All FERN Articles
Pandemic and protest in a meatpacking town
Last March, Maira Mendez, a high school administrator in Lincoln, Nebraska, worried her parents might contract coronavirus from their jobs at Smithfield Foods, a massive pork processing plant in the nearby town of Crete. While the country grappled with stay-at-home orders, meatpacking plants across the nation quickly became invisible hotspots for the virus. Mendez and… » Read More
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Latino USAOver 230 radio stations, 545,000 listeners, 4.4 million podcast downloads
As Covid-19 rises, Alaskans crowd rivers to stock up on wild salmon
Cortney Edwards’ camp at the mouth of the Kasilof River in south central Alaska looks like a preschool in the sand. His white Suburban and a long piece of driftwood cordon off a stretch of beach that is filled with toys, a pink princess tent, camp chairs sized for the kindergarten set, and an outdoor… » Read More
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As Covid-19 cases spike, an unprecedented alliance emerges to protect California farmworkers
Advocates have warned since the beginning of the pandemic that the 2.4 million farmworkers who plant and harvest the nation’s food live and labor under conditions that make them extremely vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. And now, just as they predicted, outbreaks among farmworkers have erupted in agricultural hubs across the country as peak summer… » Read More
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No. 1 Spanish-language digital property according to ComScore, with 20 million monthly U.S. usersUnivision
The pandemic is just the latest threat faced by refugee food workers in Texas
Mfaume Lawi has already lost his home several times. The first was during an attack on his village in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the civil war in the late 1990s. After fleeing to Tanzania, he lived in a precarious hut in a refugee camp for almost two decades. When he was accepted for… » Read More
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Mapping Covid-19 outbreaks in the food system
Since April, FERN has been closely tracking the spread of Covid-19 at meatpacking plants, food processing facilities, and farms. This dashboard is home to our latest reporting on Covid-19 cases and food system workers, and is updated each weekday. According to data collected by FERN, as of August 11 at 12pm ET, at least 732… » Read More
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With thousands of seafood workers coming to Alaska, state tries to contain Covid-19
Two months ago, local leaders in southwest Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a 250-mile-long inlet in the Bering Sea, begged the state’s governor to consider canceling the commercial sockeye salmon season. They feared that Covid-19 would spread through the region’s small villages, which have scant health resources. Now, preparations for this fishery, which starts in a matter… » Read More
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How did Europe avoid the Covid-19 catastrophe ravaging U.S. meatpacking plants?
BERGERAC, France — In late April, around the time that President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring U.S. meatpacking plants to be “critical infrastructure” in an effort to keep them open after they emerged as coronavirus hotspots, Germany’s slaughterhouses reported their first cases of the virus. In the ensuing weeks, as the number of… » Read More
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8 million readersMother Jones
Covid-19 is spreading among farmworkers, and it may get worse
This past January, the Supreme Court upheld Donald Trump’s invocation of the Public Charge Rule, which denies green cards to immigrants likely to request federal health, nutrition, or housing assistance. At the time, advocates worried the rule would prevent both documented and undocumented immigrants, who make up about half of the agricultural workforce, from seeking… » Read More
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For this North Dakota grocery, the pandemic is personal
When Dan Reineke was in quarantine waiting for the result of his Covid-19 test, he had his groceries delivered to his home. His local grocery store — Michigan Hometown Foods — doesn’t have an online ordering system, though, so he wrote down a list of what he wanted, snapped a photo with his phone, and… » Read More
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