FERN’s Friday Feed: Meatpackers, immigrants, and Trump
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Immigrants on the line
FERN and Reveal (audio)
In late 2023, JBS, the Brazilian-owned conglomerate, needed workers at its plant in Greeley, Colorado, and was struggling to find them. Meanwhile, Haiti was unraveling amid escalating violence, and many Haitians were fleeing to the United States. A viral TikTok video promised Haitians jobs at the JBS plant and free lodging nearby. There were sixty openings at the plant, and more than a thousand Haitians ultimately showed up. The lodging turned out to be five or more to a room, with no kitchen, in a rundown motor lodge. Coupled with the brutal and dangerous work on the packing line, it left many of the migrants feeling duped. They told the union representing workers at the plant that they felt trapped. One told FERN staff writer Ted Genoways, who reported this piece in Greeley, that he was “treated like a slave.” The man who orchestrated the recruitment scheme—an HR supervisor at JBS—and the man who made the video, as well as the higher-ups at the plant, have been accused of exploitation and human trafficking by many of the migrants they recruited, and by the local union in formal complaints to the Department of Labor and the EEOC. But now those workers face a new threat: deportation.
The far right is going … green?
Vox
“For decades, most mainstream green advocacy groups and top environmental scientists have been largely aligned with Democratic policies and leaders. Now, however, many people who are advocating for conservation, including clean water, air, and soil, have fallen into the far right and voted Trump into power,” writes Benji Jones. “It’s not uncommon to hear right-wing influencers talk about regenerative agriculture or Kennedy supporters raising concerns about environmental pollutants. While it’s not clear how much power they will ultimately wield in the Trump administration, they represent a new and increasingly visible right-wing environmentalism — or what sociologist Holly Jean Buck has called para-environmentalism.”
Farmer George
The New York Review of Books
“Washington … involved himself in most of the estate’s operations and rode its expanse daily …. In regular touch with the soil, his managers, and a number of his enslaved workers, he recognized early on that the agricultural potential of his estate as well as of the rest of Virginia was threatened by soil exhaustion, a consequence of the long devotion to tobacco and corn. He sought to pursue a husbandry that would both restore the soil and yield products with markets beyond the mother country. He turned for guidance to the ‘New Husbandry’—the methods and approach of the agricultural revolution that by the mid-eighteenth century was taking hold in Britain and spreading to France. … [I]it was suffused with the tenets of the scientific revolution, casting aside ancient authority and practice in favor of empiricism and experimentation,” writes Daniel J. Kevles. “Washington increasingly realized that the system of enslaved labor, with its inflexibility and coerciveness, was antithetical to the trust and collaboration necessary to realize the New Husbandry agriculture on which he believed the commercial future of the United States in part depended.”
Should we farm octopuses for food?
WBUR’s On Point (audio)
“A few years ago, Spanish seafood company Nueva Pescanova announced plans to build a commercial octopus farm on Spain’s Gran Canaria island. The facility would be more than 560,000 square feet and raise about a million octopuses annually for food,” says Meghna Chakrabarti. “For now, Nueva Pescanova’s plans still exist, but they haven’t moved forward significantly. But the news of a potential octopus farm immediately raised concern from researchers, activists, and many animal-welfare groups. And it sparked protest campaigns against the effort. Right now, even in the United States, there are state- and federal-level bans in the works. The concerns range from the cephalopod’s cannibalistic potential to their considerable intelligence. After all, octopuses are known problem-solvers and escape artists, they’re able to use tools, and they can recognize individuals outside of their own species, including human faces.”
‘A perfect invader’
The New York Times Magazine
“My curiosity about European green crabs began after witnessing their near indestructibility beside my own home. Our family fishes commercially in New England,” writes C.J. Chivers. “About 15 years ago, my children and I began capturing bushels of European green crabs for use as fertilizer. … Every so often we’d transfer bushels into coolers of tap water, where we expected they would die, as lobsters quickly do when immersed in fresh water. We’d then dump their limp carcasses into compost piles and cover them under a foot of decomposing leaves, vegetable scraps and manure. One day not long after one of these deposits, a neighbor arrived at our yard’s edge. He seemed bemused, and he asked if I knew anything about the crabs picking their way across his property … Yes, I admitted, I did. Upon inspecting the compost, we found that an untold number of crabs we thought dead had unearthed themselves and walked off. Over the next week we found more — hiding in shade, crouched under purple dead-nettle, pressed against the base of a shed. A murder of crows feasted on them. Crabs kept turning up.”