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Wilder Thoughts

 

“Provisioning our food is a deep part of our aliveness, our creatureness. And the systems that have turned our food provisioning into factories that operate as if they were outside of an interconnected ecosystem are not places we want to spend our time, if given the choice.”

 

Our current national policies around immigration hit home last week in Wilder, Idaho, where hundreds of people were detained after a controversial raid involving national, county, and local agencies to allegedly break up an illegal horse racing operation that the government had been watching for months. During that raid, 105 individuals not thought to be a part of the alleged ring were detained for immigration violations. Many of those individuals work on Idaho farms, and many of them had just finished the grueling onion harvest, one of the last commercial harvests of the season.

As a 100% worker-owned cooperative, we are interested in building models which protect and care for workers. Whether we like it or not, Idaho’s agriculture industry is incredibly dependent on immigrant labor. (One of the most accessible and balanced explorations of this issue I’ve come across is this KTVB 208 special that focuses on Idaho’s dairy industry—it’s really great at laying out the facts at hand from multiple different stakeholder perspectives, including Congressman Mike Simpson’s). I don’t think there is a single person in the US today who would say that our immigration system is working well, and I don’t understand it well enough to have an informed opinion on the exact ways that it could change to better protect workers and their rights.

For me, the bigger question is, if we’ve always had a food system in this country that relies on exploited labor, from slavery all the way through to the present day, how would we go about creating one that doesn’t? Is it even possible?

One thing I keep coming back to is the lamentations from so many industrial farmers about how “nobody wants to work,” and that they can’t find American citizens who are willing to do these jobs. What kind of business model makes work so awful that nobody wants to do it unless they’re desperate?

Provisioning our food is a deep part of our aliveness, our creatureness. And the systems that have turned our food provisioning into factories that operate as if they were outside of an interconnected ecosystem are not places we want to spend our time, if given the choice. We have put these factory sites increasingly out of sight and out of mind for most of the now city-dwelling inhabitants, which makes it easier to pretend that what is happening to the land and to all of the beings who interact with it, human and other-than-human, doesn’t matter.

It is no surprise that an agricultural system which exploits the land will also similarly exploit those who work the land. So the question becomes, can we feed ourselves in ways that bring us closer to—not further away from—the breathtaking beauty of the ecosystems in which we live?

We certainly can on smaller, local and regional scales. Every farmer in our cooperative is doing this every day. Every one of us knows the grounded nourishment and satisfaction, as well as the complex challenges, that come from growing food and seeds in this way. It is hard work, sure, but it is life-affirming, not life-destroying. And while it doesn’t exactly pencil out financially within a capitalist economy—some of our growers also have challenges finding qualified folks who want to work on their farms for wages they can afford to pay—there is enough freedom and flexibility within it that folks who deeply desire this type of connection are able to get creative and make it work one way or another. Each of these growers maintains a network of relationships that brings others in their community into closer contact with their food as well.

So, can it work on a global scale? Are massive factory farms and global agricultural commodities trades necessary to feed everyone on the planet? I don’t know, but if we don’t ask the question, we can’t answer it. I do know that this globalized system is 100% made up of real, local places, and it relies on real humans in each of those places—each of them with their own families, obligations, hopes, and dreams—in order to function. If we cannot take care of these local places and the people who live and work in them, there is no way the system made up of them can EVER be one of care and nourishment. It cannot sustain itself long term.

So what do we do? We can keep asking hard questions, cultivating an ethic of respect for all life, and resisting the horrible rhetoric coming at us that we should dehumanize each other instead of taking care of each other. We all know deep down that we need each other and we need this planet we live inside of. We are not separate from each other and we are not separate from the earth.

All of us at SRSC are dedicating our lives to imagining and living into a way of being and organizing ourselves that holds these truths like precious gems at the core. Thank you for being on this journey with us.

And to our fellow human beings who were just traumatized and separated from their families, we are holding you close in our hearts. You are collateral damage in a broken and toxic system and we resist the pressure to think of you as the problem itself.

There is another way forward, and we can find it together.

Grow What You Like to Eat!

Wilder Thoughts

 

“Provisioning our food is a deep part of our aliveness, our creatureness. And the systems that have turned our food provisioning into factories that operate as if they were outside of an interconnected ecosystem are not places we want to spend our time, if given the choice.”

 

Our current national policies around immigration hit home last week in Wilder, Idaho, where hundreds of people were detained after a controversial raid involving national, county, and local agencies to allegedly break up an illegal horse racing operation that the government had been watching for months. During that raid, 105 individuals not thought to be a part of the alleged ring were detained for immigration violations. Many of those individuals work on Idaho farms, and many of them had just finished the grueling onion harvest, one of the last commercial harvests of the season.

As a 100% worker-owned cooperative, we are interested in building models which protect and care for workers. Whether we like it or not, Idaho’s agriculture industry is incredibly dependent on immigrant labor. (One of the most accessible and balanced explorations of this issue I’ve come across is this KTVB 208 special that focuses on Idaho’s dairy industry—it’s really great at laying out the facts at hand from multiple different stakeholder perspectives, including Congressman Mike Simpson’s). I don’t think there is a single person in the US today who would say that our immigration system is working well, and I don’t understand it well enough to have an informed opinion on the exact ways that it could change to better protect workers and their rights.

For me, the bigger question is, if we’ve always had a food system in this country that relies on exploited labor, from slavery all the way through to the present day, how would we go about creating one that doesn’t? Is it even possible?

One thing I keep coming back to is the lamentations from so many industrial farmers about how “nobody wants to work,” and that they can’t find American citizens who are willing to do these jobs. What kind of business model makes work so awful that nobody wants to do it unless they’re desperate?

Provisioning our food is a deep part of our aliveness, our creatureness. And the systems that have turned our food provisioning into factories that operate as if they were outside of an interconnected ecosystem are not places we want to spend our time, if given the choice. We have put these factory sites increasingly out of sight and out of mind for most of the now city-dwelling inhabitants, which makes it easier to pretend that what is happening to the land and to all of the beings who interact with it, human and other-than-human, doesn’t matter.

It is no surprise that an agricultural system which exploits the land will also similarly exploit those who work the land. So the question becomes, can we feed ourselves in ways that bring us closer to—not further away from—the breathtaking beauty of the ecosystems in which we live?

We certainly can on smaller, local and regional scales. Every farmer in our cooperative is doing this every day. Every one of us knows the grounded nourishment and satisfaction, as well as the complex challenges, that come from growing food and seeds in this way. It is hard work, sure, but it is life-affirming, not life-destroying. And while it doesn’t exactly pencil out financially within a capitalist economy—some of our growers also have challenges finding qualified folks who want to work on their farms for wages they can afford to pay—there is enough freedom and flexibility within it that folks who deeply desire this type of connection are able to get creative and make it work one way or another. Each of these growers maintains a network of relationships that brings others in their community into closer contact with their food as well.

So, can it work on a global scale? Are massive factory farms and global agricultural commodities trades necessary to feed everyone on the planet? I don’t know, but if we don’t ask the question, we can’t answer it. I do know that this globalized system is 100% made up of real, local places, and it relies on real humans in each of those places—each of them with their own families, obligations, hopes, and dreams—in order to function. If we cannot take care of these local places and the people who live and work in them, there is no way the system made up of them can EVER be one of care and nourishment. It cannot sustain itself long term.

So what do we do? We can keep asking hard questions, cultivating an ethic of respect for all life, and resisting the horrible rhetoric coming at us that we should dehumanize each other instead of taking care of each other. We all know deep down that we need each other and we need this planet we live inside of. We are not separate from each other and we are not separate from the earth.

All of us at SRSC are dedicating our lives to imagining and living into a way of being and organizing ourselves that holds these truths like precious gems at the core. Thank you for being on this journey with us.

And to our fellow human beings who were just traumatized and separated from their families, we are holding you close in our hearts. You are collateral damage in a broken and toxic system and we resist the pressure to think of you as the problem itself.

There is another way forward, and we can find it together.

Grow What You Like to Eat!