Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Bringing the #MeToo fight to farm fields
Civil Eats
Many of the estimated 500,000 women farmworkers in the U.S. “describe coercion, catcalls, groping, and assault from crew leaders, supervisors, and even fellow workers,” writes Vera Liang Chang. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is trying to change that by pressuring farms to join its Fair Food Program, which includes a range of tools to enforce standards of behavior when comes to sexual violence. “Since the program was launched in 2011, seven growers were suspended for violations, 12 supervisors were terminated for sexual harassment, and 36 supervisors were disciplined for sexual harassment,” Chang writes.
As exports boom, Australian farmers suffer a devastating mental-health crisis
The New York Times
In a painful irony, Australia’s rural economy is humming thanks to globalization and growing exports, but “small farmers have not always shared in the bounty, with many forced into borrowing money or selling their farms,” writes Jacqueline Williams. This has taken a toll on the (mostly male) farmers whose identity is wrapped up in a deep-seated sense of rugged individualism. As a result, suicide rates have soared. “Nationwide, people living in remote Australia now take their own lives at twice the rate of those in the city,” Williams writes, and farmers are at highest risk.
Behind criticism of a ‘racist’ farm bill, a hard-fought battle for scholarship funds
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Congressman David Scott, a representative from Atlanta and member of the House agriculture committee, has been one of the fiercest critics of the House farm bill, calling it racist for its expansion of SNAP work requirements that would disproportionately affect people of color. But the House bill angered Scott for another reason: it failed to fund a scholarship program for historically black land grant colleges that Scott had spent years cultivating. “They took the money out,” Scott said on the House floor last week. “Just like they did in the 1890s. Black people have suffered too long, and we need to put a stop to it.”
Growing a post-coal future in Appalachia
Orion
After more than a century of an economy dominated by coal—a century that did grave damage to the land and the people of central Appalachia— “a network of nonprofit enterprises” is working to rehabilitate the region, writes McKay Jenkins. “[T]ending lavender, and raspberries, and even commercial-scale honeybees offers a glimpse of a future that is both economically viable and ecologically sustainable.”
The high-tech, deep-sea battle against sea lice
Wired
Sea lice have become the “microscopic bloodsucking foe” of the growing aquaculture industry. “Outbreaks of lice can travel like storm clouds between neighboring salmon farms and threaten wild fish migrating through nearby waters,” writes Amanda Little. “Because they replicate so quickly, the lice are also adept at developing resistance to chemicals and other lice-control treatments. ‘Superlice’ have come to defy nearly every effort to subdue them.” So fisheries managers are experimenting with lasers that could pick the lice off of fish with high levels of accuracy.