If You Want Farming to be a Climate Solution, Protect Farmworkers
Hello Big Teammates—
It’s April, somehow. It’s fewer than two short weeks until the official launch of Farm (and Other F Words), and a glorious summer is almost here. I’m deep in the weeds this week on a couple of different projects, as well as preparing to receive the thousand or so books you all have ordered, get them signed and sent your way in the next few weeks. On that note:
You’re Cordially Invited to the Farm (and Other F Words) Launch Extravaganza!
From 5-7pm ET, April 22nd, I will be hosting a Farm (and Other F Words) Virtual Launch Extravaganza. This will be our first opportunity (hopefully of many!) to meet face-to-virtual-face, share stories, and discuss the future of the Big Team Farm. A full agenda is coming soon, but there will be:
-Drinking
-An unboxing of YOUR book(s)!
-At least one impassioned speech
-A reading from said book
-A chance for us to chat and to ask me any questions you have been forgetting to email me
-So much gratitude
-Almost certainly good jokes
-and probably some kind of mega-amazing surprise… 👽
Snag your ticket today here. And in the meantime, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and set up a Big Team Farms slack channel for realtime discussions and updates (and we’re officially starting a book club!). Join it here.
Watch Minari
So my partner is one of those people that started learning Korean at the beginning of the pandemic and is actually still learning Korean (I honestly don’t know how he does it). He was excited for his birthday this past weekend to watch an American film in Korean, Minari, which received an Oscar nod recently. Minari is about a Korean family that moves to Arkansas to start a Korean vegetable farm.
I have to say, sad movies are hard on me, and I have a basic assumption that any serious movie that revolves around a farm is going to be crippling sad. So I had my doubts. But you know what? I was pleasantly surprised.
Minari is also about agriculture, and this was the other thing that made me trepidatious. I was scared that this movie, which is so clearly striving to take a bold stance around telling underrepresented stories, about diversifying American filmmaking, and emphasizing the magnificence of non-white contributions in American art and culture, was going to tell the white, settler-colonial story with a non-white family. I didn’t want to see that movie because I wouldn’t know how to talk about it. Where it might be my place to point out harmful tropes and demand recognition for white racism in agriculture, I don’t know how to engage in conversations when other communities take up those same harmful ideas and adopt them as their own.
The great news about Minari is that it is a movie about real people, not gods or saints. That alone sets it well apart in the canon of American Farm Stories. But actually, the thing that most struck me about this film was not the characters, but the story itself, and how distinctly non-Western it was.
A few months ago I read a critique of the Black Panther that hit me hard; “15 reasons why Black Panther is a nationalist, xenophobic, colonial and racist movie.” Point number 10 resonated with me in particular—
“The dominance of the underlying myth of the hero: The most classical structure of probably 99% of all blockbuster Hollywood movies is the classical ‘myth of the hero’. The hero who first felt small but received support from a wise man; the hero who travels and conquers dangers; the hero who confronts his darkest fears in an epic battle for evil; the hero who not only saves himself but also the world. Although it’s a universal story, in modern Western culture it’s so dominant that it seemingly became the only way to tell an exciting story. Just compare, for example, Disney hits with… some Japanese anime hits from studio Gibli. The latter are full of more Buddhist themes and as such often stray from the typical myth of the hero pattern. In various African cultures as well, other mythical patterns and archetypes can be found in the traditional storytelling. However, Black Panther is, from start to finish, the purest form of the hero myth. Even the previous Avenger movies such as The Winter Soldier and Civil War breached the pattern more (having the superheroes fighting each other). Yet in Black Panther there’s no single cultural change or breach of this subconscious hero pattern. As a result, there’s also no trace whatsoever of philosophical concepts like Ubuntu or the morality underlying the well-known South-African truth-commissions. There is only one simple plot: a dualism of good vs. evil and a hero who saves the day because he fights bravely and eventually crushes evil in an antagonistic fight.”
This is such an important point, and one that’s critical in how it applies to agriculture, and also everything. There’s many different versions of this “putting People of Color in a white story” phenomenon that occur in real life. For example; I’ve experienced this as a woman throughout my career— I’ve been imbued with the idea in many different positions and jobs that, essentially, the more I act like my male colleagues (brash, over-confident, loud, dominating, self-centered, etc.) the more opportunities will be available to me. This is the phenomenon above in a different form— its not that there’s “more opportunities for women” in these workplaces, it’s that there’s more opportunities for women to act like toxic men, and for people who act like toxic men to get ahead. This is not about changing the heart of the injustice then, it’s simply allowing more people to participate in the injustice to make it more widely palatable.
In agriculture, too, there’s plenty of problematic ideas about creating a “more just” farm system by simply getting more People of Color into the white settler-colonial system we have. But that assumption belies the fact that if we are truly striving to diversify our systems, the changes we make cannot be just in appearance or on the margin. We can’t just put different actors into our same old agricultural stories and pretend that that’s going to make a difference. We have to change the stories themselves.
That, in the end, is why I feel good recommending that you see Minari. Because it’s not a white, western, hero’s journey story where a small family farm triumphs over greed with family values and ends up in boisterous prosperity, with non-white actors shoehorned into a narrative that does not seem to reflect them. It’s way, way more real than that. So if you’re looking for a fresh and flawed view of what it really means to farm and dream in America, definitely watch this movie.
If you do watch it, and you’re like me and spend like first forty minutes wondering where you’ve seen that actor before, he was in a sketch on I Think You Should Leave where Tim Robinson ate a gift receipt.
The Intersection of Workers and Climate
As the madness of the early part of this year recedes I’ve been able to connect with some folx in the last few weeks I’ve missed, and ended up having a great chat with Big Teammate Ricardo Salvador yesterday. We did a lot of unpacking together of what’s happening with carbon markets right now, and why it’s so important that the Biden administration *not* rush into participation in a carbon credit system that’s going to burn out when people realize that the economics got ahead of the science and it doesn’t actually deliver on the promises it makes.
This conversation got me thinking about that Einstein quote, you know the one:
In so many ways, the whole issue with carbon markets (and many other environmentally-motivated agricultural projects and movements afoot today) is that they’re simply the current players trying to fix a problem with the current system using the tools we used to create the problem in the first place. Folx love a “market-based solution” but what happens when the very market you’re trying to shape into a solution was the crux of the problem in the first place?
When I’m feeling optimistic, I like to believe that the days of us believing that the market is the only way to motivate necessary changes are behind us. I like to believe that we are capable of thinking on the systems level. Putting a price on carbon is a market-level approach, it assumes that there are only two factors in the system, farmer decisions about how they farm, and the price that they’re paid for the work they do. The essential assumption being that if you raise the price they get paid for doing the work you want, they’ll do it (an assumption that I think finds little evidence of being true in practice). This “solution” promises to create just as many unintended consequences as any other market-level approach we’ve ever tried.
But if what we truly care about is better environmental practices on farms, a systems level approach would know that farmer decisions and the price of commodities are *not* the only two elements in the system. There are dozens of other points of intervention in a complex system where we could intercede to change the overall outcomes. And when we recognize (instead of ignore) that any action we take will create predictable and unpredictable reactions throughout the wider system, we can take those into account and plan accordingly. This is critical, because all of our experience in agriculture in the United States has taught us that it’s rarely the direct and intended effects that have the biggest and longest term impact on the system. For example, the development of steam and then diesel-powered tractors didn’t just make farm work easier (the intended consequence), it also contributed to a fundamental reformation of the nation’s farm and rural population (the unintended, harder-to-predict outcome).
Knowing this, I would argue that an intervention like comprehensive immigration reform and an increase in labor protections for farm workers (nothing radical even, just giving them the protections that all other American workers already receive) would have a much more significant and positive environmental impact than any carbon market ever will. Why? Because many of America’s most harmful farm practices are facilitated in part or in whole by unjustly cheap labor. The American dairy industry, for example, would likely shrink drastically if farm labor was better protected, leading to fewer dairy cows in the national herd and on over-taxed grasslands, and a reduction in the dramatic oversupply of fluid milk we’ve been dealing with for decades.
The fresh fruit and vegetable industry would also be roiled, and food prices would likely shoot up as they figure out how to run their food and farm businesses with something other than exploitation. This is one of the key arguments *against* farm labor protections, “it would just raise the price of food and then the poor would go hungry.” Well first of all, 7 out of the 10 lowest paid jobs in the US are in food and agriculture, so if we paid and protected food and agriculture workers better, they would be able to afford more expensive food. And secondly, how is the answer to “people are poor and hungry” to lower the price of food, and not to raise the minimum wage? Or provide universal basic income? Buying the “poor people need cheap food” argument is participating in their continued economic oppression.
Further afield from the direct consequences, more expensive labor would likely begin to encourage more older or less successful farmers to move beyond agriculture, opening up more opportunities for fresh people and perspectives to take over more land, or for that land to go out of production (the best environmental outcome possible on agricultural land) and into conservation easements or other permanent perennial systems. And perhaps as the much smaller groups of (but also much wealthier) food-producing farms struggle to deal with rising costs, they’ll march over to Congress and USDA, and actually throw their weight behind some substantive policy changes that brings more federal support to them, sucking it away from the traditional corn-soybean-wheat-cotton federal payment queens.
Most importantly, in my mind, more money to more people (as opposed to more money to fewer people— ie the carbon market model) is an indisputably good outcome. When people are not struggling the abject poverty and labor exploitation, they’re free to and capable of making choices that benefit themselves, they’re children and future generations, and all of us. There are way more farm and food workers in the US than there are farmers, and they are vastly poorer than farmers. If anyone in the food system needs our help to be part of the solution, it’s the work force, not the people who own all the assets.
So the next time you here someone start a conversation with the question, “how do we help farmers [insert good outcome here],” consider countering with, “let’s start with determining who the people are in this system who really need help, rather than assuming it’s farmers.”
Last F(ew) Things
If what you need is a little joy today, definitely check out this long look at why you can’t buy a Bob Ross painting today.
A little later today (10 et) I’m going to be participating in a food conversation to talk about the recent story I wrote about Gracy Olmstead’s NYT opinion piece. Join here:
Join us & @AgFunder tomorrow for Future Food News Review. We’ll dig into the news w/ @aliciakennedy @Ximena_Bustillo @EWatsonWrites @grocery_nerd @joefassler @sarah_k_mock @kh @GreenQueenHK @meganpoinski & @iamlbt at 10am EST on @joinClubhouse 🗞 👋joinclubhouse.com/event/MOpOV6Y0
And later today I’ll be on another carbon panel on Clubhouse (ugh). If you need a Clubhouse invite just ask. More info here:
If you’re new to Big Team Farms and want some explanation for what the F you just read, check out The Intro Newsletter and more recent additions by visiting Big Team Farms online.
Do you have announcements that would be relevant to the 1,200 or so members of the Big Team? Feel free to shoot me messages about projects, resources, job posting, etc. And to everyone who’s done that already, or who has asked questions that I haven’t yet responded to, look out for those in the next couple of newsletters.
I’ve been taking a screen break this last week (kind of) and accidentally got really into this book about Irish history that’s adapted from a bunch of radio shorts. It’s super interesting, and the most important thing that learning about first and early second millennia European history reminds me is how much Europeans have been moving around and destroying one another, and for how long that his bean common. It’s nuts.
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Stay safe out there, dear ones. Don’t forget, if you have funny gifs, thoughts, comments, stories, questions, feedback, catchy song lyrics, good podcast recommendations, or anything else to tell me, I’m right on the other end of this email.
Rock on,
Sarah