foreign workers
GRAPHIC: Use of the H-2A program more than tripled in past decade
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The number of positions certified for the fruit and tree nut industry increased about 400%, according to USDA data.
coronavirus
Analysis: N.C.’s rural Covid-19 rate stems from meatpacking plants
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While nursing homes and prisons made up most rural hot spots in the spring, growing evidence now points to a different major “engine of spread” that has lurked beneath the radar of public awareness and official recognition: meat-processing.
coronavirus
Amid COVID-19 Concerns, Clinics Step Up Testing For Migrant Farmworkers
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“When the pandemic first started, and we were just beginning to hear information about the impact on farmworkers, we knew it was coming,” Partida says. “You just knew that it was going to get worse and worse and worse.”
Opinion
Opinion: Will feds rise to the long-term challenges of COVID-19?
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It’s really no wonder that the latest Pew Research Survey said that just 17 % of Americans currently trust government to do the right thing all or most of the time. In all fairness it just isn’t the current POTUS. Trust in the federal government has been declining for years in the wake of a boatload of poorly mishandled crisis – the invasion of Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil well explosion, the inability to sign up for the Affordable Care Act to name just a few.
Agribusiness
EPA temporarily suspends monitoring of a pesticide in water over COVID-19 concerns
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has allowed Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta to halt its water monitoring program of a pesticide linked to reproductive issues and cancer that is found in the drinking water of millions of Americans because of COVID-19 restrictions.
Opinion
Opinion: Government’s dirty little relationship with Big Meat
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For those of us who cover Big Agriculture on a daily basis it was no secret. It was just a matter of time before the novel coronavirus would infect thousands of workers at the nation’s meat processing plants. Plants with marquee names. Smithfield. Cargill. JBS USA.
Bader Farms
Bayer seeks to strike $265 million award in first dicamba-related trial
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Bayer has filed post-trial motions in the Missouri Bader Farms case, asking for the $265 million verdict to be overturned in the first dicamba-related case to go to trial.
The weedkiller dicamba is at the heart of hundreds of lawsuits against the company from farmers who claim the pesticide drifted and significantly damaged their crops, once it was widely sprayed as early as 2015.
Government
After suing feds for contempt, Kraft Foods attempts second settlement in wheat market manipulation case
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The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Kraft Foods Group, Inc. have reached a tentative second out-of-court agreement in an ongoing saga that stemmed from the food company’s alleged wheat futures market manipulation nearly a decade ago.
Agribusiness
As sales of the pesticide chlorpyrifos ends in California, maker Corteva announces it will stop producing it.
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Corteva Agriscience – the main manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that has been linked to brain damage in children – said it would stop its production by the end of this year.
A Texas community chokes on fecal dust from cattle feedlots … And regulators aren’t doing anything about it.
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This story was produced in collaboration with The Texas Observer , Food and Environment Reporting Network and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. This article may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact info@thefern.org.
Lawrence Brorman eases his pickup through plowed farmland in Deaf Smith County, an impossibly flat stretch of the Texas Panhandle where cattle outnumber people 40 to 1. The 67-year-old farmer and rancher brings the vehicle to a stop at the field’s southern edge.