Replies to post #151941 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

F6, thanks, for the good news story, not much else could be as heartening.

[StephanieVanbryce]

A Debate - Could Farms Survive Without Illegal Labor?

........There are six articles here..starting with comment on the one you posted ...

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/08/17/could-farms-survive-without-illegal-labor

[StephanieVanbryce]

Tensions rise as Latinos feel under siege in America's deep south

As illegal workers flee the threat of police checks, southerners are uniting to fight the laws dividing communities
and killing economies which rely on immigrants to thrive


Estimates show the shortage of immigrant labour has left so many crops unpicked that it has cost $1bn

Paul Harris Sunday 21 August 2011

The mobile home that Nancy Lugo and her two children live in might not seem like much to many people.

It sits off a dirt road, by a slow-moving creek, on the outskirts of the tiny Georgia town of Uvalda. It is surrounded by thick forest and fields full of the local speciality: Vidalia onions.

But for Lugo, 34, it is a symbol of a better life in America. Here in Georgia, far from her native Mexico, Lugo has a solid job, sends her kids to school and loves the rhythm of rural life. "It is peaceful. I am happy here," she said.

The patch of land she bought for her trailer was vacant before she came. But she dug a well and sank septic tanks, carving a home from the wilderness in a grand American tradition. She got a job. She paid her taxes.

Now it is all under threat.

For Lugo is an illegal immigrant in the deep south. In the midst of general anti-immigrant sentiment, several southern states have passed strict anti-illegal immigrant laws that critics say raises the prospect of a new Jim Crow era – the time when segregation was law –across a vast swath of the old Confederacy.

They will ostracise and terrorise a vulnerable Hispanic minority with few legal rights, encouraging them to leave or disappear further into the shadows.

In Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina, new laws have been signed that represent the toughest crackdown on illegal immigrants – the vast majority of whom are Hispanics – in America. They give the police sweeping new powers and require them, and employers, to check people's immigration status. In Alabama, they even make helping illegal immigrants, by giving them a lift in a car or shelter in a home, into a serious crime. For many, the laws echo the deep south's painful history of segregation, sending out a message to people of a different colour: you are not wanted here.

"That is exactly right," said Andrew Turner, a lawyer with the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Centre. "We view it within the context of the history of the deep south. It is using the law to push out and marginalise an ethnic minority."

The new laws' defenders deny that. They are merely enforcing the law, they say. Their problem is not with immigrants, but with those who came to America illegally. They say the laws are colour-blind and aimed at making sure everyone obeys the same rules and does not cheat the system.

Yet illegal immigrants have become a fundamental part of the American system. Huge swaths of the economy rely on the cheap labour they provide.

From construction to agriculture, to restaurants to gardening, to childrearing, hotels and home help, illegal immigrants are a major driver of the US economy. They may have no papers, but that does not stop them paying taxes, buying homes and raising children who, if born in the US, are American citizens. It has also – as happened during the civil rights era – put these southern states in direct conflict with the federal government. Last week, the White House moved to suspend many deportations of illegal immigrants without criminal records, putting it at odds with the new, harsher state laws.

Which is why Lugo is speaking out. Though illegal, she is angry at feeling suddenly hated by a society she has contributed to. She has two kids and a hard, low-paying job in a factory that makes US army equipment. When Georgia passed its law she was laid off by a manager fearful of prosecution. Yet, within a month, she was rehired. No one had wanted her work. But suddenly it showed how vulnerable her new life was.

"You fear that if you look Latino then they will stop you and send you home. But I have to stay here for my kids. I don't know how, but I will stay. I am afraid. But more than that I am angry," she said. She repeated the word like a mantra: "Angry. Angry. Angry."

Someone else who is angry is Paul Bridges, mayor of Uvalda. "I don't believe the state should tell me who can get in my car or that I should ask to see their papers before they come to my house," he said, sitting in the new city hall of the community of 500 souls.

Later, driving around the sleepy town on a day when temperatures topped 100F (38C) and the air felt like treacle, Bridges pointed out where Uvalda's Hispanic population lives. He knows everyone and showed where abandoned houses had been fixed up by a Hispanic family or vacant lots transformed into homes. Aside from being racially tolerant, Bridges is self-interested: new homes equal more taxes for his city budget. "There is also lots of mixed status here. In one house you could have a citizen, an undocumented person, and someone with a work visa," he said.

But across the southern states that have passed new laws, Hispanic people are leaving. In Uvalda several families have upped sticks, either selling homes or shuttering them. It is the same in Alabama. Maria Santiago, 23, is a child minder in Birmingham, the state's largest city. She has been in the US for 11 years, her son is a US citizen, but she is illegal. "A lot of our neighbours have left. They have lost their jobs. Every week people go back to Mexico," she said.

In Alabama, that is no wonder. It has passed the harshest anti-illegal immigrant law in America. It allows police to check people's immigration status on traffic stops. It makes it a crime to transport or to rent property to people known to be illegal. Alabama church leaders have complained that it criminalises performing marriages, baptisms or simply giving people lifts to church if they involve an illegal immigrant.

Other states have not gone quite so far. The Georgia law had similar harsh provisions suspended by the local courts, although the state has appealed against the decision and could get them re-instated. South Carolina contents itself with more efforts at having police check people's status and forcing employers to make more stringent checks.

But, critics say, the impact is the same across the region. Concerned parents are afraid to register their children in schools. Many Hispanics are worried to drive, out of a fear that they will be stopped. By involving the police in immigration enforcement, Hispanic activists say crimes will go unreported as people will not come forward in case their immigration status is checked. That has huge implications for tackling domestic abuse, gang violence or any crime that a Hispanic person might witness.

Isabel Rubio, director of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, described it in colourful southern terms: "Getting a Hispanic witness is going to be like pulling teeth from a lizard's mouth."

Theoretically, some Hica activities could even become unlawful. In a back office near a dilapidated-looking mall in suburban Birmingham, Hica recently hosted a women's meeting. Everyone was illegal. But they – like most people who come to Hica – are taking English lessons, and getting legal help and advice on coping with domestic abuse.

Rubio shook her head at the potential impact of the law. "It's a huge step backwards. After all the progress that has been made in terms of race, and then his happens. Where do I begin?" she said.

Then she produced a copy of the law and pointed out a shocking segment. In the text there is an exemption for domestic service, meaning that anyone with an illegal immigrant maid is not defined as an "employer" under the law. It was a grim reminder of old social realities. "It's Alabama," said Rubio. "It means you can still have your Latina household help."

Back in Uvalda, Howard Morris's business is not so lucky. Leaning on a tractor with his forearms coated in Georgia mud and sweat pouring down his face from the late-afternoon heat, Morris is worried. He owns 40 acres of onion fields, but fears no one will harvest his crops.

"The people that we normally hire are just not here," he said. That is bad news for somewhere like Uvalda, which is reliant on agriculture.

Morris knows that if the Hispanics who have left do not come back, there will be trouble. "The crop could rot in the ground," he said. That concerns Bridges, the mayor. "If we can't harvest, it will decimate this community," he said.

The problem is not unique to Uvalda. The Georgia Agribusiness Council estimates the labour shortage has left so many crops unpicked and rotting that it has cost $1bn. The industry currently has 30% fewer workers than it needs and, contrary to accusations that illegals take American jobs, no one is stepping in.

Nor is it just agriculture. The Georgia restaurant trade is in convulsions as staff flee. Karen Bremer, head of the Georgia Restaurant Association, says a quarter of her members' businesses are struggling with too few staff. "The damage has been done. The bad news has already gone through the communities," she said.

From an economic standpoint, passing such stringent laws has been a dramatic own goal. Recently a violent tornado tore through the Alabama city of Tuscaloosa, wreaking havoc and devastation. But the exodus of Hispanics from Alabama has been so great that building firms say they will struggle to employ enough people for rebuilding. Indeed, Tuscaloosa's Hispanic soccer league saw a third of its teams disbanded in a week

This is the paradox: the political backlash has come as Hispanics, and illegals, have become an integral economic and demographic part of the south. The region, outside Florida, has traditionally had only a small Hispanic community but now – fuelled by illegal immigration – it is rapidly growing. The Pew Hispanic Centre estimated that Georgia had an illegal population of some 425,000, most from Hispanic countries. The same study showed Alabama had a population of 125,000 illegal immigrants and has seen its Hispanic population jump 145% in a decade. That is a major ethnic shift in a region whose very history is riven with struggles over race, economic exploitation and southern identity.

But a fightback for a Hispanic place in the deep south has begun. One of the more dramatic moments happened when a car pulled up outside Georgia's state Capitol in Atlanta recently. Out got the frail figure of Salvador Zamora, a Hispanic activist. Zamora has been on hunger strike since 1 July, when Georgia's law came into effect. In that time he has shed more than 2st 2lb (13.6kg).

He was so weak that he sat in a wheelchair as he was taken into the building to hand over a protest letter to Georgia governor Nathan Deal. "I want these laws to change. I am not worried about me. I am worried about other people. I will do this as long as it takes," Zamora told the Observer.

Zamora, who was accompanied by leading Atlanta church figures who were black, white and Hispanic, conducted his protest in the vein of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. That was no accident. Across the south, other activists and groups are taking that lead by combining street protest and activism with legal challenges in the courts.

Demonstrations and candlelit vigils have been held in Alabama and Georgia. In Atlanta, thousands of protesters marched through the streets in one of the biggest demonstrations since the civil rights era. In another action, six young students revealed their illegal status and were arrested for a sit-down protest. One was Dulce Guerrero, 18. She was born in Mexico but has lived in America since she was two. She is a high-flying student with excellent grades. But Georgia's new law – which threatens her with deportation – has been a radicalising event. She had no regrets about her time in jail.

"It was time to take action," she said "I am American in everything but papers. I speak better English than I do Spanish. I don't remember life in Mexico."

Many others have spoken out. Church leaders have joined forces with lawyers and business groups and police officials. Suits have been filed attempting to get the law overturned. The federal government has weighed in via the courts, as it did in Arizona when that state attempted a similar act. In general, like many illegals themselves, most opponents want a "path to citizenship" or a work scheme for people already here.

Among them are people like Bridges, who is far from a typical liberal campaigner. He is a proud southerner and Republican who has little time for President Obama. But he joined a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union; a conservative bête noire. "I dislike the ACLU but I find myself on the same side. It is shocking to me," he joked.

But he insisted the new law was the work of politicians ignorant of new economic and social realities. "The vast majority of Georgians are not racist. Things have truly changed here," he added.

The outcome of the battle remains to be seen. People like Guerrero say they will not stop fighting their new Jim Crow. She recalled the feeling of handcuffs being put on her. She remembered her happiness at the policemen who said they sympathised as much as anger at those who did not. And she swore to keep fighting. "That was only the beginning," she said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/21/racist-immigration-law-in-deep-south

[StephanieVanbryce]

Alabama Immigrant Law Irks Business


Opponents of Alabama's new law marched in Birmingham in June.

MIRIAM JORDAN AUGUST 24, 2011

An Alabama law to tackle illegal immigration is coming under fire from some business leaders in the state, who say the measure is undermining Alabama's economy even before it takes effect.

Representatives of agribusiness, the state's biggest industry, and sectors such as construction, which is charged with rebuilding the tornado-hit city of Tuscaloosa, are reporting worker shortages because of immigrants already fleeing the state. The state agriculture commission says squash, tomatoes and other produce are rotting in the fields.

"We have a big problem on our hands," said Brett Hall, the state's deputy commissioner for agriculture and industry. "Farmers and business people could go under."

Their experiences mirror those of business leaders and farmers in Georgia, who have complained that a similar law signed in May in their state is driving away immigrant workers vital to farming, poultry, restaurants and other businesses in the state.

On Wednesday, a federal judge will hear arguments from a coalition of civil-rights groups that want the law blocked. The U.S. Justice Department has also sued to stop the law from going into effect Sept. 1, arguing that immigration enforcement is a federal matter.

Opponents of the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act say the measure promotes discrimination, hurts business and will cost the state millions of dollars in legal bills.

But supporters of HB 56, as the bill is known, argue it will drive illegal workers out of the state, opening jobs to unemployed Alabamians. It would also save money spent on health care and education associated with illegal immigrants, they say.

"The intent of the bill is to discourage illegal immigrants from coming to Alabama and prevent those already here from putting down roots," said Republican state Rep. Micky Hammon, a co-sponsor of the bill. "We think it will help the economy."

Polls showed a majority of Alabamians favored the law when it was passed in June, after the state Republican Party captured a majority in Alabama's House and Senate in November. Several legislators had campaigned on the promise of ridding the state of illegal immigrants.

Alabama has proportionately fewer illegal immigrants than other fast-growing southeastern states. Its new law, however, criminalizes many aspects of illegal immigrants' lives, including being in the state as well as seeking employment there. It makes it a felony to use fake identification to secure work, a common practice among illegal immigrants.

HB 56 also forbids renting to illegal residents, transporting them or providing them shelter. It requires public schools to check the immigration status of students who enroll, even though schools must enroll everyone, to enable the state to tally the cost of educating illegal immigrants.

Based on previous rulings in Arizona and Georgia, U.S. District Judge Sharon Blackburn is expected to block some parts of the law, particularly one allowing the police to detain individuals who they have "reasonable suspicion" are in the U.S. illegally.

But business leaders and immigrant activists say Hispanic households, whose members often include both legal and illegal members, have been leaving the state since Republican Gov. Robert Bentley signed the law in June.

James Latham, chief executive of WAR Construction Inc. in Tuscaloosa, expressed concern about the impact of the exodus on reconstructing the tornado-ravaged region.

"We are seeing smaller crews, and work taking longer to get accomplished, due to less available workers," said Mr. Latham, who is also president of Alabama Associated General Contractors.

Agribusiness contributes $5 billion annually to the state's economy. Johnny Adams, executive director of the Alabama Poultry & Egg Association, which employs about 100,000 people directly and indirectly, said chicken farmers who supply large poultry plants were already hurting.

Alabama began drawing Latin American immigrants in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the state's overall Hispanic population has more than doubled to nearly 200,000 in the past decade, according to the Census. Illegal immigrants account for 2.5% of the population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group, compared with 4.4% in Georgia and 6% in Arizona.

An illegal immigrant named Marisela said her days working at the Birmingham hotel that has employed her for five years were coming to a close. "If they won't keep me, there won't be work for me anywhere else," she said.

Indeed, the district judge is expected to uphold provisions of the law pertaining to business. For example, employers can lose their business license for "knowingly" hiring undocumented labor, and they will have to use E-Verify, an electronic system designed to check whether employees are eligible to work in the U.S.

Instead of expanding his peach farm and adjacent jam and basket-weaving factory, "I'm closing down on Sept. 1," said Hal Hayes of Clanton, Ala.

Echoing a point raised by farmers in other states, Mr. Hayes said that a handful of Americans who showed up to apply for jobs demanded that he pay them off the books so that they can continue to collect unemployment benefits.

Mr. Hayes, who has farmed for more than three decades, said, "We are going to lay everybody off and I am going to draw unemployment because the state put me out of business."


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903461304576526740948686416.html


..........what good are the teabaggers if they can't even help business ? sheesh! ..Driving people out of business
is SICK! ..and in these times ....unbelievable ..

[F6]

Shared Meals, Shared Knowledge

By MARK BITTMAN
September 27, 2011, 8:30 pm

This year, Slow Food USA, which defines “slow food” as good for its eaters, its producers and the environment — a definition anyone can get behind — set out to demonstrate that slow food can also be affordable, not only a better alternative to fast food but a less expensive one. The organization issued a $5 Challenge [ https://secure3.convio.net/sfusa/site/SPageServer?pagename=5Challenge_Home ] with the inspired rallying cry of “take back the ‘value meal’,” which in most fast food restaurants runs somewhere around five bucks.

Under the leadership of its president, Josh Viertel, Slow Food has moved from a group of rah-rah supporters of artisanal foods to become a determined booster of sustainability and of real food for everyone. Last month it called for people to cook pot luck and community dinners for no more than $5 per person. “We gave ourselves a month to launch the first big public day of action in what we hoped would become an ongoing challenge,” says Viertel. “In those four weeks we hoped to organize 500 people to host meals on Sept. 17. Our dream was to have 20,000 people participate.”

They did far better than the 500-meal mark; more than 5,500 people [ http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/slow_food/blog_post/over_5570_meals_shared/ ] hosted dinners, and more than 30,000 enjoyed the new value meal. Slow Food intends to make this an ongoing project, and is calling for a repeat performance of the $5 Challenge for Oct. 24, which not coincidentally is Food Day [ http://foodday.org/ ]. (That’s another subject, but I encourage you to click that link; the six goals on Food Day’s home page succinctly sum up the current issues in food.)

Frugality in cooking has a long and powerful history and a pathetic present. With the exuberant abundance of the post-war half-century, many Americans forgot the lessons brought over from the old countries, honed during the rapid but harsh development of the 19th century, the lean years of the Depression, the rationing of the 1940s. Old-timers made soup from scraps, saw potatoes as a main course and considered three squares the pinnacle of good living.

Can you imagine? Now fast-food joints litter the eight-lane thoroughfares that rip through most cities and suburbs. If you want a pizza, you reach into the freezer or make a phone call; you get hungry, you pop something in the microwave, pull into the drive-thru, wait on a line. We have become accustomed not to real food but to “convenience,” one of the filthiest of modern catchwords, and to the ill health and waste associated with it. (Some estimate that 50 percent of all food produced in the U.S. is wasted, and that doesn’t include the junk that isn’t worth producing in the first place.)

Though cooking is healthier for land and bodies, marketing, habit, social pressures and the false belief that it’s expensive (it isn’t, as I demonstrated in this [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html ] Review piece Sunday), have all but killed it. To become a healthier, more sustainable population — in every sense of both adjectives — one of the major goals of the foreseeable future must be to encourage a shift from ubiquitous fast food to the all-but-vanished craft of cooking and associated thrift.

How that might happen is the subject of thousands of conversations, but the movement is in full swing, as the Slow Food campaign demonstrates. Showing that buying normal ingredients from a regular grocery store and cooking them at home is cheaper than going out to eat doesn’t present much of a challenge, but feedback I get when I write about this shows both that it surprises some people while leaving others wondering why this common knowledge isn’t more common.

One problem is that too often we let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we paint the only acceptable alternative to fast food as local, sustainable, organic and fair, we make it nearly impossible to progress along the spectrum from bad food to better food. Ethical, sustainable food is surely the ideal, but to get there we have to encourage the purchase and preparation of available food that can then be cooked (or eaten raw, for that matter) at home.

There are millions of people throughout the country who routinely buy and cook “slow food” — I’d prefer the term “real food,” but whatever — and spend very little money doing it. (Five dollars per person is a generous, even unachievable budget in many kitchens, but it really is no more than the cost of fast food — and for many people it’s a trifle — and it’s a sum that will allow and encourage cooks to upgrade to sustainably raised food.) Slow Food wanted to find out how thrifty shopper-cooks do what they do, and to encourage them to share their tips and tricks with one another and with as many neighbors as possible, and the site on which they do so [ http://5challenge.tumblr.com/ ] is fun and inspiring.

All of this is indeed a “challenge” largely because we’ve strayed so far from our roots. Real food, generally speaking, is seasonal food, a notion that has been reduced to pumpkins turned into jack-o-lanterns, followed by cranberry sauce (sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, no less). Yet shopping and cooking seasonally means eating more locally, eating less imported food, relying on staples like grains and beans, reducing your food’s carbon footprint and eating a healthier diet — all desirable outcomes.

There is a steep learning curve here, along with the well-publicized issues of access. Not just seasonal food but any fresh food is difficult to find for some people, and even more people have no idea what to do with it once they bring it home. Slow Food believes that the very best way to build the kind of social movement needed to produce the systemic changes that they seek is to start small: to share knowledge and to share meals. What’s wrong with that?

© 2011 The New York Times Company

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/shared-meals-shared-knowledge/ [with comments]

[StephanieVanbryce]

When the Uprooted Put Down Roots


Khadija Musame, above right, with a customer from Somalia at the New Roots Farm stand in San Diego. More Photos » [ http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/10/09/us/20111010-REFUGEE.html ]

PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN October 9, 2011

SAN DIEGO — At the Saturday farmer’s market in City Heights, a major portal for refugees, Khadija Musame, a Somali, arranges her freshly picked pumpkin leaves and lablab beans amid a United Nations of produce, including water spinach grown by a Cambodian refugee and amaranth, a grain harvested by Sarah Salie, who fled rebels in Liberia. Eaten with a touch of lemon by Africans, and coveted by Southeast Asians for soups, this crop is always a sell-out.

Among the regular customers at the New Roots farm stand are Congolese women in flowing dresses, Somali Muslims in headscarves, Latino men wearing broad-brimmed hats and Burundian mothers in brightly patterned textiles who walk home balancing boxes of produce on their heads.

New Roots, with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.

With language and cultural hurdles, and the need to gain access to land, financing and marketing, farm ownership for refugees can be very difficult. Programs like New Roots, which provide training in soil, irrigation techniques and climate, “help refugees make the leap from community gardens to independent farms,” said Hugh Joseph, an assistant professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts, which advises 28 “incubator” farms representing hundreds of small-scale producers.

Cameroonian peanut plants are growing at Drew Gardens in the Bronx, chronicled on the Facebook page of Angela Nogue, a refugee farmer. Near Phoenix, a successful goat meat farm and store was begun by Ibrahim Sawara Dahab, an ethnic Sudanese from Somalia. “In America, you need experience, and my experience was goats,” he said.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement in Washington formed a sustainable farming program in 1998, financing 14 refugee farms and gardens, including one in Boise, Idaho, where sub-Saharan African farmers have gradually learned to cope with unpredictable frosts.

Larry Laverentz, the program manager for refugee agriculture with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said inspiration came from the Hmong, Mien and Lao refugee farmers of Fresno County, Calif., who settled in the late 1970s and now have 1,300 growers specializing in Asian crops.

These small plots of land can become significant sources of income for refugees, with most farmers able to earn from $5,000 to more than $50,000 annually, as the Liberian refugees James and Jawn Golo do on their 20-acre organic farm outside Phoenix, including sales to five farmers’ markets, restaurants and chefs.

In Burlington, a four-acre farm started by Bhutanese-Nepali, Somali Bantu and Congolese farmers is still reeling from the flooding of the Winooski River after Hurricane Irene, which ruined crops at the height of the season and caused an estimated $15,000 in losses.

“This is a significant supplement to our diet, and budgets are geared to it,” said Yacouba Jacob Bogre, 38, executive director of the Association of Africans Living in Vermont and a lawyer from Burkina Faso. “Emotionally, we lost a lot, along with fresh vegetables for our households.”

New Roots in City Heights, which Michelle Obama visited last spring, is a model for today’s micro-enterprise. (It is also a culinary education, where a Zimbabwean grower can discover bok choy.) It was started at the request of his Somali Bantu community, said Bilali Muya, the effervescent trainer-in-chief. “There was this kind of depression,” he said. “Everyone was dreaming to come to the U.S.A., but they were not happy. The people were put in apartments, missing activity, community. They were bored.“

They were also homesick for traditional food, grown by hand. In City Heights, where half the residents live at or below the federal poverty line, the three-year-old farmer’s market was the city’s first in a low-income neighborhood, a collaboration between the nonprofit International Rescue Committee and the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

One can hear 15 different languages there, amid the neat rows of kale, rape and banana plants — but body language is the lingua franca.

“If I see a weed, I pull it, shaking my head,” said Mrs. Musame, the Somali farmer. “We understand each other.”

The hub of refugee life, City Heights was largely home to African-Americans and Mexican immigrants until the fall of Saigon in 1975, when thousands of Southeast Asian refugees arrived to a massive tent city at nearby Camp Pendleton.

From 1980 through 1990, the population almost doubled with immigrants and refugees (most recently from Iraq). The changing demographics of the neighborhood resemble an electrocardiogram of international conflict.

But the exquisite fruits and vegetables for sale, lovingly grown, belie the life experiences of the growers. Mrs. Salie, the Liberian, was raped by rebels and hid for two years in the bush after reporting the crime, she said. Mrs. Musame, a Somali Bantu, came to San Diego as a widow after her husband and three of her sons were gunned down.

And Mr. Muya said Somalis had taken his father, who dug irrigation trenches for a local banana farm, and tortured him, his screams echoing through the village. His grandfather went to help and was beaten with the butt of a rifle. Many hours later, Mr. Muya said, the villagers were told: “Come pick up your dogs.”

“As a Somali Bantu, you don’t go to sleep really deep,” Mr. Muya continued. “You sleep awake.”

In addition to accepting food stamps, the market offers $20 a month to low-income shoppers to buy more produce (financing comes from Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit based in Connecticut, and a $250,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

“Especially in tough times, farmers are becoming pharmacists — providing healthy fresh local fruits and vegetables to vulnerable families,” said Gus Schumacher, a former under secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture and now an executive vice president of Wholesome Wave.

Their produce is sold to restaurateurs like George and Samia Salameh, who buy the farm’s tomatoes and mint. Mr. Salameh, a former airline pilot, came to the United States from Lebanon 37 years ago. “This product is absolutely fitting for me,” he said.

The country’s pioneering refugee farm program, in Lowell, Mass., was founded by Tufts University and continues to thrive.

Visoth Kim, a Khmer refugee from Cambodia, now 63, farms land in Dracut, Mass., owned by the widow of John Ogonowski, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Mr. Ogonowski, whose ancestors were Polish immigrants, made land available to Hmong and Cambodian refugees, teaching them modern irrigation techniques in exchange for fresh vegetables.

Mr. Kim, who witnessed mass starvation in Cambodia, losing a brother, refers to his two-acre plot as “my plenty.” His fellow farmer Sinikiwe Makarutsa grew up in Zimbabwe and now grows maize on land rented from a local church. She made enough money to buy a tractor and rototiller.

Ms. Makarutsa was inspired to farm, she said, after tasting supermarket tomatoes. She uses the Zimbabwean phrase “Pamuzinda” to describe her seven-acre plot.

Roughly translated, she said, “It means ‘where you belong.’ ”




http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/us/refugees-in-united-states-take-up-farming.html?ref=business

[F6]

Farms Need People, Not Machines


gameanna/Shutterstock

Mechanization and automation have reduced the difficult physical labor of food production, but they've also rendered agriculture dependent on non-renewable, polluting substitutes

Nicolette Hahn Niman [ http://www.theatlantic.com/nicolette-hahn-niman/ ]
Oct 21 2011, 8:57 AM ET

Machines have their place on farms and ranches. Researchers have calculated how the tractor's plowing, planting, and harvesting has saved tens of millions of people and draft animals from backbreaking toil. And personal experience has taught me the indispensability of a tractor for lifting and moving heavy objects on a ranch. But broadly adopting an industrial model in agriculture -- especially for raising animals - has been disastrous.

In The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry builds perhaps the most compelling case that technology has been misapplied to agriculture. Industrialization, he argues, is the primary cause of our depopulated farms and rural towns. In 1790, 90 percent of our people were engaged in agriculture. Today, technology and decades of federal policy that deliberately reduced agricultural jobs have shrunk the farm community to less than 1 percent of our population, and our rural population to 17 percent. Our physical separation from natural settings may well be exacerbating an alienation from nature fraught with trouble for our collective health and psyche.

Department of Agriculture research in the 1930s and '40s documented the importance of farming practices based on human skill and hand work - crop diversification and rotations, integration of animals, and using grass to guard against erosion, manage pests, and maintain soil fertility. But, as Berry notes, at mid-century the American approach to producing food veered sharply away from farming founded on human stewardship, natural cycling, and recycling. It abandoned grass and embraced chemicals and machines.

As World War II munitions plants were converted to manufacturing agricultural chemicals, U.S. use of manmade fertilizers quickly doubled. Government policy subsidized and encouraged maximum grain output, while discouraging permanent pastures, crop rotations and diversity, and grass buffers.

Berry notes that from 1950 to 1970 "farms became larger and more specialized, handling either crops or livestock instead of both," while chemicals and machinery skyrocketed. Artificial fertilizer use in those years, for instance, increased by nearly 300 percent.

These trends have persisted. Farming now uses four times more energy than in 1950, about 40 percent of which goes into producing fertilizers and pesticides. Some 20 million tons of chemical fertilizer and 1.1 billion pounds of herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides are used on U.S. farms every year. Diversity of farm crops has disappeared. While in 1900 U.S. farms averaged five different crops, farms today average just one. Genetic diversity on farms was reduced by 75 percent during the 20th century, according to a United Nation's report.

All of this has taken a heavy environmental toll. Repeated application of agricultural chemicals renders soils brittle and lifeless, prone to blowing and washing away. Eighty percent of U.S. agricultural lands show severe to moderate erosion, which is occurring at a rate seventeen times faster than nature can re-generate soil. Groundwater, lakes, and streams are increasingly contaminated by pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.

Although automation and mechanization have reduced the difficult physical labor of food production, they have contributed to our national obesity epidemic, and rendered agriculture utterly dependent on such non-renewable, polluting substitutes for human labor. In today's specialized, segmented, and mechanized agriculture, chemicals are the answer to fertility, pest control, and weed suppression. The farmer's hands, knowledge, and husbandry have been replaced by machines, capital goods, pharmaceuticals, and fossil fuels, used directly to power farm equipment and indirectly to manufacture chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.

Mechanization has reduced conventional animal farming to production and eliminated true animal husbandry. Laboratory-produced vitamin D and antibiotics now make it feasible to restrict animals to the indoors round the clock. Feed and water are delivered mechanically; manure removal systems are automated. Humans have ceased providing individual animals attention. As I noted in Righteous Porkchop, Department of Agriculture studies show that at a typical confinement facility, a pig is in the company of a human for 8 seconds of each day. Such an approach cannot provide appropriate care.

U.S. agricultural policies that foster industrialization persist. And they continue to nudge the remaining farm-related jobs in fields, animal operations, and slaughterhouses in an ever-more unappealing direction -- one that is more machine-based, chemical-intensive, and less connected to natural seasons and cycles. It is increasingly difficult to attract people to those jobs. This is foolhardy -- particularly in our current economy, which we are desperately striving to revitalize.

Ecologically based farming is entirely different. A recent academic paper on the burgeoning agro-ecology movement in Latin America notes that there is "a new 'agrarian revolution' worldwide" and argues that "agroecology-based production systems are biodiverse, resilient, energetically efficient, socially just and comprise the basis of an energy, productive and food sovereignty strategy."

A 2011 report to the United Nations by Olivier de Schutter, its Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, concludes that ecologically based farming requires both greater knowledge and more human labor. But that can be an economic advantage: "Creation of employment in rural areas in developing countries, where underemployment is currently massive, and demographic growth remains high may constitute an advantage rather than a liability and may slow down rural-urban migration."

Here in the United States, a recent Rodale Institute report on a 30-year field research project highlights the overwhelming benefits of sustainable farming. The report concludes that organic crop yields match conventional; that organic crops perform better in draughts; that organic farming uses 45 percent less energy; and that organic farming systems are far more profitable for farmers.

As Americans increasingly seek local food raised without drugs and chemicals, ecologically based food systems should become an overarching goal. Rather than further entrenching the industrial farming model, federal subsidies should be geared toward farming that sustains natural resources. The shift would employ more people while providing better, more appealing jobs. It would also create safer, tastier, more nutritious food, something that would benefit us all.

Nicolette Hahn Niman is a livestock rancher, environmental attorney, and author of Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (2009) [ http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Porkchop-Finding-Beyond-Factory/dp/0061466492 ].

Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/10/farms-need-people-not-machines/246944/ [with comments]

---

(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66821790 and preceding and following

[F6]

Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local


Radishes are among the many vegetables grown at Alm Hill gardens near Everson, Wash., where produce is sold locally.
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times


Jenny and Alex Smith, both 25, are first-year farmers on a tiny plot about an hour north of Seattle.
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times


Customers strolled through the Ballard Farmer's Market in Seattle.
Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: July 1, 2012

SEATTLE — The cultivated rusticity of a farmers’ market, where dirt-dusted beets are status symbols and earnest entrepreneurs preside over chunks of cheese, is a part of weekend life in cities across the nation as the high days of the summer harvest approach.

But beyond the familiar mantras about nutrition or reduced fossil fuel use, the movement toward local food [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/l/local_food/index.html ] is creating a vibrant new economic laboratory for American agriculture. The result, with its growing army of small-scale local farmers, is as much about dollars as dinner: a reworking of old models about how food gets sold and farms get financed, and who gets dirt under their fingernails doing the work.

“The future is local,” said Narendra Varma, 43, a former manager at Microsoft who invested $2 million of his own money last year in a 58-acre project of small plots and new-farmer training near Portland, Ore. The first four farmers arrived this spring alongside Mr. Varma and his family, aiming to create an economy of scale — tiny players banded in collective organic clout. He had to interrupt a telephone interview to move some goats.

Economists and agriculture experts say the “slow money [ http://www.slowmoney.org/ ]” movement that inspired Mr. Varma, a way of channeling money into small-scale and organic food [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/o/organic_food/index.html ] operations, along with the aging of the farmer population and steep barriers for young farmers who cannot afford the land for traditional rural agriculture, are only part of the new mix.

A looming shortage of migrant workers, with fewer Mexicans coming north [ http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/net-migration-from-mexico-falls-to-zero-and-perhaps-less/ ] in recent years, could create a kind of rural-urban divide if it continues, with mass-production farms that depend on cheap labor losing some of their price advantages over locally grown food, which tends to be more expensive. From the vineyards of California to the cherry orchards of Oregon, big agriculture has struggled this year to find willing hands. Local farm sales are becoming more stable, predictable and measurable. A study last fall [ http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-report/err128.aspx ] by the Department of Agriculture said that local revenues had been radically undercounted in previous analyses that mainly focused on road stands and markets. When sales to restaurants and stores were factored in, the study said, the local food industry was four times bigger than in any previous count, upward of $4.8 billion.

More predictable revenue streams, especially at a time when so many investments feel risky, are creating a firmer economic argument for local farming that, in years past, was more of a political or lifestyle choice.

“How you make it pay is to get closer to the customer,” said Michael Duffy, a professor of economics at Iowa State University, capsuling the advice he gives to new farmers in the Midwest.

Labor, as it has been for generations in the United States, is still the big wrinkle for local growers. But in many cases, experts like Professor Duffy say, the local food system is increasingly going its own way, differentiated from the traditional labor pool of migrant workers that the United States’ mainstream produce system depends on. Many larger local farms hire Hispanic workers, but at more farm stands and markets, buying local also means, in subtle or not so subtle ways, buying native.

“A byproduct of local food is that local hands are more likely to be producing, harvesting, packing and marketing it, especially for new farmers on small-scale farms,” said Dawn Thilmany McFadden, an agricultural economist at Colorado State University who is part of a leadership team for a training program for beginning farmers.

In other instances, Hispanics who had worked as low-wage laborers are now becoming entrepreneurs. A three-year-old nonprofit group north of Seattle, Viva Farms [ http://www.vivafarms.org/ ], specifically aims to help Hispanic farmers get started, with assistance in language training and in understanding the vagaries of the marketplace.

“We work harder now,” said Misael Morales, 35, describing the main difference between life as a farm laborer and as an entrepreneur.

Mr. Morales came to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico, as a teenager, and last year he and his brother, Salvador, 32, began farming a one-acre plot at Viva Farms. They mainly grow lettuce for markets and restaurants in Seattle.

“Early or late, when something has to get done, you do it,” he said.

Viva Farms’ director of business and organizational development, Ethan Schaffer, said former wage workers like the Morales brothers are often surprised when they realize the prices and profit margins that local organic produce can fetch — something, he said, that rarely penetrates down to the daily life of a migrant picker.

“They get the ag part, and once they realize how the market works, they’re off and running,” Mr. Schaffer said.

Other new farmers, like Christopher Brown, 26, a former Marine infantryman who worked his first day last month at Grow Washington, an organic farm north of Seattle, have more complex motives. Taking a break from the carrot-cleaning table, he says he dreams of building an organization to help bring other veterans into local farming.

Other urban-focused farms, including one in Oregon City, Ore., called C’est Naturelle [ http://cestnaturellefarms.com/fulldietfarm.html ], are offering, starting this month, one-stop shopping services: community-supported agriculture subscriptions to supply a family a full diet of food from one place, from eggs and butter to beef and greens.

Mr. Varma’s project near Portland, called Community by Design [ http://www.communitybydesignllc.org/the-project/ ], was inspired, he said, by the Slow Money movement, which has emerged in recent years as a vehicle for financing local, organic food production through groups like Slow Money, a nonprofit group in Boulder, Colo., that connects investors, entrepreneurs and farmers. Of $18 million raised in the last two years by Slow Money, $4 million — the biggest chunk — landed here in the Pacific Northwest [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/national/usstatesterritoriesandpossessions/pacific-northwestern-states/index.html ], said Woody Tasch, the group’s chairman.

But the economic path for local food is still in many ways difficult.

The federal farm bill [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/farm_bill_us/index.html ], passed by the Senate last month, has provisions to support farmers’ markets. But in Washington State, a program aimed at helping growers build direct marketing relationships with grocers or restaurants died last year in a round of budget cuts.

For Jenny and Alex Smith, both 25, a couple since they met in college — now first-year farmers on a tiny plot about an hour north of Seattle — the economic equation comes down to lowering costs and needs.

They live in a recreational vehicle with no television or Internet service, and they hope to break even this year, earning perhaps $1,600 a month through farmers’ markets and subscriptions for weekly produce packages, so far mostly from friends and family. But they say a farming life still feels, to them, full of promise. They had boring office jobs in Seattle, they said, and now they have a farm dog named Banjo.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/us/small-scale-farmers-creating-a-new-profit-model.html

---

(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70414767 and preceding and following