Christina Cooke | Civil Eats

Zero-Waste Grocery Stores in Growth Mode as Consumers Seek to Ditch Plastic

Christina Cooke — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 09:00:24 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

As a barista in San Francisco for almost a decade starting in 2007, Joseph Macrino hated all of the waste the coffee shop produced—the disposable cups, the lids, the sleeves. He’d give his regulars grief for not bringing in their own mugs.

“I’d be like, ‘Bring your own cup! I see you every day, you get the same drink. I can still do a pretty rosetta or heart on top of your latte, but bring your own cup. It’s such a waste!’” Macrino said.

When he moved to Los Angeles in 2016, he and his then-partner decided to open up the city’s first zero-waste grocery shop. Drawing inspiration from the bulk-food-heavy Rainbow Grocery Co-op, one of their favorite haunts in San Francisco, they opened the doors of re_grocery on Earth Day in 2020.

“I really want to change people’s thinking around grocery shopping, around sustainability, around consumerism, around capitalism, thinking about how we can leverage our goals and principles but still run a profitable company.”

From neat bins, glass jars, and metal canisters, the certified B-Corp offers more than 500 refillable bulk goods including snacks, seeds and nuts, coffee and tea, oils and vinegars, cereals and grains, household items, and bath and body products. The store purchases in buckets and other containers they can return to the supplier for refill or recycle, and customers can bring in their own containers or cloth bags to stock up, or get reusable containers from the store.

In traditional grocery stores, plastic holds everything from apples to trail mix to detergent to water. “Plastic packaging is ubiquitous,” said Celia Ristow, who launched the zero-waste blog Litterless in 2015. (The site is down now, but will be back up this summer, she said.) “It’s cheap, it’s lightweight, if you need to ship, it’s non-breakable. So, there are some real advantages that you have to overcome.”

Yet given some of the shocking statistics—that 95 percent of plastic packaging is disposed of after a single use, that only 9 percent of the plastic ever produced has actually been recycled, and that 72 percent of plastic ends up in landfills or the soil, air, or water—some are trying to figure out how to sell food in a way that prevents plastic from being produced in the first place.

Since opening the first shop in Highland Park, Macrino has opened two additional re_grocery locations in L.A.—and has diverted 500,000 packaging items from the landfill. He would like to continue expanding, eventually to around 10 stores throughout L.A. and then more beyond that. And while the store currently offers delivery throughout the city and the shipping of non-perishables nationwide, he’s currently working to launch the shipping of bulk items nationwide as well, using compostable, biodegradable packaging.

The first iteration of minimal packaging in stores was the extensive bulk sections in the hippie food stores of the 1960s and ’70s, said Ristow, who currently works as the certification manager for the Total Resource Use and Efficiency (TRUE) zero-waste certification. TRUE is offered by Green Business Certification Incorporated (GBCI), the same agency that oversees LEED and other green rating systems.

The second iteration—stores like Macrino’s, which produce little to no waste at all—have taken hold over the last few years, Ristow said. When she began tracking zero-waste and refillery stores in 2015, there were fewer than 10 in the U.S. “It started to explode over the next five years,” she said.

Inside a re_ grocery store in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of re_grocery)

While California and New York are hotspots for zero-waste grocery stores, Ristow also sees them in more unexpected places, like small towns and rural areas, in states like Ohio and Wisconsin. “As this movement took off, the people who started these stores were ordinary citizens. It wasn’t a centralized movement. People said, ‘I think my community needs it,’ and so they began opening them where they lived,” Ristow said.

Larasati Vitoux, originally from France, opened the zero-waste grocery store Maison Jar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, two years ago. European countries are generally at the forefront of efforts to reduce and recycle, and the zero-waste grocery store movement is much more developed there than in the U.S. After visiting her parents in Orléans, France, early in the pandemic, Vitoux noted that their relatively small town, with a population of just over 100,000, supported five zero-waste grocery stores. Meanwhile, in the entire city of New York, with a population of 8.3 million, Vitoux knew of only one, called Precycle.

She saw an opportunity and started to put together a business plan. Her community—home to many young families—immediately embraced her. Eighty percent of her customers are return shoppers, and most live within a 10- to 15-minute walk. “We opened in March 2022, and by the end of the year, for the holidays, we received a lot of cards from people telling us that we were the best thing that happened to the neighborhood that year,” she said.

Larasati Vitoux in front of Maison Jar. (Photo by Arnaud Montagard)

The business started making money within six months of opening, Vitoux said, and year-over-year sales increased by 50 percent between the first quarters of 2023 and 2024. Additionally, as of their second anniversary in March, the store had sold—in bulk—the equivalent of 1,420 bottles of olive oil, 1,820 jars of nut butters, 762 plastic-packed blocks of tofu, and 2,443 bottles of kombucha.

In addition to offering local and organic food without packaging, plus perishables like fruit and vegetables, eggs, and bread, Vitoux aims to promote a sense of community around ideas of sustainability. The store has hosted a soap-making workshop, speakers on climate change and eco-anxiety, vendor popups, and happy hours, where all items are 20 percent off for a two-hour stretch. (These are very popular, she said.) Maison Jar is also an electronic waste and battery drop-off location and serves as a pickup location for Green Gooding, New York’s first circular economy rental system, which offers people access to small appliances like air fryers, juicers, and popcorn makers.

As she continues building her business, Vitoux is working toward a TRUE zero-waste certification offered by GBCI. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s important to have a third-party certifier say you’re doing things the right way,” she said.

There are, however, a number of challenges to operating a zero-waste grocery store.

“I think the hardest part about it is the consumer wants Costco prices from their local mom-and-pop shop,” Macrino said. “For people owning a small business, it’s hard to compete against those humongous companies.” Re_grocery tries to pass on to consumers the savings that comes from sourcing in bulk. “We’re really trying to be competitive with our pricing as best as we can,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of options for us to choose from. We really are always looking for other suppliers to give us better competitive pricing.”

(Photo by Arnaud Montagard)

For Vitoux, New York City rent is very high, and because cleaning and refilling the bulk containers is work-intensive, she also has to invest a lot in her workforce. Plus, because the number of package-free stores in the U.S. is still relatively small, systemic supports like the ones present in her home country do not exist.

In France, after package-free stores started booming in the early 2010s, she said, the government developed rules and regulations for hygiene and sanitization to govern them. Additionally, a zero-waste business association offers training and support to store owners and supply chains for bulk products developed because of the increased demand. (The movement’s ideals are taking hold in the mainstream as well, she said: By 2030, the French government is requiring that grocery stores of more than 4,300 square feet devote at least 20 percent of their sales area to bulk items.)

“The trend in Europe, it was really kind of a grassroots-type of growth and then regulation and supply chain followed,” Vitoux said. “I think it could happen here.”

Ristow sees the bulk aisles of traditional grocery stores as a good option for people looking to cut down on waste without access to a full-on zero-waste shop. At the same time, she hopes that as the package-free grocery movement grows, stores will continue to “invest in the idea of being community sustainability hubs” and will also “find ways to welcome in a larger demographic, maybe people who are more price conscious or need to shop with benefits.”

Some of the most important work these stores are doing, she said, is developing an alternative model to traditional, plastic-heavy grocery stores. “We have to find alternatives that work before we can scale them,” she said.

Macrino, for his part, is committed to figuring out how to scale. “My goal now is how am I going to get this thing so big that I can get a store in every major city and really make a real impact sustainably?” he said. “I think it can be done. And I think we have the tools to do it.”

Ultimately, he hopes for a cultural shift. “Everyone needs to take a step back and think, ‘These short-term instant gratifications are really piling up, and we really need to rethink how we’re operating.’”

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A Guide to Climate-Conscious Grocery Shopping

Christina Cooke — Tue, 07 May 2024 09:00:31 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in the “Revitalizing Home Cooking” issue of The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Between considering the impact of your food choices on your health and on the well-being of the planet—and accounting for the very real constraints of time, money, and accessibility—shopping for groceries can often feel daunting.

Purchasing food exclusively at farmers’ markets or local co-ops and buying 100-percent organic, animal- and earth-friendly products is not a realistic option for most people. So what do you prioritize? And when values conflict—like when a product is nutritious but hard on the environment (in the case of almonds) or produced humanely but packaged poorly (like Animal Welfare Approved milk in a plastic carton)—what do you do?

Sophie Egan, author of How to Be a Conscious Eater: Making Food Choices that Are Good For You, Others, and the Planet and former director of the Health and Sustainability Leadership at The Culinary Institute of America, offers advice for how to shop for the benefit of yourself, others, and the environment—without feeling guilt for the compromises you have to make.

While Egan lays out numerous, specific guidelines in her book, she provides here some key, big-picture concepts to keep in mind as you strive to align your food shopping choices with your values.

Photo credit: Cristin Young

Your shopping choices CAN make a difference in planetary health.

Embrace the incredible power of food choices as a daily climate solution. There’s an incredible call to action from leading global scientists, Project Drawdown in particular, which tells us that of all the climate solutions, the number one is reducing food waste. Number two is eating a plant-rich diet. And what I find so exciting about that is it’s something that every individual can contribute to on a daily basis.

Eat more fruits and vegetables, but drop the binary, all-or-nothing mindset, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

There’s too much black-and-white messaging and all-or-nothing mindsets. You do not have to go vegan to eat sustainably. As an individual or household, the more you’re generally aiming for plant-positive, plant-centric, flexitarian—basically just general emphasis on the delicious, abundant diverse foods from the plant kingdom—that’s great.

It’s a win-win that’s good for the planet and good for your health. It’s far more impactful to be a flexitarian for life than vegan for one summer.

One in 10 Americans eat the recommended value of fruits and vegetables. I often hear, “I don’t buy organic blueberries because they’re too expensive. So therefore, I just don’t buy blueberries.” The perceived hierarchy of produce just gets in the way of people eating more of it, in any form.

“Applaud yourself for eating foods that are supportive of your health and planetary health in whatever ways you have access to, and in whatever frequency is viable for your budget.”

I think whatever way you can enjoy access to fruits and vegetables—frozen, canned, if you grow them yourself—great. If they’re organic or regenerative—great. Truly, just eating more—some, any—is better than none. Applaud yourself for eating foods that are supportive of your health and planetary health in whatever ways you have access to, and in whatever frequency is viable for your budget. The goal is not 100 percent perfection.

From my perspective, conscious eating—trying to eat healthy, sustainably, equitably—is not about a diet. It’s not about hard-and-fast rules. It’s not about a no-no list or self-righteous over-emphasis on only a few foods. It’s not about giving up the foods you love. Food is also joy and deliciousness and heritage and family and connection and community. And don’t have blinders on in the pursuit of more sustainable eating to the crowd out those things that that are equally important.

Make small, strategic changes in your shopping habits that add up to the biggest cumulative impact.

Start with the things you do frequently, the food you eat often. Don’t stress about what you eat on holidays or vacation or birthdays or when you’re traveling and so forth. It’s really the routinized, regular items. What do you and your family eat every weekday for breakfast? What’s your Friday dinner ritual? What are the 10 things that you always buy at the grocery store? That’s where the biggest cumulative impact of you as a conscious eater is really worth the effort.

Start with a simple swap. So, if my weekday lunch is a turkey sandwich every day, look at a couple of times a week swapping avocado toast or a bean-dip sandwich or pita and hummus.

Shop at whatever store is accessible and fits within your budget, and seek out the healthy, sustainable choices there.

If you have to take two buses to get to a certain store and another store you can walk to, that’s a relevant consideration. It’s not just more expensive co-ops and Whole Foods that have healthy, sustainable foods. A tub of plain oats from anywhere is a phenomenally healthy food. Same for a bag or can of beans. Keep in mind that although some stores are full of highly processed junk foods, pretty much all of them tend to have those staple whole grains, legumes, frozen vegetables, and fruits. Sometimes you may just feel more like a salmon swimming up steam to locate them.

Look for trusted third-party certifications.

Third-party certifications can be the referees of values-based marketing claims. If your goal was to have eggs from chickens that are not just cage-free, but truly have more space and are pasture-raised or in more humane living conditions, you would look for a third-party sticker such as Certified Humane Raised & Handled.

It’s not that everyone is expected to memorize all the little stickers. It’s just to know that when there is a third-party entity, it means they went to the trouble of auditing against an evidence-based standard that they deem worthy of the marketing claim, as opposed to taking the company’s word for it.

Editor’s note: Egan shared an excerpt about labels from her book. In “Stickers to Know,” she explains the various certifications you might encounter as you shop. From Certified Organic to Biodynamic to Animal Welfare Approved, she offers this guide to what each certification does or does not mean, who is behind it, and why it’s legit.

When values conflict—for example, when a healthy, organic food is packaged in plastic—in general, put more weight on agricultural practices than on packaging.

More often than not, what good for you is also good for others and the planet. So thankfully, I feel very comfortable saying that the majority of the time, they’re actually in concert. For the handful of times when they are in conflict, it is likely going to be case by case.

Data actually shows that how foods are produced has a far bigger environmental footprint than packaging. Packaging is very popular to focus on because I think it is easier to see; it’s a more tangible concept. But question is, where’s the biggest bang for my buck, environmental impact-wise, and it actually does matter more—emissions, water, land use, biodiversity impacts—how the food is produced. [When choosing between organic milk in a plastic jug and conventional milk in cardboard], I would choose the organic milk and worry less about the packaging.

“If you’re making a choice that doesn’t reflect any of those three dimensions—if it’s not good for you, it’s not good for others, and it’s not good for the planet—how is that really worth your dollars?”

Sometimes, it’s also asking yourself the question, “As compared to what?” Almonds get a really bad rap for high water use, even though they’re super healthy. So that can feel like a conflict. But the problem is, the water use of almonds is looked at in isolation, instead of in comparison to foods like a hamburger or cheese. And when you compare it to those foods, which are not only much, much higher water use, they’re actually worse for you health-wise, you can actually reframe the almond equation to say, “OK, well, I’m eating something that’s healthy, and it uses some water to produce, but it’s better in both dimensions than some other things I might choose, like a beef jerky stick.”

The broader question if they’re in conflict comes down to which dimension you value more. If your own goal is more around supporting women-owned businesses than completely eliminating sugar from your diet, then maybe you feel great buying an indulgent cupcake from a woman-owned bakery for your kid’s birthday party.

If you’re making a choice that doesn’t reflect any of those three dimensions—if it’s not good for you, it’s not good for others, and it’s not good for the planet—how is that really worth your dollars? Maybe another way to navigate that conflict is just to ask yourself, “Is it at least checking one of the boxes on my personal checklist?” That’s a good starting point.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post A Guide to Climate-Conscious Grocery Shopping appeared first on Civil Eats.

A Culinary Worker Strike Could Reshape the Nation’s Restaurants

Christina Cooke — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 08:00:45 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

In early October, thousands of bartenders, culinary workers, and hotel attendants formed a picket line outside eight casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip. It was the largest union demonstration on Las Vegas Boulevard in 20 years.

Since April, the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and the Bartenders Union Local 165 have been negotiating with the city’s three largest companies—MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, and Wynn Resorts—for a new five-year contract. To no avail, says Ted Pappageorge, who has served as the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer since 2022 and was its president for more than a decade before that. “We’ve been respectful, and we’ve been patient,” he says. “But it’s time now to come to the table.”

“To get through the pandemic, people did extra—they did more to save their own jobs, to help save the companies—everybody pitched in. But [it became clear that] regardless of the sacrifices you make, you’re dispensable.”

Meanwhile in Detroit, about 3,700 food and beverage and other workers at the city’s three casinos walked out on strike a few days after the Las Vegas action, demanding improved wages and working conditions.

Across the United States, the labor movement has gained strength in recent years. And while food system workers have historically been less organized than other industries, they are now more frequently using their collective power to push for demands that benefit workers.

In addition to higher wages, health care, and pensions, the Las Vegas culinary union is also fighting for a reduction of workload, expanded on-the-job safety protections including panic buttons to cut down on sexual harassment and assault by customers, and stronger technology protections that guarantee workers advanced notification if a new technology will be introduced that will affect their job, as well as health care and severance pay if they are laid off because of new technology.

While the picketing in early October was meant to apply pressure to the companies, union members have authorized their leaders to declare an active strike at any time. And with the Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix race coming up in November, as well as numerous holiday festivities, a strike would cause challenges for the owners of many properties.

Pappageorge recently took a break from negotiations to explain what led to the latest action, how it fits into history, and what this picket line means for the labor movement across the country.

Ted Pappageorge, the culinary union’s secretary-treasurer, says massive corporations cannot leave their workers behind as they reap massive profits. (Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226)

What led up to workers picketing the Strip in early October?

We came through quite something during the pandemic. We were 25 percent back to work in 2020; 50 percent in 2021; and 80 percent back to work in 2022. Normally we were around 60,000 workers, around 50,000 dues-paying members in Las Vegas, and we leveled off around 40,000. The workers just didn’t come back.

It was for a few reasons. One was companies bringing in technology that eliminates jobs, and another was companies not bringing back workers and not having the same amount of service [but upping their prices]. Like you may not get your hotel room cleaned daily, but they’re still charging you rates that are 30 percent higher than what they were pre-pandemic. And now they have fewer workers doing more work.

All those things put together have given these companies incredible margins. I mean, the Las Vegas economy is on fire. Companies are setting incredible records. [But workers aren’t seeing corresponding improvements.] There are a lot of young people entering the workforce, and many ask, “How am I gonna own a home?” Forget about that. In Las Vegas, we’ve got this whole issue of Wall Street landlords buying up housing, buying up apartments, Airbnbs. Rents are up roughly 40 percent in the last three years. If you want to try to put your kids in college, or you’re mid-life, it’s harder and harder to get by. And if you’re nearing retirement, Social Security is extremely important, but it’s not enough.

These companies are on the wrong track. And we’re trying to push them to understand that time’s running out.

What about this moment has prompted the potential for strikes of these magnitudes?

This is not a Vegas phenomenon. It’s happening all over the country. To get through the pandemic, people did extra—they did more to save their own jobs, to help save the companies—everybody pitched in. But the pandemic made it very clear to workers that regardless of the sacrifices you make, you’re dispensable [in the eyes of the company]. And that’s the message that has come out of this—whether you’re a nurse, or you worked in a grocery store or a hotel.

These massive corporations have been merging and gaining power. Wall Street private equity influence is very powerful, and workers are fearful of being left behind. And that’s something that we see at our sister local in Detroit. We sent staff to help with the strike. Folks have really taken a hit after sacrificing during the pandemic, and there’s a lot of anger and nervousness about where these massive corporations are trying to go.

“We think service workers deserve to own their own homes and have health care, and to be able to take care of their kids.”

How does what’s happening in Las Vegas and Detroit fit into the larger landscape of food and beverage workers across the country?

The reality is a lot of our jobs across the country are poor people’s jobs when they’re not [connected to a] union. If you’re a server, you might do a little better than the cook. But restaurant jobs, room-cleaning jobs—if they’re not union, generally, it’s folks just getting by.

I was born and raised in Las Vegas. My parents worked in hotels. My grandfather worked in the food industry here. And a lot of us are like that. But the difference is we’ve been able to create a standard of living—through long, nasty strikes, really. We’ve been able to get health care and have job security in a restaurant or hotel, which normally doesn’t happen. We’ve been able to create jobs with security, health care, and pensions. We have a housing fund that helps people buy homes. We have a free legal services fund. What we’ve been able to do here is something that helps raise all boats.

The volume of workers here [has historically been very high]. Pre-pandemic, we [numbered] almost 65,000 with the bartender’s union, which is affiliated with us. Around the country, it’s a little different. But we think service workers deserve to own their own homes and have health care, and to be able to take care of their kids. And so our Culinary Workers Union—we’re part of Unite Here—is fighting and standing up and organizing.

The push for union protection is building across the U.S., including for food and farmworkers. What do you see as the biggest challenges confronting that movement?

I think companies have gotten addicted to these profit margins since the pandemic. These are massive corporations; they’re not mom-and-pop restaurants that we’re talking about. People look at MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, or Wynn Resorts, and they get it, they’re all over the world. You have to be able to join together to have the power to beat them.

One of the big issues is the decline of the labor movement [in recent decades]. You’ve got to have scale to be able to take on these companies. It’s a romantic notion that workers can just get together and win against big corporations—it doesn’t happen. If you want to beat Starbucks, it’s not about 30 workers and a locally owned franchise. You’ve got to beat the corporation. Labor has got to say, “we’re going to put X amount of money and resources and manpower into working with non-union workers and organizing.”

Culinary workers, bartenders, and hotel attendants strike in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 12, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Culinary Workers Union Local 226)

How is this movement for food and beverage workers different from others you’ve seen in your 30-year career?

There’s this idea that in Vegas we’ve been able to succeed because it’s easier. It’s not; it’s tougher. These companies are massive. They’re extremely powerful. It’s like a steel mill town or a coal town. But we’ve been one of the fastest-growing local unions over the last 25 years across the country in a right-to-work state. In other words, legally workers don’t have to pay their union dues, and they would get all the union benefits that we negotiate.

I think there’s understanding now that we can do this, and so I’m very optimistic about that. But it takes real sacrifice and real commitment. If you look at all the polling, the favorability of unions and the idea of belonging to the union is at its highest peak in the last 30 years. And it’s not because unions are doing something different; it’s because workers are seeing the fact that these massive corporations are gonna leave them behind.

It’s going to take unions willing to lay down massive funding to support workers and then workers willing to risk their jobs, and risk their families—to go on strike. It’s a very serious decision. But if workers have a plan to win and are backed up by the labor movement, there is incredible opportunity right now.

What counts as a victory for the Culinary Union, and how could that shape the working conditions throughout the country?

If you win $10 an hour tomorrow, but you can still be replaced by technology and AI, then what do you have? Nothing.

After five years, we’ve got this protection that helps workers deal with technology. Throughout our industry, we’ve been sharing that, and we understand that other unions have been able to go in that same direction.

I think folks are ready to have that fight. In Las Vegas, we’re trying to send a message to these companies that it’s time. And if not, we’re going to have a strike deadline and we’ll end up joining our Detroit brothers and sisters on the picket line.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Congress Likely to Preserve OSHA Loophole That Endangers Animal Ag Workers

Christina Cooke — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 08:00:17 +0000

Members of Congress will likely reapprove a policy that may be obscuring the deaths of hundreds of animal agriculture workers—and which leaves the vast majority without any oversight or protection—despite concerns from worker advocates and a key legislator.

A little-known appropriations rider has been attached to the budget of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency that oversees the American workforce, every year since 1976. The rider prohibits OSHA from spending money to regulate or investigate injuries or deaths that happen on small farms that do not have temporary labor camps.

Small farms are defined as those with 10 or fewer employees. Because the industry has consolidated operations over the last few decades, however, the rider reaches far beyond farms that could colloquially be called “small.”

“The rider puts small farm workers, who are already part of one of the country’s most dangerous workplaces, in harm’s way, with an outsized impact on racial and ethnic minorities.”

Instead, it often excludes from protection workers employed by complex corporations that are responsible for hundreds or thousands of animals on large farms—farms that, because of automation, employ very few people. This circumstance leaves those workers no way to report unsafe conditions and no recourse for them or their families if they are injured or killed.

Last year, a Civil Eats investigation revealed the scope of the rider’s reach: It exempts the vast majority—96 percent—of meat, dairy, and poultry operations that hire workers in the U.S. from OSHA oversight. And yet, between 2011 and 2020, around 85 percent of the deaths associated with animal agriculture happened at operations not under federal OSHA’s jurisdiction. During that decade, 1,006 people died in the animal agriculture industry, and only 149 of those deaths were investigated by the federal agency.

Since 2003, our investigation found, more than 13 people have drowned or asphyxiated in manure pits at dairies. Others have died after being attacked, gored, or trampled by cows or bulls, getting entangled in or run over by heavy machinery, or suffocating in piles of hay, grain bins, and silos. Many workers have also lost fingers, arms, and legs in accidents. And some have mistakenly injected themselves with vaccines meant for animals or drunk poisonous chemicals from unmarked containers thinking they were water.

President Joe Biden nevertheless included the rider on the first page of the proposed OSHA budget presented to Congress in March. Congress deliberates, then approves the nation’s budget annually before October 1. The White House did not respond to questions about Biden’s decision to continue to exclude workers at small dairy, poultry, and livestock operations from OSHA protections.

OSHA said officials take seriously their mission to keep workplaces as safe as possible and, faced with the small-farm rider, the agency “tries to utilize whatever remaining tools we have” to protect all agricultural workers.

A spokesperson for the president referred general questions about the OSHA budget to Doug Parker, OSHA’s assistant secretary of labor. Parker said OSHA officials take seriously their mission to keep workplaces as safe as possible and, faced with the small-farm rider, the agency “tries to utilize whatever remaining tools we have” to protect all agricultural workers.

The agricultural lobby, led by organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, has long led the charge to oppose regulation and worker protection, including efforts to remove or adjust the small-farm rider.

Republicans generally say they support the rider as a means of upholding the agriculture industry and rural economies, although the small farms purportedly bolstered are in decline as farms consolidate. And though Democrats have voiced support for underrepresented workers in other industries, few have been willing to take on the small-farm exemption.

Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), who has led previous efforts to remove the rider from House budgets, continues to insist on its removal. “The rider puts small farm workers, who are already part of one of the country’s most dangerous workplaces, in harm’s way, with an outsized impact on racial and ethnic minorities,” DeLauro said. “There is no good reason OSHA should not be able to monitor 96 percent of animal-ag operations. We need to bring our regulations into the 21st century and protect workers.”

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), which created the Fair Food Program to improve conditions for farmworkers picking tomatoes in Florida, also believes all agriculture workers should have government protection. “The size of an employer or agricultural operation—regardless of the subsector of the economy to which it belongs—should not determine whether workers have a safe and dignified workplace,” said Lupe Gonzalo, CIW’s worker education team leader. “All work has dignity, and no farmworker should have to forfeit their human rights when they go to work.”

Part of a Bigger Anti-Regulatory Picture

Limiting OSHA’s oversight of workers on farms is part of a larger partisan pattern of targeting and limiting the federal agency. In its first four years of operation, for instance, eight Congressional committees held more than 100 oversight hearings looking to restrict or abolish the agency.

Today, OSHA still lacks jurisdiction over public employees, and numerous other riders limit its ability to regulate workplaces and assign penalties, including a rider on small employers in so-called “low-hazard industries,” whose employees miss less work due to injury than the national average.

In January, Representative Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) attempted to curtail OSHA further by kicking off the current legislative session with the introduction of a bill to abolish the agency.

“In this political climate, accepting the small farm exemption is a nod to the unfortunate political realities of funding OSHA.”

None of the six Republicans with either rank or influence on key budget committees responded to Civil Eats’ questions about their stance on the rider. But now that Republicans hold the majority in the House, experts say the rider’s elimination seems especially unlikely.

Debbie Berkowitz, who spent six years as chief of staff and then a senior policy adviser for OSHA during President Obama’s administration and who now serves as a practitioner fellow with the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, said that OSHA’s existence is often questioned, making it difficult to try to add to the agency’s regulatory powers.

“In this political climate, accepting the small farm exemption is a nod to the unfortunate political realities of funding OSHA,” Berkowitz said.

With many pressing issues before Congress—such as states reducing child labor protections, for example—the rider, which affects a mostly immigrant workforce, is not where lawmakers want to spend their political capital, said Peg Seminario, director of occupational safety and health for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from 1990 to 2019.

“They are aware of the political situation with the votes that are there and that it’s just not possible in this climate,” Seminario said. “You focus on things that are possible.”

Seminario sees the introduction of the rider in President Biden’s proposed OSHA budget as a move designed to pacify detractors. It’s the White House’s way of saying, “‘We’re not going to make a fight over this,’” she said, in order to avoid jeopardizing other priorities.

Nevertheless, Emma Scott, associate director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, believes the issue of eliminating the small farm rider could be timely.

“There’s additional attention coming to child labor in the farming sector, so it’s a good opportunity to bring attention to the kinds of policies that foster this risky environment,” Scott said. “But it can be one of those things that people seem to feel, because it’s been one way for so long, there’s nothing that anyone can do—even though policymakers could.”

A Recent Push to Remove the Rider

Because of the current balance of power in Congress, there is little momentum to remove the near 50-year-old small-farm rider. But in the last three years, the exemption has faced a challenge to its existence for the first and only time in its history.

Under Representative DeLauro’s leadership—and with Democrats in control of the House—in fiscal years 2020, 2021, and 2022, the House passed appropriations bills that kept the small-farm and other riders out of the OSHA budget. In each of those three years, however, the rider was added back in during House and Senate budget negotiations.

“There are a lot of opportunities for not just mischief, but for real damage in the appropriations process,” Seminario said. “The thing about appropriations is there are hundreds of amendments that get filed to a bill. There’s a lot of back and forth during this process between staff, between the majority and the minority. There’s a lot of horse-trading that goes on” as lawmakers sacrifice lower priorities for higher ones.

The fact that the rider is enmeshed with other issues—and that budget negotiation is such a massive, complicated process—also works against its chances of removal, Seminario said. “The whole government is in play,” she said.

Since getting rid of the small farm rider would be part of the same budgeting process as getting rid of something like the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits funds from being spent on abortion, the two issues could potentially be pitted against each other. “Which one is going to win?” Seminario said. “There are a lot of other things that are a whole lot more important to people than worker safety.”

“The agriculture industry has enormous power over the federal government—Democrats as well as Republicans.”

Likely for this reason, nearly a dozen of the lawmakers we contacted declined to comment on the issue, including those often willing to take a stance on labor issues—Senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts).

As to the White House’s inaction in its own budget, “It’s disappointing, but it’s not surprising,” said Jordan Barab, who was deputy assistant secretary of OSHA from 2009 to January 2017 and a senior labor policy advisor to the House Education and Labor Committee for two years after that.

“The agriculture industry has enormous power over the federal government—Democrats as well as Republicans,” said Barab. “So, it’s extremely difficult, or impossible, to get anything through Congress or even sometimes through a regulatory process, that faces strong opposition from the agriculture community.”

Strength of the Ag Lobby

That agricultural lobby is stronger than ever. The meat and dairy industry—which has consolidated so deeply over the last few decades that four companies control the majority of the market in each industry—has powerful sway in Washington.

Meat, poultry, and dairy companies and their associated trade groups, including the American Farm Bureau, spend heftily to influence policy, generally promoting an anti-regulatory agenda. In 2021, for example, Tyson Foods spent almost $2 million lobbying at the federal level, and the National Pork Producers Council spent $2.2 million.

Meanwhile, isolated behind barn walls in rural areas, animal-ag workers are not organized and have no such advocates to counter the tide.

“All the OSHA rules that I am aware of pretty much—in general industry, and many of the ones in construction—come from the unions pushing for them, petitioning,” said Seminario of the AFL-CIO. “And who is there advocating on behalf of farmworker and agriculture rights? Not a lot of people. There’s not the organized worker power that there has been in some of these other sectors.”

Over the decades, a few lawmakers have tried to make targeted adjustments to the protections the rider denies—allowing OSHA to investigate deaths, but not impose penalties, on small farms if the victims were children, for example, and passing labor laws designed to protect children from dying on farms. The agricultural lobby, however, has pushed back—and defeated—the attempts at incremental change.

Agricultural lobby groups and animal agriculture corporations have demurred comment on this issue, with only the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) responding to questions. A NPPC spokesperson did not comment directly on the OSHA rider but instead pointed to voluntary safety programs like the USDA’s Pork Quality Assurance Plus (PQA Plus), which provides on-farm certification covering animal well-being and worker safety, as evidence of support for laborers.

“Nothing is more valuable to the success of our industry than having trained, knowledgeable workers to keep America’s pig farms operating safely,” the spokesperson said.

In 12 states and Puerto Rico, state-run OSHAs don’t observe the federal exemption in place everywhere else. If the rider was eliminated at the federal level as well, OSHA would receive reports about hospitalizations and fatalities from small farms across the U.S. and would be in a position to respond and investigate where needed. According to Barab, even if OSHA did not receive a huge boost in funding, the additional attention on small farms “would encourage compliance even over and above the actual ability of OSHA to inspect,” he said.

Some policy experts see incremental tweaks—investigations that respond to critical emergencies, for example, or that respond to small farm deaths without issuing penalties—as potentially valuable if the rider cannot be eliminated.

“These workers do some of the most dangerous jobs in the country,” Barab said, “and there’s absolutely no reason why you should have fewer rights because you work for a small entity than if you work for a larger entity, especially when it comes to such dangerous work. The whole thing is unjustified. It’s an outrage. Workers are dying needlessly because of this rider.”

While worker advocates and lawmakers do not expect movement on the issue under the current political conditions, Barab believes momentum could develop if Democrats controlled both chambers and had 60 votes in the Senate. “I’m sure it’s possible that under a better political environment, there could again be proposals to remove the rider,” Barab said. “I wouldn’t rule it out at all.”

The post Congress Likely to Preserve OSHA Loophole That Endangers Animal Ag Workers appeared first on Civil Eats.

What Cuts to the Food Safety Net Mean for People’s Lives

Christina Cooke — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 08:01:23 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

See the related feature article about the large-scale impacts of benefits cuts.

This spring, the pandemic-era increases to benefits offered through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) ended in most states, substantially reducing the monthly dollar amounts many food-insecure households receive to buy food. Together with inflated food costs, the end of the emergency allotments—and revised work requirements for SNAP—has meant that many people across the U.S. are struggling to put food on the table.

To shed light on the problem we spoke with four people—two food-assistance recipients, a farmworker, and a school food professional—about their day-to-day realities and what the dismantling of the food safety net means for them.

Kyler Daniels, SNAP Recipient

By CHRISTINA COOKE

Kyler Daniels lives in North Carolina with her boyfriend and 4-year-old toddler, where she works for Down East Partnership for Children while completing her Master’s degree in social work. She has been receiving SNAP benefits since 2019.

When you were getting SNAP originally, what difference did that make for you and your family?

It was security for us. We started off getting about $212 or $215 each month. Then three or four months later, we started getting the maximum amount for our household because of COVID. Then we were earning about $600 total. We didn’t have to worry about meals. We didn’t have to worry about supplementing.

We could get our daughter the snacks she wanted—the fruit cups, yogurt, and applesauce. We could engage her in the shopping experience without having to worry about how much things were going to cost.

You said in April, you received $31 in SNAP benefits, and in May, you did not receive any benefits at all. What types of shopping decisions are you having to make given this decrease in support now?

Now, I go into the grocery store and try to crunch numbers. You don’t want to get up [to the register] and overspend and then have to go back and decide what to do.

At the beginning of the month, we look at what we have. . . [and] decide right then how much we’re going to take off for food after we pay the bills that need to get paid. If there is a bill we don’t have enough money for, we decide which one we will we get less penalties from—which one will work with us, which one will extend the deadline.

When I know we need it, I will [pick up shifts driving] for DoorDash. But then I’m tired all the time—when do we get to sleep?

I imagine access to healthier food is harder right now.

Yeah, definitely. Inflation has really hiked up the prices on things. Trying to get lettuce for a salad, or organic foods is higher. So, we don’t do that as often.

How does your daughter complicate the decisions that you’re making around food?

We wouldn’t eat at times to make sure that she had food—or we’d just eat noodles, something quick that we can make at the house—to make sure she can eat what she wants. She’s a picky eater. I don’t want to force her to eat something that she doesn’t like and then see her be hungry.

Are there challenges to navigating the benefit system? Did you run into any stumbling blocks?

I have never been 100 percent sure about why I received the benefits that I did. The application is not user-friendly. I am college-educated, getting a master’s degree, and there are things on there I don’t understand. For the average American, trying to get those benefits—and already being stressed out about needing them, with the negative stigma that goes along with it—is frustrating enough.

Can you describe the emotional toll on you?

Emotionally, there will be times where I would feel like a failure because we’re very low [on money], and it’s not the end of the month [so I’m not] about to get paid. It’s like, what do we do now? We’re constantly encouraging each other and ourselves to keep going. Nobody should have to deal with that on a daily basis. I feel like a bad parent for not being able to provide whatever my daughter needs, whatever she wants, especially when it comes to something as basic as food.

What would you like to see in this upcoming farm bill for SNAP and other programs that help people in need?

I would like it to be easier for people to apply [for SNAP]. If we had the revenue to give people the extra benefit during the pandemic, what is the difference now, especially if you are charging so much more for food?

There’s more that goes into needing food than what we make—I don’t think that [income] should be the first thing you look at. I moved in with my sister, so I don’t have a mortgage or a lease right now, but I’m still paying [for housing]. It’s hard to [reflect that expense] on the SNAP application.

So what do you wish that people—and lawmakers—who are in favor of cutting SNAP and other benefits programs understood about the people who use those programs?

We want the same things that they have. And not every person who needs assistance looks the same and has the same circumstances. It’s not black and white; there are areas of gray.

Adela Martinez, Farmworker

By JULIA KNOERR

Adela Martinez is a seasonal farmworker living in Immokalee, Florida—the nation’s “tomato capital.” The following responses have been translated from Spanish, and touch on many of the same themes as a longer feature on community responses to food insecurity in Immokalee that ran on Civil Eats.

Where do you and members of your community access food? How do challenges in access shape daily life?

Here in Immokalee, the [farms] primarily grow a lot of vegetables: tomatoes, chiles, cucumbers, and fruits in some areas as well. The growers bring them to a market area, and I buy food there when I don’t go to Walmart or Sam’s [Club]. Although I could buy food somewhere nearby, I [often] go further. I usually look for the place with the most affordable prices.

There are places that give out food, like vegetables, noodles, and rice. I look for food in the most affordable places because I don’t have a steady job. I’ve used coupons; I’ve used everything that I have at home so that I don’t waste anything. It’s also difficult for people who live far away from the places that donate food. Although they might want to go, sometimes they can’t drive, it’s very hot outside, or they have small children.

How has your access to food changed since the pandemic, and did changes in SNAP allowances impact you?

It’s a truly great help. There was an increase twice, and I didn’t want to spend it just anywhere. I had to look at what I bought and get what was affordable. In the small stores here, I have noticed that a single banana can cost you $1, but in Walmart, you can get lots of bananas for $1.50. [SNAP assistance] is very helpful for me. Now they don’t give as much, but it’s something.

I always try to economize what I can in every way. During the pandemic, things weren’t like they are now. Sometimes [the assistance] was enough for me to buy everything for two weeks—meat and lots of fruits and vegetables. But now, it’s not. I go to Walmart to buy what I need, and I sometimes spend $250 or $300. Sometimes I get extra things, but with this [reduction] and the lack of work here now, you don’t have the luxury of buying what you want. You think about everything: your rent, phones, and many things. Now I don’t buy anything like $250 or $300 worth of food. What they give me now [in assistance] for a month lasts me one week.

What are some potential solutions to improving food access in Immokalee?

The Cultivate Abundance community garden is a blessing for me. When I wasn’t working, we would go there to help, and they would give us herbs and other things. For me, that’s a lot, because in reality, if you go to the store, you spend $5 or $6 on herbs—for cilantro, for a cabbage. If [they were] able to do [the gardening] on a larger scale, it would be a great help for many people. The store owners take advantage of people who don’t have a car to get to more affordable stores. If there was a place that could help harvest more vegetables and fruits, that would be [helpful].

This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Tricia Kastelitz, School Food Professional

By ANNA GUTH

Tricia Kastelitz is the coordinator of nutrition and student wellness education at Suffolk City Public School District in Virginia. She is one of many in roles like hers who have had to find creative ways to feed families during difficult times.

How does food insecurity shape day-to-day life for members of your school community?

I wish more people could understand that food insecurity is a fluid situation, and it can go up and down during the month. It is also a spectrum. Sometimes, when we think about food insecurity, we only think about the students who don’t have any food at home. But there are also a lot of people in that gray range who eat every day, but maybe they can’t afford [to buy] healthy foods. Or, the kids are eating every day, but their parents are skipping meals. Or, they eat every day, but a lot of their food is coming from a food pantry or some other social service. I think it’s important to remember that those children, and families, are also food insecure.

After the federal universal meals offered during the pandemic ended, how did access to food in your district change?

We are a CEP [Community Eligibility Provision] district, which means that all our students are still eating free breakfast and lunch because of the amount of students who are “directly certified.” We actually opted into the CEP program in the middle of the pandemic, so our students and our families never really felt a difference between the universal feeding and free CEP meals we offer now. But I think making permanent universal free meals is definitely a concern on the horizon. We are a borderline district: Forty [percent] is the number to qualify for CEP. Last year, we were under 40.

As the menu planner, can you describe the challenges of shifting from remote meal deliveries back to in-person meals?

During COVID, we had to shift to mostly pre-packaged foods, mostly for safety reasons. The downside was that we became more reliant on those types of foods. Trying to make that transition back has been very challenging. Our biggest challenge right now is labor, and we are always looking to hire more people so we can begin to provide more home-cooked meals. We were really fortunate that our district chose to pay all of our [cafeteria] staff completely during the pandemic, but a lot of our older staff just decided not to come back, either because of health concerns or they had gotten used to being home.

How have recent cuts to the food safety net, following the end of the COVID public health emergency, affected your community?

The reduction in SNAP benefits often leads our families to make up that money elsewhere and to really try to find more resources. We have some close community partners—food banks and other feeding sites. I know they have [seen more demand] in the past few months. Recently, we’ve also had an uptick in people trying to go back and look at their P-EBT [Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer] benefits, [which are still available to families eligible for free or reduced-price school meals this summer]. And that makes me think that people are seeking more resources for food.

What is one thing that our readers could do to better support people in your position?

The more partners who get involved in school nutrition, and the more people who have a finger in the pot, so to speak, the better for everyone. If you feel called to help with school meals, call up your school nutrition department and see what they need. Asking the people you’re trying to help what they need is so, so important—especially in the food web, which is so different depending on where you are.

Jayson Call, Puerto Rico PAN recipient

By LINDSAY TALLEY

For all the shortcomings of SNAP, the situation in Puerto Rico poses even more challenges. The U.S. territory currently uses the Programa de Asistencia Nutricional (PAN), but many Puerto Ricans are hoping Congress will help the territory transition to SNAP instead. Jayson Call, a current PAN beneficiary, explains how this program falls short and why he thinks it’s important to improve food assistance for the people of Puerto Rico.

How did you first learn about PAN? Were you on the program growing up, or did you begin to access the benefits as an adult?

My family did use it for a little while when I was a child, before they were able to establish themselves economically and leave the program. But I went on PAN as an adult because I have a child with type 1 diabetes. I had to stop working to help him.

The application system is very complicated, and every time I submitted, they denied it. But then I found out that I could submit my son’s medical expenses and my [medical expenses], and with that they qualified me.

My son’s expenses are about $4,000 a month in medication. It’s not easy. If I go to work, I can’t make enough money to maintain the cost of living and my children’s medication. It was a tough process to apply because not even the employees who work there advise you correctly [to figure out how to present your finances to qualify for food assistance]. They said, [because I made $1 too much] I didn’t qualify. For a dollar! And if you don’t have someone to help you, you don’t know how to qualify for the program. I was looking for alternatives for months until someone told me [about] the medical expense [deduction].

How does food insecurity shape your day-to-day life, and the lives of other members of your community?

We have seen how inflation has [raised prices]. There are times when you say, “How is it possible that with $100 or $200 10 years ago, I could fill my cart?” Today with the $400 that [PAN] gives me, it doesn’t come close. And now there is a third-quality product [food that is lower quality than what is sold in the mainland U.S.] that you have to buy in order to eat the same thing you ate before. Many people, a lot of senior citizens, have even less and have to choose between buying food, personal toiletries, or medications.

What is one thing that could make a substantial difference in the lives of food-insecure Puerto Ricans?

The creation of community kitchens is really needed. A fund for the people to convert abandoned schools into community kitchens. Because, remember, communities know what is needed and how to solve things here.

Another thing that could be beneficial is more food banks. Right now there is just a single [food bank in Puerto Rico,] in Carolina, and it really can’t keep up. We need one in Ponce, one in Ceiba. It’s not like in the United States, where many of the churches have food banks.

How have recent events, from the hurricane to the earthquakes to the pandemic, affected access to food?

The PAN benefit card [system] depends on electricity. If there is no electricity, you cannot buy anything. And that affected us a lot when Hurricane María hit. If the electricity was out, the system was completely down. Useless. Also, if for any reason the port of Puerto Rico is affected, there is no [way to get food onto the island, which imports about 85 percent of what it consumes].

What can our readers do to better support and help people in your position?

Any organizations or individuals that are able to send funds to Puerto Rico could partner with local organizations and individuals in order to recuperate some of the abandoned schools (of which there are many) and turn them into community kitchens.

These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The post What Cuts to the Food Safety Net Mean for People’s Lives appeared first on Civil Eats.

How the Jackson Water Crisis Is Hurting Its Restaurants

Christina Cooke — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 08:00:18 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

When historic flooding caused the pumps to fail at a water treatment plant in Jackson, Mississippi, last August, leaving the city without running water for about a week, restaurateur Jeff Good had to close all three of his establishments.

Even when water finally did return to the tap, it was unsafe to drink. In order to operate under the nine-week boil-water notice, Good had to buy bottled water for baking, washing vegetables, and filling customers’ glasses. He also had to turn off his ice machines and soda fountain and serve commercial ice and canned sodas.

“It’s $2,000 per restaurant per week in extra expenses,” said the owner of BRAVO! Italian restaurant, the Broad Street bakery and café, and Sal & Mookie’s pizza and ice cream joint. “So that’s $18,000 over nine weeks for three restaurants. And we never get that money back.”

“If we can fix this water system and start a different narrative, investment can come back and the city can rebirth, and we can be a great story.”

Other restaurateurs also reported damage. At Johnny T’s Bistro and Blues in the Farish Street Historic District, John Tierre bought the same extra supplies—and paid his staff to come in one to two hours early each day to unpack and distribute them and boil dishwater, Tierre said.

At Lou’s Full-Serv, owner Louis LaRose said, “We went from having a good summer and a little bit of cash flow to basically zero cash flow. We were so slow that it literally almost bankrupted us.”

The August water crisis resolved, at least for the short term, after Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency and brought in the Mississippi National Guard to distribute safe water and oversee emergency repairs, and after President Joe Biden declared Jackson a disaster area and sent in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with resources and assistance.

While the city’s water shutdown made national news, it wasn’t the first time water issues have plagued the Mississippi capital. Decades of deferred maintenance to the crumbling water system—some parts of which are more than 100 years old—coupled with recent extreme weather events like freezes and flooding have brought the system to its breaking point.

Some see mismanagement and poor planning at the local level at the root of the water crisis. Others see racism as the cause; as a progressive city that is 84 percent Black in a conservative, white-led state, the city for years has not often received the state support it has requested to address its challenges.

But now, for the first time, the federal government has stepped in in a major way. In November 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice appointed a third-party manager—water systems expert Ted Henifin—to fix the drinking water and the associated billing system, allocating $600 million for that job exclusively.

With the repair process underway, many hope this can be a turning point—for the city’s residents and also for the restaurants and other businesses that keep the city’s economy afloat and its identity intact.

Good says repairing the infrastructure is a crucial first step. “If we can fix this water system and start a different narrative, investment can come back and the city can rebirth, and we can be a great story,” he said.

Ramon Davis stocks bagged ice at Babalu in Jackson during the September 2022 water crisis. (Photo © Rory Doyle)

A Long-Failing Water System

Jackson has faced population decline and severe economic challenges over the last few decades. The city shrunk from around 203,000 residents in 1980 to around 150,000 residents in 2021 as many white people fled the city limits, taking their wealth—and tax dollars—with them.

While the suburbs surrounding Jackson—nonexistent in the ’80s—are growing and thriving, the city’s 26 percent poverty rate is more than twice the national rate of 11.6 percent.

“Our city has been tanking year after year,” said Good, who in addition to owning three restaurants is past president of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce. “Every system we have—social, educational, economic, public safety, public works—is strained and failing. And that’s led to the outflow of care and economics. We have hit rock bottom.”

Without a solid revenue stream over the last few decades—and with problems including residents altering their meters to avoid paying for water and the 2012 installation of a faulty water meter and billing system by the German technology company Siemens—city leaders have not had the money necessary to maintain the water system. And with severe worker shortages and high turnover, the water department does not have enough operators on staff to conduct preventative maintenance.

Amidst this dysfunction and neglect, Jackson residents and businesses became accustomed to regular service shut offs, line breaks, boil-water notices, low pressure, and exposure to lead and harmful bacteria like E. coli. In March 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an emergency administrative order for the Jackson water system—one of many official warnings about the city’s water—saying it put consumers’ health at risk.

Then in February 2021, when the winter freeze took out the Texas power grid, old pipes in Jackson froze and burst, leaving the city without clean water for more than a month.

“A two- to three-day boil notice poses challenges for restaurants,” said LaRose of Lou’s Full-Serv. “You multiply that by 50 days, and you can’t wash lettuce, you can’t wash fruits and vegetables, you’ve got to boil water and cool it or buy distilled water. Your costs go through the roof.”

“My mom and my aunt say, ‘You’ve got this big fancy restaurant in Jackson, but y’all don’t have running water.’ It’s kind of embarrassing that in 2023 a city doesn’t have running water.”

Tensions between the city and state leaders have been running high, including a particularly hostile relationship between Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Jackson’s progressive mayor, and Reeves, Mississippi’s conservative governor. Reeves has described the water situation as “a crisis of incompetence,” implicating Lumumba, and Lumumba has characterized the state’s dealings with Jackson as “racist” and “paternalistic.” When Jackson asked for $47 million from the state to fix the pipes after the big freeze to try to get ahead of the problem, for instance, it received $3 million, 6 percent of the requested amount.

Though the city’s water system has stabilized since the August crisis, there have been a number of boil-water notices issued, and people generally don’t trust Jackson water, which makes them wary of eating out, restaurant owners say.

“My mom and my aunt say, ‘You’ve got this big fancy restaurant in Jackson, but y’all don’t have running water,’” Tierre said. “It’s kind of embarrassing that in 2023 a city doesn’t have running water.”

Good sees water as vital to restaurants’ success—and restaurants as vital to the city’s success. “I hire 210 people—they’re all Jacksonians,” he said. In his 30 years in business, he estimates he has hired between 10,000 and 20,000 people. “I am a major job provider here, and a major quality-of-life provider, and an economic engine,” he said.

After the August outage, Good organized a coalition of 46 Jackson restaura teurs, including Tierre and LaRose, asking city, county, and state representatives to cooperate to solve the problems. Without a solid fix, he said, “we’re going to become a burned-out donut—we will be the hole and around us will be great wealth and prosperity.”

Brent’s Drugs manager Sarah Donald pours bottled water into a coffee pot during the September 2022 water crisis. (Photo © Rory Doyle)

Neglect, Bad Planning, Racism—or All Three?

Some Jacksonians blame local lawmakers. “There has been mismanagement through local government and leaders for so long,” said LaRose. “I don’t care if they’re blue or red, it has been mismanaged. People choose not to work with one another, and nothing gets done.”

Tierre of Johnny T’s sees the issue as primarily about money. “You can shake it how you want to, but the bottom line is, it’s economics, it’s funding,” he said.

Others, however, see racism at the root. In September 2022, the NAACP filed a complaint with the EPA under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing a history of discrimination through the repeated rejection of requests for federal funds to address the problem.

“The water crisis in Jackson is just the latest example of a negligent—if not racist—pattern of underfunding basic water services for Black communities,” added Abre’ Conner, NAACP’s Director of Environmental and Climate Justice. “Our country has a longstanding history of mistreating and neglecting Black communities, putting the lives of men, women, and children at risk.”

Cindy Ayers Elliott, owner of the 68-acre Foot Print Farms, which sits within the Jackson city limits, sees the disinvestment as an intentional move on the part of conservative state leaders to disempower the Black city and take control, as has happened in other parts of the U.S.

“The policies that they are pushing and the legislation that they have been passing, without a doubt, brings you back into the ’40s or ’50s,” she said. “They keep this state depressed, deprived of resources that [should be] available to the people . . . It’s just a different way they’re lynching now. And it’s with the dollar, and with something as basic as water.”’

Indeed, in recent years, the state has repeatedly attempted to gain control of the city’s spending, services, and infrastructure. State leaders have tried to take over the Jackson airport and expand the jurisdiction of the Capitol police. Then, in January, Republican state legislators introduced a bill that would place Jackson’s water systems under state control, giving the state access to the $600 million designated by the federal government for the repairs.

Notices posted on the social media pages of Broad Street Baking Company & Cafe and Lou’s Full-Serve during the 2022 water crisis.

‘I Believe in the City; I Fight for the Underdog’

Since he started, Henifin, the third-party manager, has set to work on 13 main priorities. To rebuild trust, he has created a water bill debt-relief program for residents who were unfairly overcharged.

Additionally, Henifin’s team is identifying leaks in the system and creating plans to replace small-diameter water lines with larger ones. They have also lined up systems for corrosion control and identifying lead.

The restaurateurs Civil Eats spoke to expressed confidence in Henifin’s leadership, and a sense of relief that the water system is in the hands of a competent federal appointee with the money to complete the work. And many are committed to sticking with the city through what they expect to be a long process.

“I understand it won’t get fixed overnight. It’ll probably take 10 to 15 years,” said Tierre. “But I think the people of Jackson are strong. So, we’ll get through it, and we’ll continue to thrive.”

Good is aware he could move across the Pearl River into Rankin County and earn more in sales—without the water issues. “But I believe in the city, and I fight for the underdog. I have a deep-seated belief that business has a responsibility to the community,” he said. “And I tend to believe that we’re going to rebirth, and this is going to be the phoenix from the ashes.”

“I have high hopes,” said LaRose. “If nothing else, I’ve got hope.”

The post How the Jackson Water Crisis Is Hurting Its Restaurants appeared first on Civil Eats.

Perennial Crops Boost Biodiversity Both On and Off Farms. Researchers Explain How.

Christina Cooke — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 09:00:53 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue in your inbox.

We have long reported on the many climate and food security benefits of perennial crops, whose roots stay in the soil year-round. But research also shows that perennial agriculture, which includes orchards, agroforestry, silvopasture, and row crops, also helps increase biodiversity—both on the farm and off.

“From an observational standpoint, having more perennials in a system makes sense,” said Ebony Murrell, a lead scientist at The Land Institute, a Kansas-based nonprofit that conducts research to help develop diverse, perennial, and regenerative agricultural systems at scale. “We’re trying to better mimic ecological processes to produce a system that can better provide ecosystem services.”

On farms, perennial crops provide year-round homes for a number of species, from insects to mammals to soil microbes. For instance, a 2022 study that Murrell helped conduct found that flowering perennial border crops support particularly robust pollinator communities. That’s in part because most bees native to the U.S.—like sweat bees and long-horn bees—are solitary and live underground, and they require undisturbed habitat.

A flowering grain legume called sanfoin is good at attracting honeybees and native leafcutting bees, Murrell said, and a sunflower-like native prairie plant called silflower, which is being developed as an oilseed crop, is popular among native bees. “We have so far found over 35 species of bees visiting that one plant,” Murrell said. “We are interested in trying to get it planted in more places to help serve that purpose.”

Additionally, perennial crops like Kernza, the grain developed by The Land Institute, provide habitat for ground-nesting birds and other animals. “A vegetated landscape is going to accommodate species that a tilled, denuded landscape as far as the eye can see does not,” said Tim Crews, chief scientist at The Land Institute and director of its international program. “There are going to be a lot of species that take advantage of it.”

A mallard takes flight from its nest in a Kernza field. (Photo courtesy of courtesy of the University of Manitoba)

Perennials’ long-lived and deeper root systems build more biodiversity underground as well. A study published in January 2020 found the fungal microbiome in the soil of a single stand of Kernza closely overlapped with the soil microbiome of native restored prairie—and was quite distinct from the microbiome of a field planted in a tilled rotation of three annual crops—suggesting that Kernza cropping systems “have the potential to mimic reconstructed natural systems.”

While the microbial community overlap was high across the board, it was particularly high for mutualists, or beneficial fungi that consume organic matter and release nitrogen for the plants, as well as saprophites, or decomposers.

“If you add carbon to soils, you almost always get a pretty big response in terms of the microbial community growing to consume that carbon,” said Crews, one of the study’s authors. “And there’s zero question that the amount of available carbon that gets added to the topsoil of an agricultural field is far greater—many-fold greater—in Kernza compared to annual wheat or any of the annual grains. I mean, there’s so much more root system, and those roots turn over, they die back some every year, and there’s a huge amount of carbon that goes into the soil.” And, he added, higher-functioning beneficial mycorrhizal fungi tend to develop in the undisturbed soil of perennials.

Researchers point out that perennial crops also benefit off-farm biodiversity, because they reduce the negative impacts of traditional agriculture on the environment. “The Mississippi Basin’s annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is from nitrogen leaching out when there are no roots in the soil and there’s no activity,” said Crews. With perennial covers like Kernza, he continues, “the vast, vast majority of nitrate leaching stops.”

Additionally, he said, “There’s increasing evidence that you lose less in nitrous oxide fluxes as a greenhouse gas, because these crops take up the nitrogen so quickly, and year-round—you don’t have times of the year when there are no plants to take up nitrogen.”

Prairie chicks wait for food in their nest in a Kernza field. (Photo credit: Patrick LeHeiget, University of Manitoba)

To make the most of perennials’ ability to produce both on- and off-farm biodiversity, some researchers and farmers are following the example of Indigenous people, who have thoughtfully stewarded landscapes for millennia.

While farmers often rotate their annual crops or plant cover crops during the off season, “the idea with perennial crops is that you want them to stay in the ground for many years, which means you’re not rotating anymore. So how do you take that diversity in time and move it to diversity in space?” Murrell asked. The answer: strategically planting different perennials together to benefit one another.

A few examples: planting silflower with a perennial groundcover like turf grass, which provides a natural weed barrier. Alternating rows of Kernza with rows of alfalfa to provide Kernza with nitrogen and prevent the grain from clumping together, competing with itself, and becoming less productive, which it tends to do after a few years when planted alone. Growing two flowering species that bloom at slightly different times together to support pollinators. Or practicing agroforestry by incorporating trees or shrubs into farming systems, while producing additional forest products like fruit, nuts, or mushrooms.

“The real powerhouse of our agriculture is based on grain crops and grazing crops, but trees are an amazing addition to the toolkit,” said Fred Iutzi, director of research and commercialization with the Savanna Institute. Because they’re perennial and tall in stature, they help create an important year-round diversity of ecosystems in the farm landscape, in addition to supporting a diversity of species, Iutzi said.

“The real powerhouse of our agriculture is based on grain crops and grazing crops, but trees are an amazing addition to the toolkit.”

Several efforts to promote perennial agriculture have received influxes of funding in recent years. As part of last year’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funding program within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the agency dedicated $60 million to agroforestry, for instance.

The Savanna Institute plans to scale up its agroforestry work as a result, said Iutzi. “And that will work hand in glove with the money that’s available for farmer incentives, as farmers will receive free technical assistance here and in making agroforestry a reality on their farms.”

The Savanna Institute also plans to use some of the new funding to measure and document indicators like how agroforestry practices mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and to develop relationships with processors and buyers that might be interested in expanding their Midwest sourcing of perennials like tree fruit and nut crops.

In 2020, the USDA also awarded $10 million to a coalition of farmers, scientists, educators, policymakers, and food industry players to help scale up Kernza production. The five-year Kernza CAP initiative, spearheaded by The Land Institute and the University of Minnesota, recently released its year-two annual report outlining its progress on efforts like creating recommendations for optimizing yield, profitability, and environmental quality and developing supply chains and products.

Iutzi believes that perennials can help solve many of the problems facing the world—and that we need to think of agricultural productivity in a more holistic way that includes factors like biodiversity. “One of the biggest challenges in front of humanity is how we get both ample food while providing a stable climate, healthy soil, clean water, and biodiversity,” he said. “We have to expect both from our agricultural landscapes.”

The post Perennial Crops Boost Biodiversity Both On and Off Farms. Researchers Explain How. appeared first on Civil Eats.

Young People Working for Food Justice in North Carolina

Christina Cooke — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 09:01:36 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in the October issue of the Deep Dish, our monthly newsletter for members. Become a member today to receive the next issue.

Over a few weeks this fall, the youth involved in the Growing Change program have adopted two orphaned cows: One was born in the driving rain of Hurricane Ian and got so wet her mother did not recognize her scent; the other was a rejected twin. The young men, who are part of a project to flip a decommissioned North Carolina prison into a sustainable farm, are bottle-feeding the two animals and plan to introduce them into the farm’s multi-species grazing system soon.

“There should be a term beyond humanely raised,” says Noran Sanford, Growing Change’s founder and executive director, for the love and care the boys are giving the animals.

Seven 14- and 15-year-olds, all on the edge of the criminal justice system, comprise the current group helping convert the Scotland Correctional Facility, abandoned since 2001, into a working farm and education center. (We first reported on the effort in 2020.)

Growing Change is one of seven youth-led food justice organizations across North Carolina that make up the Food Youth Initiative (FYI), a project of NC State University. Other FYI groups include Transplanting Traditions, a community farm led by Karen refugees from Myanmar, PJC Poder Juvenile Campesino, a farmworker youth council affiliated with NC FIELD, and Pupusas for Education, a nonprofit that provides higher education scholarships to undocumented and DACAmented students.

“Youth are going up against the tide all the time,” says FYI’s youth food systems coordinator Bevelyn Ukah. “On the other hand, youth are the best, the most provocative storytellers in the world. In that sense, they’re well positioned and our greatest hope. Not because, ‘Oh my gosh, youth are the future,’ but because of their levels of willingness and courage to push against the status quo.”

The pandemic presented FYI with great challenges: For a couple years, the organization was not able to carry out its central work of convening youth to learn, share ideas, and build off each other’s energy. But the group is finding its footing once again, Ukah says.

“[Young people are] well-positioned and our greatest hope. Not because, ‘Oh my gosh, youth are the future,’ but because of their levels of willingness and courage to push against the status quo.”

Significantly, FYI recently received a $1.7 million grant from Blue Cross Blue Shield to fund racial equity work in food systems. And the organization is once again bringing young people together. In its first in-person effort since the pandemic, about 18 participants and their adult allies painted a food-justice mural on the side of a community food truck that will be used to help prospective chefs and young people launch food businesses and navigate the systemic barriers that often stand in the way. After an eight-month process, they unveiled the completed truck at the Transplanting Traditions farm in June.

“It’s really important to create the space where youth have roots,” said Cecilia Polanco, the director of development of Pupusas for Education, who is also helping lead FYI’s racial equity work. “If they see an injustice or need support, they’ve got supportive adult relationships they can call on. We’re also creating a standard they take into the world with them [where they can say], ‘Actually, this is not right. We can do better.’”

In addition to caring for the baby cows and carrying out other elements of the program’s master plan, the young men at Growing Change are establishing a vermicomposting business using food waste they collect from local residents and businesses. They are also expanding a project they developed during the pandemic to distribute boxes of food to people in need. To stock the boxes, they collect overflow food from the local food bank and partner with local churches to help them establish gardens.

“They’re feeding hungry neighbors,” says Sanford, “but deeper than that, they’re demonstrating that despite their challenges, they can be part of the solution, not the focus of the problem.”

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Absent Federal Oversight of Animal Agriculture Safety, States and Others Step Up for Change

Christina Cooke — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

When he arrived in the United States from Guatemala in 2012, Efrain got a job at a dairy farm in Vermont. There, he slept on a wooden pallet on the floor of the calf barn because his employer didn’t provide housing. Two years later, when he slipped and injured his back on the icy steps at another dairy, he worked the remaining six hours of his shift, afraid of what would happen if he stopped.

Read all the stories in our series:

Animal Agriculture Is Dangerous Work. The People Who Do It Have Few Protections.
Federal OSHA protections don’t apply to 96 percent of the animal agriculture operations that hire workers in America. When people die on the job, the federal agency doesn’t respond 85 percent of the time.
‘I Was Coughing So Hard I Would Throw Up’
Workers at the tens of thousands of hog, chicken, and cow CAFOs in the US face severe respiratory health burdens. The corporate response is risk management.
Biogas Expansion May Compound Worker Risks
Government incentives are driving larger, more crowded CAFOs—while protections for the workers inside lag behind.
Tyson Says Its Nurses Help Workers. Critics Charge They Stymie OSHA.
The company’s on-site care system is emblematic of risk-management practices that disadvantage workers farther down the supply chain.

During his first few years in the country, Efrain, who has asked that we not use his last name for fear of retaliation from immigration authorities, never felt completely safe or secure in his job. That changed in 2018 when his current employer, a medium-sized Vermont dairy, joined Milk with Dignity, a program that sets worker-developed standards for wages, safety, housing, and scheduling, among other things.

Now, the 30-year-old works alongside a few other hired workers. He is paid more, his schedule is stable, he has a full day off every week, and he can take paid time off when he’s sick. The whole feeling of work is different now, he said. He feels safe, comfortable, and supported.

“Beforehand, they didn’t care about the conditions; you just had to get the work done however you could. There was nobody checking to see if you could do it safely,” Efrain said through a translator. “Now, it’s very different. They have to give you protective equipment, and if there’s not, you speak up and they provide it. They take measures to make sure we can work safely.”

“I think the COVID crisis exposed the intense fragility of this industry. It started people asking how efficient is too efficient? At what point does efficiency become violence?”

This is a bright spot. In animal agriculture, where a budget rider exempts 96 percent of the operations that hire workers from federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protections, innovative programs like Milk with Dignity—as well as a few states’ efforts to pass worker-centered legislation—are signaling that change is possible. They’re also proving it can be affordable for farms, too.

While advocates have pushed to improve federal protections for years with only limited success, those worker-driven programs, as well as state-level innovations, have blanketed the nation in a patchwork of fixes. Even as federal changes lag behind, smaller-scale efforts are gaining momentum.

“I think the COVID crisis exposed the intense fragility of this industry,” said Alex Blanchette, a professor of anthropology at Tufts University who worked in pork production to write the book Porkopolis. “It started people asking how efficient is too efficient? At what point does efficiency become violence?”

A Worker-Developed Standard

After years of pursuing protections for dairy workers in Vermont and New York, the immigrant-led organization Migrant Justice created Milk with Dignity, taking inspiration from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), the tomato pickers from south-central Florida who developed the worker-driven Fair Food Program.

Through Milk with Dignity, dairy farms can receive a premium for milk in exchange for complying with a code of conduct developed by workers. The Milk with Dignity Standards Council (MDSC) monitors compliance, audits dairies annually, and leads corrective action when needed. If working conditions aren’t up to standard—workers can report concerns without fear of retaliation.

“This really takes that extreme power imbalance, upends it, and says to corporations, ‘The workers in your supply chain are now your business partners.’”

Ben & Jerry’s became the first buyer to sign on to Milk with Dignity in 2014 after three years of negotiation and campaigning by workers, signaling the impact that corporate buy-in to worker initiatives can have. By last year, 51 dairy farms in Vermont and New York employed more than 200 workers to cover 100 percent of Ben & Jerry’s northeast dairy supply chain—all protected by Milk with Dignity standards.

Participating farms are required to collaborate with workers on developing site-specific health and safety processes. Those include practices around maintaining and operating heavy machinery, avoiding repetitive stress and musculoskeletal disorders, handling needles and chemicals, managing animals, ensuring proper ventilation, weathering extreme temperatures, communicating during emergencies, and accessing safety data sheets. Additionally, farms are required to offer new employees paid training and provide them with personal protective equipment.

“This really takes that extreme power imbalance, upends it, and says to corporations, ‘The workers in your supply chain are now your business partners—you’re signing a contract with them, where in essence, you are ceding power to them to determine the conditions in the supply chain,’” said Will Lambek of Migrant Justice.

A farmworker education session led by Migrant Justice. (Photo courtesy of Migrant Justice)

Tom Fritzsche, the MDSC executive director, noted that almost none of the farmers in the program had ever had their working conditions monitored before. “It can be uncomfortable to welcome an inspection and interviews with employees when that type of thing hasn’t happened before,” he said.

The result has been big improvements. Since 2019, the program has conducted hundreds of education sessions and farm audits and developed 1,340 corrective action plans—all of which were agreed to by farmers. The 24/7 worker support line has also received more than a thousand inquiries from farmers and workers.

Efrain feels fortunate to have landed at a farm where the human rights-focused program sets the standard. He no longer works 16-hour shifts, sleeps on the floor, or works for a supervisor who drinks and is difficult, like one of his first jobs. Now he is paid $875 a week, about double a prior wage. And where before, “There was no rest,” he’s now guaranteed a full day off every week.

State-Level Innovation

Many experts see the removal of the OSHA budget rider as key to protecting workers in animal agriculture from both short- and long-term dangers. But they aren’t optimistic its elimination will come soon.

“You have to have the political will to bring these CAFOs [Confined Animal Feeding Operations] under regulatory oversight,” said Robert Martin of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

In the absence of federal change, it isn’t just programs like Milk with Dignity that serve as models for innovation. Some states are also testing ideas and retooling worker safety protections—and showing what is possible. “Federal labor standards are abysmal in a lot of ways, but we do see more promise with states kind of leading the charge to improve conditions for workers,” said Jessica Maxwell, the executive director of the Workers’ Center of New York.

“You have to have the political will to bring these CAFOs under regulatory oversight.”

States can choose to adopt stricter standards than those set by the federal government, and some do.

Thirteen of the 22 states and territories that run their own State Plan OSHA offices—including California, Washington, Oregon, Kentucky, Maryland, and Puerto Rico—do not observe the federal “small farm” exemption created by the OSHA budget rider. Because they allow OSHA oversight of farm operations that employ 10 or fewer non-family employees, they’re able to more closely supervise animal-ag workers.

Additionally, 14 states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin—have passed legislation guaranteeing collective bargaining rights for farmworkers.

And some states—including California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, and Washington—have passed laws that give agricultural workers more protections than federal standards, addressing issues such as overtime pay, minimum wage, meal breaks, and rest periods.

In 2019, for example, New York passed the Farm Laborers Fair Labor Practices Act, which took effect in January 2020. It grants farm workers overtime pay after 60 hours, a full day of rest each week, and disability and Paid Family Leave coverage, as well as unemployment benefits and other labor protections.

“We hear from workers all the time who used to work seven days a week who now do get that day off, that day of rest,” Maxwell said. And while the Workers’ Center still hears about workarounds—like farmers paying their workers in cash once they get over 60 hours to avoid the increased wage—she said, “in general, it’s had a big impact in terms of starting a shift. And that speaks again to why we need regulation, because that does start to create change on a bigger level.”

Photo credit: Vera Chang

Two states have also expanded OSHA’s powers through Local Emphasis Programs that extend OSHA’s authority in industry-specific ways. The programs began addressing worker safety in dairies beyond the federal standard in Wisconsin in 2011 and in New York in 2014. Both allow the agency to make random, unannounced compliance inspections. A study found they raised producers’ awareness of the workplace hazards and ways to mitigate them.

“We certainly heard from workers at the time that they were getting training that they’ve never gotten before, that they were getting equipment that they’ve never had before—whether it was more appropriate length gloves, or boots, or even something as simple as an eye washing station in case of exposure to chemicals,” said Maggie Gray, a political science professor at Adelphi University in New York who studies low-wage, immigrant agriculture workers. To increase worker safety, she said, “Other states could also push for Local Emphasis Programs.”

A Culture of Safety—What Farmers Say Has Worked

As individual states enact worker protections, industry pushback often follows. “What you hear all the time is ‘You can’t do it, you’re going to kill the industry,’” said Maxwell of increased worker protections. But that isn’t true, she said.

For example, while the U.S. Farm Bureau Federation and other industry players said lowering the overtime threshold in New York to 40 hours would devastate the industry, California’s success in implementing a similar threshold reduction proved the opposite.

In a round of hearings in New York in January, California’s success “allowed us to make the argument of, ‘Look, the agricultural industry did not collapse. We don’t see a huge shuttering of farms; we haven’t seen a big layoff of workers,’” she said. “States moving on worker protection allows other states to show proof that the industry will not collapse when you provide worker protection like the ag lobby says it will.”

Farmers and workers inside the Milk with Dignity program provide key insights into why worker-centered changes have worked.

Matt Maxwell, who operates Maxwell’s Neighborhood Farm, a third-generation dairy in Newport, Vermont, enrolled his operation in the Milk with Dignity program as soon as it was offered in 2018.

Before joining, the farm treated its workers well, he said. But he reported in the program’s first biennial report in 2020 that in adhering to the industry standard, the farm had unintentionally paid low wages and offered substandard housing. Milk with Dignity positioned the farm to increase its wages—and improved “both the business and employee sides of the operation,” he said.

“Since joining Milk with Dignity, our farm has maintained an 85 percent employee retention rate,” Maxwell noted in the report. “Less turnover has led to higher morale and greater workplace continuity.”

Photo courtesy of Migrant Justice.

He said the program also enabled his farm to make huge strides in communication with its employees. “Where before we may have had a company-wide meeting once a month, now they are held weekly,” Maxwell said. “The increased interaction has been a benefit to us both. Problems are identified earlier and corrections made where necessary.” In addition to more open lines of communication, “everyone has a job description and has been trained on safety and procedural protocols.”

Clement Gervais of the large, three-generation Gervais Family Farm in Franklin County, Vermont said the program helped his farm respond to COVID and better address safety issues, according to the 2022 Milk with Dignity report. In addition to coordinating employee vaccinations during the COVID outbreak, Milk with Dignity also helped create safety protocols, bilingual safety posters, and pamphlets for new employees.

Like the Maxwell farm, the Gervais farm credits Milk with Dignity for improving its communication with workers. “That can be bridging the language barrier, or helping both sides negotiate conflicts if they arise,” Gervais said in the report. Overall, “Milk with Dignity has been a very positive program helping immigrant workers on my farm.”

For workers, the energy at dairies just feels different in the Milk with Dignity program.

“The bosses have more trust in our work; they aren’t always looking over our shoulders,” Efrain said. “I don’t know exactly what the Milk with Dignity people told them, but it’s really changed their mindset, whatever it is,” he said. “Now, I feel freer, I feel calmer, I feel safer at work.”

Efrain explained the improved safety response. On a snowy morning before the Milk with Dignity program existed, he was leading cows in from a corral to be milked when he slipped on the icy steps of the milking parlor. “I didn’t feel anything other than the pain when I landed, just excruciating pain on my left side,” he said. He let his bosses know about his fall, he said, “but they didn’t really care.”

Because there was no one else to fill in for him, Efrain felt he had no other option but to continue milking the cows. “To be honest, at that time, we all worked with the fear that if you couldn’t do your work, you would just get fired,” he said.

“I couldn’t bend over, and I couldn’t turn to one side or the other,” he said. For the next month, he worked in a back brace—and finally started feeling some relief when a man came to his house to adjust his spine.

When a broken metal gate fell on his foot at his current workplace, however, he was able to tend to his injury. His employer provided a first aid kit—and then paid time off to recover.

“The protocols farms follow aren’t not cheap or easy, but farms are able to afford the changes through premiums paid on the milk.”

Still, getting animal-agriculture companies to sign onto worker-safety programs has proven difficult, because human rights often fall at the bottom of companies’ priority lists. “We see focus on organic and environmental practices,” Jessica Maxwell said, “and workers’ rights have really lagged in terms of getting the attention that it deserves in sustainable agriculture.

“Even Ben and Jerry’s, which is a progressive company, it’s not like they went out and created or supported a version of this program—workers did it,” she said. “We see it over and over again, that corporations consistently resist this sort of change.”

Milk with Dignity is currently applying similar pressure to Hannaford Supermarkets to get the New England and New York grocery chain to sign onto the program for its store-brand milk. Although companies resist, the program has proven that farms are capable of complying with regulations when forced to, said Fritzsche of the MDSC.

“The protocols that farms follow as a consumer protection measure are strict. They’re not cheap or easy to follow,” he said, adding the premiums farms receive through the program help them afford the changes.

Changes at the Federal Level

A concern among worker advocates about the state-centered approach is that it doesn’t reach workers in less progressive states. “At some point, we need that to shift to a federal level,” Jessica Maxwell said.

Though most experts are also not optimistic that federal change will come soon, Martin of the Center for a Livable Future said the Biden administration’s approach to monopolies—including those that control the meat and poultry industries and promote an anti-regulatory agenda—is encouraging.

“The source of most of the dysfunction in the animal ag industry is the concentrated economic and political power of the companies,” he said. “So, when Joe Biden says he’s going to look at antitrust and price fixing of the companies, that’s a good thing to do.”

Martin believes there OSHA should meanwhile step up inspections and enforcement to make sure existing rules are followed until additional legislation to protect workers can be passed. This includes providing training and instructions for personal protective equipment in the languages that workers actually speak, not just in English, he said.

“I don’t think any state is allocating enough financial and human resources to CAFO oversight,” Martin said. “It’s an across-the-board lack of oversight of these operations . . . [resulting in] a mistreatment of workers and the broader community.”

A 2020 report on the agency in the American Journal of Public Health suggested OSHA can also benefit from more standards-writing staff and a nimbler process by which to update its health and safety standards. Many OSHA safety standards, created in the 1970s, don’t reflect the present, industrial conditions of animal agriculture. For example, 90 percent of the chemical exposure limits don’t account for the majority of the chemicals in the present-day workplace.

Building Momentum, Pushing Forward

Jessica Maxwell stressed that for improved regulations to be meaningful, however, the animal-agriculture industry needs to overhaul—and slow down—the way it operates, putting less emphasis on peak speed and efficiency. “Some of the ways we do our agriculture have become so unsustainable that it’s like we’re putting Band-Aids on,” she said. “We need more systemic change.”

Dr. Athena Ramos, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and principal author of a 2018 study of swine confinement workers in Missouri, hopes that as systemic changes take hold, researchers can collaborate with willing producers to fine-tune solutions to safety issues, including workers’ chronic respiratory problems.

Ramos and her collaborators recommend baseline health screening to assess respiratory health as people are hired, for example, so that workers could be assigned to job sites that don’t exacerbate preexisting health conditions, she said. Follow-up screenings throughout a worker’s tenure can help detect changes in health and further inform assignments.

At right, Efrain, with his brother Ervin (at left), who works at the same dairy. Also pictured are Ervin’s wife and daughter.

She also proposed farms conduct regular safety audits to check whether workers are using available personal protective equipment and donning it properly. And safety training—or safety messaging—should be offered throughout a worker’s tenure, in their primary language, by a qualified and trained professional—not just someone who happens to speak the language.

“It’s about developing a culture of safety where worker health is prioritized at the same level as the animal health and well-being,” Ramos said. “Contract growers face tremendous pressures. But we’ve got to find a way that we can balance the productivity and the bottom line with worker health and safety.”

For now, workers like Efrain take solace in their gains. Since the Milk with Dignity program increased his pay and days off, Efrain has been able to start enjoying his life more. His brother Ervin got a job at the same dairy a few years after he did, and Ervin’s wife was able to join him. The two recently had their first child.

“Vermont has been a beautiful place to live, and every year has been different and new,” Efrain said. In the spring, “all the wildflowers come out, and you’re surrounded by flowers. It’s a very happy and pleasant area.”

He recently bought a car and can now leave the farm with friends to play soccer. “I feel comfortable here,” he said. “I feel comfortable with the changes that have happened.”

As workers realize success—at the state and local levels, and through industry-focused programs—momentum builds. “Workers see that they’re able to make changes, and then able to benefit from those changes,” Maxwell said. “And that creates momentum and empowerment to continue pushing forward and doing more.”

“I feel comfortable here,” he said. “I feel comfortable with the changes that have happened.”

Such worker empowerment is one of the most important levers for creating change, she said. “The most protected worker is an informed and educated worker who feels like they have the support to speak out and advocate for themselves,” said Maxwell.

Another key is educating lawmakers—and consumers—about the conditions under which animal agriculture workers work. Changes come from people caring about the treatment of the workers behind their food and applying pressure to elected officials, according to Martin.

“Politicians see the light when they begin to feel the heat,” he said, and, in this case, “the heat comes from political activity and organization.”

Read the entire series here, our methodology here, and check back here for our follow-up reporting.

Gosia Wozniacka contributed reporting to this story.

The post Absent Federal Oversight of Animal Agriculture Safety, States and Others Step Up for Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

Animal Agriculture Is Dangerous Work. The People Who Do It Have Few Protections.

Christina Cooke — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 09:00:29 +0000

On a rainy morning in September 2013, Lazaro Alvarez Andrade greeted the cows at the small dairy where he worked in rural New York. He was preparing to lead them six at a time into the milking parlor when he heard the thunder of hooves behind him. Before he could run, a young bull—which had been brought to the farm without his knowledge—rammed into him from behind, slamming him to the ground. As he fell, his face struck a metal rail separating two cow stalls. He felt intense pain, and he could not see out of his right eye. Blood gushed from his face, soaking his short-sleeved shirt and denim pants and running over his oilcloth boots.

The owner of the farm, an older white man, pulled the bull off. He led Andrade to a chair outside the milking parlor and told him to sit; he’d take him to the hospital once he had milked the cows—around 80 total—he said. For at least two hours, Andrade sat bleeding outside the milking parlor while the farmer finished the morning’s chores.

Ninety percent of the animals grown for food in America are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations, known as CAFOs. Each one houses at least 1,000 cows, 2,500 hogs, or 125,000 chickens.
As CAFOs growing chickens, hogs, cattle and dairy cows become larger and more automated and efficient, the workers inside are less protected by federal OSHA.
Federal OSHA protections don’t apply to workers on farms with 10 or fewer workers due to a 46-year-old budget rider intended to protect family farms. Today, that exempts 96 percent of the animal-ag operations that hire workers from OSHA oversight.
Agricultural work is meanwhile some of the most dangerous work in the country, ranking third in fatal injuries among all occupations.

Read the full series here.

Even more present than the intense pain, Andrade said later in Spanish, was his worry that he would lose his eye. “It’s not like losing a foot or a hand—vision is the most important thing,” he said. “I would have been totally useless.”

Originally from Mexico City, Andrade had been in the United States for only five months. Prior to his arrival, he had worked in transportation logistics for the pharmaceutical industry for 40 years before his employer automated operations and laid him off. In search of work to put his son and daughter through college and support his wife and elderly parents, he emigrated to the U.S. at 55 years old. In his new country, he did not have family, he did not speak English, and he had no one—except his employer—to turn to for support.

Outside the milking parlor, he did the only thing he could think of to help himself: he found a bottle of iodine used to disinfect the cows’ teats, applied some to a towel, and held it to his face to control the bleeding. “I felt really vulnerable,” he said.

Lazaro Alvarez Andrade days after he was attacked by a bull and almost lost his eye. (Photo by Rebecca Fuentes.)

The bull attack nearly cost Andrade his vision, in addition to breaking two of his teeth, fracturing bones in his face and cracking two of his ribs. It also triggered a chain of events that revealed just how precarious his position was, working in the U.S. in an industry with few protections for workers like him.

Even though agriculture is one of the most dangerous occupations in the country, ranking third among all occupations in fatal injuries, workers in the U.S. dairy, poultry, and livestock industries lack the basic protections that workers in most every other industry take for granted. While the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), created in 1970 to oversee worker safety, has hundreds of standards to protect workers in industries like construction, it has only a handful protecting workers in agriculture.

And workers like Andrade are often exempt from the labor protections it does offer. That’s because a rider attached to OSHA’s budget in 1976 aiming at protecting small farms from onerous government oversight prohibits the agency from using federal funds to investigate injuries and deaths on farms with 10 or fewer non-family employees. Exceptions are only made for farms that maintain labor camps.

Today, in the increasingly industrialized and automated U.S. dairy, poultry, and livestock industries, where a single worker can tend thousands of animals and a staff of fewer than 10 is the norm, the rider leaves the vast majority of animal agriculture workers without oversight or recourse when they get hurt. Even when a worker is severely injured or killed on a farm with 10 or fewer workers, OSHA is prohibited from investigating.

Despite research, news reports, and articles about worker injuries and deaths, a Civil Eats investigation has found that because of the exemption, workers are unprotected by federal OSHA labor laws at 96 percent of the operations that hire people to produce pork, eggs, beef, poultry, and milk in America. And federal OSHA sees only a sliver of the total fatalities associated with that work. Over the decade between 2011 and 2020, for instance, 85 percent of the deaths related to animal agriculture were not reported to the agency.

It is impossible to know how many worker deaths OSHA’s limited authority obscures. What is clear, however, is that the federal government lacks a true picture of the dangers of animal agriculture.

OSHA confirmed that the rider handicaps its ability to address the safety of animal agriculture.

“The rider places limitations on OSHA’s ability to intervene, but that does not diminish our concern for worker safety,” said Doug Parker, OSHA’s assistant secretary of labor. Parker did not respond to more detailed questions about the high percentage of fatalities falling outside the agency’s jurisdiction or OSHA’s inability to investigate worker deaths.

It is impossible to know how many worker deaths this limited authority obscures. No other federal agency routinely gathers data that is specific to injuries and deaths among farm employees, making it tough to parse them from overall farm fatalities. What is clear, however, is that the federal government lacks a true picture of the dangers of animal agriculture, and though a small number of states can investigate small-farm incidents using state funds, federal OSHA legally cannot investigate or sanction employers in what may be a significant number of worker deaths.

“Agriculture is dangerous, animals are dangerous, and really, the government’s hands are tied to help workers. And a lot of these are immigrant workers who are very scared to complain and speak up,” said Deborah Berkowitz, who spent six years as chief of staff and then a senior policy adviser for OSHA during President Obama’s administration.

The lack of safeguards is especially alarming, given the factory-like state of animal agriculture today. More than 90 percent of agricultural animals in the U.S. are raised mostly indoors in facilities called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which typically house at least 1,000 “animal units”—equal to about 1,000 beef cows, 2,500 hogs, or 125,000 broiler chickens—on site.

What OSHA reports do exist paint an ugly picture. Thirteen people have drowned or asphyxiated in manure pits at dairies since 2003; others have died after being attacked, gored, or trampled by cows or bulls, entangled in rotating equipment, crushed or run over by heavy machinery, and suffocated in piles of hay, grain bins, and silos.

In dairies and hog and poultry barns, a number of workers have accidentally injected themselves with vaccines intended for the animals, resulting in poisoning or wounds. Dairy workers have been hospitalized after drinking chemicals they mistook for water. Exposure to manure infected at least one hog barn worker with E-coli, and others have lacerated their feet with the power washers required to clean the floors. And workers across most animal-agriculture industries are frequent victims of amputations caused by oft-present heavy machinery that catches clothes and body parts, or by crushing injuries sustained while moving animals.

These incidents are in addition to the innumerable broken bones, sprains, and head injuries normally associated with manual labor and animal contact. And though identified as “accidents,” many of them would be preventable through training, safety equipment, and more standardized protocols.

Despite the dangers inherent in the work, the agricultural lobby, led by organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, opposes regulation and worker protection with arguments that hearken back to the idea of farming as a natural, wholesome occupation and farmers as self-reliant people who do not need government bureaucracy in their way.

Members including the Farm Bureau, as well as poultry, meat, and dairy companies and trade groups, declined to comment on their anti-regulatory agenda or respond to detailed questions from Civil Eats about the OSHA exemption and its impact on the safety of animal agriculture workers. However, a few—namely the North American Meat Institute (NAMI), the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC), and Smithfield—pointed to voluntary industry safety programs as evidence of their concern for worker safety.

“Smithfield Foods supports sensible government regulations that protect the health and safety of our workers,” said Ray Atkinson, Smithfield’s director of external communications, in a statement. “Worker safety and health is a key pillar of Smithfield’s industry-leading philosophy.”

Still, critics say the industry’s exemptions from worker protections should be re-examined. “There’s always been this myth of the Yeoman farmer out there,” said Robert Martin, director of the food system policy program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. “‘We don’t need to regulate agriculture; it’s an individualized industry.’ There’s been this agricultural exceptionalism in policy, regulation, and legislation, and it’s really just not the way things are anymore.”

Lazaro Alvarez Andrade is among those most impacted. After two hours outside the milking parlor, the farmer’s wife drove him to the hospital in the farm’s pickup truck, stopping by the house the farmer provided about five minutes down the road so he could put on a clean shirt. Because she spoke only English and he spoke only Spanish, they were quiet during the near half-hour drive from there to the hospital.

Around 1 p.m., three hours after the incident, Andrade finally saw a medical team. The doctor was surprised, he remembered. “They said, ‘What happened to you? What happened to you?’” Andrade said. “I had a lot of blood on me, and it was continuing to bleed.”

The doctor gave Andrade five stiches from the middle of his right cheek up to his right eye. He wanted to put in a sixth stitch as well, but it may have damaged his eyeball, so he refrained. The doctor told Andrade that given the seriousness of his injuries, he was lucky to have emerged with his vision—and his life.

Minimizing Risk and Externalizing Impacts

This country is dotted with CAFOs. From Washington to Iowa to North Carolina and across great swaths of the Southwest, barn after windowless barn holds cows, hogs, and chickens being milked, fed, and watered by the thousands, sometimes the tens or hundreds of thousands.

A tiny handful of companies reap the largest share of profits from these operations. In pursuit of efficiency and revenue, animal agriculture has become extremely consolidated over the last few decades. Now, the top four companies in each industry control the majority of the market share—54 percent of the poultry industry, 70 percent of the pork industry, and 85 percent of the beef industry. They make billions—in fiscal year 2021, for example, the top processor Tyson Foods reported sales of $47.05 billion.

Meat and poultry companies—including Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield—are practiced at diffusing risk, minimizing liability, and externalizing the negative impacts of their operations through contracting and byzantine corporate structures. For instance, as vertically integrated corporations, or “integrators,” they contract with independent farmers to grow their animals, and those farmers then hire the laborers needed to manage the animals, a setup that distances the corporation from the people doing the work—and often allows the workforce to fall below the threshold for OSHA oversight.

The companies named and their trade group affiliates did not respond to detailed questions from Civil Eats about their use of these techniques.

Aaron Johnson, who manages the Challenging Corporate Power program with Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI) and works most closely with the poultry industry, said the tactics externalize labor risks. “They have got more than 10 growers in a region, but because those are each independent entities, then none of those growers and whoever else is working on those farms would be under OSHA scrutiny,” he said. “Perdue’s overall labor pool is definitely above that OSHA exemption, but because they’ve externalized that out into the contract structure, they don’t have to worry about it.”

In the hog industry, larger companies have also found a way to divide up the workforce and avoid liabilities, potentially also avoiding OSHA oversight. Take the Illinois-based Carthage System, for example. A top pork producer in the U.S., Carthage exemplifies a growing model of hog farming that brings management and service firms together with investors to cooperatively fund CAFOs that purport to be family farms.

Hogs inside a finishing barn in Iowa.

The CAFOs are registered as subsidiary LLCs and run by management firms, not by farmers. Other LLCs in the system are set up to site the CAFOs, train and manage employees, run labor camps that house workers, conduct animal research, and provide veterinary services. In the Carthage system, the CAFOs breed and then wean a supply of feeder piglets for more than 300 farmers in six states who have invested in the system. Those farmers then grow the pigs to market weight and send them to processors for meat.

The network is specifically designed to protect corporate assets, shield the identities of investors and protect them from liability in the case of lawsuits, said Loka Ashwood, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky. Ashwood and her colleagues published a study about Carthage System and its network, which described how it allows one LLC to easily fold when faced with a pollution lawsuit or bankruptcy without impacting the assets of all the others.

The same structure can also shield the CAFOs from liability connected to labor issues, said Ashwood. And it provides little incentive to improve working conditions. Within Carthage, an LLC called Professional Swine Management hires and manages the laborers for all the CAFOs, shielding investors from any disputes or investigations arising over worker health and safety. It’s nearly impossible to decipher who the investors are, she said, so workers can’t directly pressure or sue them.

OSHA said that each CAFO registered as an LLC is liable as a separate entity. “Evaluation of corporate structure is assessed on a case-by-case basis,” the agency told Civil Eats. The scenario allows corporate networks to divvy up a large number of workers among dozens of CAFOs, potentially pushing some below the threshold for OSHA enforcement and keeping workers outside the reach of federal OSHA protections.

“If something egregious does happen, they’re incredibly isolated,” Ashwood said. “It’s hard on the people, and I think [the CAFOs] are made that way by design.”

Carthage isn’t unique in using the model, she said. Other pork powerhouses use a similar model, running a network of specialized LLCs to organize shareholder investments, deflect lawsuits, and minimize financial risks for investors, including for labor, Ashwood said.

Carthage System’s founders, Joe Connor and Bill Hollis, did not respond to phone calls or to detailed questions from Civil Eats about the ownership and structure of the organization.

A Compromised Mission

As an employee at a small New York dairy, Andrade was also working in a consolidated industry bent on efficiency and profit, often at the expense of other values. Following his third doctor’s appointment, nine days after his accident, he struggled to talk because of his facial fractures and damaged teeth, and his broken ribs made bending and climbing stairs painful.

He was eating a traditional Mexican breakfast in the two-story house he shared with a man named Salvador, a dairy worker at another operation in the area, when the farmer appeared in the doorway. With Salvador as translator, the farmer told Andrade that he was no longer going to be useful on the farm and had no more work there. He handed him $500 in cash owed for the previous week’s work and told him to leave.

While the farmer had been kind to Andrade before the accident—even taking him to the store to buy groceries a few days prior—he approached Andrade in its aftermath with aggression, speaking harshly, and opening and closing his fists, Andrade said. “He was trying to scare me, to cause me to be fearful, saying I wasn’t going to be able to work there anymore,” he said.

“The first thing that came into my head is, ‘Where am I going to go? I have nowhere to go if the house and the work go together,’” Andrade said. Given the farmer’s behavior, he sensed he needed to be out soon.

To help Andrade have a place to live while he healed, Salvador quit his job to head south for different work. The two left that night.

Especially at operations not under OSHA’s jurisdiction, workers like Andrade are at the mercy of their employers—the conditions they set, the rules they create.

“Congress passed this law with a lot of promise, and then Republicans and big business have tried to weaken and even kill the law ever since.”

“In essence, there is no oversight for labor and housing conditions for immigrant farmworkers,” said Will Lambek of Migrant Justice, a Vermont-based nonprofit that helps farmworkers attain economic justice and human rights. For foreign workers especially, he said, there are no effective ways to protect their rights through litigation and no practicable means for workers to win rights through collective bargaining. “There is no effective regulatory apparatus,” he said. “What employers say goes, and workers have very little recourse.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. President Richard Nixon created OSHA in 1970 to require that American employers provide their employees with safe work environments. But almost immediately, corporate forces began efforts to restrict or abolish it, citing what they viewed as its unnecessary and costly bureaucracy.

“Congress passed this law with a lot of promise, and then Republicans and big business have tried to weaken and even kill the law ever since,” Berkowitz said. “I started in the field in 1978, and there were all these bills to get rid of OSHA enforcement. There are still bills coming now to get rid of OSHA. Even though it’s such a weak and small agency. . . . It’s always been a target of big business.”

OSHA’s budget is consequently anemic. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had an $8 billion budget in 2020, OSHA’s budget was a mere $600 million that year, according to a report on the agency. And while OSHA oversees between 7 and 8 million workplaces employing around 130 million workers, federal and state OSHAs combined have only around 2,000 inspectors—and about 5.6 federal inspectors for every 1 million workers. That means that if OSHA inspectors were to visit each workplace once, it would take 165 years.

“All that power [the agricultural lobby has] is because of dollars given to politicians, spent on campaigns, or spent influencing state and local politics at every stage,” Berkowitz said. “The lobby is huge, and it’s powerful, and politicians get scared.”

Once the rider intended to relieve small farmers of the burdens of excessive bureaucracy passed in 1976, farms with 10 or fewer non-family employees and no temporary labor camp slipped out from under federal OSHA oversight. In addition to being prohibited from investigating worker injuries and deaths, OSHA also cannot conduct programmed safety or health inspections in these workplaces or respond to employee complaints.

Thirteen states and territories that run their own OSHA programs—including California, Washington, Oregon, and Virginia, as well as Puerto Rico—do allow oversight of small livestock operations using state funds and they have lower fatality rates than other states.

Andrade wasn’t living in one of those states. Wounded, and now unemployed and homeless, he was in an especially vulnerable position. He connected with Rebecca Fuentes at the Workers’ Center of Central New York, who he’d met at a health and safety outreach session she’d conducted at a large dairy where he’d worked.

While advocating on Andrade’s behalf, Fuentes soon collided with the small farm exemption. She filed a complaint with OSHA detailing Andrade’s accident, but the federal agency responded that because the dairy had fewer than 11 hired employees (just two, Andrade said), it was not within OSHA’s jurisdiction. The agency said it was prohibited from conducting an investigation.

“OSHA gave us a paper that said they couldn’t go there,” Fuentes said. “No matter if a worker dies, they cannot go there. They cannot do an inspection, they cannot fine them, they cannot spend one penny on a farm with 11 or less workers,” she said. “This is what the lobby is doing—they found this loophole, and they’re advising all the small farms not to be bothered.”

In places where OSHA does have oversight, it can and has made a difference: while an average of 38 people were killed at work each day nationwide back when the agency was first created, as of 2015, only about 13 people were killed at work each day, even with a workforce almost twice as big.

“At the end of the day, it has to come from regulation setting a playing field,” said Jessica Maxwell, the executive director of the Workers’ Center of Central New York, of improved conditions for workers. “Otherwise, that competition—that race to the bottom of cutting labor costs and increasing production to maximize profits—that’s always a losing game for workers.”

An Unseen, Unsupported Workforce

Though it was against the rules, Salvador snuck Andrade into the on-farm housing of the new dairy where he worked and let him sleep on a broken-down couch in the living room while he recuperated out of sight. “Salvador means ‘savior,’” Andrade noted, telling the story later.

In the months that followed, standing and talking were still painful and difficult, so he spent most of his time on the couch. But when Salvador would bring home groceries after his shift at the dairy—tortillas, rice, beans, meat, potatoes—Andrade would cook them into meals to show his appreciation. “I couldn’t exert myself too much, so I made simple things,” he said.

The absence of protection and support for animal-agriculture workers like Andrade has deep roots in history. They are not—and never have been—subject to the same protections as workers in other industries. The National Labor Relations Act, a federal law enacted in 1935 as part of the New Deal, enables workers to collectively bargain—and specifically excludes most farmworkers. And the Fair Labor Standards Act, enacted in 1938, created a minimum wage, established overtime pay, and put child labor protections in place—and purposefully exempted most farmworkers as well. Its protections for agricultural workers have improved only slightly since.

Aerial view of a North Carolina hog farm. (Photo CC-licensed by Waterkeeper Alliance, Inc.)

“In the creation of modern labor law regime in the U.S., two sectors were categorically excluded . . . agricultural workers and domestic workers,” said Lambek of Migrant Justice. “You don't need to be a history professor to guess who was performing agricultural and domestic work primarily in the United States in the 1930s. That is, of course, Black people—the descendants of slaves,” he said. “This was a legislative bargain that was deemed necessary to win the support of Southern Democratic senators to pass the landmark labor legislation.” And, he said, it forms the legislative basis for the conditions that we have today, nearly a century later.

The structure of the animal-agriculture industry reinforces workers’ invisibility and inability to access help and support, says Alex Blanchette, a professor of anthropology at Tufts University who worked in pork CAFOs to write the book Porkopolis, about how the standardization and industrialization of factory farms affects the rural communities that house them.

“A 20,000-head-a-day slaughterhouse for hogs might employ 1,000 to 2,000 different people on a single site. People are in constant contact with each other, and unions can form under those conditions,” he said. “But with CAFOs, with industrial animal production, we're talking companies that are splitting production across 500 different barn sites or something like that, spread across a 100-mile-radius region.”

Organizing workers is especially challenging when dealing with a group of workers, “that do not know each other, they all have different formal bosses and a subcontracting relationship, and in turn have minimal legal federal rights to unionize or organize,” Blanchette said.

And without the safeguard of formal OSHA oversight, workers at small livestock operations are at an extreme disadvantage if and when they try to access basic compensation and care for injuries.

That was the case for Andrade, who, in the aftermath of the bull attack, was told he needed to see eye and bone specialists, care he was not able to afford without a job. The Workers’ Center of Central New York put him in touch with immigration and workers’ compensation attorney Jose Perez, who manages about 30 workers’ comp cases per week for farm and animal agriculture workers in central and western New York.

According to Perez, the owner of the dairy farm where Andrade was hurt didn’t carry workers’ compensation insurance because he believed he did not employ enough workers to need it. And according to legal records, he disputed the claim that Andrade was an employee, saying he only hired him for temporary work. The farmer also denied witnessing the injury, according to the records. It was basically one person’s word against another’s, Perez said. “The farmer played dumb—‘I don’t know what happened; I was not there; I didn’t see anything,’” he said.

Perez litigated the case. “They made many claims,” he said about the farmer. “What really saved us, to be honest, was when we went to get the medical records . . . Lazaro talked to one nurse and explained how the injury happened.” The medical record corroborated Andrade’s account.

Andrade chose to settle in 2016, three years after the injury, for $10,000. When he saw specialists soon after, they advised recasting his broken ribs, which had healed out of alignment, to avoid lifelong pain.

That outcome would likely have been different if OSHA had been allowed to investigate and document what happened after Andrade’s attack, Perez said. “It would have made my case right away.”

In addition to resolving Andrade’s case and getting him the money he needed to see medical specialists sooner, an OSHA investigation may also have resulted in safer conditions on the dairy, Andrade said. “I believe OSHA would have given recommendations to make it safer for the workers, because bulls are big and always aggressive.”

In a Consolidated Industry, Corporations Create the Rules

Even in circumstances where OSHA can intercede, penalties for lives lost and lifelong, debilitating injuries sustained in animal agriculture are often nominal and can vary widely.

For example, in Parks, Nebraska, when an employee at a cattle feedlot became engulfed in grain and suffocated in 2011, OSHA fined the operation $64,000. Minnesota OSHA fined an egg-production facility in Mapleton, Minnesota, $32,350 after an employee became entangled in the rotating shaft of the conveyor system and died in 2018. But the agency in Virginia requested no apparent penalties from a dairy farm in Bridgewater, Virginia, after five people were asphyxiated by gasses in a liquid cow manure pit in 2007. Nor did it assign penalties after an employee was killed by a charging steer at a cattle ranch in Bland, Virginia in 2020.

Still, OSHA did record violations in two of those cases and required that the operations abate health and safety issues. That’s much more accountability than in incidents like Andrade’s, which fall outside the agency’s purview.

Some see farmers as caught in the fray between their workers and the industry. Because the meat and dairy industries are built on efficiency and profit margins are slim, those growers often focus on survival—and simply being able to pay their workers—rather than improving workplace safety.

Lazaro Alvarez Andrade at work at a dairy years after his injury. (Photo courtesy of Lazaro Alvarez Andrade)

“On small farms, it’s not like people are saying, ‘I want to create an unsafe environment.’ It’s not like they’re saying, ‘I don’t care about my workers,’” said Maggie Gray, a professor of political science at Adelphi University in New York who studies low-wage, non-citizen workers in the food and agriculture industry. “A lot of these smaller farmers, they're trying to do the best they can. And because of the economics of farming, it's really hard for them to have safe workplaces.”

Over the years, Congressional leaders have made attempts to remove the appropriations rider, though all have failed. In 1999, Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) proposed an amendment to give OSHA permission to investigate deaths on small farms if the victims were children. Reed emphasized that the agency would be restricted to determining the cause of the accident and would have no power to impose penalties. The proposal failed in a committee vote.

“A lot of these smaller farmers, they’re trying to do the best they can. And because of the economics of farming, it’s really hard for them to have safe workplaces.”

In recent years, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee and the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations subcommittee, has repeatedly tried to remove the rider from the bill that funds OSHA. “The implications this language has on worker health and safety and racial equity give it no place in our federal spending bill,” she said via email.

While the House labor appropriations committee for fiscal years 2020, 2021, and 2022 removed the provision, she said Republicans refused to remove it from funding legislation, and the rider has gone through each time. “The meat industry continues to push back against sensible protection measures for their workers, prioritizing production and profits over health, safety, and equity,” she wrote.

About a dozen meat, dairy, and poultry trade associations and companies contacted by Civil Eats declined to comment on this characterization or answer detailed questions regarding the industry’s lobbying expenditures and reliance on family farm narratives to discourage regulation.

Dairy cows gather at a farm in Visalia, California. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A few did, however, pointed to voluntary industry safety programs. The North American Meat Institute, which represents the companies that process 95 percent of the pork, beef, and veal in the U.S., said its partners’ Protein PACT aims to reduce 2019 workplace injury levels by 50 percent by 2030.

Smithfield described its Smithfield Injury Prevention System (SIPS) program, a worker-safety program implemented in 2018 that involves annual audits of all facilities, including farms.

“These initiatives, among others, are responsible for Smithfield’s safety record that not only exceeds our industry peers, but also tracks better than a broad range of non-manufacturing-industry sectors,” said Atkinson, Smithfield’s director of communications, in a statement.

The National Pork Producers Council similarly stressed “agriculture’s proven track record” of developing health and safety management plans and worker safety training programs. “While OSHA regulations cover all farms, pig farmers go beyond regulatory compliance to protect the health and well-being of their employees,” a council representative said in a statement, describing the industry’s investments in on-farm certification and auditing programs and training to support worker safety.

Berkowitz, however, describes the agricultural lobby as "incredibly powerful" and bent on fighting government regulation.

In 2021, for example, the National Pork Producers Council alone spent $2.2 million lobbying at the federal level, and Dairy Farmers of America spent $1.3 million. Individual companies spent nearly as much or more. Tyson Foods spent almost $2 million in 2021; the China-based WH Group, the largest pork company in the world and owner of Smithfield Foods, spent $920,000; and the Brazil-based JBS, the largest meatpacking company in the world, spent $794,000.

The lobby relies on a number of techniques to sway legislation and public opinion, using campaign contributions to influence politicians toward their causes, employing ag gag laws to silence critics, and relying on philanthropic arms that fund things like community centers and child nutrition programs to build goodwill—and distract from the harm they cause.

The meat industry’s arguments against regulation and worker protection are often most strident when they center on the idea of “family farms”—of small, independent, mom-and-pop operations just scraping by, according to numerous interviews, as well as industry statements on proposed legislation. They emphasize that these homespun establishments are the American way and that requiring them to abide by government health and safety standards, like other workplaces, could put them out of business.

In one 2012 example, when the Obama administration tried to pass agricultural child labor laws to protect children from dying on farms (which was happening for teens at a rate more than four times that of those working in non-agriculture industries), the agricultural lobby and its representatives rallied government leaders and the general public the against it.

Though the proposal exempted children who worked on their parents’ farms, it drew vehement criticism from the Farm Bureau as well as Republican lawmakers and a few Democrats, too—all centered on the idea that the protections would prevent farm children from being able to do chores, destroying family farms. More than 70 House lawmakers, led by Representative Denny Rehberg (R-Montana), wrote the Labor Department a letter saying the rule challenged “the conventional wisdom of what defines a family farm in the United States.”

“Even though they specifically exempted any relative,” said Berkowitz, who was leading OSHA at the time, “the farm lobby screamed and yelled at the top of their lungs and got ginned up that this would be the ‘end of the family farms.’” In response, the Labor Department withdrew the proposal.

Hard Realities on the Ground

After a couple months on his friend’s couch, Andrade eventually felt well enough to take a job at another dairy, and he has continued to work at dairies ever since, about 20 in all, ranging in size from small to huge. The largest CAFO he worked for employed about 50 people, all Latino, in demanding 12-hour shifts; he and five others were responsible for milking the operation’s 15,000 cows two to three times a day.

“It’s really work under pressure. You have to finish milking all the cows you’re supposed to,” he said. “You can’t let them go un-milked.”

Absent new legislation and increased scrutiny of animal agriculture, challenges for workers like Andrade continue. Over his near decade in the industry, he said he has never received training from his employers in any language and he has relied instead on word-of-mouth instruction from his colleagues to learn the ropes. Because of this, he has witnessed accidents in addition to his own.

In 2015, a coworker found an unmarked bottle containing a mixture of bleach and acid and, thinking it was liquid soap, applied it to his skin. When he inhaled the fumes, he began to have trouble breathing and talking. Hearing his screams, his coworkers, including Andrade, almost called an ambulance, but the man was able to recover his breath after a few hours without a trip to the hospital. And a few months ago, a near 1,500-pound dairy cow stepped on the foot of a woman he works with, putting her in the hospital and out of work for three months.

Additionally, through the Workers’ Center, Andrade knew a 31-year-old Guatemalan dairy worker named Marco Antonio who was killed in 2014 at a family-owned organic dairy farm in Penn Yan, New York. He had been cleaning an auger in the grain silo—a task he had never been trained to do—when his body got caught and mangled in the rotating machinery.

The lack of training and protocols in the dairy industry—on top of the long hours and demanding work—puts workers at a disadvantage when trying to stay safe. “If there were protocols in place, they would be followed,” said Andrade, who, through his affiliation with the Workers’ Center, has begun speaking out for other workers. “In the pharmaceutical industry where I worked for 40 years, we had written protocols.”

Photo credit: Vera Chang

Recounting his experience with his own injury, and OSHA’s limited jurisdiction and ability to help him, Andrade said he believes the agency should play a greater role in protecting the people who produce America’s meat, eggs, and milk.

“The economy in agriculture in the U.S. is based on Latino labor,” Andrade said. “The work is dirty, risky, and poorly paid.” In addition to investigating small farms, the federal agency should be stricter with all farms, he said. “There would be better supervision that way, and better work, and there wouldn’t be as many accidents.”

Gosia Wozniacka contributed reporting to this article.

Next: Workers face long-term respiratory disease inside CAFOs, but protective equipment is scarce and accountability for employers is scarcer. New risk management models shield corporations from liability. Read the full series here.

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