning and unlearning process that we need to do to support Indigenous sovereignty, we need to hold our government accountable and vote for the people who will support land back and introduce policies that advance land back and Indigenous sovereignty. 

Find out whose land you’re living on. There are 109 federally-recognized tribes In California, as well as many other tribes that have not been federally recognized or had their federal recognition terminated through the California Rancheria Termination Acts of the 1950s and 1960s. Some Native tribes and nations accept donations or outside support (including land donations and land taxes).

To follow Minnow’s work, subscribe to their newsletter

The post Growing the Foundations of Land Justice appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

Industrial agriculture is designed around an extractive relationship with the land, water, and other natural resources—large scale monocropping, or the practice of growing the same one or two crops (mostly corn and soy today) on the same plot of land, ultimately depletes soil health, making it less productive over time and increasing farmers’ reliance on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. A lot of these crops go toward animal feed used on factory farms, aka Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). CAFOs contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, and burden workers and rural communities with polluted air and water. Industrial fisheries have a similar impact on our oceans. Large amounts of pesticides and antibiotics are used in on and offshore aquafarms, and overfishing, bottom trawling, and longline fishing not only impacts fish stock but can harm ocean biodiversity. Emerging developments like genetically modified salmon also pose a threat to native species and undermine indigenous communities’ food sovereignty.

This extractive mode of production is at the root of our food system’s role in the climate crisis. It’s behind the greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil depletion that are symptoms of a failing food system.

WATCH: SALMON PEOPLE: The risks of genetically engineered fish for the Pacific Northwest

A remedy to the climate crisis

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than 90% of farms around the world are run by an individual or a family and rely primarily on family labor. Despite the myth that industrial agriculture and biotechnology are needed to feed the world, these family farms produce about 80% of the world’s food. Throughout time, people have evolved place-based cultivation techniques and trading systems, adapting to ecological and social conditions. And while industrial agricultural systems rely heavily on fossil fuels and chemical applications that contribute to climate change and biodiversity loss, smaller-scale producers not only depend on thriving ecological systems, they often contribute to them through nutrient cycling, habitat creation, and more.

Several studies have shown that utilizing traditional farming practices, which are rooted in stewardship and the interdependence of environmental and human health, can help mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis. Traditional agroecological practices (also known as regenerative agriculture) are built on a mutual relationship with the land.

Instead of using harmful pesticides, fertilizers, and monoculture practices, the majority of farmers around the world are small-scale producers using compost, cover cropping, minimal tillage, and crop diversity to grow food. In doing so, they are nurturing soil health, protecting biodiversity, and sequestering carbon in the soil, thereby reducing the amount of carbon in our atmosphere. Scientists say that transforming our food system to reflect these practices can potentially change the fate of our planet. Many farmers are already seeing small, but significant results like richer soil, increased biodiversity in the surrounding areas, and improved water retention. Many BIPOC producers who neither benefit from nor have an interest in industrial agricultural practices continue to farm using this traditional ecological knowledge.

EXPLORE: Real Food Media’s Tackling Climate Change Through Food Organizing Toolkit

Building community and resilience

For BIPOC communities, food and farming have long been connected to civil rights, community self-determination, and collective liberation. Many BIPOC agricultural communities have long been at the forefront of creating models that are heralded as part of a new sustainable agricultural movement.

While the predominantly white back-to-the-land “movement” of the 1970s is often credited for food distribution models like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA’s, often known as “the box”), its origins are simultaneously rooted in Japan and birthed in the US via Black communities in the deep South in the 1960s. The original CSAs served as a means for consumers to buy-in and share the risk of crop failures due to weather or other unforeseen circumstances, and to share equally in the harvest.

WATCH: Food, race, and justice | Malik Yakini | TEDxMuskegon

Cooperative practices by farmers in the South played a key role in the Civil Rights movement and because Black and Brown communities continue to experience food apartheid to this day, they have always turned to each other and to the community to feed themselves and provide healthful food for their families. Some For many that have been systematically left out of the food system and often borne the brunt of a food system that was designed to amass wealth through their oppression, growing food on their terms and ensuring the communities’ access to it, is in itself a radical political act. The majority of BIPOC producers today are politically motivated by the need to fight for a more equitable, and ecologically sound food system and reclaim their connections to the land that has been historically denied to them. They use their position as providers and their land access to create space for learning, healing and resisting. Organizations like Truly Living Well in Atlanta and La Semilla Food Center in Anthony, NM have succeeded not only in growing food for local communities but also in creating a welcoming space for people to reconnect with their food sources, with each other and learn how to farm. The Dine Food Sovereignty Alliance is working with indigenous producers to honor their ancestral traditions and heal their land and advocate for a return to traditional farming practices and stewardship that their communities have used for generations.

READ: Diné Food Sovereignty – A Report on the Navajo Nation Food System and the case to Rebuild a Self-Sufficient Food System for the Diné People

Even as the largest chemical pesticide, fertilizer, and pharmaceutical companies buy up the food system and consolidate power by controlling seeds and inputs, indigenous communities and other BIPOC producers continue to grow, save and trade seeds – and with these traditional heirloom seeds – keep their cultures alive.

WATCH: Rematriation of Seeds | Rowen White

As we take measures to mitigate the climate crisis and commit to fighting systemic racism and white supremacy in our food systems, we should start by acknowledging the stewardship and resilience of these producers and organizations and their contributions to the community, the movement, and the planet. We should be asking ourselves what we can do to ensure that small-and-medium producers, especially those from BIPOC communities need to thrive. Apart from changes in policy and leadership, philanthropic dollars, community patronage and institutional funding can go a long way in honoring the work of BIPOC producers and ensuring that they can continue their critical work.

The post Can small-scale producers nurture climate resilience and feed us all? appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

Lessons from the pandemic

The current model of food production and distribution is fuel-intensive and an active contributor to the climate crisis—both in its reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers made using fossil fuels, as well as in its fuel-intensive distribution network that has the entire country consuming food from a handful of food hubs. These industrial supply chains have also proven to be rigid and inadequate during crises and natural disasters such as hurricanes, forest fires, and public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic.

What seemed to many as a shortage in food supply during the early weeks of the pandemic was in reality, the inability of the centralized distribution channels to respond to disruptions in transportation and the shuttering of usual outlets like cafeterias, restaurants, and stadiums. During this time, communities in some regions had limited or no access to food, while producers in the same regions lacked access to markets. By April 2020, as the rest of the country was attempting to ‘flatten the curve’, meatpacking plants turned into COVID-19 hot spots, putting workers’ lives and public health at risk.

Community-based food systems are crisis-proof food systems

Decentralized, smaller-scale, community-based food outlets proved more reliable in the face of the pandemic—direct markets (farmer’s markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), and Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs)) saw an uptick, while mutual aid groups stepped in to ensure that at-risk community members were taken care of. At the same time, more people were growing their food, with the help of community gardeners and seed keepers. Community-based economies proved critical in this time of crisis, and we know that to survive future crises, especially those brought about by climate change, we have to transform our food system.

REPORT: Reframing Food Hubs- Food Hubs, Racial Equity, and Self-Determination in the South

To do this, we need immediate and long-term investment in localized food systems, Policy that supports the growth of small and medium-sized farms, and institutional adoption of value-based procurement programs like the Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) that can help small and mid-sized producers to grow their operations, access markets and nurture mutually beneficial relationships between producers, workers, and consumers. We need shorter supply chains that grow pasture-raised livestock on independent small and medium-scale farms with small and mid-sized meat processors which are also more environmentally sustainable and result in more nutritious food for eaters. We also need increased funding for research on the role of regenerative agriculture and traditional agricultural practices in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, preserving and nurturing biodiversity, and subsequently mitigating climate change.

Grassroots organizations, small-scale producers, Indigenous communities, and cultural organizers have been building resilient and equitable food systems for years. As the pandemic has revealed, these systems are best positioned to withstand and mitigate crises. Investing in them will move us closer to a food system that can not only carry us through crisis like the pandemic and climate change, but also mitigate their impacts.

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Today, the food and agriculture industry spends billions of dollars lobbying each year, and their influence over policy means that the rules are still largely written in their favor. We’re now left with a reality of larger farms but fewer farmers and recent political decisions like the trade war on China have pushed many remaining small farmers, and rural economies over the edge. Under this system, where large corporations control almost every aspect of farming, it is often unviable to go against the current, irrespective of who you are—even without the additional barrier of structural racism.

Most farmers now rely on government bailouts and crop insurance to offset their losses and keep themselves afloat through particularly difficult seasons, but government aid has not reached all farmers equally. The payments are based on production: the bigger the farm, the bigger the payments and loans are configured to serve large scale farmers.  According to a report by NPR, about 100,000 individuals collected 70% of the money. BIPOC farmers, on the other hand, have historically been left out of USDA programs including disaster relief, conservation grants, and loan assistance due to discriminatory lending practices and inadequate outreach and assistance to their communities. Rather than rewarding farmers who practice ecological agricultural techniques that have long lasting positive effects on soil health, and air and water quality, such programs continue to benefit megafarms that practice extractive agriculture that contributes to the climate crisis. As a result, small farms engaged in ecological agricultural practices, struggle to remain viable in a market-based economy.

For BIPOC producers, though many of them have ancestral connections to agriculture and come from communities that have stewarded land for generations, continuing those traditions as a vocational farmer is impossible for a majority. Unlike their white counterparts they are also less likely to own land and have access to intergenerational wealth that can cushion their losses.

Yet, as you’ll see in the following sections, there is a growing number of BIPOC farmers that are at the forefront of the agroecological movement.

The post Small producers can grow food in regenerative ways — but our food system works against them appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

The history of agriculture in the US is one of colonization and enslavement, followed by a long history of denying land rights to Black and Indigenous people, and later to other People of Color. Between 1784 and 1887, 1.5 billion acres of land was stolen from indigenous people—through war and attempts at genocide, outright theft and legislative appropriations like the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Homestead Act of 1862 (the total landmass of what is now the United States is 1.9 billion acres). From the vast plains of Iowa to the fertile acres of California’s Central Valley, America’s farms are on land that was taken from the Indigenous communities that once stewarded it. 

The violent colonization was an act of physical and cultural genocide; not only were millions of Indigenous people killed, but a majority of them were removed from their homelands, which they had stewarded for thousands of years. As a result, they were disconnected from their traditional foodways and forced to assume European systems of land ownership through legislation such as the Dawes Act. To date, profit-driven corporations and the U.S. government continue to violate treaties and extract oil, water, minerals, and more from lands that even by U.S. law are governed by indigenous communities. 

EXPLORE: To learn more about the indigenous lands you currently occupy, explore this map. You can also download an app.

From the early 1600s, enslaved Africans were abducted from their homelands to cultivate cotton, sugarcane, tobacco and more on monoculture plantations on these stolen lands—these were some of the nation’s most valuable exports at the time and served to lay the foundations for American capitalism, and simultaneously set the scene for American agriculture for centuries to come.

Towards the end of the Civil War, in 1865, Union leaders met with a group of Black leaders in Savannah, Ga to discuss how the Union government could support previously enslaved Black people. In 1865, based on what he heard from those leaders, Union General William T. Sherman passed an Order declaring that each family would be given land to farm on—“a plot of 40 acres of tillable ground”. Subsequently, 400,000 acres that were confiscated from confederate soldiers were set aside to be distributed among Black families. This was the first systematic attempt at reparations for Black people, but it didn’t last long. Less than a year after the Order was passed, it was reversed. The land went back to its former Confederate owners, under who it remains to this date. Land ownership remains tenuous for Black and Indigenous farmers today. 

READ: The invasion of America: The story of Native American dispossession is too easily swept aside, but new visualizations should make it unforgettable

WATCH: Food justice: a vision deeper than the problem | Anim Steel | TEDxManhattan 

Contemporary land struggles

 Despite this history, by 1920, the United States had about 1 million Black farmers; however as of the 2017 Census of Agriculture, this number is closer to 45,000, and just 0.52% of the total farmland in the country is owned or operated by a Black farmer. How did this happen? 

Over the last century, Black farmers were dispossessed of 12 million acres of land.  A significant portion of this—6 million acres—occurred between 1950 to 1969, and according to writer Vann R. Newkirk II, can be tied with the rise of the civil rights movement. Additionally, federal programs during that time were designed to create larger, more consolidated farms (more on this later!) that drove many small and medium scale farmers off their land. Black farmers, and especially those that were in the South, were particularly vulnerable due to the systemic racism that persisted in federal agencies that were charged with providing credit, capital, and insurance to farmers that would help them remain on their land. Aside from this, legal loopholes like ‘Heir’s property’ prevented and continue to impede Black people from using their land to get loans or available federal disaster relief, and maintain control over its sale. 

WATCH: The Great Land Robbery: How Federal Policies Dispossessed Black Americans of Millions of Acres 

Indigenous producers and communities face different challenges when it comes to land. In 1848, the Dawes Act, or the Allotment act forced indigenous people into a system of private property ownership that did not exist in their traditional land tenure systems and enabled the sale of ‘surplus’ land to non-Natives. After being dispossessed from land that their ancestors stewarded for centuries, many indigenous communities are still fighting for sovereignty over their land and its resources. Forcing indigenous people to assume a capitalist, proprietary relationship with the land has not only threatened their sovereignty over the land but fractured their spiritual connection with the land—a vital component of indigenous culture.

A report on the mass incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 found that the decision to intern more than 110,000 people was partly initiated by West Coast farmers’ racist resentment of Japanese farmers. During that time, Japanese-American farmers produced more than 40 percent of California’s commercial vegetable crop alone and generated a much higher income per acre than white farmers. West Coast farmers who were threatened saw the war as an opportunity to rid themselves of the competition, and also gain access to some of the most fertile farmland in the region. About 258,000 acres of land was ‘confiscated’ from Japanese farmers and was never fully returned to them; and the impact of their dislocation has had a generational effect. 

READ: The dangerous economics of racial resentment during World War II 

Reevaluating our relationship with the land

Starting with indigenous ancestors that fought back against relocation and the group of Black leaders in Savannah, GA who advocated that ‘40 acres and a mule’ be given to previously enslaved families, to organizations like the National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), Southeastern African American Farmers’ Organic Network (SAAFON), the Land Loss Prevention Project,  Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust,  White Earth Nation and BIPOC producers who are growing food and advocating for themselves across the country, the desire to maintain relationship to the land among BIPOC communities is as old as the attempts to deny them land access and sovereignty. 

While these organizations lead the fight to ensure land access for existing BIPOC producers, those like New Communities Land Trust are providing spaces where people from BIPOC communities can reconnect with land and farming. In urban areas, where communities are burdened by the twin forces of gentrification and food apartheid, community gardens stewarded serve not only as a source of food but as a community meeting space and sanctuaries. 

As European settlers colonized North America, they also exposed vast expanses of land to the plow for the first time and it only took a few decades until their mode of farming drove around 50 percent of the original organic matter from the soil into the sky as carbon dioxide. Much of the work being done by traditional farmers and new proponents of regenerative agriculture is geared towards undoing this colonial legacy and restoring land to its earlier, more fertile state. Together, the work of these organizations plays a crucial role in redefining our collective relationship with the land, nurturing food sovereignty, mitigating food apartheid, and healing the planet.

The post Food Justice is Land Justice appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

• Independent farmers and ranchers, especially those who are Black and Indigenous, and other People of Color (immigrants and US-born) who operate small to midsize farms and utilize ecological farming and ranching practices, and fair labor practices
• Indigenous land and water stewards who use traditional agricultural practices to grow food for their communities
• Foragers and hunters
• Independent fishers, especially those from Indigenous fishing communities whose practices align with conservation principles
• Farmworkers, a majority of whom are Latinx and Indigenous immigrants, and have been cultivating land for decades,possess a wealth of agricultural knowledge and skill, but have limited access to land and resources
• Urban farmers who grow community gardens in cities, often in abandoned plots, providing food and community in neighborhoods previously lacking in nutritive food sources
• Beginning farmers and fishers, especially those who are Black and Indigenous, and from other communities of color, who want to grow their own food and reclaim their relationship with the land

The post Our food is grown and gathered by a variety of people in a variety of ways appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

Why is phasing out factory farming a priority for LSP’s membership and larger community? 

Our members are driven to organize against factory farms because they care about pushing back against corporate power.  Factory farms are the dominant corporate power in this region. Morris, Minnesota, for instance, is home to Riverview Dairy Farm which owns up to 27% of the dairy cows in Minnesota and is one of the largest dairy operations in the state.Most of the businesses in town are now owned by the one family or group that owns those barns. People feel the impact this has on their community.

Factory farming drives out small and mid size farmers. The Farm Bureau talks about how it takes “all kinds of agriculture — big and small,” but when you put up a big operation that’s got 100,000 cows, that means you’re driving out a 100 small farms with 100 cows off of their land. The effect trickles down to processing too. Those who can get a 100 cows at a time get a much better price at the butcher or processor than someone who can send a few cows at a time. In Minnesota, we have a lot of dairy coops left but even they have implemented practices like volume premium, i.e. if the coop can send 10 trucks to you, they’ll give you a better hauling feel than someone who does organic raising and can only fill half a truck at a time.

What are the challenges of organizing against factory farming, and what has made campaigns successful?

Factory farms are often owned by people who are known to the community so it’s not an easy thing to organize against one unless you have other community members standing with you. So a large part of our work involves engaging deeply with the community and making sure people feel empowered to speak up about these things with their neighbors and local decision makers.

There’s multiple decision makers when it comes to factory farms, and you can go through different layers of government but so far, most of our victories have been at the township level. In Minnesota, the cities and towns have authority when it comes to zoning and can set rules about how land is used so you can talk about how close a factory farm can be to water supply, or other peoples houses, and you can set animal unit caps per farm. But this differs by state. In Wisconsin, local governments don’t have the same level of authority at the local level.

We’ve also had luck putting direct pressure on operators. There was an operator that was going to expand, and members came together to do their own air quality testing for hydrogen sulfide.  We put together a report and used that to bring others in the area to the county commissioners offices to say that our community doesn’t want this, and the operators pulled their proposal.

Other times, we’ve focused on gaining enough public support so county officials can then feel confident about enforcing the rules. This involves public education and bringing people together, door knocking campaigns, calls and rallies.

How does this local grassroots organizing and advocacy connect with your policy work on a federal and state level?

There’s a million policies that you could have in Minnesota to phase out factory farms, from regulating water and air pollution to zoning to putting caps on the size of farms. But it’s not about what the right policy to win is, it’s about power. The question is: What’s it going to take to build up enough power to change something at the state or federal level? If we get enough towns, cities, and counties on board with something, it’s possible to win statewide, and if we have enough power across states, we can win something nationally.

The way the agriculture economy is structured, a lot of decisions cannot be made on the local level. For instance, if we have to do anything around the price for dairy, that can only be changed at the national level. We are in regional and national coalitions where we learn from each other and see how we can all work together. Each state is in a different cultural and political context but one thing we’re all working together on is to move things in the Farm Bill.

What are some emerging priorities within the Farm Bill?

Federal policy has been a big part of our work for a long time. LSP members can take some credit for helping to start the Conservation Stewardship Program in the Farm Bill in the mid to late 90s. We got small and midsize farmers together to discuss the issues they were facing and brought folks out to DC to lobby to carve out the program.

We’re currently talking to farmer members about what they want to see in the Farm Bill — we’ve done 700 surveys and multiple listening sessions, and will zoom in on exact priorities soon. An emerging concern is that some programs and resources in the Farm Bill are used to prop up factory farms. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program(EQIP) programs for instance: recently the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) put out a report showing that all the EQIP funding in Minnesota was going to factory farms. Aside from pushing back on that, our two priorities related to consolidation in agriculture are supporting the the FSRA and strengthening the Packers and Stockyards Act. We are actively organizing on these. For example, an LSP member was invited to testify on the FSRA.

Factory farming is currently the dominant production method for meat, dairy and poultry in the US but we know that there’s a better way — how is LSP supporting farmers who want to practise sustainable animal agriculture?

Our mission is to not only stop factory farms but also support systems that are based on our values of stewardship, democracy, and building strong economies. That’s what people want — the vast majority of people agree with our values and our mission but we have a system that makes it hard for people to succeed in that way.

Aside from fighting corporate control and advocating for small and medium producers and communities, LSP also has a long history of directly supporting farmers and ranchers. Fifty percent of our work is just farmer-to-farmer education which includes beginning farmer training, education on soil health and other stewardship processes, and getting access to land. LSP has put close to 1,000 beginner farmers in contact with land or resources, and has helped many farmers implement and manage rotational grazing and shift to more regenerative ways of raising livestock and farming sustainably for the whole community while also being profitable. We need to show folks that these possibilities exist.

LSP and their members are currently campaigning to stop the expansion of a factory farm in their community. Watch now to learn more about the campaign and how you can support them:

Inspired? Join LSP in taking a pledge to say ‘no’ to factory farms!

The post Raising grassroots voices to take on corporate factory farms appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

The handful of giant corporations that control the meat industry in the US tout factory farming as an efficient, cheap way to produce meat. In reality, factory farming comes at a huge cost to health and safety, the environment, and consumer pocket books, and that’s why we’re working with members and allies to phase out factory farming.

Over 90% percent of the meat, dairy and eggs stocked in American grocery stores come from animals that were raised in factories. Factory farms, also known as Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), are a form of intensive industrial agriculture in which farm animals are raised in crowded, confined spaces for human consumption. A factory farm may have as few as 500 animals to upwards of 1,000 beef cattle, 2,500 pigs, or 100,000 broiler chickens. About 10 billion animals are raised on US factory farms every year. Factory farms generate tonnes of waste that pollute our air and water ways, hold animals captive in unhygienic and inhumane conditions, are hazardous environments for people to work in, and rely heavily on chemically intensive agriculture and fossil fuels to maintain their production and supply chain. Similar to land-based farms, farmed fish are housed in overcrowded conditions which make them prone to injury, infection and disease. Despite all that, meat from factory farms is less healthy, carries the risk of disease and is still too expensive for many eaters.

That’s because the main goal of a factory farm is not food production, but to generate maximum profits at the minimum cost to the farm owner — and they do that by externalizing the above costs to nearby communities, small and medium producers and businesses, working people, and the confined animals. As Sean Carroll, Policy Director at Land Stewardship Project puts it — “It’s hard to think of a worse thing that can happen to a rural community than a factory farm opening up in the neighborhood”.  Here’s why that is:

Air and water pollution from factory farming cause chronic health issues

A 2021 study found that agricultural production results in over 17,900 air pollution related deaths annually and about 80% of those can be attributed to factory farms and the production of animal feed for factory farms.

To begin with, animal feed is grown using chemically intensive agricultural techniques that deplete the soil, release chemical runoff from the fertilizers and pesticides into local air and waterways, and reduce biodiversity by converting rich ecosystems into monocropped farmland.

Factory farming also has a waste problem. Factory farms produces 82 billion additional tons of manure yearly. A small portion of this manure is sprayed onto crops as fertilizer, but most of it ends up in a “manure lagoon” along with waste like antibiotic residues and other medical or chemical waste, bedding waste, and even dead animals. A Google Image search for ‘manure lagoons’ will give you a sense of how they have been taking over the rural landscape in areas with a high concentration of factory farms. The resulting air pollution contains a range of toxic pollutants such as ammonia (which is contained in chicken manure), methane, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter, and antibiotic resistant pathogens.

Studies have linked exposure to these gasses to respiratory conditions, chronic lung disease, stress, anxiety, and high blood pressure. This waste can also contaminate groundwater and local waterways through leaching and runoff. Across the country, pollution from factory farms threatens more than 14,000 miles of rivers and streams and 90,000 acres of lakes and ponds. Scientists have also warned that factory farms are raising our risk for the next pandemic.

Factory farms perpetuate environmental racism

While factory farms exist across the country, certain communities are burdened with a disproportionate number of them. This is by design: since the negative impacts of factory farming are well known, factory farms receive a lot of pushback from rural communities. However, communities of color and low income communities who have been historically excluded from accessing economic and political power are less likely to be able to push back against giant factory farm corporations. These communities often get burdened first and worst by the negative impacts of the farming operation, and are also least likely to have the resources to relocate. Examples of this exist across the country, from hog operations in North Carolina that burden Black residents to  dairy farms in the California’s Central Valley where low-income Latino communities are dealing with drinking water contamination

WATCH: North Carolina Hog Farms Spray Manure Around Black Communities; Residents Fight Back

Factory farms accelerate the climate crisis

Factory farming is responsible for 14.5% of all human sources of greenhouse gas emissions. They are resource intensive operations that often rely on fossil fuel energy across the entire production and supply chain. Growing corn and soy feed for factory farms are responsible for almost half of the total emissions from animal agriculture as well as one of the primary drivers of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Enteric fermentation is another significant source of methane emissions. Though this is a completely natural and integral part of the digestion process of cows, the current national and global population of cows has led to dangerous levels of methane emissions across the country and the globe. Large off-shore fish farms, and the proposed use of GMO Salmon also poses an existential threat to ocean biodiversity.

SOURCE: https://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/

Factory farms cause undue suffering to animals

Factory farms are inherently inhumane in their treatment of animals. Animals are held in cages or crates, or are crowded together in pens with no access to sunlight or fresh air. Confining animals in small, overcrowded spaces comes with its own set of problems including disease, but rather than providing animals more space and access to the outdoors, factory farms resort to extremely cruel tactics such as debeaking and tail docking. Animals are routinely pumped with antibiotics to prevent infections resulting from the conditions in which they are kept, have been selectively bred for the market, and often suffer from physical problems resulting from these genetic modifications. Learn more about what animals face on factory farms from our members at ASPCA >>.

Factory farms harm rural economies and communities

Factory farms represent another worrying food industry trend: corporate consolidation. Historically, small and medium scale farmers raised livestock on a small scale or as part of a diversified farming operation. This meant that most animals were pasture raised and processed at local slaughterhouses for regional consumption. Today, a handful of giant corporations control the meat and poultry supply chains. Once a giant corporate processor sets up in a town, they contract growers to grow livestock for them in factory farms. The corporations provide the chicks and dictate the conditions in which the animals are grown, provide the feed they eat, and set the price at which they can be sold.

As more farmers take up contracting farming to serve a large corporate processor, smaller slaughterhouses and packaging facilities are forced to close shop leaving small and medium scale farmers with few options for processing infrastructure. This erodes the local economy, increases debt, and drives farm loss.

Factory farming leads to hazardous conditions for working people

The meat industry supply chain poses several risks to those that work in its many different  stages. People working in factory farms may be subject to long-term exposure to hazardous chemicals and disease-causing bacteria, and workers in meat packing facilities have to contend with dangerously fast line speeds that puts them at risk, long working hours without breaks and unfair working conditions. Since factory farms are owned and operated by ‘contractors’, they are also exempt from certain Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations that would normally apply. Learn more through the work of Rural Community Workers Alliance, Migrant Justice, Venceremos, Idaho Organization for Resource Councils and the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

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