FERN’s Friday Feed: The end of American tobacco
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
Farming tobacco in the U.S. no longer makes sense
FERN and The New Republic
Linwood Scott III is a sixth-generation tobacco farmer in Lucama, North Carolina. “When I visited in December,” writes Duncan Murrell, “he led me on a tour of his operation. ‘Tobacco has been growing on this farm way back before me,’ he told me. ‘I walk the same fields that my great-granddad and my granddad and my dad walked.’ He spoke as if he could see the families stretching out behind him and over the distant horizon of his very flat fields on the coastal plain of North Carolina. But he’s stressed, he explained, worried about tobacco’s ‘razor-thin’ margin in a way that few before him had to be. A bad or failed crop could end the operation. When there’s a hurricane near the coast, he stays up all night, as if obsessing about the weather could change it … If tobacco built the farm over generations, it’s no longer a dependable source of the kind of income his grandfather earned decades ago, much less its best cash crop. Scott plants most of his acreage in sweet potatoes now. And he has begun to entertain the notion that his farm, one of the biggest tobacco growers in the biggest tobacco state, may soon get out of tobacco altogether.”
We need a farm bill for farmworkers
FERN and Mother Jones
“Farm work has long been among the most dangerous jobs in America. But while Congress has had many chances to bolster labor protections in the 18 versions of the farm bill it has passed since 1933, it has instead largely ignored the needs of the workers who plant, tend, harvest, and process the nation’s food. As climate change worsens, this disregard for the food system’s ‘essential workers’ is increasingly hard to justify,” writes Teresa Cotsirilos. “The legislation has long supported farm owners, through federal crop insurance and other programs; when things go wrong for farmers, the government is there to help. Yet Congress continues to treat labor as being outside the legislation’s purview.”
Sea Shepherd’s sea change
Outside
“From our vantage on deck the morning after our arrival, clouds pillowed the sky and the Gulf of Guinea was flat around us. After a breakfast of a smoothie and black coffee … [Peter] Hammarstedt climbed the stairs to the bridge for a command briefing with the Bob’s Dutch captain, Bart Schulting, and three Gabonese fishery officers … The image of Hammarstedt huddled with the uniformed officials was striking,” writes Tristram Korten. “It was only nine years prior that a U.S. federal judge declared that Sea Shepherd’s actions were ‘the very embodiment of piracy’ in a 2013 decision upholding an injunction to stop the organization from harassing Japanese whalers. For most of its 46-year history, public awareness of Sea Shepherd has been primarily through its work battling governments in order to draw attention to dolphin, seal, and whale hunts. But in the previous decade, the group shifted its focus heavily toward illegal fishing, largely because of need—there are half as many fish in the oceans today compared with 50 years ago—but also because its opposition to mammal hunts started to bear fruit.”
The significance of roadside pollinator patches
Modern Farmer
“If you’re driving along the highway in Florida sometime soon, you may find the roadside dotted with the blooms of thousands of flowers. But they aren’t just eye candy. These flowers are intended to create pollinator habitat corridors,” writes Lena Beck. “According to Jaret Daniels, curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, we no longer have the luxury of relying only on conservation lands to address biodiversity loss. Climate change, pollution, pesticides and habitat destruction are putting increasing pressure on pollinators, such as bees and butterflies. He says we need to look at nontraditional spaces as well, such as agricultural margins, utility corridors and roadsides. Although roads commonly fragment habitat for wildlife, pollinator programs, present in many states, flip the script and provide opportunities for conservation.”
Indian farmers fight for justice against long odds
New Lines Magazine
India’s farmers “represent 70% of that portion of the country’s 1.4 billion people who reside outside the major metropolitan areas, and occupy the peripheries of society, without proper access to health care and education,” writes Parth M.N. “From 1995 to 2016, over 300,000 farmers died by suicide in India, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau. In 2021, close to 11,000 farmers ended their lives, that is, at least 30 farmers were dying by suicide every day. The $120 per month of income that an average farming family in India makes is not enough to meet basic needs. Erratic rainfalls have significantly increased the frequency of crop failure, meaning those meager incomes have also become less reliable. Furthermore, farmers’ access to credit has worsened, forcing them to borrow from loan sharks at rates between 4% and 8% per month. Yet the issues have received scant attention; in 2014-15 the Centre for Media Studies found that only 0.24% of front-page news in national dailies covered rural India.”