FERN’s Friday Feed: A game of chicken in Mississippi
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Facing a merger and a pay cut, chicken farmers push back
FERN and The Capitol Forum
“[I]n early August, when Sanderson Farms announced a base pay cut for its growers throughout Mississippi,” Trina McClendon and dozens of other farmers around the state objected, forming an alliance and preparing a list of demands of Sanderson, as Marcia Brown explains in FERN’s latest story. The news came on the heels of a deal that would effectively merge Sanderson with Wayne Farms, another major poultry processor in the state, and Trina believes “the only reason Sanderson proposed the cut was because the merger would leave growers with little choice but to accept the new terms.”
One Alaska bay is full of salmon, at least for the moment
FERN and The Atlantic
“Bristol Bay’s sockeye harvest has long made up about half of the global catch of this species … [a]nd this year, Bristol Bay outdid itself, notching the largest sockeye run in the region’s recorded history with an astonishing 66 million returning fish,” reports Miranda Weiss, in a new FERN story published with The Atlantic. “Even more astonishing, this season capped nearly a decade of extraordinarily high salmon returns in Bristol Bay, where sockeye harvests have reached more than 50 percent above the most recent 20-year average. But such riches are localized. Outside of Bristol Bay, salmon fisheries are failing.”
Gathering seeds to restore prairie grasslands
High Country News
“[T]he Fort Belknap Indian Community Grassland Restoration Project [is] a partnership between the reservation and the Bureau of Land Management. Gathering [sweetgrass] seeds from healthy plots is the first step in restoring dry, dusty degraded land in the area, a visible mark of colonization,” writes Kylie Mohr. “Changes in land use here can be traced back to the Dawes Act of 1887, when the federal government subdivided tribal lands and tried to force assimilation into U.S. society. The grassland restoration project was created to revitalize the land, but it also helps the young adults who do the work.”
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The Walton family’s controversial role in helping the Colorado River
The Wall Street Journal
“[A] charitable foundation controlled by the Waltons, the Walton Family Foundation, has given about $200 million over the past decade to a variety of advocacy groups, universities and media outlets involved in the river. No other donor comes close,” writes Scott Patterson. “Putting a monetary value on water has raised concerns among those who benefit from guaranteed access to water and those who believe markets benefit investors while hurting farmers and the poor. Water markets in Australia have been blamed for helping dry up waterways due to overuse by a handful of wealthy farmers and investors.”
The dams are coming down, but maybe not in time to save the Klamath River salmon
Yale Environment 360
“The planned demolition of dams on the Klamath River was expected to help restore the beleaguered salmon on which Indigenous tribes depend,” writes Jacques Leslie. “But this year the basin has experienced so many kinds of climate-change-linked plagues — a paradigm-shattering drought, the worst grasshopper infestation in a generation, and a monster fire — that it’s uncertain whether the remaining salmon will survive long enough to benefit from the dams’ dismantling.”