FERN’s Friday Feed: Japanese-American farmers in WWII; poultry collusion; and immigration fears on the farm

In FERN’s latest story, with KQED’s California Report, reporter Lisa Morehouse returned with some of the survivors of Japanese-American incarceration camps and their relatives to the Lake Tule camp in Northern California, where Japanese-Americans, many of them farmers, were forced to grow food for the U.S. government. “Over 1,000 Japanese-Americans worked in the fields [at Lake Tule], most earning just $12 a month, a quarter of what farmworkers made at the time,” says Morehouse.

Many of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were rounded up in 1942 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor were farmers, despite the fact that multiple laws across the country made it difficult if not impossible for them to have long-term leases on land. By 1940, the Japanese-American community cultivated nearly 40 percent of the vegetables in California, with some two-thirds of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast working in agriculture. But while being held prisoner during the war, many lost their farms. “By 1960, the number of Japanese-American farmers dropped to a quarter of their pre-war presence,” says Morehouse.

What undocumented immigrants mean to farms and farm communities

Grist

“The argument for limiting immigration rests on the conviction that a country must put its citizens’ needs first, rather than trying to embrace the whole of humanity, and that a country cannot survive too rapid a pace of cultural change,” writes Nathaniel Johnson. “But the things that worry immigration-hawks don’t apply to the bulk of farmworkers,” 50 to 70 percent of whom are undocumented. Yet most have been in the country for years. “These farmworkers are no longer outsiders — they’ve become our neighbors, they’ve assimilated into communities,” says Johnson. As one farmworker put it, “I wish people would realize that it’s because of us,” he says, “that the rest of America eats this beautiful harvest.”

Are chicken companies rigging the system?

Bloomberg

In a major class-action lawsuit, poultry wholesalers are claiming that a secretive data-service company is helping big poultry companies fix their prices. Agri Stats produces confidential weekly reports for poultry companies that are packed with coveted information, like the kind of feed companies use and how many eggs they hatched last week (company names aren’t revealed). “Agri Stats has for years maintained that its reports don’t violate antitrust laws, in part because the information provided is historical,” says Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket. “A typical report doesn’t say how much a company plans to charge for a cut of meat, only what it charged last month or last week.” But in a federal antitrust lawsuit filed against a dozen of the country’s biggest poultry providers — including Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride — Mapleview Farms and other wholesalers say it’s naive to think the companies aren’t piecing together the information in order to keep prices high. The plaintiffs argue that they’ve been paying more for chicken because of an “illegal, if tacit, agreement” among the poultry companies, an agreement made possible thanks to Agri Stats, says Leonard.

The hills are alive with the sound of climate change

Pacific Standard