FERN’s Friday Feed: What should desert farmers grow?
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
A latex-producing desert shrub could ease Arizona farmers’ water woes
FERN
“The compound was nothing like the farms of fluffy cotton and bright green alfalfa I was used to seeing in central Arizona,” writes Stephen Robert Miller in FERN’s latest story. “A ring of barbed wire contained a stucco building with offices, meeting rooms, and a greenhouse where geneticists in white coats peered through microscopes. Out back, rows of ragged shrubs grew at varying heights. This was guayule (pronounced why-oo-lee), a plant native to Southwestern deserts that happens to produce latex. From this unassuming outpost, Bridgestone was trying to establish the country’s sole domestic source for the kind of high-grade natural rubber used in airplane tires and surgical gloves — and they were doing it with a crop accustomed to drought.”
An immigrant family’s fight to save its restaurant during the pandemic
The Washington Post
“To Janet and Alan, Hollywood East was more than a way to support the family,” writes Tim Carman. “For 24 years, their restaurant had been a place to gather, to share stories, to create memories. It was the place where they celebrated the Lunar New Year, where Alan and his sons performed traditional Chinese lion dances to ward off evil and bring good luck. But such good-luck rituals were no match for the pandemic. Over the next 22 months, the family would be tested like never before, both personally and professionally. They would put all their effort and ingenuity into keeping their restaurant, the place where Pops had poured so many drinks and forged so many friendships, alive.”
A harrowing tale of toxic nutrients in farm country water
Circle of Blue
“The chemical fertilizers that farmers insist are needed to assure high crop production, and the nitrogen-rich manure produced by contemporary animal agriculture, are largely unregulated,” writes Brett Walton. “The result is nitrates are causing health and ecological trauma in farming regions across the country and around the world as farmers and governments intensify their efforts to produce more food from each acre of land.”
Art that defies a system that prefers to keep farmworkers invisible
High Country News
“Rosalinda Guillén … runs Community-to-Community Development in Bellingham, Washington, a 20-year-old grassroots organization focused on food justice and immigrant rights,” writes Sarah Sax. “The organization collects paintings, posters, and other artwork created by farmworkers or their family members, including Rosalinda’s father’s work. They portray farmworkers in a myriad of ways: at times playful, serene, beautiful and almost transcendental. She calls this ‘artivism’ — a way of resisting a system that prefers to see farmworkers as disposable and invisible.”
Japan’s centuries-old wasabi-growing culture is in crisis
The New York Times
“Mr. Asada is just one of many growers in Shizuoka, one of Japan’s largest wasabi-growing regions, who must confront rising challenges from global warming, the legacy of untended forests and demographic decline,” write Motoko Rich and Makiko Inoue. “Over the last decade, the volume of wasabi produced in Shizuoka has declined by close to 55 percent … ‘I have a sense of crisis,’ said Hiroyuki Mochizuki, president of Tamaruya, a 147-year-old company in Shizuoka that processes wasabi to sell in tubes, as well as in salad dressings, flavored salts, pickles and even nostril-tickling chocolate. ‘In order to protect Japanese food culture … it is important to protect wasabi.’”