Farm Safety: The Real Story

U.S. Labor Department has just withdrawn a set of proposed safety regulations for young people working in agriculture. The regulations proposed to disallow children under 16 from operating machinery with power takeoffs, and from working in feed lots, grain silos and stockyards.

Under these regulations, my brother wouldn't have been able to pay for his university education by farming my grandmother's land. And my dad wouldn't have been able to tell the story about riding his bicycle down the road when he was ten, and seeing a driverless tractor coming toward him. As it approached, he realized it was being driven by his five-year-old cousin who couldn't be seen above the steering wheel. My brother and my dad's cousin survived, just as I survived using the rotary mower, as a subcontractor mowing besides the railway tracks, at age 13.

But the thing is, my dad didn't survive a farm accident, three years ago. Farming is dangerous. A Stats Canada Report shows that "Agriculture is one of the industries with the highest rates of fatal injury. From 1991 to 1995, that rate varied between 14.9 and 25.6 per 100,000 workers in Canada... Agricultural production thus ranks as the fourth most dangerous sector, behind mining, forestry and construction ...With regards to non-fatal injuries among agricultural producers, studies indicate that annual frequencies are generally in the range of 5% to 10% of the population." It's not just because the average age of farmers is really high: the injury death rate for young children who live on farms is almost twice that for all young children in Canada.

Maybe it is more effective to educate about farm safety than to disallow children from working on farms - this is the tack the American government is going to take. However, I think there are two essential pieces to this news that have not been emphasized. First, these labour laws would not have applied to children working on their parents' farms. How many children under the age of fifteen (need to) work on other peoples' farms? Yet, it wasn't only 4-H instructors complaining about these laws. News articles were full of emotional manipulation like this:

e here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/27/4447875/child-labor-groups-upset-farm.html#storylink=cpy

On the Sombke family farm four kids learned everything they know about the trade from their parents..."I wouldn't have worked out here, I would have taken a completely different, completely different path in life," Brett Sombke said.

The Republicans were all over this overblown rhetoric, for their own political gain. However, despite the wholly inaccurate portrayal of the proposed laws in this article, the closing paragraph holds the key to another very important piece of the puzzle:

Brett says it's hard enough to find people to work during the spring and fall. He says that without kids being able to perform certain tasks on family farms the traditional meaning of family farm could end.

None of the farm groups protesting this law have mentioned the bigger issue behind it - the need for cheap or free labour on family farms. How many bankers or plumbers do you know who need to take their kids to work just to keep food on the table? (Hint: none.) And it's not because they are so much better at their jobs than family farmers are at theirs. It's because small family farmers are getting screwed every which way by input sellers, by processors, by commodity speculators, by consumer expectations of cheap food.

And *that* is the real problem.

And, it might even have something to do with farm safety. Stats Canada also says that farm receipts are inversely proportional to farm accidents.

Jill-of-all-trades.

Recently, I heard about the value of being a generalist from two different places. First, I attended a workshop on permaculture by Rob Avis of Verge Permaculture. He suggested that being a generalist was valuable for permaculture because you need to be able to see whole systems and integrate a lot of different parts. You can, of course, specialize in mycellium or straw bale building, but you need to be able to put that together with a working knowledge of botany, climatology, animal husbandry, energy flows, nutrient cycling, etc. in order to create a permaculture system.

On her science blog, Sharon Astyk reviews some homesteading/small farming how-to books and says,

Agriculture requires a wide-ranging set of skills vaster than almost any field I can imagine, and while one becomes deeply expert in some parts of the work, it is still necessary, even imperative, to constantly be gaining some superficial understanding of a host of new things. The generalist is jack of many trades, but master of few. That's not a criticism.

This is good news if you're a person who's highly curious, who likes to see how things fit together, or who has a five year old who asks 'why' and 'how' a lot. In a way, it's what attracted me to my first career, teaching. A mentor told me, "You will never be bored." It was true, except for during staff meetings.


I also think there's danger in our becoming a world of specialists. For one, it results in certain metaphors being transposed where this may not be appropriate - so that, for example, everything is a business. To a businessperson, this seems axiomatic. Post-secondary education must produce workers trained for a specific career, and must pay for itself. I am expected to do a financial cost-benefit analysis when deciding whether to take a job in another city, and if I decide to turn it down for family reasons then I am not a serious candidate. If I sell vegetables with business profits foremost, then I must try to achieve a premium price and lower my costs, which may mean that my produce is only available to the rich, or that I use free municipal waste, replete with pharmaceutical residue, to fertilize my crops. If I sell vegetables with the goal of increasing food security, biodiversity, and community engagement, my practices will look quite different and I may use a different metaphor to guide my practices - perhaps the metaphor of an ecosystem.

It's at this point that Gregory Bateson weighs in with the suggestion that

"whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; whenever we start insisting too hard upon "operationalism" or symbolic logic or any other of these very essential systems of tramlines, we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking" *

In other words, a wide experience helps us to think of new ideas, to see new things, which can then be refined and tested. Perhaps all the things that I am learning, seemingly dissociated, will be used in ways I can't yet foresee. Learning many ways to learn may be the best strategy.

* Bateson, G. (1941). Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material, Philosophy of Science, 8(1): 53-68.

Watching FRESH with my five year old

FRESH the movie is streaming for free until tomorrow, so I thought I'd finally get around to watching it, and write a review. Eleven seconds in, Joel Salatin starts calling, "Pig, pig, pig, pig" and my 5 year old son, Vincent, ran over to the laptop to take a look. I had a brilliant idea. I would watch the movie with him and then use his insights to write a review from a child's point of view. You, blog audience, would eat it up.

Happy to be exploited for purposes of education.

We watched the pigs happily graze the pasture, and I remarked on how healthy they looked. I explained what "inconvenience" meant when Vincent asked, and guided his responses to the subsequent shots of supermarket packages - "That doesn't even look like food, does it?". I was being so educational!

And didactic. Then, at 2:29, the crates of baby chickens appeared on screen and Vincent was instantly on the verge of tears. "Why are they in cages?!"

And from that point on, I let him lead the viewing. We talked about the metaphor of the factory being applied to all areas of life. He asked what monocropping meant and we talked about the benefits of biodiversity. He was fascinated by the pictures of fluorescent bacteria, and we talked about antibiotic resistance. Half way through the movie, he started putting ideas together about how we could keep weeds out of our garden without using chemicals. "We could put a small greenhouse in it with not too many cracks and a small door so it would be hard for weeds to get in, plus there would be a fence of corn outside it, to keep the plants that are living healthy."

Then he threw me for another loop. As we were learning about the nutrient cycling through the tilapia tanks at Will Allen's Growing Power, Vincent said, "I think the fish should be free to swim about." Hmm. "Well," I hedged, "People think that fish don't have the same kind of ...brains... and feelings... as..." He stared me down. "I think they should have lots of room to swim about."

I didn't come up with a good answer for that one, but I know the topic will come up again - and it should. These are big questions - what makes us human, yet animal, and how do we decide what sentience is? How and why do we, and should we, play gods? What is our role in the food system?

Watch this movie with your kids! Or grab someone else's kid and watch with them. I promise you that you will learn something you didn't know, and see something in a new way.

The State of Science Journalism Today

I can hear the voices of a hundred neglected tasks setting up a cheap, jangly tintinnabulation in my ears. My to-do list for this afternoon stretches to the horizon - and I live in a province where you can watch your dog run away from you for three days. So today will not be a feel-good post. I'm going to engage in some catharsis; in other words, I am going to irritably complain about the state of food reporting.

While I do have post-secondary education in the area of food, agriculture and social justice, it doesn't make me an expert on food issues; nor does my reading, my gardening practice, or what I like to think of as my common sense. But surely, some things are obvious to thinking people? I stumbled on this article, "Expert spills the beans on organic food: new article stews over the advertising myths of the corporate organics industry" by accident through an offhand Twitter link. It is absolutely appalling

Although it pained me to do so, because I taught English for several years, I overlooked the error in each of the first four sentences. I am more concerned with the lack of science knowledge demonstrated by the reporter - and, possibly, the cutbacks in media that allow a poor paraphrase of a press release to pass as journalism. Here are my quibbles with the article:

1) Claims to authority are unsubstantiated
The article, and its place of publication, are not listed. Google tells me that the author quoted works in a lab at the university mentioned; I could find no mention of a degree he may possess. I do not see how he can be called an expert. His publications, listed on his website, are primarily letters to newspaper editors.

2) Claims about organic food are misleading
While the article is not detailed enough to give specific examples of advertisements that make the claims that organic food is healthier, not grown with pesticides or antibiotics, and more natural, I can still argue against the author's oversimplistic refutation of these claims.
      a) He claims that "Every scientific organization that's in charge of food safety, that has looked for a health benefit in organic food, cannot find one." I wonder if he has looked at claims by organizations who are "in charge of" nutrition, rather than food safety. In truth, the evidence is inconclusive. It is clear, however, that organic food production is far healthier for growers, farmworkers, flora, and fauna. (Please note the credible sources I have linked to, as this is an essential part of science journalism.)

Organic insecticide used: thumb and forefinger.

     b) He claims "Organic foods do use antibiotics and toxic chemicals, they just aren't synthetically produced." This is true. However, there are strict regulations in place around the use of antibiotics: an organic dairy cow in the US, for example, can no longer be used for organic production when antibiotics are given. It is also true that organic growers can use some toxic chemicals, such as copper sulfate in orchards as a fungicide. The author does not say how widespread this use is, while implying that it is ubiquitous, and dangerous. But pesticides are not necessarily so. My brother set out dishes of beer for slugs - a potent and compostable insecticide. Many organic horticulturalists that I know use Bt, a biological insecticide that is non-toxic to humans and animals, biodegradable, kills only specific insects, and is non-toxic or only mildly toxic to beneficial insects.
     c) His last claim, that organic food is no more "natural" than say, genetically modified food because all agriculture is a human modification of the environment, is a simplification of the issue - I may post about it later. However, if he had said that the word "natural" as employed in advertising is meaningless because it has not been codified or standardized, I would have agreed.

Such is the state of science journalism today. I offer this complaint in the hopes that you, at least, will not let these facile arguments thwart your pursuit of the truth.

Yes, I sent a comment to the editor of this news source. No, I have not received a response.

Tantalizing Quotes from "Decolonizing Food"

Briarpatch Magazine has just put out a food and agriculture issue, "Decolonizing Food". This covers a wide range of food and agriculture issues in Canada, with implications for beyond. Some excerpts:

"As a result of destroyed livelihoods in their countries of origin due to free-trade-facilitated corporate expansion (in which Canadian multinationals are often complicit), thousands of farmers come from Mexico, Guatemala and elsewhere to work in Canada’s SAWP. Canada creates and perpetuates an unjust situation for these farm workers, who are usually poorly paid, given harsh accommodation and denied access to services...how do we make these spaces safe for the most marginalized among us while also building an effective resistance to the systems that create and perpetuate food injustice?" Maryam Adrangi and Laura Lepper, "Food for all! Food justice needs migrant justice"

"Farming, in my experience, is too rich, too complex, too full of pleasure and agony to be learned from a distance. You need to wade ankle deep into mud, gorge on warm berries, toss bales until your fingers bleed. Farming as an art is interconnected and complex and requires a method of instruction that reflects this essence." - Anna Kirkpatrick, "Learning to grow: The proliferation of hands-on educational opportunities for wannabe farmers"

"The need for commercial, artificial human milk has been manufactured through the same intentional degradation of community that has manufactured doubt in our ability to produce milk from our breasts or food for our tables. It is not at all surprising that the years that saw dramatic decreases in breastfeeding are the same years that we gave up more and more of our gardens, our chickens and our recipes in exchange for supermarket solutions. We have been told that the work required to feed ourselves and our infants is drudgery and that time spent washing bottles and standing in line at the till is freedom." - Erin Laing, "From apple pie and mother's milk to pop-tarts and formula: How will we feed the next generation?"