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Tag: farming
Factory Farming Creates Conditions For New And Deadly Viral Infections

Factory Farming Creates Conditions For New And Deadly Viral Infections

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

As the number of COVID-19 cases in the United States grow and the government scrambles to address the virus's spread, it's important to reflect on its source and discuss the role that consumption of animals plays in the spread of the disease.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 likely originated in bats, and the first outbreak in Wuhan, China, has been linked to a live animal market. These markets, known as "wet markets," allow the sale of wild animals and put people in close proximity to both live and dead animals with little or no regulatory oversight. Wet markets are also thought to be the place where other deadly diseases like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) crossed the species barrier.

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Farmer Suicides Rising In Wake Of Trump’s Trade War

Donald Trump's trade war with China contributed to a spike in farmer suicides across the Midwest in recent years, according to an investigation by USA Today and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.

On Monday, USA Today reported that more than 450 farmers killed themselves between 2014 and 2018. However, investigators cautioned that the true number is likely higher because several states did not share complete data with the investigative team.

More than 150 of the suicides were committed during 2017 and 2018.

"We like to identify something as the cause," Ted Matthews, a psychologist who works with Minnesota farm families, told USA Today. "Right now, they talk about commodity prices being the cause, and it's definitely a cause, but it is not the only one by any stretch."

The investigation found several key factors that contributed to the suicide crisis, including the drop in commodity prices since 2012, as well as increased farmer debt, bad weather that prevented planting, and a severe drop in exports to China "amid festering trade tensions."

Trump often complained about U.S. trade policies when running for office, and started taking some actions in 2017 in an attempt to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. In March 2018, Trump officially announced $50 billion in tariffs against China, setting off an extended trade war between the two countries.

Since Trump's trade war began, farmer bankruptcies in the Midwest have been on the rise. Bankruptcies for Midwest farmers increased by 19 percent in 2018 compared to the year before, according to the Farm Bureau. In 2019, Midwest farmers saw bankruptcies increase by another 17 percent compared to 2018.

Across the country, the Farm Bureau reported a 20 percent increase in farm bankruptcies in 2019 compared to 2018.

Wisconsin, famous for its dairy products, saw a loss of 10 percent of its dairy farms in 2019, the largest decline in state history.

Trump has "undermined our health care system at every turn, directly impacting farmers' ability to get the mental health services they need," Philip Shulman, spokesperson for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a Monday email.

Experts told the USA Today that "devastating economic events" are not solely responsible for suicides, but such events "can be the last straw for a person already suffering from depression or under long-term stress."

"Trump pursued reckless trade policies that caused Wisconsin farm bankruptcies to spike and exacerbated the financial strain on farming families across the country," Maddie McComb, spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said in an email this week. "Instead of obsessively tweeting, trying to slash Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and lying to farmers about unfulfilled trade deals, Trump should focus on finding real solutions to this growing crisis."

In 2018, Farm Aid, a nonprofit group focused on helping farmers, saw a spike in calls to its crisis hotline, spokesperson Jennifer Fahy said in an email. The hotline worked with 1,034 farmers that year, and another 864 farmers in 2019.

"Farm Aid stresses that while the trade wars have further damaged farmers, there is no one cause of this farm crisis," Fahy said about the recent spike in suicides. "The long term answer is not continued federal payouts to farmers, but a shift in farm policy to deliver fair prices and reward farmers for practices that increase farm resiliency and mitigate climate change."

The Trump administration has spent twice as much to bail out farmers hurt by its trade policies ($28 billion) as the Obama administration spent to rescue the auto industry during the Great Recession ($12 billion).

In addition to Farm Aid, many farmers have said that the bailouts are not enough.

"This [bailout] was supposed to make sure farmers were not the victims of this trade policy," Jim Mulhern, president of the National Milk Producers Federation, told the New York Times in November 2018. "I think most agriculture producers feel that the payments have not come close to making up for the damage for the tariffs."

In December 2019, the Trump administration announced a Phase I trade deal with China meant to bring an end to the trade war, but many farmers are skeptical that it will be sufficient. Trump announced China would soon purchase $50 billion worth of American agricultural products per year, despite the fact that the U.S. has never exported more than $26 billion in agricultural exports to China in a single year.

"I think it's a lot of false promises again," Bob Kuylen, a wheat and sunflower farmer who also and raises cattle in North Dakota, told the Associated Press in December.

Farmers looking for assistance can Farm Aid's hotline at 1-800-FARM-AID (1-800-327-6243). And anyone can call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline (1-800-273-8255) for free help and support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This story has been updated to include additional comment from the Democratic National Committee.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

Agriscience Programs Aren’t Just For Future Farmers

By Annie Martin, Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

ORLANDO, Fla. — A snake rested on the back of Valerie Lantigua’s neck as she sat, unperturbed, facing her laptop. The 16-year-old occasionally took her hands from her keyboard to steady the snake’s wandering head.

It’s a typical day in Timothy App’s class, which is part of the Veterinary Animal Science and Services magnet program at Colonial High. The four-year program covers critters from the zoo to the wild.

Agriscience programs like Colonial’s don’t fixate on “cows, sows and plows,” said Danny Garner, the district’s coordinator of agriscience and natural resources education. Today’s classrooms emphasize transferable skills including public speaking, debating and critical thinking.

“To me, it’s a program that can benefit any and every student at a school, regardless of career choice,” he said.

About 4,500 Orange students participate in agriscience programs like the one at Colonial, Garner said. That’s up from 2,500 during the 2012-13 school year.

Though Colonial’s program is about animals, Garner said the focus of each agriscience program varies among schools. Wekiva High offers an agriscience academy that includes aquaponics, biotechnology and horticulture.

Orange isn’t the only place where students are showing a growing interest in agriscience. The National FFA Organization (formerly known as Future Farmers of America), counted 629,000 members this year, up from 495,000 a decade ago.

The organization estimates more than a quarter of its members live in urban or suburban areas, said Kristy Meyer, a spokeswoman for the organization. Students in Orange’s agriscience programs aren’t always FFA members, but many are.

Yet, today’s students are less likely to become farmers than in previous generations. The share of Americans who work in agriculture has shrunk from 41 percent in 1900 to less than 2 percent today, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Employment in fields like agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting is expected to decline by 6 percent over the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But Orange educators say studying agriscience can help students prepare for a wide range of careers, like becoming veterinarians, scientists or nutritionists. And App said helping students explore their options, including eliminating those that are a bad fit, is a priority.

“I want them to find out what they want to do before they go to college,” he said.

At the Colonial High magnet program, about a quarter of the 74 students don’t live in Colonial’s zone. Many students who enter the program are eager to become veterinarians, and a few do just that. But App said he tries to educate them about other animal-related careers, too.

“We have to be very diverse because we’re trying to reach a larger student audience and stimulate their interest in a career in animal science,” App said.

App said he covers all types of animals because that’s what his students want to learn. But snakes are clearly an emphasis. The reptiles lurk in the glass tanks that border the room. Students roam freely with the animals wrapped around their necks.

App said he used to have chinchillas in his room, but the noise stressed the rodents, and snakes are a better fit for a busy school.

Behind the school, a couple of large tortoises sat lazily in a pen. Dozens of chickens clucked noisily in a coop. Three sheep waited to be fed in a covered area.

At Colonial, where students mostly live in homes with small yards and apartments, App allows his most serious students to keep farm animals in a grassy area adjacent to a parking lot. Families must purchase the animals with their own money. Students arrive on campus before the first class starts at 7:27 a.m. to feed the goats and come in on weekends and over school breaks.

One of the sheep that lives at Colonial belongs to Valerie. She’s raising the animal for a school project, and she’ll eventually sell it for its meat.

A junior at Colonial, Valerie commutes 45 minutes each way to Colonial from her home in south Orange County, near Kissimmee. The extra time in the car is worth it, she said, because it’s good preparation for veterinary school.

“There would be no means for me to raise these animals if it weren’t for this program,” she said.

©2015 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Fla.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Colonial High School juniors Cameron Ramola, 16, left, and Valeria Lantigua, 16, check on their chickens at the school on Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015. (Jacob Langston/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)

 

Farming Moves North With the Temperatures

Farming Moves North With the Temperatures

Before there was a California, New England fed itself. Somehow. The soil was lousy, the climate cold, and the diet limited (lots of cabbage, no avocados). At least there was plenty of water.

Thanks to improved transportation, the production of fruits and vegetables followed the sun, first moving to the fertile Midwest and then settling in the deserts of California. The Central Valley’s climate was close to perfect and the lack-of-rain problem fixed by moving water from elsewhere and digging deep wells.

A multiyear drought made worse by climate change has altered the assumption that California’s agricultural empire will always be able to stock the nation’s produce shelves. Warmer temperatures, meanwhile, have turned formerly inhospitably cold parts of America into contenders for that market.

This is no endorsement of climate change — let’s make that clear — but rising temperatures are breathing new life into northern agriculture. Farm economists say that the net result will be a vast expansion in America’s food growing capability.

A century ago, corn was not a viable crop above North Dakota’s southern third. But an average temperature rise of 2.7 degrees over that period has let North Dakota farmers grow feed corn up to the Canadian border. The growing season there is three weeks longer. In farming, that’s huge.

For similar reasons, soybeans now grow in upstate New York. And though the state’s Finger Lakes region has produced hardy wine grapes for a long time, milder winters have enabled it to nurture fancier European grape varieties.

As for New England, the hope is that some centuries-old farms will become profitable, as well as picturesque. Agriculture never disappeared there, but it had to concentrate on dairy products and niche crops, such as cranberries and wild blueberries. Warmer weather opens new possibilities. For example, peaches may become a commercial crop in Maine.

A paper out of Brandeis University predicts that by 2030, the New England region could have three times as much farmland as it does now, thanks to warmer weather. Should that happen, New England may end up producing half its food.

Which brings us to the concept of food miles. For more than a decade, agricultural scholars have marveled at a national system of food distribution that ships California vegetables thousands of miles to eastern cities where the same things could easily grow a few miles away.

One famous study at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture found that carrots consumed at Iowa institutions traveled an average of 1,800 miles from the conventional source (California). Had they been grown in Iowa, the average trip would have been 27 miles.

What gives? Anyone who travels the Hawkeye State feasts on vistas of horizon-to-horizon farmland. The soil is heavenly, and water falls from the skies. But a system of subsidized industrial agriculture has turned most of Iowa’s farm acreage into factories for commodity crops, mainly corn and soybeans.

Global warming seems to be also changing the distribution of rainfall. The Northwest, central states, and the South are seeing more rain and snow than they did a century ago. The Rockies and most of the Southwest are seeing less.

Again, climate change is not something to celebrate, including in places seeing opportunity in it. The northern states’ ghastly cold winters had the advantage of killing off insects. The pests now have a better chance of proliferating. In one of the sadder examples, bark beetles have been decimating the aspens of a warmer and drier Colorado.

The New England soil is still rocky. Will warmer temperatures, new seed varieties and other technological advances bolster its farming economy? Remember, it still rains there — a lot.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Joel Dinda via Flickr