The research gap

In 2021, the USDA announced $25 million to state Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Networks (FRSAN) to build crisis hotlines, establish anti-suicide trainings, and offer free or low-cost counseling, among other services. It was an important step toward recognizing the emotionally grueling, often isolating nature of farm work. But it did little to respond to the needs of Black farmers, who tend to operate smaller farms, face increased economic pressure, and are routinely exposed to racism in agriculture and beyond. Of the 50 FRSAN projects USDA funded in 2021, only 7 programs—in Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Rhode Island—pledge to make efforts to accommodate the specific needs of communities of color. 

It’s yet another indication that the bulk of U.S. research on farming and mental or behavioral health and stress focuses on white farmers. And while that may partly be a function of demographics—Black farmers make up 1 percent of growers nationwide, a stat that itself testifies to the exclusionary force of systemic racism in agriculture—important research or diagnostic tools fail to be race-sensitive. Without these mechanisms, it’s difficult to provide informed treatment that responds to the specific needs of Black farmers and could improve their physical and mental well-being. 

The Farm/Ranch Stress Inventory, created by psychology doctoral student Charles K. Welke in 2002, is a tool that assesses stress, satisfaction and perceived social support among farmers and ranchers. It asks dozens of questions to assess a farmer’s anxiety level and is sometimes adapted for studies of farmer well-being. But its questions focus mostly on financial and family matters; while it inquires about conflict with relatives or community, no question mentions race or racism specifically. In another example, a 2021 Farm Bureau-commissioned study of 2,000 rural Americans found that farmers and farm workers were significantly more likely to have said their stress increased in the last year than their non-farming neighbors. But the insurance and lobbying giant told The Counter that it did not analyze its data by race. 

Laketa Smith manages the Farmers of Color Network of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI-USA). In collaboration with N.C. State University, she and North Carolina-based RAFI are conducting an ongoing study of farmer mental health and financial stress. Unlike many other studies, that research is intentionally oversampling farmers of color. Though the study won’t conclude until later this year, it will interview 15 Black and Indigenous farmers, respectively, in addition to the same number of white growers (a future iteration will include Latinx subjects). 

While final results aren’t in, Smith said that there’s no indication that suicide is higher among either group. Still, preliminary results suggest that chronic stress is a feature of life for many Black farmers, and that stress can manifest in a variety of ways, from family conflict or separation to substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and ill physical health. 

“Pride is the flip side of shame, and [when money problems happen and land loss is possible], there’s a lot of shame over being in that position,” Smith said. “Farming is often not [simply] what they do. It’s who they are. They’re fourth or fifth generation. And sometimes they think ‘This land’s been in the family for years, and I got us in trouble.'” 

Racism as risk factor

It’s a realm of lived experience that’s also established science: Being subjected to racism is unhealthy. Even encountering the more subtle, daily varieties can be stressful—and, over time, that stress can impact mental and physical health outcomes in concrete ways. A 2013 article in The Atlantic summarized the current state of the medical literature, which draws links between discrimination and increased rates of hypertension, the common cold, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and even general mortality. One study of 30,000 participants found that racism-induced stress is directly related to poorer physical and mental health. It’s a phenomenon that social psychologist Nancy Krieger calls “embodied inequality”—and these damaging linkages have only become better established in recent years. 

“The perception of racism, that feeling can have an impact on psychological well-being,” said Telisa Spikes, a cardiovascular researcher at Emory University who has conducted studies on the impacts of financial and racial stressors on African American health. “Your body responds by going into fight or flight mode—blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up. When you’re constantly in this hypervigilant state it can have a negative impact on health.”

Spikes describes hypervigilance as a heightened response to prior racial trauma that leads African Americans to anticipate negative or discriminatory experiences when they are in predominantly white spaces. 

“You have this stigmatized status as a Black person where you feel you always have to be constantly on watch,” she said. 

Epidemiologist Camara Jones has long made the case that racism is a public health crisis. Notably, she has called on fellow researchers to prioritize data collection by race, urging them to focus their attention on the root causes of racial differences in health outcomes. 

“When we collect data by race, our findings most often reveal significant race-associated differences in health outcomes,” Jones wrote in a 2001 article published in the Journal of American Epidemiology. “The differences are so ubiquitous across organ systems, over the life span, and over time that they do not surprise us or seem to require explanation. Indeed, only when there is a White excess in disease burden, as with suicide, is our professional interest piqued.”

More recently, researchers have continued to probe the role that racism plays in lowering Black Americans’ life expectancy. A 2020 Auburn University study concluded that stress caused by experiencing racism accelerates aging at the cellular level; while a study published by Georgia State University in 2019 found that experienced over time, racism and long term anxiety could “wear and tear down body systems,” weighting the body’s allostatic load—the lifelong build up of stress—and putting African Americans at greater risk for chronic illness. 

“Health cannot be separated from the social environment. Many of the disparities that we see are a result of the social environment. And going back to clinical research, you cannot address problems without highlighting the racial demographic and the role that social determinants play in contributing to these disparities,” Spikes said. “Racism is now listed as a fundamental cause of disparities. It may not be experienced in the form of interpersonal racism—I’m going to charge you a higher price because of the color of your skin—but it’s more of the institutional and systemic racism. The trickle-down policies that derive from that is what has negative implications for health: not being able to afford housing in a good school district if you have children; not being able to get a loan for a mortgage,” said Spikes. 

Those risk factors are only magnified and exacebated within the context of farming, where discriminatory individuals, processes, and systems can continually threaten one’s livelihood and land. Combine U.S. agriculture’s institutionalized racism with the profession’s inherent volatility, and there’s an argument that Black farmers are at heightened risk for all manner of stress-related ailments. 

It happened to Lucious Abrams. The 68-year-old Georgia farmer was denied compensation as a claimant to 1997’s Pigford v. Glickman racial discrimination class action lawsuit against the U.S. government. He has filed numerous legal measures since then to delay foreclosure, and rents his farmland to neighbors to keep the taxes paid. After three decades wrangling with USDA, his body became a vessel of agony and apprehension. 

“I had kidney failure. I had a blood vessel burst up in my colon. My wife had a nervous breakdown. There’s no way to tell you the trauma that we have been through over the years. Through God’s grace and his mercy … that’s the only way I know how [we’ve survived],” said Abrams. “It’s been an absolute nightmare.”

Kentucky State University economist and rural sociologist Marcus Bernard worked with farmers in Alabama’s Black Belt region as the former director of a rural training and research center for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a nonprofit association of about 20,000 mostly Black farmers and landowners. While completing his PhD at the University of Kentucky, Bernard examined how racism, institutional racism, and class conflict affected Black male farmers. His research identified high levels of acute stress in both African American men and women farmers, typically wives of the male subjects he interviewed. 

The long and well-documented history of Black mistreatment at the hands of the USDA, its partners, and agricultural colleagues also produces well-founded anxieties that bias will put more roadblocks in Black farmers’ way. 

“When you think about a picture of whites farming [and] then think about a picture of Blacks in agriculture, those are two very different experiences,” said Bernard. “The picture with Blacks in agriculture is marred by stigma and labels: a feeling like ‘Someone is always out to get me.’ Like ‘I’m not going to get a fair shake.’ Either ‘I’m going to get shorted on my price,’ ‘Somebody is after my land,’ or ‘I may not get the financing that I need.’”

For decades, USDA and associated lenders withheld critical loans from Black farmers on the basis of race—only one factor among many that gave white farmers an unfair advantage, and a shorter path to profit. Today, countless hurdles remain, from fierce, hyperlocal cronyism that excludes these farmers, to price manipulation that drives down their profits and earnings, and excessive collateral required to secure loans that put them at risk of losing everything if they fall into debt—a shameful legacy that is literally written across Black farmers’ bodies. 

For 26-year-old farmer Tamarya Sims, the anxiety lies not in the fear of dispossession—but in the fear that she may never own land at all. Sims is a landless Black farmer in Asheville, North Carolina. By day, she works for a land trust, managing chickens and bees on a community farm. She runs her own business, Soulfull Simone Farm, on the side. The urban flower and herbal farm takes up less than half an acre of rented land. 

Sims, who experiences anxiety related to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), hopes to one day own 60 acres of forested land she envisions as a “healing space” where she can grow herbs and plants, and visitors of color can attend workshops and feel welcome. She describes the distress she deals with as threefold.  

“There’s the stress of being a farmer, then there’s the stress of being a Black farmer, and then of being a landless farmer,” she said. Added to the anxiety she feels, these stressors can make it difficult for her to focus, sapping her energy and ability to solve problems that may arise on the farm. 

As a Black female agriculturalist in an overwhelmingly white area, Sims has experienced strong feelings of alienation. When she spoke out in the wake of George Floyd’s death, she became instantly and uncomfortably recognizable in her community. 

But invisibility, rather than hypervisibility, has been the norm for her. When white visitors stop by the community farm, they often pass her wordlessly, seeking out the first white face they can find as an authority. When she was shopping for her own tractor, she brought a white male associate with her to the dealership, for fear she wouldn’t be taken seriously or get a fair deal. The sales agent spoke exclusively to the white man and refused to look her in the eye, she said. Knowing she must enlist the same tactic in her search to acquire land is upsetting and tiresome. 

“One of the main recurring things I’ve went through is being on land and folks seeing me and thinking that I don’t belong just because I’m Black. Even at my job, I’ve had people slowing down in their cars to see what I’m doing.” If they come onto the land, they ignore her just as the tractor salesperson did. “There’s nowhere I can go where people see me and think I belong, or where I feel safe.”

This feeling has been a primary motivator in Sim’s desire to carve out her own piece of land where she can enjoy the restorative benefits of nature that all farmers love: the joy and relief that comes from digging in the dirt, watching a tiny seed shoot out roots long before its verdant foliage begins to show.

“I work through a lot of my life issues in the garden, and I think that everyone should have the opportunity to do that… When you connect people with land, they see the mountains behind them, and they feel comfortable,” she said. It’s a feeling of ease she continues to chase and an irony many Black farmers experience: that working the land can relieve stress, while also exacerbating it. 

Community as coping

Former cattle farmer Michael Rosmann is a psychologist who has worked with farmers and institutions for more than 30 years to raise awareness about the importance of behavioral health in agricultural communities. His work with the nonprofit Agriwellness Inc., a partnership initiative between seven Prairie states facilitated by the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health, informed the framework of USDA’s Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network. 

“The traits that define successful farmers are a capacity to endure extreme hardship, the capacity to work alone, if necessary, self-reliance for making decisions, and keeping things to oneself. These traits cut across all races and cultures,” said Rosmann. 

However, these characteristics can have a downside: a reticence to divulge thoughts and emotions to behavioral health professionals or scholars who could document farmers’ individual or collective mental health needs. To combat this, Rosmann emphasizes a need for counselors and therapists who have a shared understanding of not only agriculture, but the complex racial and cultural histories these farmers hold. 

In practice, that’s not always easy. Rural communities, where most farms are, often lack the medical resources and services offered in major cities. At the same time, only about 3 percent of U.S. psychologists are Black. For farmers, these factors—the disparity in health care services and the lack of representation among health care professionals—mix with other forms of inequity to create barriers to relief from occupational stress. 

In the absence of doctors they can trust and enough rural mental health providers, many Black farmers like Abrams lean on religion to lessen their mental anguish. 

“There is still within this community of older Black farmers, deeply spiritual, deeply rooted ties to their churches. Their spiritual life is what I believe is the No. 1 thing that keeps them sane and grounded,” Kentucky State’s Bernard said. 

He speculated that faith may offset suicide risk among Black farmers. But because Black farmers are not often studied or written about outside the bounds of their racial experiences, there’s little to no information about the prevalence of suicide and self-harm among them. 

That most Black farmers turn to social networks for support bears out an aspect of Farm Bureau research: in general, farmers are far more likely to tap their friends and family for help than seek a doctor’s advice.  

Kaleb “KJ” Hill, 35, is a fourth-generation farmer from New Orleans and the founder of Oko Vue Produce Co., an agricultural business that specializes in edible landscapes and stormwater management. 

He looks inside and outside his community for assistance. 

“A lot of [farmers] are not very vocal with what they’re going through. They’ll speak in a lot of cliches, like ‘You know, it’s just part of the job.’ But the way I live my life, I share if I’m seeking additional support,” Hill said.  

Though he doesn’t presume to recommend mental health services to his peers, “we usually talk to each other,” he said. 

“That’s important,” he went on. “I won’t say it’s like traditional group therapy or anything that’s facilitated by a professional. It’s just us sitting around in a circle or gathering at the end of the season, and having a little dinner together with some of the things we have left over and just talking about how that was a rough year. It’s an ongoing conversation. You’re venting like ‘Man, that was frustrating, this insect ate up everything. What did you do about it?’ That’s a therapeutic session in itself.” 

Still, traditional talk therapy keeps him “in touch with reality and it’s helped me grow as a man. … Sometimes you have these emotions that you don’t necessarily have a word for and that professional does,” he added. 

The Provosts also sought help to alleviate their feelings of despair. Both now speak with a therapist regularly. They say it’s had a marked effect on their ability to cope with the day-to-day stress incurred by attempts to preserve their livelihood. But the fight is long from over. What was once an almost 5,000-acre family sugarcane operation—June’s family owned about 300 of those acres and rented the remainder—is now a mere 36 acres, split between June and one of his brothers. Angie’s civil rights claim remains open, and Congress’s effort at debt cancellation, which would have offered them a much-needed reprieve, remains stalled. 

Additional reporting contributed by Cynthia Greenlee.

The post Debt, racism, and fear of displacement are driving an overlooked public health crisis among Black farmers appeared first on The Counter.

Some groups that sell seeds and food-bearing plants say the option is being used. Through her work at Tilth, Cacciata says she has had a number of people purchase edible plant starts — broccoli, beets, leafy greens and beyond — with SNAP benefits at events like Tilth’s annual Edible Plant Sale and the seasonal farm stand. 

Locals like Slighte are so passionate about this option that they make instructional videos to share online as a way to expand awareness of it. Using online platforms like TikTok, Slighte — under the handle @NeurodivergentGranny — shows people how to double the value of their SNAP benefits at farmers markets, where she purchased tomato plants last year, from which she saved seeds for future harvest. Even during the winter, the foods she harvested and dehydrated from her first year of having a “major” patio garden provide about 10% of her food, she says. In the early fall, she was able to grow about 30% of her own food. 

DeLong says the process of using SNAP at farmers markets can be awkward, involving tokens and Monopoly-style money. “I want to use the state’s money at the farmers markets to support local farmers. But it’s really just like a strange belittling interaction,” they said.

Not every seed and start retailer participates in this program, let alone realizes they might, which can add to the awkwardness of trying to use SNAP benefits for gardening. Cacciata says grocery stores are more likely than nurseries or garden centers to accept SNAP, since they already handle food purchases made with SNAP, but even grocery clerks might not know it’s a viable option. 

“If you’ve got cashiers that don’t understand that you can do that, then you’re met with an immediate barrier, immediate judgment. And so all your plans are completely thwarted before you even start,” Slighte says.

Aimée Damman, director of marketing and communications at Swansons Nursery, says she doesn’t know of anyone who has used SNAP to purchase seeds or plants. While the nursery donates plants to the Ballard Food Bank and seeds to the Giving Garden Network, among other organizations, it doesn’t accept SNAP. “I don’t think [the option] is very widely known,” she says. “We haven’t had any demand.” If demand arose, Swanson’s would need to adjust its sales technology, and may actually have to offer more food-related items to even become eligible to accept SNAP benefits. 

Urban Feed & Garden in Beacon Hill doesn’t accept SNAP benefits, but General Manager Risa Wolfe says she thinks using the benefits on seeds and starts sounds like a great idea. Urban Feed & Garden donates seeds to community gardens, and donated about $1,200 worth of seeds to Nurturing Roots last winter. She thinks her staff would be willing to accept SNAP benefits, but no one affiliated with SNAP has reached out to educate the staff on the business side of the program. “If somebody came to me with SNAP benefits, I wouldn’t know what to do,” she says. 

Other hurdles to growing food

Once someone has seeds in hand, they need gardening maintenance supplies, time to garden and container space or land. 

“Land access is the big one,” Matter says, stressing the importance of accessible community gardens. “Time to garden can be an impediment, but if folks have growing space at their home or nearby, this makes it more practical.” 

“You could get a pack of carrot seeds, but if you don’t have land for the carrot to grow into it, then it’s not really worth much,” adds DeLong.

People in King County have unequal access to these resources. Backyards are increasingly scarce, not all multifamily housing residents are able to grow plants in containers or on roofs, and while Seattle’s P-Patch program makes many acres of land available to the community for gardening, including food gardening, the P-Patches can have yearslong waitlists. 

People also need educational resources to be successful. In addition to distributing fresh fruits and vegetables, a number of local organizations also provide gardening education, including Tilth Alliance, The Beet Box, Solid Ground, Nurturing Roots Farm, Black Star Farmers and the Black Farmers Collective’s Yes Farm. 

The King County Seed Library system and Plant Based Food Share also share seeds and starts. 

Bill Thorness, coordinator of the seed library, says the popularity of gardening during the pandemic reduced the seed library’s seed supply. “Because the seed companies have been so busy, we haven’t had as many donations. And part of our model includes holding seed swaps where gardeners can bring seeds to share, but we haven’t done that for two years. We are talking about holding an outdoor one this spring,” he says. 

Some food banks also share seeds. Mara Bernard, the community farms and facilities manager of the White Center Food Bank, says the food bank last year distributed 4,000 seed packets and 2,000 plant starts.

In Slighte’s experience, growing any amount of food with whatever space and time people can find during a time of great anxiety is valuable for producing more than just fresh produce. 

“When you use SNAP benefits for gardening, you’re experiencing a type of self-sufficiency that you don’t get to experience when you’re low-income,” Slighte says. “And it’s that nontangible benefit that is so incredibly helpful to your mental health.”

Update: This article was updated at 12:38 p.m. on March 3, 2021, with language clarifying that many nurseries and plant stores may not currently be eligible to accept SNAP benefits. The program as it stands requires retailers to qualify based on either providing a certain number of food products, or making a certain amount of revenue from selling food products. 

The post For some families, gardening starts with SNAP benefits appeared first on The Counter.

“Mountaire plans to contest these citations, because they are incorrect,” the company’s spokesperson, Catherine Bassett, wrote in a statement to The Counter. “We offer extensive training to all of our employees on a variety of topics, including chemical safety. Our safety teams are very involved in ensuring that our workforce is safe and using all Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that is standard in our industry.”

According to NC DOL’s notice, the violations must be fixed and the company must pay the fines within 15 days, unless Mountaire appeals. As one former NC DOL employee told The Counter, repeat violations are rare and not good for companies’ reputations, which means companies often “vigorously fight” repeat citations.

Hazardous chemical

Workers and advocates in the state have lingering concerns about employees’ safety at the plant, and the citations issued to Mountaire lead to more questions than answers. Notably, OSH makes no mention of the levels of Spectrum 22 being used at the plant. NC DOL said that because this is still an open case, the agency is unable to share additional, specific information about the inspection until the case is closed. Ideally, the final inspection file will provide more information regarding Mountaire’s practices concerning peracetic acid.

Back in 2013, Stan Painter, a former inspector with the Department of Agriculture (USDA), predicted that poultry plants would “increase their reliance on chemicals to make up for inspection gaps”—and this included a reliance on peracetic acid. Painter described the process that commonly makes workers sick: Poultry carcasses sprayed with peracetic acid are put in the chiller and depending on the chlorine concentration of the chiller, “it can be like having a bucket of bleach under your nose,” he explained. 

Because of Mountaire’s silence on the issue, workers assumed the chemical was ammonia or bleach due to its strong and noxious odor. This is why ammonia is referenced in the complaint filed by the North Carolina Justice Center on behalf of a Mountaire worker.

“The original complaints were about ammonia and bleach. The latest findings have nothing to do with ammonia or bleach. As for Spectrum 22 or peracetic acid, this is a chemical that is commonly used inside hospitals, health care facilities, and food manufacturing facilities,” Mountaire’s spokesperson said in an email. 

While USDA permits the use of peracetic acid up to a certain level on food products, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) confirmed to The Counter that it currently has “no permissible exposure limit for peracetic acid” in the workplace. OSHA does maintain standards that apply to other chemical use in poultry processing plants, including those associated with safety management of highly hazardous chemicals, personal protective equipment, and hazard communication. 

These kinds of citations related to peracetic acid now appear to be fairly common.

If peracetic acid isn’t mixed properly or it’s used at very high levels, it can become noxious. Yet OSHA isn’t issuing citations directly related to workers’ respiratory issues; the citations are often issued because an employer failed to properly train workers on the chemical’s potential hazards. It’s unclear how long Spectrum 22 has been used at the Lumber Bridge plant or whether Mountaire uses peracetic acid as part of daily operations. Obtaining records related to peracetic acid can be challenging, given the hodgepodge of state and federal plans. Mountaire has operations in five states, none of which are overseen by federal OSHA. Some have an OSHA-approved state plan that covers all workplaces, while others have an OSHA-approved state plan that covers state and local government workers only. But despite the challenges in obtaining company-wide data, Lumber Bridge clearly isn’t an isolated operation: In 2018, about 318 gallons of peracetic acid spilled onto the ground at Mountaire Farms’ Selbyville, Delaware, plant, leading to citations, according to records.

NC DOL said in its citations that Spectrum 22 was used on the plant’s deboning lines 1-4 and in the evisceration department, but one former worker using the pseudonym Rosa said employees on many other lines were also “exposed” and experienced respiratory issues. Rosa said she left Mountaire a few months ago to recover from an unrelated health issue that she says her doctor feared was exacerbated by the plant’s chemical use, but she still has family members who work for Mountaire. 

Prior to the pandemic, there appeared to be some movement toward addressing peracetic acid safety issues. In California, for example, regulators were working on rules regarding airborne concentrations for the chemical. In 2019, OSHA entered into an alliance with the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, the National Chicken Council, and the National Turkey Federation, with a goal of providing training and education around the safe handling and use of peracetic acid. The Counter reached out to these agencies to learn where these efforts are now. 

A spokesperson for the California Department of Industrial Relations said that while a Health Effects Advisory Committee performed a review of peracetic acid and issued recommendations 

for concentrations of the chemical in December 2017, peracetic acid has “yet to move to rulemaking.” A spokesperson for OSHA did not comment on whether the federal agency is considering a permissible exposure limit for peracetic acid, but said that the alliance with poultry trade groups led to the development and implementation of “a worker safety culture perception survey” and to scripts “for employee micro-learning videos on peracetic acid exposure.”

Long-term health concerns

Dr. Howard Hu, a specialist in occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, reviewed the safety data sheet for Spectrum 22. As an expert on the impact of toxic chemical exposure to human health, Hu said Spectrum 22 sounds like “a product that was designed for a workplace that doesn’t exist.” 

“The product says how it’s supposed to be used, but obviously most poultry plants don’t have conditions that align with how the product is intended to be used,” Hu said. “Someone who was exposed to this product without the benefit of either the appropriate ventilation or respiratory protection will be at increased risk for a lung infection, just like the case that was cited in the complaint.”

Hu is referring to the August 19 complaint that triggered the inspection that led to Mountaire’s recent citations. Carol Brooke, the senior attorney at the North Carolina Justice Center (which filed the complaint), included reference to a Lumber Bridge poultry plant worker who was hospitalized for a lung infection in July 2021. A family member of the worker previously confirmed the information with The Counter, alleging that the illness and hospitalization were both the result of exposure to what—at the time—was an unknown chemical.

Evonik Active Oxygens, LLC, manufacturer of the chemical, recommends that Spectrum 22 only be used outdoors or in well-ventilated areas. However, windowless and crowded poultry plants–facilities where Covid-19 spread like wildfire–are typically not known for being open and airy. (A spokesperson from NC DOL said that the lack of windows in a plant “does not necessarily suggest that a facility is not well-ventilated.”) Previously, Rosa said that only some areas of the poultry lines were outfitted with small air vents. 

Brooke said it was “immediately obvious” when she spoke to Mountaire workers that they were experiencing respiratory issues. 

“The workers that I talked to were coughing on the phone and had hoarse voices,” Brooke said. 

According to the Mountaire workers Brooke remains in communication with, the chemical is still in use at the plant. This information was echoed by Ilana Dubester, founder and executive director of nonprofit advocacy organization El Vínculo Hispano. Last summer, Dubester’s organization interviewed several workers about their symptoms with the goal of helping them file a complaint; they still maintain regular contact with Mountaire workers.

Rosa says her family members and friends still employed at the Lumber Bridge plant continue to report the presence of a sour-smelling chemical that leaves them struggling with dizziness, headaches, and coughs. While she’s desperately in need of the paycheck, Rosa said she is also relieved not to currently be working for Mountaire. She often thinks about an experience she had late last year before she had to go on medical leave. Rosa said she was deboning chicken on the line when she began to feel very sick. 

“I told the supervisor, ‘I need to go home. I feel very sick. I’m going to throw up.’ He wouldn’t let me leave,” she said. “Nobody cared. Mountaire didn’t care. I told my supervisor, ‘We’re not animals. You can’t treat us like animals. We’re human beings.’” Rosa left the line to vomit in the restroom. When she returned to her job, she alleges that three supervisors were waiting to reprimand her. 

Rosa said her son also quit working for Mountaire Farms shortly after she stopped working at the Lumber Bridge plant. “He was tired of feeling sick,” she said.  

Mountaire told The Counter that it prioritizes workers’ safety and that the Lumber Bridge plant “recently celebrated a record 10 million hours without a lost time accident and remains one of the safest processing plants in the country by all objective measurements.”

Brooke said it can be hard to make sense of the fact that chemicals like peracetic acid are approved—they’re safe for the food product but not necessarily safe for the workers. This is why the attorney said it’s so important for Mountaire–and the staffing companies it contracts with–to properly train workers on how to deal with chemical hazards in their already-dangerous workplace. 

The workers in North Carolina’s poultry plants are overwhelmingly Latino. While the specific demographics of Mountaire’s two plants in the state are unknown, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest the company relies heavily on an immigrant workforce–and many of the workers who went public about the company’s chemical use were migrants. In 2012, a study found that Latino workers in North Carolina’s poultry industry experience decreased lung function due to exposure to bacteria, cleaning agents, and dust on the job. Hu said that based on what he’s read about Mounaire workers’ symptoms, he’s worried that long-term exposure to Spectrum 22 and chemicals like it can cause a condition called Reactive Airways Dysfunction Syndrome (RADS), a variant of asthma. 

“At some point–either from repeated overexposures or sometimes from a single massive overexposure–the lungs can develop a sensitivity to respiratory irritants and respond with an asthmatic-type reaction, which includes symptoms like wheezing and shortness of breath. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are workers who develop shortness of breath related to repeated exposures to this chemical, but they just didn’t make the connection because for example, they got short of breath walking into a perfume store or when they were standing next to a truck giving off a lot of exhaust,” Hu said. “They might not know they’ve developed a chronic health problem.”

‘The truth about Lumber Bridge’

Workers and advocates in the state say they feel conflicted about the fines NC DOL issued to Mountaire. Brooke said the penalties are “absurdly low.” According to NC DOL, the maximum penalty for each willful or repeat serious violation is $70,000.

“This is a repeat citation, and it could have carried a much higher penalty,” the attorney said. “And it’s certainly not high enough to make any difference to a poultry company that makes millions or billions of dollars each year. Peracetic acid is a chemical that is now routinely used in poultry plants, so Mountaire certainly knew the dangers of the chemical. I can’t imagine that their failure to train workers properly and use the chemical in a way that exposed workers to health problems wasn’t wilful.” 

Rosa believes that each worker made sick by exposure to the chemical should be given $21,000, the total amount NC DOL fined Mountaire. Even with the absence of financial compensation for workers, however, Rosa expressed that she feels vindicated. While Mountaire characterized workers’ concerns as “bogus complaints” filed by “advocacy organizations,” there is now evidence from the government that workers weren’t lying. Rosa said she feels “very proud” of herself and the other immigrant workers who went public to expose conditions in the plant.

“I hope this sets an example for other plants–not just in the state, but in the whole country,” Rosa said.

Coming forward wasn’t easy. While she reiterated she doesn’t currently work inside the plant, Rosa said that workers are fearful that Mountaire is “angry” about the publicity, and rumors are circulating that the company is eager to terminate those who spoke to the media.  

Mountaire has publicly refuted workers’ allegations and lashed out at reporting on the subject.  On October 20, just two days after The Counter published its reporting about chemical exposure at the Lumber Bridge plant, Mountaire posted “The Truth about Lumber Bridge” on its blog. In it, the company alleged that it investigated the allegations internally and found they had “no merit.” Mountaire also claimed that OSH “did not suggest any changes to any operations in Lumber Bridge” when it inspected the plant in August. “While we await their final report, the fact that they didn’t take any immediate action suggests they saw nothing out of the ordinary,” the blog read. 

NC DOL spokesperson Jennifer Haigwood would not comment on the claims in Mountaire’s blog post, but she clarified that the agency’s OSH inspection was still open and ongoing in October when the company published its post. “The citations speak for themselves,” Haigwood wrote. 

A majority of the post’s focus sought to discredit reporting related to the workers’ health concerns. References to reporting included quotes around the word “news,” indicating published reports were fake.

“These ‘news’ stories are filled with anonymous sources, rumor and speculation, and are completely without merit,” the post read. “When advocacy publications pose as legitimate news sources and print unsubstantiated allegations and rumors, it not only destroys credible journalism, it affects innocent people who no longer know how to separate fact from fiction.” 

At the time of our original coverage, Bassett failed to respond to five requests for comment from The Counter–including a bulleted list of allegations pulled directly from the reporting prior to publication. Still, the company claimed otherwise. On November 8, a Rose Law Firm attorney representing Mountaire contacted The Counter and alleged we did not take steps to verify the allegations we printed.

Mountaire’s attorney claimed The Counter’s reporting on chemical exposure at the Lumber Bridge plant was “false, libelous, and potentially damaging to its business.” 

“We previously asked The Counter to substantiate its false claims and for four months they have not done so,” Bassett said in a February 25 email after the company was fined by NC DOL for serious violations. “We place worker safety as our primary goal and we call on the Counter to stop hiding behind anonymous sources and send us facts and information so that we can investigate.”

Dubester said Mountaire’s response is “a very bad look” for the company.

“It doesn’t make any sense to mount a [public relations] campaign against workers and reporters. According to Mountaire, everyone is lying–reporters are lying, workers are lying, advocates are lying, everyone is lying,” Dubester said. “It’s actually very offensive. With my own ears, I’ve heard workers cough so hard they couldn’t breathe. What would they get out of making false allegations?” 

Workers and advocates are anxiously awaiting Mountaire’s response to the penalties imposed by NC DOL, but in the meantime Hu said it’s important to remember that there is still nothing stopping Mountaire from using Spectrum 22 at levels that make workers feel sick. The doctor said he “highly recommends” that employees at the plant request a Health Hazard Evaluation (HHE) from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a federal research institute responsible for making recommendations for the prevention of work-related injuries and illnesses. 

An HHE is an evaluation of a workplace to determine whether workers are exposed to hazardous materials, and whether these exposures are responsible for health risks, illness or injury, or harmful conditions. Based on their findings, NIOSH investigators recommend ways to reduce hazards and prevent work-related illnesses and injuries. Per standard HHE Program procedures, OSHA and state health and labor agencies would receive a copy of the final report that provides findings and recommendations. Federal law also prohibits employers from retaliating or punishing employees for making HHE requests or cooperating with the HHE program.

Rosa, who worked at the Lumber Bridge plant for five years, is currently weighing her options. Jobs in rural North Carolina are hard to come by for migrant workers, but it’s unlikely she’d return to Mountaire. 

“Even if they would have me back, I don’t think I can go back,” Rosa said. “Hopefully, I can find something else to do that is safer.” 

*NOTE: The initial headline for that story stated that workers were quitting in large numbers, an accusation in the worker complaint that could not be wholly verified.

The post Mountaire Farms said North Carolina worker complaints about a toxic chemical were “bogus.” The state DOL just fined the company for serious violations. appeared first on The Counter.

Many farmers were critical of the changes. They contended it created uncertainty, unfairly targeted whole counties and had a significant impact on their operations. A Corteva spokesman told DTN-Progressive Farmer it is continuing to conduct studies to get the EPA to “remove some of these geographic label restrictions while still ensuring protection of listed species and their habitats.”

Croplife America, a lobbying arm of the chemical industry, did not respond to a request for comment. The American Farm Bureau Federation declined to comment.

Dan Snyder, the EPA’s agriculture advisor who formerly worked as a lobbyist for Croplife America and the National Corn Growers Association, told DTN-Progressive Farmer that it is a necessary step toward allowing use of pesticides.

“There is concern that over time, we could actually lose tools altogether as a result of these lawsuits,” Snyder said. “We feel we’re at a critical moment in time to look for some longer-term solutions rather than reacting on a court-case-by-court-case basis.” 

Hartl said the Enlist decision shows that even a small amount of mitigation can have a drastic impact on protecting the environment and human health.

“We can still use pesticides in most areas most of the time,” he said. “We’re not saying we need to abolish all pesticides everywhere, forever, in order to save endangered species.”

The Endangered Species Act has long been a sticking point between industry and conservationists. The Trump administration implemented many rollbacks to the law, some of which have been reversed by the Biden Administration. In the 2018 Farm Bill, House Republicans proposed removing the EPA’s obligation to follow the Endangered Species Act when it comes to pesticides, but that measure did not pass.

“Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s 1962 book documenting the danger of pesticides, helped spark the modern environmental movement that led to the creation of the EPA in 1970 and passage of many of the nation’s foundational environmental laws in the 1970s. The main pesticide the book focused on, called DDT, caused the thinning of eggshells, which led to significant population declines of bald eagles, peregrine falcons and other bird populations. 

After DDT was banned in 1972, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The act has been praised for helping recover species such as the bald eagle and gray wolf. 

Patti Goldman, a senior attorney at the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, called the new policy “a down payment” on following the Endangered Species Act. Goldman has worked on Endangered Species Act cases involving pesticides for more than 20 years. This includes successfully suing for protections for endangered salmon. 

“This is the first time they’re actually putting some mitigation into place, based on anticipated impacts to endangered species,” Goldman said.

‘Regulatory predictability’

The recent announcement however, still does not follow the correct process under the Endangered Species Act, environmental lawyers told Investigate Midwest.

The EPA is supposed to follow the same process as all other federal agencies when they take an action, such as build a bridge, conduct a timber sale or lease federal land for mining. 

Under that process, the agency first must determine whether a listed species may be affected by the use of a pesticide. 

Then, if the EPA determines a listed species is likely to be adversely affected by the pesticide’s use, the agency must initiate a formal consultation with the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service. 

Those agencies will then determine whether the action will “jeopardize the continued existence” of the species. 

If the services make a “jeopardy” call, they will then decide what mitigations the agency must conduct in order to protect the species. 

For pesticides, that can range from limitations on when the pesticide could be sprayed to an all-out ban in certain areas, such as states or counties.

In its recent change, the EPA is not waiting for the services’ consultation but instead “making a prediction about what it thinks that conclusion will be,” which is not the proper process, Goldman said.  

“It has to do that in consultation with an expert agency,” she said. “It’s skipping over that for now. It’s starting that consultation, but it’s predicting the outcome.”

In a FAQ published with the announcement, the EPA said it’s allowed to issue a registration before formal consultation as long as it will not impact future implementation of alternatives the services recommend. EPA said this process provides “regulatory predictability to registrants, growers, and other pesticide users.”

Many questions remain

Now that the EPA has announced this new policy, many questions remain about how the agency will address the backlog of pesticides that have not yet been assessed for their impact on species protected by the Endangered Species Act.

Milbourn, the EPA’s spokeswoman, said the EPA will release a work plan on the issue in the coming months.

When the EPA has followed the Endangered Species Act — when forced to do so by lawsuits — the agency has found that pesticides have a large impact on many endangered and threatened species. 

Since genetically engineered crops were introduced in the 1990s, the amount of pesticides sprayed have skyrocketed. That is particularly true for glyphosate, the most widely used pesticide in the U.S. 

The EPA found glyphosate is likely to harm 93% of endangered species, including species as wide-ranging from the gray wolf to the whooping crane to the rusty patched bumble bee. A lawsuit forced that analysis. The agency has not taken any action to protect these species from glyphosate exposure.

The herbicide atrazine — the second-most widely sprayed pesticide in the U.S. — is also likely to harm more than 1,000 of about 1,800 endangered species, the EPA found. The EPA and Syngenta reached a voluntary cancellation agreement for atrazine in the state of Hawaii after concerns were raised about its impact on endangered species in that state. Hawaii is home to about 500 endangered species.

Both of those pesticides are widely used on corn and soybeans, which are the two most planted crops in the U.S. More than 428 million pounds of pesticides are sprayed on the two crops each year, according to a report published by the Center for Biological Diversity and World Animal Protection on Tuesday.

Use of pesticides like dicamba and 2,4-D are especially expected to increase in coming years, according to the report.

Under court settlements, the EPA is supposed to assess at least nine different pesticides (chlorpyrifos, malathion, diazinon, carbaryl, methomyl, atrazine, simazine, popazine and glyphosate) and their impact on listed species.

The EPA has progressed the farthest with malathion, a popular insecticide that is commonly used in mosquito spraying and in agriculture. 

However, that pesticide has been the subject of controversy. During the Trump administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agencies charged with providing an opinion on whether species will be endangered, dramatically decreased the number of species the pesticide is considered to potentially harm. 

This happened after input from David Bernhardt, who later became Secretary of the Interior, according to The New York Times. Last year, the EPA published a draft finding from the services that said the pesticide could potentially jeopardize the continued existence of 78 species.

Milbourn, the EPA spokeswoman, said EPA plans to publish the services’ finalized opinion for malathion “in the coming weeks.”

The post “A pretty big sea change”: EPA says it will consider endangered species when approving new pesticides—with or without the threat of lawsuits appeared first on The Counter.

Martin was partly motivated to help build a community-owned market because elderly neighbors had to travel long distances to get groceries. 

“For them to try and drive 15 miles or 20 miles to a grocery store when they need a gallon of milk and maybe some bananas, it just made no sense at all to me,” Martin said.

Martin said that the response to the community-owned market has been positive, but running a grocery store is not always profitable. Market on the Hill operates as a co-op, funded and operated by Mount Pulaski and southern Logan County neighbors. 

“Because there’s such a thin margin in the grocery business, if you’re not doing the volume, it’s really hard to make a profit,” Martin said.

Sean Park, program manager for the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs, helps communities organize their own markets, like Market on the Hill. Park knows firsthand the challenges of operating a grocery store because he owned one in Rushville for a decade.  

For Park, the exodus of grocery stores contributes to the overall decline in population in rural communities. In Illinois, all but three rural counties lost population over the last decade. 

“What we see is the death of those communities without the grocery store anchor institution,” Park said. “You’re not going to move to a community that doesn’t have access to fresh food.”

The rise of dollar stores

In rural areas across the country, according to the USDA, 11.6% of households struggled to access food in 2020. Dollar stores offering cheap food and other products have entered small towns in recent years as communities lose grocery stores. For instance, Dollar General — which has a location in Mount Pulaski — now has 18,000 stores nationwide.

After years of backlash, dollar-store chains, which mostly sell packaged and frozen goods, have begun to offer fresh foods in some stores, CNN reported last year. But some advocates for healthy food options remain skeptical. 

“Their focus is not on fresh food,” said Jennifer Paulson, executive director of Food Works, a southern Illinois nonprofit. “They may carry some fresh foods, but they are usually not in the best shape. I think about things like trying to get someone to eat more fruits and vegetables. They need to have fruits and vegetables that are fresh and taste good.”

Paulson noted that many households in rural areas face food insecurity, and shopping at dollar stores may be the only way they can access goods.

“(Dollar stores) don’t have fresh food because it requires people and requires labor, and on top of that, has some training,” Park said. “It’s just really difficult to work with.”

In a statement, Dollar General said about 2,000 stores nationwide offer fresh produce, and it plans to add the option to about a thousand this fiscal year.

“In many instances, Dollar General is sought out by communities to open stores in their towns after their local grocery store closes,” the statement reads. “We are grateful for the opportunity to help fill this gap and serve customers that would otherwise not have access to an affordable retail option.” (Read the full statement here.)

Feeding the community

For Paulson, rural towns — often surrounded by farmland — struggling to access fresh foods presents a “strange paradox.”  

“You can drive through and see miles and miles of farms, but very few of those farms are actually growing food that people can eat,” she said.

She said farmers’ markets offer a way to overcome the problem of food accessibility in rural communities. Food Works runs the Community Farmers Market during the winter in Carbondale, located in southern Illinois.

Though markets are a start, she said, it’s going to take more to ensure access to food in rural areas. 

“They don’t work for everyone, whether that be because maybe someone’s not familiar with shopping in that way or maybe it doesn’t work for people because (the market is open) on a certain day,” Paulson said. “Many, many people in rural areas are still traveling really kind of significant distances to get to grocery stores.”

For Martin, the farmer, opening up a market to feed his community wasn’t an easy task, but it was certainly worth it.

“It takes a lot of diligence to continue to offer your community and your customers what they want and bring them in through the door,” he said. “But I think in the long run the people in the community appreciate it, and it’s been a huge asset to the town.” 

The post “When a grocery store closes up and it’s your last one, you feel it immediately.” appeared first on The Counter.

While in a medium-security prison in West Virginia, Nuevelle “erred on the side of anorexia.” She notes, too, that many other women she served time with exhibited trauma-induced behaviors: hoarding, drinking coffee all day to suppress appetite, “eating and eating and eating,” and bingeing and purging.

Weight gain is an even bigger challenge than weight loss for many; Nuevelle calls the bellies of women who eat the high-starch meals off the chow hall trays “‘tray babies.’ It’s not uncommon for women to gain 70 pounds. You literally watch their bodies grow.” 

Before her time in that West Virginia facility, Nuevelle spent two years in a federal prison camp some 200 miles south called Alderson—the facility where Martha Stewart served time in 2004 and that’s considered swank by prison standards. “My first Thanksgiving there, I couldn’t believe it. We had turkey, and they gave us ham and green beans and collard greens,” Nuevelle said. “At Christmas, we had Cornish hens and shrimp, and there was real cutlery and salt and pepper shakers.” 

Corrections departments often claim that better food is financially beyond their means. In 2016, California spent $3.14 per day per inmate while in Texas in 2019, 4 percent of the corrections budget went to carceral food. But the example of Alderson “tells you that there is a baseline for doing better, and the only reason that [Alderson] is the way it is is because the people that come there were not society’s undesirables before they went to prison,” Nuevelle said, referring to the fact that the Alderson tends to house people accused of white-collar crimes.

Wayne Williams was actually able to learn more about nutrition during the 35 years he was imprisoned in federal prisons. Today, he’s project coordinator at The Food Trust in Philadelphia, which offers trauma-informed nutrition education, shopping, and cooking classes for the formerly incarcerated. He remembers the poor-quality carceral meals as well as the preponderance of “junk” like ramen noodles from the commissary. His journey to more healthful eating started with “looking at the deterioration of other inmates’ health, [which] began to cause me to be concerned, like sugar, diabetes, high blood pressure. I didn’t want to take medicine,” he said. “So I started paying more attention to what I was eating.” 

He read magazines such as Men’s Health and swapped nutritional information with other men he was serving time with; that information formed the basis of the work he does now with people returning home after incarceration. 

Trauma-informed nutrition education goes beyond simple cooking classes and connections to food resources. It addresses mental and emotional wellness, with an eye toward how stressful and traumatic experiences can shape a person’s relationship to food, and the ways in which shame, anxiety, and tension around eating can be reduced, according to Leah’s Pantry, a San Francisco nonprofit that trains nutrition ed facilitators. 

This kind of education can be a long haul and requires those who offer it to understand the wider implications of trauma. “I had to broaden ‘nutrition education’ to the idea of a better quality of life and connect it with, not just physical health, but mental health, spiritual health,” Williams said. 

He starts by telling those who take his six-week class that he shares their experience within the system, in order to forge trust. Afterward, he aims to stay connected with them as a mentor, helping them sign up for SNAP benefits, referring them to health clinics where they can receive additional nutrition counseling. 

“Eating healthy helps me to have a healthy attitude and value my own life,” Williams said. “When you are concerned about what you eat, then you’re concerned about yourself. That’s the beginning [of healing]; you’re not thinking short term anymore.”

After she returned home from prison, Gantan gained a lot of weight as she attempted to navigate her bingeing and hoarding. “I had to get back into the motion of meal planning. Once I was able to lay out what I was going to eat, and how much [food] do I need for these meals, it helped me put down the extra box of pancake mix and think, ‘Okay, I don’t really need [this] because [it’s] going to be there the next time.’” 

Now studying for a master’s degree in public policy, she sees benefit in connecting the formerly incarcerated with things like CalFresh—California’s version of SNAP, which matches $10 worth of fresh produce purchases per month (notably, California has lifted the SNAP ban for those with drug felonies). She wants to see people who are coming up for parole automatically given CalFresh signup sheets and lists of other food resources, in addition to trauma-informed nutrition ed.

Nuevelle would like to see initiatives start much, much earlier. “At the federal level, [prisons] have residential drug-abuse programs. Can you imagine if we had trauma treatment programs in carceral spaces?” she said. For that matter, “what would it look like if, right from the moment you get arrested, [judges and lawyers] asked, ‘What is it that this person really needs?’ And nine times out of 10, it’s not going to be incarceration; it’s going to be trauma treatment.”

At Food & Abolition, Kathuria works to abolish the carceral system outright. But in the meantime, the organization is aiming to connect prisons and jails with urban and small-scale farms. It hopes the farms provide more nutritious food to those who are incarcerated and also meaningful, sustaining jobs, to those coming back to their communities. A pilot project to do just this was waylaid due to the pandemic.

“A person going into prison, even if they’re healthy, is likely going to leave with chronic health conditions, whether physical or mental,” Kathuria said. “What are the implications of that amongst the millions of folks who are incarcerated in this country every year? How do you even measure that impact?”

The post Poor food in prison and jails can cause or worsen eating and health problems. And the effects can linger long after release. appeared first on The Counter.