Thinking about Farm Workers and CSA List for 07/29

I’ve been thinking about the farmers and farm workers in the areas most affected by the smoke from the wildfires in Canada.  Over the past couple weeks I’ve seen several posts on social media of small farmers like us working under smoky orange skies wearing N95 masks.  Doing just what is absolutely necessary each day.  Because work on the farm needs to happen every day.  There’s irrigation to run and crops to harvest and problems to solve every day.  Their livelihoods depend on it.

I tried searching online for more information so I could write an informed post.  Apparently I searched the wrong thing because all my results were about the effects of smoke on crops, not on the people who grow them and harvest them.  And of course much of our nation’s farmland is used to grow commodity crops and only ever sees the wheels of a tractor with an enclosed cab, never a human hand or booted foot, so I can understand to an extent.  But growing fruits and vegetables is a hands on activity.

I know you all reading this see us and know your food comes from the hard work of real live people.  Even the food you buy at the store.  But it did kind of rub me the wrong way, that there is so much more information available about how the smoke might affect a field of soybeans than how it might affect a community of migrant workers picking tomatoes, for example.  Only three states, California, Washington and Oregon, require employers to provide masks to workers when air quality is dangerously low.  Nobody is making sure that happens.

Why are we as a society asking the people with the least agency and the least capacity to cope with financial hardship to put their bodies on the line and bear the cost of these environmental catastrophes?  I have my suspicions, and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.  All I ask is that we try to think about people first, and productivity second.  Goodness knows there is enough to go around, if it actually did go around.

Small Shares

• small watermelon or cantaloupe
• okra
• carrots
• tomatoes
• eggplant

Full Shares

• small watermelon or cantaloupe
• squash and/or zucchini
• eggplant
• tomatoes
• juliet tomatoes
• cherry tomatoes