Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
As dairy industry tanks, farmer suicides rise
The New York Times
New York is the nation’s third-largest milk-producing state, and each year dairy sales represent roughly half of all farm sales. So the industry’s economic drought, now entering its fourth year, has taken an emotional, as well as financial, toll. “The situation has become so grim,” writes Corey Kilgannon, “that NY FarmNet, a leading farm support group, has started running suicide prevention training for local agricultural service providers and lenders who deal with dairy farmers.”
Debunking the young-farmer myth
The New Food Economy
Many portrayals of young farmers focus on women and minorities. Even the Department of Agriculture has boosted its image by highlighting the spike of young and minority farmers between its 2008 and 2012 agricultural censuses. But Nathan Rosenberg and Clay H. East write that in fact, “farmers under age 35…are 94 percent non-Hispanic white and 90 percent male, while each older group is less white and male than the youngest cohort of farmers.” They attribute USDA’s ‘progress’ to changes in methodology, making “meaningful comparisons with previous years difficult.”
Even bigger big farm data
Wired
Big data is a rising sector in the agriculture economy, and nearly every agrochemical company is now engaged in farm data collection. Granular, Dow-DuPont’s data arm, has just drawn up a deal with Planet, a company that collects satellite images of the globe. “With Granular, farmers can craft crop and field plans, delegate duties to employees, track inventory, and predict revenue and yield,” predicts Sarah Scoles. “And through the new deal with Planet, Granular will daily slurp images into its software, gathering perhaps more data than has ever been available about crops.”
Who’s telling food stories?
San Francisco Chronicle
Coal ash is the “second-largest industrial waste stream in the country behind household garbage,” and has contaminated water sources in communities from coast to coast. But amid industry reports that demonstrate that “toxins like arsenic, mercury, and radium are leaching into groundwater from pond-like storage pits filled with the sludgy leftovers of coal burning,” EPA chief Scott Pruitt intends to roll back regulations and monitoring requirements for the industry.
Red-state America drops environmental regs, and foreign companies see green
Rolling Stone
When a Chinese conglomerate with government ties bought Smithfield Foods, America’s largest pork producer, in 2013, it raised eyebrows over national security concerns. But, “[p]art of what made the company such an attractive target is that it’s about 50 percent cheaper to raise hogs in North Carolina than in China,” writes Doug Bock Clark. “This is due to less-expensive pig-feed prices and larger farms, but it’s also because of loose business and environmental regulations, especially in red states, which have made the U.S. an increasingly attractive place for foreign companies to offshore costly and harmful business practices.”