With rural issues in the spotlight following the election, Iowa's poet laureate, Mary Swander, speaks about her work with farmers, the concerns of her neighbors in this political moment, and the role of art in challenging times.
A lot has changed since 1966, when watermelon workers in the South Texas borderlands walked out of the melon fields in a historic strike to protest poor wages and appalling working conditions. What hasn't changed is the work: It's as brutal as ever. Workers are vulnerable to getting cheated by growers and crew bosses. Texas — with the third-largest population of farmworkers after California and Florida — has some of the lowest agricultural wages in the country.
Officer Nakia Jones Talks About the Alton Sterling Shooting. Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Why We Need to Stop the TPP. How the Cannabis Business Community Pays Taxes. Gretchen Carlson Is Suing Fox News' CEO. This Might Be Why. This Farm of the Future Uses No Soil and 95% Less Water.
Vertical farms produce crops in stacked layers, often in controlled environments such as those built by AeroFarms in Newark, New Jersey.
American bureaucrats, seed sellers, food company executives and farmers seek the prizes that are likely to come if the United States ends its trade restrictions against Cuba.
Though just down the road from each other, the country's tech capital and one of the country's largest farming regions are only now starting to work together—with only a little culture clash.
If farmers and tech entrepreneurs can find common ground, our food supply will benefit.
Reader Comments - Fast Food Strike, Low-Wage Workers Struggle for More than Wages; TPP - LAtest Leak; Hillary Clinton, Fracking and 2016; Eduardo Galeano; CIA Infiltration at Home; Anne Braden; Sundown Towns; 'Driving While White'; Cuba Coops; NYT and Russian Wages; Charter Schools; Walton Wealth;
Announcements: Walden Bello in New York; Vietnam - The Power of Protest and In Defense of the Public Square - Washington
Reader Comments - Mexican Farmworkers Strike; Innocent Man on Death Row - Prosecutor Apologizes; Stealing Africa's Seeds; Fighting Water Privatization - Ireland and Mexico; Run Elizabeth, Run; Jews Who Speak Out Against Israeli Policies; Cesar Chavez, the UFW - Lessons for Today; Feminist Heroes for Children; Cuba Eradicates Syphilis; Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg;
Resources for Passover; To Better Understand Greece and Syriza;
Announcements
Food movement advocates and consumers, driven to forge alternatives to industrial agribusiness, have neglected the labor economy that underpins ‘local’ food production,
The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.
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