FERN’s Friday Feed: The farm bill fight
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The farm bill’s changing mandate
FERN and Mother Jones
With the state of the next farm bill in crisis, FERN and Mother Jones are launching a series of articles that analyze the nature of that crisis and explore the emerging issues — from racial equity to climate change — that are changing the mandate of the nation’s most important agricultural legislation. This week we delivered the first two pieces. Lee Drutman and Dustin Wahl show how the doom loop of extreme partisan politics shattered the bipartisan compromise that has long made the farm bill work. And Tom Philpott makes the case for tying environmental stewardship to farm subsidies as a way to force Big Ag to act on climate change and biodiversity loss. Look for new pieces each Wednesday through February.
Prison labor linked to hundreds of popular food brands
The Associated Press
“A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at … a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison,” write Robin McDowell and Margie Mason. “Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are … forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill. Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide … The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice.”
Beware climate populism
Aeon
“The climate crisis is turning more severe with every passing year, and we are coming close to a point where it would no longer be possible to ignore or deny its existence,” writes Ákos Szegőfi. “Somewhere down the line in this collective awakening, we can expect the rapid emergence of actors who are more interested in blaming others for the climate emergency than actually providing solutions; culprits could be immigrants, Jews, disliked minorities, old enemies — the usual suspects or new targets, yet to emerge. Already we can see early signs of a shift from denial to blame in what one could call climate populism — an approach to the problem and the politics operating with slogans but without solutions, with blame but without taking responsibility — a direct descendant of the populisms we know of today.”
Solar farms bring pollinator bonus
Anthropocene
“To see if the promise of a solar farm paired with a critter haven could bear fruit, scientists from the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado converged on southern Minnesota to count bugs,” writes Warren Cornwall. “In 2017, two different solar installations in the middle of Minnesota’s farm country were built on 76 acres of land that had been farmed with row crops for decades. Much of the land beneath the panels was dosed with the … herbicide to kill weeds, then seeded with 66 different species of native grasses and flowers. A small sub-section of the land got a bonus of another five dozen plant species. The following year, researchers began systematically scouring the areas planted with the extra species to tabulate all the insects they could find … Within a few years … [t]he total number of insects had tripled. By the end of five years, the population of native bees such as bumble bees and little sweat bees had soared to more than 20 times their initial tiny numbers.”
Indigenous languages may hold clues to protecting biodiversity
Knowable Magazine
As a young linguist in the 1990s, David Harrison “traveled to the Russian republic of Tuva to spend a year with a group of herding nomads. During time with the Tuvans, he witnessed the close relationship between these Indigenous people and the animals, nature and landscapes they coexist with. That connection is deeply ingrained not only in Tuvan culture,” writes Katarina Zimmer, “but also in their language, from its rich vocabulary for describing their livestock and the world around them to its very sound, which can closely mimic noises of the landscape. Harrison has since studied Indigenous languages in other parts of the world … and learned that many of them are nature-centric in this way, reflecting millennia of deep observation of the natural world. Scholars increasingly recognize that many of these tongues encode much knowledge about the world’s species and ecosystems that is unknown to Western science — knowledge, Harrison argues, that may prove critical to protecting nature amid a global extinction crisis.”