Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Coronavirus forces California farmworkers to scramble for clean drinking water
FERN
Some 1 million residents of California farmworker communities have relied for years on bottled water because their tap water is tainted with nitrate and agricultural pollutants. Now, as stores ration water to prevent hoarding during the coronavirus crisis, these residents are relying on friends and family, or driving many miles to bigger towns in search of water, reports Liza Gross.
What an ancient farming culture can teach us about climate change
FERN and The Weather Channel
Centuries ago, the Zuni people in the arid Southwest region of the United States developed a sophisticated farming culture, channeling water toward crops and breeding climate-resilient seeds, reports Tim Folger, in a new FERN story, produced with The Weather Channel. But that culture was also likely wiped out by a rare 50-year megadrought that may now be underway again.
Smithfield ‘missteps’ contributed to virus spread at South Dakota plant
BuzzFeed News
Smithfield Foods’ pork processing plant in South Dakota is one of the country’s largest known coronavirus clusters, with more than 700 workers infected. The company blames workers’ “living conditions,” but, as Albert Samaha and Katie J.M. Baker write, “the company did little to inform or protect employees during the critical two weeks after the first case at the plant surfaced. Then, with confirmed cases rising quickly, Smithfield introduced new safety protocols but applied them unevenly across the plant’s departments, leaving hundreds of workers exposed.”
Each day, this Tennessee restaurant decides anew whether to stay open
The Ringer
On March 28 Riyad Alkasem, chef and owner of Café Rakka, a Syrian restaurant in Hendersonville, Tennessee, gathered his staff to ask what they wanted to do. “They ranged in age from their early 20s to their 50s. A few were white, native Hendersonvillians. Others were immigrants from Jordan and Ecuador and Mexico and elsewhere,” writes Jordan Ritter Conn. “‘This is my new tribe,’ [Riyad] likes to say about himself and his staff. Together, they’d built a restaurant consistently named the best in their mostly white and conservative suburban county. But now, he looked around the room and he saw that they were afraid. Of illness. Of unemployment. Of how the virus could destroy life in so many cruel and unpredictable ways.”
Why leading liberals oppose a plan to save the San Francisco Bay ecosystem
The Nation
“The whole San Francisco Bay ecosystem—that enormous estuary with its maze of bays, rich delta, and associated rivers and streams—is in the midst of an ecological calamity. Decades of dam building and water extraction to quench the thirst of California’s growing population and the needs of its mighty agriculture industry have starved the state’s waterways, as well as the bay itself, of crucial freshwater supplies,” writes Jimmy Tobias. Now, a new plan to address the crisis is facing “a host of powerful antagonists, including the city of San Francisco, that glittering capital of left coast liberalism.”