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Growers and Greens Unite Farmers and environmentalists shuck age-old stereotypes to fight common foes. By Gerald Haslam Brian Blain is a straight talker who will tell you what you need to hear, which is not necessarily what you want to hear. "A lot of farmers genuinely believe that environmentalists are out to destroy agriculture," the head of California's largest pecan- growing and -processing operation announces. "Many things can be done that would be good for farmers and for the environment, but suspicion prevents people from working together." In the central-valley city of Visalia, Blain and the Sierra Club's Richard Garcia smashed the stereotypes when they took on a local irrigation district hell-bent on cementing an earthen canal and ruining its riparian habitat, home to century-old valley oaks and the San Joaquin kit fox. "We had to work together," explains Garcia. "The stakes were simply too high to let ourselves lose." Common concerns can bring diverse groups to the table, but overcoming mistrust between farmers and conservationists has been particularly vexing. Environmentalists are often lumped in with outsiders-particularly the bureaucrats who dispense rules and regulations from afar-who don't understand what's really happening on the farm, and conservationists often discount farmers as stubborn and narrow-minded. Both characterizations have, at times, been apt. But "grower-green" alliances are developing nationally, catalyzed by high-profile issues like the explosive growth of industrial livestock operations and the struggle to keep family farms afloat and maintain the rural character of local communities. (It's a good thing, too, since farms and ranches occupy more than half of all land in the Lower 48.) People with wildly different backgrounds are learning more about each other as they come together to defeat common opponents. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are among both groups' most determined and well-funded foes. "There are hog farms here so huge they seem to extend from horizon to horizon, and their stench has unified farmers and environmentalists," explains Scott Dye, director of the Sierra Club's Water Sentinels Program. "The people who suffer as a result of hog factories aren't newcomers. They're people who've been farming for generations before the corporate hog operations showed up." In Missouri, farmers defied the powerful Farm Bureau in 1998 and joined environmentalists to seek endangered designation for a small fish, the Topeka shiner. As cattle farmer Martha Stevens reasoned, "If the water kills the fish, it can't be good for us." That simple logic packed a hearing in the small town of Bethany, with local farmers concerned about what runoff from industrial hog farms was doing to their environ- ment. "The shiner is an indicator that stream water is safe and clean," Stevens notes, explaining why small farmers supported the designation even though they would be required to keep soil out of waterways. "They figured it was something we could live with." While Stevens's water comes from wells rather than streams polluted by massive hog farms, she suspects the two sources are intertwined; besides, she says, "my kids used to wade and swim in these streams. They can't do that with their kids today. Not when the water is loaded with E. coli and nitrates and other crap." According to Ken Midkiff, clean-water campaign director for the Sierra Club, environmental groups are in a good position to lend a hand on farm-related issues. "We deal with everything from organic to sustainable to pesticides to monoculture to CAFOs and everything in between," he says. "Farmers recognize that we are much more in tune with their interests than the commodity groups, particularly the Farm Bureau." With more than 5 million members, 2,800 county bureaus, and a Washington, D.C., lobbying staff, the American Farm Bureau Federation defines clout-and conservatism. Over the years, the organization has regularly opposed plans to benefit the environment, fearing even the slightest impact on agricultural profits. The Farm Bureau is critical of the Endangered Species Act, the Food Quality Protection Act (passed unanimously by Congress in 1996), and of attempts to regulate CAFOs. The thorn in its side is the 300,000-member National Farmers Union, which has allied with environmental groups to oppose farm subsidy payments that disproportionately benefit very large operations. Last year, the Sierra Club joined the union in a major lawsuit against corporate hog-raising factories in the South and Midwest. "Ag-enviro" alliances succeed by stressing what both sides have in common, a lesson not lost on Scott Dye. "Some farmers think a Sierra Club organizer will show up looking like their image of an environmentalist nut, with a long ponytail and sandals," he says. "When I show up looking like an average farm kid, well, they're more apt to listen." Not that there isn't still skepticism. "Farm folks tend to be distrustful of city people," acknowledges Dye. "You have to go to the farm where a family has lived and worked for a hundred years, and listen to their concerns. You have to show genuine empathy, not phony sympathy. They can tell in a hurry if you're an elitist. And they tend to be conservative, in part because their sources of information-the Farm Bureau, Agritalk radio programs, and so on-are conservative." But farmers will reach out when they find themselves up against the offal of a hog factory. An average hog produces two to four times as much raw sewage as a human being, so the 80,000 pigs raised by one of Premium Standard's operations in Lincoln Township, Missouri, for instance, can actually create as much waste as a city with 300,000 residents. In fact, it's estimated that the nation's 60 million hogs produce about 100 million tons of feces and urine each year. Premium Standard is one of a handful of corporations-Seaboard, Tyson, and Smithfield are others-that so dominate hog production that many family farmers can only hang on by contracting with them to grow the companies' animals. Increasingly, though, communities are realizing that hog farms aren't worth the environmental damage, and are rejecting the overtures of the megafactories. In Oklahoma, rancher and state senator Paul Muegge, persuaded by arguments from the Sierra Club and family farmers' groups, became an environmental hero when he authored the strongest set of regulations on hog production in the nation. In Alabama, Sierra Club members joined agriculturists in a protest calling for stronger regulations of mass-production animal farms. And in Kansas, farmers and conservationists in Great Bend managed to rebuff Seaboard's attempts to locate a factory there. Next the corporation tried St. Joseph, Missouri, where the city council acceded to community pressure and voted to keep them out. Then Seaboard sweet-talked politicians in Elwood, Kansas, but the community again thwarted the corporation. As Midkiff puts it, "Seaboard is still looking for a home, wandering the plains in vain." Brian Blain and Richard Garcia's home is the nation's second-most-productive farming county. Farmers and environmentalists here in Tulare County, California, came together as a group dubbed POWER (Preserving Oaks, Water, Environmental Rights), and stared down the Tulare Irrigation District, an agency accustomed to moving water where and when it wanted. For decades water was cheap for California farmers. But by 1998 the cost had risen to $34 per acre-foot. The Tulare Irrigation District figured it was losing more than $300,000 annually to seepage, so it decided to line its main intake canal with concrete. The district had a problem, though: The canal, built to carry water from the Kaweah River watershed in the 1870s, was actually a series of natural channels connected by ditches. Many stretches retained riparian forests that would wither without groundwater; farmers and nearby towns that relied on the canal to replenish their aquifer worried that wells would dry up. The Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club opposed the project, and filed a lawsuit. Meanwhile, Tulare County citizens, drawn by newspaper accounts or by word of mouth, were joining POWER, which included the Sierra Club. Even Bob Ludekens, owner of the 1,100-acre L. E. Cook Nursery and the Farm Bureau's Man of the Year, joined up. The previously unlikely allies, Ludekens, Blain, and Garcia, began slide and lecture presentations to service clubs, professional groups, city councils, chambers of commerce ("The lair of the enemy," grins Blain), and the county board of supervisors. In public confrontations with the water agency, POWER's team learned to shape its message to the audience. When talking to builders, the M-word ("moratorium"-if town wells dry up, building may be prohibited) was powerful; with conservationists, "habitat"; with workers, "jobs." "To create a diverse coalition, you have to show everybody that they are impacted," explains Blain. "Water was an issue that united us and nobody-conservative or liberal-wanted to see those trees removed." Walnut-growers Don and Peggy Peterson found themselves swept into activism, and remain a little stunned by it. "We're grandparents," says Peggy. "Who would've thought we would be out there with picket signs." Members of POWER raffled quilts, sponsored bake sales, and hosted barbecues to raise money for legal costs. "Little old ladies can have all the fundraisers they want, but we're still going to line this ditch," irrigation-district manager Gerald Hill reportedly said, words that would come back to haunt him when women started carrying signs reading "Little Old Lady Power." The day before a hearing on lining the canal was scheduled, the district foolishly announced it would begin bulldozing oaks along a section known as Potter's Slough. Richard Garcia quickly organized "Potter's Slough Blockade," a moving barricade that refused to allow district trucks and equipment to cross private property. Equally important, the local press reported the encounter. "All of a sudden photos of prominent local citizens were on the front page and people said, 'That's Peggy. That's Bob. That's Sandy. That's my scoutmaster. That's my barber,'" Blain recalls. "'If they're involved, then there's really something to this.' Public sentiment kept swinging our way." Eventually, says Garcia, "we just wore them down. They had the money, but we had the people." In April 2001, the irrigation district shelved its plan to line the canal. Sometimes the key to reaching agriculturists is understanding the financial challenges they face. "For farmers, the bottom line is trying to survive," explains organic farmer Chris Korrow of Burkesville, Kentucky. Korrow is an enthusiastic promoter of sustainable agriculture, which involves many specific practices-crop rotation for farmers and alternating grazing for ranchers, the avoidance of pesticides, and the reintroduction of native plants or animals, among others. All seek to create agriculture that is economically viable and ecologically sound. Korrow readily points out that only 8,000 of the country's farms are "certified organic." But that doesn't dampen his desire to bring sustainable agriculture to the rest. "We tell farmers a few simple things," Korrow says. "Sustainable farming is the only aspect of farming that's on the rise-organic sales are growing twenty-five percent a year-and that their inputs will be less and their profits higher." Even when sounding more like a banker than the eco-evangelist that he is, Korrow says it's still a hard sell. "These guys just want to make a living," he says. "And when extension agents tell them that organic is 'alternative,' to them that means 'risky.'" There is one argument that hits home, however: "Being successful opens people's eyes," Korrow says. But farmers don't always need an economic incentive to see the environmental light. On California's north coast, stream restoration and habitat protection are sources of great local pride. When wild salmon were designated endangered species in the mid-1990s, Sonoma County activist Kurt Erickson predicted, "The coho will come back when the community comes back together, because then the watershed will be healthy enough to sustain them." Indeed, citizens' groups have united a whole community-ranchers, farmers, winemakers, developers, and environmentalists-to protect and restore their nearby streams. One Sonoma waterway has been reborn thanks to a visionary teacher named Tom Furrer. Petaluma, California, a suburb 40 miles north of San Francisco, was once a rural village veined by small but prolific streams. When in 1981 native-son Furrer returned to his hometown to teach at Casa Grande High School, he noted that the stream running next to the campus appeared moribund, with virtually no water, little foliage, and few fish. Adobe Creek had once hosted steelhead and salmon runs, but stream diversion and overgrazing, as well as the expansion of housing tracts, seemed to have pushed it beyond hope of revival. Then Furrer encountered a rancher who had planted trees to shade his stretch of the stream and was trying to save a few steelhead fry in a pool there. That there were fry at all surprised Furrer, so he asked a simple question: Why not try to save the whole creek? He would end up educating a community about the health of streams and ecosystems, and about stewardship. In 1983, Furrer's wildlife and forestry class began cleaning the creek and replanting the long-gone riparian forest. Despite setbacks (in 1989, for instance, county workers bulldozed 200 fledgling redwoods planted by the students), a circle of supporters arose within the community. The public sector caught on late, but in 1992 the city of Petaluma joined the team by ceasing its diversions of the creek's water; for the first time in 80 years, Adobe Creek flowed naturally. It took many car washes and candy sales and donations, but the group now known as the United Anglers of Casa Grande has annually planted 1,200 native willows, broad-leaved maples, and oaks; removed over 25 tons of garbage from the streambed; and constructed a state-of-the-art conservation fish hatchery. Only unprecedented cooperation could accomplish those things. Just last year, for instance, cattle rancher Merv Sartori, through whose property Adobe Creek flows, agreed to allow more than four miles of wildlife-sensitive fencing to protect the stream from his 650 head of cattle. "The creek's going to overgrow because the cattle won't be there to beat it down," he says. "That's what the fish like, a lot of cover. It will keep the erosion down, no doubt about it." Adobe Creek has come back to life because a community has come to life to support it. Shared problems can build teamwork, and common concerns can lead to cooperation. Once the doors are open even a crack, and folks begin to relate to one another as individuals rather than as stereotypes, they see that within familiar labels-farmer, rancher, environmentalist-there are plenty of variations, and plenty of ways to find common ground. Gerald Haslam is author of The Great Central Valley: California's Heartland (1993) and Workin' Man Blues: Country Music in California (1999), both from the University of California Press. He lives in Penngrove, California. Get Cultivated Even if you don't drive a combine or herd cattle, your food choices affect how land is farmed and how well rural environments are protected. Here are some agricultural resources worth harvesting: MEAT FACTORIES HELP FROM THE HILL PROFILES IN TILLAGE Produced by the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this book is available on the Web at www.sare.org/newfarmer. RAISING AWARENESS |
