Meg Paska with one of her chickens. (All photographs by Valery Rizzo/Nona Brooklyn.)

It’s a dreamy combination of hipster clichés: an urban farming-themed pop-up store made of salvaged materials. In Brooklyn. Maybe that’s why, when Hayseed’s Big City Farm Supply opened at the beginning of April, founder Meg Paska thought, “We’re going to get mocked.” But mockery did not ensue; instead, an enthusiastic community response showed that Paska was on to something with this small, seasonal shop catering to the needs of people growing food and raising animals in the city.

Paska, who blogs about her own backyard garden, chicken coop, and beehive at Brooklyn Homesteader, started Hayseed’s with the folks who run Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Queens. The store will be around until early July in a space Paska rented from the design studio Domestic Construction. We chatted with Paska recently about the project.

Q. How did Hayseed’s Big City Farm Supply come together?

A. My business partners and I both kind of have our own urban farm things going on. We were talking one night over beers, and we both admitted that we had thought about opening a farm store. But we were concerned about retail spaces being really expensive. We kept our ears to the ground and hoped that something would present itself, and it did. A bunch of friends of mine had posted a Kickstarter campaign for a design studio a few blocks from my house. They were going to try and save the lot next to their studio and turn it into an urban farm. I asked them how they would feel about hosting a pop-up store, and they were really into the idea. Their studio is in a big mechanic’s garage. They rented out the front space to us and then actually built out a storefront with pallets and old wood. We didn’t spend a single cent on materials; they built it all with salvaged objects.

Most of the Hayseed’s store is made out of re-purposed objects like these shipping crates.

Q. Why did you see the need for a place like Hayseed’s?

A. As someone who raises chickens for eggs, I struggled to find quality feed at a reasonable price. I am really into a small feed company in Virginia called Countryside Organics, but when you have the feed shipped it doubles the price. There are a lot of other people who raise chickens in the five boroughs here, and they were experiencing that same thing. I started posting on the Just Food City Chicken meetup group’s message board asking who would want to go in on ordering a full pallet [of feed]. The response was overwhelming.

Getting straw and hay delivered to Brooklyn is nearly impossible. It’s difficult to find places to dump bulk loads of soil and stuff, too. Most people don’t want to have a big pile of manure-based compost dumped into their [yard]. We’ve been fortunate this season that the gals at Domestic Construction allowed the use of their lot to do this. We’ve gone through about 60 cubic yards of soil in the month and a half that we’ve been open.

Q. As someone who was doing urban farming on her own, what’s it like to connect to the community through this project?

A. When you’re in the store and you have people coming in asking questions all the time, it makes you realize how much you know, and how much you don’t know. It’s given me confidence, but it’s also given me an opportunity to spot areas where I could improve my knowledge, which is ultimately what I want to do — keep learning and getting better at what I do every day. I’ve learned quite a bit from being questioned on things that I’d never really considered.

Q. What range of farming experience do you see among your customers?

A. We get a ton of people who think they don’t have the ability to grow anything. We give them suggestions for things they can grow easily — foolproof crops with a really high rate of success. Most of the people around here don’t know anything about fertilizing, and we have a whole array of organic fertilizers.

We do workshops every week, on [everything from] beekeeping to raising chickens. We’re doing a small livestock workshop this week, we’re doing a gardening-for-flower arrangements class, we do some on basic container gardening, and then we have a really fun workshop coming up on vegan gardening techniques — using fertilizers that are not animal-based, low-impact gardening, and finding ways to control pests without spraying a bunch of stuff.

Q. What other projects do you have going besides Hayseed’s?

A. I’m writing a book on urban beekeeping. I’m starting an educational homestead in New Jersey at a place called Seven Arrows. We’re hoping to create a place where people can come to get away from the craziness of the city, but also learn more about growing food. We’re going to put all the infrastructure in place late this summer, and then by early 2013 we’ll be in full swing. The goal is to create a hub for learning in the region.

Q. What’s the plan for the store from here?

A. We’re open for another month. We’re going to end [the store] no later than early July. The last two weeks we’ll do a lot of sales and start doing workshops on how people can prep for their fall garden come late August, and then we’ll close up shop. If the numbers reflect a sustainable operation, we’ll do it again next year. All our overhead [for this year] has been paid off, so anything that we sell from here on out is gravy.

We’re just trying to get people pumped on growing their own food, and we want to give them the confidence to get started.

Almost all buildings have the potential to become energy-saving superstars. (Photo by Kevo89.)

In the 12 years since the debut of LEED certification, the green-building stamp of approval has become the holy grail for every earth-loving contractor and home-builder. But while brand-new, Dwell magazine-worthy eco-structures are a flashy way to highlight new construction practices, the greenest buildings, it turns out, are almost always old ones. By fixing up an old building, you’re saving the planet all the costs of growing, manufacturing, and shipping new building materials all over creation, putting yourself decades ahead of a new building in terms of mitigating climate impacts.

LEED has a special set of awards (silver, gold, platinum) for existing buildings that have energy efficiency retrofits and other upgrades, but these rising energy-saving superstars haven’t seen much limelight — until now. Next month, the first annual EBie Awards will recognize impressive environmental performance improvements in existing buildings (existing buildings – E.B. – get it?).

“There’s not been enough recognition of the talent and skills that go into making effective change through existing buildings,” says Russell Unger, executive director of the Urban Green Council, which created the awards. “By bringing these incredible case studies to light, we’re hopefully encouraging duplication. People will start asking themselves, ‘Why can’t I do that, too?’”

The shift in focus from new green building to retrofitting existing buildings is already underway, spurred by a lack of capital for new construction and a realization of the huge benefits of rehabbing older buildings. Unger says that last year alone, New York City had 22 LEED-certified existing building projects, compared with 24 over the previous four years.

One of the main reasons these projects haven’t gotten more attention is their total lack of sex appeal. The 18 EBie finalists include an elementary school, a hospital, an art museum, and an affordable housing complex. If these buildings have one thing in common, it’ that they look more or less the same as they did before.

Hollie Brown is a project developer for Schneider Electric, which did a retrofit for the Dallas Museum of Art, one of the finalists. She doubts much of the Dallas public is even aware of the impressive changes their museum underwent — a testament to the skill of the construction team, but also an example of how under-the-radar green retrofits remain, in part because they achieve such significant savings through practically invisible changes. The retrofit involved implementing strict humidity controls, important for the art’s physical preservation, and had to take place without disturbing the exhibits.

“None of the retrofits [we made] were terribly exotic,” says Marc Zuluaga, director of multifamily energy services for Steven Winter Associates, which oversaw the rehab of a Brooklyn affordable housing complex, another finalist. The apartment building got new windows and a more balanced, functional ventilation system, both of which subtly improve comfort and quality of life for residents in addition to lowering the owner’s energy bill. But “it’s not necessarily something that tenants feel or see on a day-to-day basis,” Zuluaga says.

Just because these retrofits are not immediately visible doesn’t mean the savings they achieve are minor, however. Unger says that when the judges decided on a scoring scale, they assumed the highest energy savings they’d see would be 40 percent. But multiple projects showed savings of more than 50 percent.

By helping spread the word about these potential savings, the EBies could help convince banks and other lenders that retrofits are solid investments. Brown’s company, Schneider Electric, retrofitted the Dallas Art Museum as part of an energy conservation performance contract, which guarantees the project will pay for itself within 10 years by taking a huge bite out of the museum’s utility bills. Zuluaga’s company, Steven Winter Associates, did a study for Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation and Living Cities to analyze the energy savings achieved by over 200 multifamily housing units, and found the buildings reduced their fuel consumption by an average of 19 percent.

“Almost all buildings are going to have opportunities to improve efficiency that will save money and be a far better investment than the stock market,” Unger says.

With the EBies highlighting the upper end of what’s possible, we should see support for existing building retrofits grow. For this year, though, EBie finalists will mostly enjoy basking in some long-deserved glory. Those who can make it to New York for the awards ceremony on June 28 will enjoy a “VIP day” with a fancy lunch, a tour of the World Trade Center site, and a walk down the “green carpet.” And then they’ll return home to — hopefully — toil in a little less obscurity.

Just don’t hold your breath for the TMZ post-show commentary.

Love him or hate him, the man knows how to mobilize a following. (Photo by Scandic Hotels.)

However you might feel about Jamie Oliver — most seem to love him or hate him — you can’t deny that the man has a following, and he knows how to mobilize it. Since he declared this Saturday, May 19, Food Revolution Day — calling on “an international community of foodies, chefs, parents, educators, companies, activists and celebrities to arm people with the knowledge and tools to make healthier food choices” — that community has responded in force. So far they’ve planned over 600 events in 58 countries to answer the celebrity chef and real-food champion’s call.

The events range from privately hosted dinner parties to school excursions to cooking and gardening workshops — anything that falls under the mantle of spreading the gospel of good food and healthy living. If you’re in Amsterdam, you can take a “Good Food Tour” of the city. Stuck in the Maldives? Attend an “outdoor fitness event.” Those in Singapore can tour the few farms that still exist in this land-scarce country. Volunteers in Lorain County, Ohio, will be planting gardens for low-income families. Multiple cities will host grocery store and farmers market tours. If you can’t find an event in your area, you can sign up to host one. The @FoodRev twitter feed includes replies like: “it’s not too late to get an event on the map. We’d love to see another event in Kuala Lumpur.”

Shane Valentine, whose Baby Cuisine Cookbook and “Pre-School Food Revolution” was featured on Oliver’s website, organized several events in the Bay Area connected to Food Revolution Day: a dinner party, a pasture-raised pig roast, discussions with parents at local preschools, and an assembly and garden cooking workshop with middle schoolers in Richmond, Calif. On Saturday, he’ll be taking part in a Google+ hangout with Oliver and three others at 8 p.m. EST, chatting about their work in the food revolution.

Valentine describes his mantra as “Why wait ’til first grade?” — meaning it’s never too early to get kids cooking and eating real food. He already works with parents and childcare providers to change attitudes and practices around feeding kids, so for him, Food Revolution Day is a chance to further his education mission. “It gives people like me an opportunity to start a dialogue for discussion and change,” he said. “It gave me the chance to approach this school in Richmond. They loved it.”

The Food Revolution website clearly identifies the prevalence of nutrition-related health problems as the reason for this day of action, and after HBO’s high-profile mini-series on obesity, The Weight of the Nation, aired this week, the timing for a celebrity-led crusade against unhealthy food couldn’t be better. One critic took issue with Weight of the Nation’s focus on behavior change and localized solutions over policy, and the same critique could be made of Food Revolution Day, for all its good intentions — can thousands of people teaching each other to garden and cook really make a dent in the obesity epidemic when Big Ag and fast food lobbyists still have so much control over policymakers? What if all the energy and excitement inspired by Jamie Oliver’s cause could be channeled into a political movement, instead of a lifestyle movement?

But Valentine doesn’t think the two are mutually exclusive. “The start of a grassroots movement is a dialogue between people on a personal level,” he said. For him, part of that dialogue is addressing the complaint that “real food is more expensive,” when “the question you need to be asking is, ‘Why is [other food] so cheap?’” And he has a point; if everyone participating in Food Revolution Day starts making the connection between cheap, unhealthy food and the politics that keep it that way, it would be a big step in the right direction.

A sweet potato from Saura Pride Purple Sweet Potato, a fledgling business that was once a tobacco farm. (All photos by RAFI.)

Alan Flippin comes from a long line of North Carolina tobacco growers. But, a few years back, the crop just stopped making sense. His family’s operation stopped making much of a profit as the cost of fertilizer and other inputs rose. And, Flippin says, “I don’t really enjoy growing tobacco; I don’t use it. I was looking to get into something else.”

He wanted to transition to growing produce instead — something he could feel good about cultivating, eating, and selling. But shifting to a completely different crop is a hugely risky proposition. “With tobacco, you pretty much know how to grow it; you’ve got a market, and you get insurance for your crops,” Flippin says. “Whereas for produce, it’s very scary because there’s so much you don’t know.”

Flippin’s fledgling produce operation got off the ground with the help of a grant from something called the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund. The grant enabled him to build a greenhouse and experiment with several varieties of organic vegetables to sell to wholesalers, farmers markets, and at a local co-op.

The fund was created in the wake of the Tobacco Master Settlement to help North Carolina’s agricultural communities transition to new sources of income. According to the terms of the settlement, announced in 1997, the country’s four largest tobacco companies would make perpetual payments to 46 states to compensate them for smoking-related health-care costs and, in tobacco-growing states, economic losses (four other states already had individual agreements with tobacco companies).

A percentage of North Carolina’s settlement money goes to the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund, which is a program of the nonprofit Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI).

Jefferson Herr, owner of Herr Flower Farm, is a recipient of funding from the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund.

“The idea,” says Joseph Schroeder, the fund’s director, was to “fund farmers to take that first step in discovering new, innovative ways of making money off farms. In turn we would make them share their lessons and business plans with their community.” Tobacco comes with many of the same issues as other commodity crops (those grown at a large scale and sold to the commodities market, such as corn, wheat, and cotton): It’s a monocrop that requires large amounts of pesticides, depletes soil, and is susceptible to disease. And tobacco locks farmers into a dependent relationship with the corporations who buy their crops and provide them with seeds and pesticides.

The transition from commodity crops to more diverse, locally focused operations can be jarring, and hard for farmers to make on their own. As Flippin noted, small and mid-scale farmers rarely have the security of crop insurance, which makes it much easier to get loans. “Getting that capital infusion [from the Fund] was a big boost to us,” Flippin says. “It really got the ball rolling.”

Beyond the struggle to access capital, Schroeder says, “the thing about commodity production — and tobacco is one of the best examples of this — is you don’t learn how to do everything you need to do to be an entrepreneur. All you learn how to do is grow the product.”

In addition to money, the grant gave Flippin access to guidance from a regional expert and support from a network of grantees around the state. And, true to the other end of the deal, Flippin’s business now serves as a model for how a farm can transition from tobacco to produce. “We’re one of the farms everybody’s looking towards to see if we actually make money or not,” he says.

Though the fund was originally intended for tobacco growers, it’s now open to anyone who earns the majority of their income through farming. In addition to grants for individual farmers, the fund awards community grants for collaborative efforts, and the range of projects they’ve have supported — over 500 in the last 15 years — is an inspiring testament to the potential of farmers’ innovation.

Meredith McKissick, who grows flowers, got a community grant to buy shared-use equipment for a farmers’ co-operative she belongs to near Asheville, N.C., and later served on the review board that selects grantees.

Kay Doby of Hot Shot Goat Farm (once a debt-inducing conventional poultry business).

“It was a super amazing experience for me to see all the different farmers trying to be innovative,” she says of the review process. “There was one fellow who had been [raising chickens] and had been asked to make upgrades he simply couldn’t afford, so he was forced out of his contract. His family banded together and decided they would turn one of the chicken houses into a creamery for dairy goats. Despite his age, he was starting over from scratch. That made me feel like there was hope for some of these growers getting squeezed out.”

Schroeder explains that while other states often funnel settlement funds toward a few specific crops and farming practices, in North Carolina, they “trust the farmer to be the expert.”

That strategy has paid off: Schroeder says RAFI’s surveys report that over 80 percent of the projects it’s funded are successful after three years. And because of the requirement that proposals be replicable — ideas that other farmers could learn from and adapt — the success of any one project has a resounding impact. A University of North Carolina study [PDF] found that each dollar awarded to a farmer through the reinvestment fund generates a whopping $205 of local economic activity, and that each grant creates an average of 11 new jobs in one year.

The fund is based on some pretty simple principles: Support farmers with new and creative ways to make a living off the land; encourage them to share their ideas and inspire others; and in the process, revitalize rural economies once dependent on commodity crops. It’s exciting to imagine how this model could be applied to other industries — corn, industrial livestock, even coal and oil.

Sadly, the fund has taken a bit of a financial hit. It’s fully funded by the North Carolina Tobacco Trust Fund Commission, which was nearly eliminated in the state’s recent budget crisis; instead, it went from distributing $35 million to just $2 million. That means this year, the Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund was only able to give out 34 grants compared to last year’s 181 grants. But the ripple effects of the fund will hopefully continue to widen, especially as recently funded projects grow.

Flippin, for his part, feels that his years of produce-growing trial and error are about to pay off. “The broccoli’s looking great, the zucchinis are looking great, and the tomatoes are looking great,” he says. “It’s finally all coming together this year.”

The film follows a plucky 18-year-old girl named Manjusha, whose father was one of the quarter-million farmers who have committed suicide in India in the last 16 years. As Grist and others have reported, the motivations for these suicides follow a familiar pattern: Farmers become trapped in a cycle of debt trying to make a living growing Monsanto’s genetically engineered Bt cotton. They always live close to the edge, but one season’s ruined crop can dash hopes of ever paying back their loans, much less enabling their families to get ahead. Manjusha’s father, like many other suicide victims, killed himself by drinking the pesticide he spreads on his crops.

Why is Monsanto seen as responsible for these farmers’ desperation? The company began selling Bt cotton in India in 2004, after a U.S. challenge at the WTO forced India to adopt seed patenting, effectively allowing Monsanto to monopolize the market. Bt cotton seeds were — and still are — advertised heavily to illiterate Indian farmers, who have bought the company’s promises of high yields and the material wealth they bring. What the farmers didn’t know until it was too late is those seeds require an expensive regimen of pesticides, and must be fertilized and watered according to precise timetables. And since these farmers lack irrigation systems, and must instead depend on not-always-predictable rainfall, it’s incredibly difficult to control the success or failure of any year’s crops. As farmers bought the Bt cotton in droves, the conventional seed they’d been using — which needed only cow dung as fertilizer — disappeared in as little as one season. Now, in communities like Manjusha’s, it’s virtually impossible to buy anything but Monsanto’s seed.

Manjusha, the film’s protagonist, goes looking for answers after her father commits suicide.

To pay for seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer, farmers must take out loans, but most banks refuse to deal with them, so instead they turn to moneylenders, who charge exorbitant interest rates. Many farmers have nothing to offer as collateral besides their land. If a crop fails and they can’t pay back the loans, they lose everything.

The film offers a glimmer of hope in Manjusha, an aspiring journalist in a world where farmers’ daughters aren’t exactly encouraged to pursue independent careers. Scenes of her first earnest attempts at reporting are intimate and touching (“I had other questions to ask, but I forgot”), and her commitment to telling the story of her family’s and her community’s struggle always shines through her nervousness. This appealing heroine makes a story of global manipulation more personal, and thus more devastating.

Piece by piece, Bitter Seeds lays out the bleak situation in India, using interviews with all players, from condescending seed sales reps and callous Monsanto execs, to activist Vandana Shiva, to farmers, their families, and village old-timers who remember when life as an Indian cotton farmer was not so bitter.

Proponents hail GMO crops as a triumph of science over nature that could provide a solution to world hunger. But this film reveals a society of farmers whose way of life, and very lives, are threatened. If GMOs have any benefits, it would be hard to convince me that they outweigh the human costs portrayed in Bitter Seeds.

Michael Twitty.

Michael Twitty is about to embark on what he calls the “Southern Discomfort Tour” — a journey to follow his ancestors’ “foodsteps” through the American South.

This self-described writer, culinary historian, and Jewish educator from the Washington, D.C., area will be traveling with a small group for two months by car, from Maryland to Louisiana and back, covering almost 4,500 miles.

In addition to tracing his personal history, Twitty will be speaking, giving cooking demonstrations, and volunteering on farms and for food justice organizations over the course of the trip. He plans, as he puts it, to “make sure that organic, local and sustainable food in Southern communities — particularly that produced by farmers of color — is highlighted and supported.” He also plans to document the journey on his blog, The Cooking Gene.

Twitty’s roots go back through the segregated South to slavery in Virginia, and he also hopes to engage communities in conversation about the region’s fraught history, using the unique and beloved cuisine of the South as a medium for education and reconciliation. We caught up with Twitty as he was fundraising for the tour.

Q. Describe your approach to this project and what kinds of things you’ll be doing along the way.

A. I’ve been planning the road map [for this trip] for 25 out of my 35 years — learning about genealogy, African American history, and slavery. I really wanted to feel that I was not an armchair scholar. [To that end, Twitty has picked cotton and tobacco in the South.] I didn’t just want to do a project about my ancestors and slavery. The food thing makes it unique, because you can talk about it in regards to slavery, race, class, and power. It’s not just a cultural conversation about things that make people mad, it’s a way to do it that brings people together.

We’re going to be working with a couple different community garden groups, and working with African American farmers. And doing historic [cooking] demonstrations.

We’re going to be at a synagogue in Birmingham where there are black churches sharing the same street, and we’ll have this — hopefully — rich discussion about what identity means and how being Southern brings everybody together. I’m also looking for Chinese communities in Mississippi who have been blending Southern produce and African American food traditions with Chinese regional food traditions for years, and no one’s ever thought to ask them, “how do you make that collard green and crawfish stir fry?”

Q. What’s unique about Southern cuisine?

A. It’s the oldest verifiable, continuous American food tradition. Our food is this incredible blend of the earth, the sky, the water, native America, Africa, and Europe. And it just keeps on incorporating new elements, whether they’re Latino or they’re Asian.

Q. What’s the impact of race on how we eat, and how has that relationship evolved over history?

A. There is a really interesting, apocryphal anecdote [that] said that the only day black people were allowed to publicly eat vanilla ice cream was on the Fourth of July.

Food was a tool of control. To this day, there are certain overtones of food as a means to control. Also, I think people are uncomfortable with the notion that the mother of Southern cuisine is not just a black woman but an African woman. The image of this African woman coming from Senegal or Ghana, having to pick up those gadgets in a European American kitchen with those Native American foods and those African memories and make it work — that’s problematic because they don’t want the culinary DNA of the South to go back to Lucy.

Q. So food was a source of control as well as being a source of joy for African Americans. How does your project reflect that tension?

A. One of the elements of African American culture that people in the antebellum time struggled to understand was how can these people who are so oppressed feel such joy? How can they smile in the middle of hell? And isn’t that the story of the blues? Every element of Black culture [contains] that tension between pain and joy, between control and liberation. And you can use the food to liberate yourself, to figure out your identity. When I picked cotton for 16 hours, the only thing I had to eat was a hoe cake and some water. You don’t know shit about Southern cuisine or slavery until you’ve actually spent 16 hours in the fields sweating, running away from poisonous snakes, and getting your hands cut up by cotton. Then you find out what a hoe cake really meant.

Q. You wrote that “most of us are still enslaved to food systems that aren’t sustainable.” Can you elaborate?

A. We have serious addictions to things that we know aren’t good for us. But it’s not in everybody’s power to live the ideal. We’re blocked in by financial constraints, by lack of access. So there’s this idea of enslavement that comes into play — that I don’t have the ability to always make the best choices for myself or my family. I know that’s been my struggle in life several times over. People hear me talk a good game about organic, healthy, and sustainable food — but that’s not my complete life.

Q. Shouldn’t we all be more in touch with our food heritage? How can we go about doing that?

A. When you follow a family recipe, you have an opportunity to bring life to your family story. What sustained your ancestors and your parents? It becomes exciting because you can say, “This is what my so-and-so ate to celebrate the end of World War II.”

Q. Your Twitter handle is @koshersoul. What role does your faith play in your relationship to food? How do kosher food and soul food coexist?

A. I feel really blessed to come from two diasporas that circled the globe, and have touched every culture they’ve been a part of, especially on a culinary level. There are Jewish foods that incorporate some of the ingredients that you might find in the average southern kitchen. Black-eyed peas are eaten for good luck on Rosh Hashanah in the Sephardic Jewish tradition. But they’re also eaten by African Americans and Southerners on New Year’s for good luck.

For me, it’s like blending together Jewish soul food and Black soul food from all over the world and making it taste fantastic and having people go, “Wow, your identity is in this food.”

What’s your favorite non-your-background cuisine?

Q. I’m a fan of Vietnamese food.

A. I’m sure you’re a pho fanatic. That’s your identity cooking. You and other folks on the West Coast are on the Asia-Pacific rim, so how could that not be a part of who you are, no matter what color you are? People need to get over being locked in their ethnic boxes.

I don’t want people to read [the Southern Discomfort Tour] as a race thing. I am so humbled by the fact that so many people who are not of color have said, “This is something we’ve been waiting for, something we want to be a part of.” Knowing that makes me feel good.

Sarah Palin added her two cents to the public discussion by posting a note on Facebook — with her signature poetic subtlety — entitled, “If I Wanted America to Fail, I’d Ban Kids From Farm Work.” It has since been “liked” by over 8,000 people. In it she seethed:

The Obama Administration is working on regulations that would prevent children from working on our own family farms. This is more overreach of the federal government with many negative consequences. And if you think the government’s new regs will stop at family farms, think again.

Opposition to the updated regulations hinged on the argument that they would hurt family farms, stirring fears of the Feds swooping in to arrest Farmer Joe for sending Joe Jr. out to milk the cows in the morning. But the new rules would not have applied “to children working on farms owned by their parents,” as the U.S. Department of Labor clearly stated when it announced the proposed changes.

Rather, the regulations targeted specific types of high-risk work, such as pesticide and livestock handling, tobacco harvesting, and employment in grain silos. Last fall, when many child safety and labor advocates were optimistic about the proposed rules, we described the conditions these regulations were trying to change here on Grist:

[Child farm workers] often work with livestock, handle toxic pesticides, and run heavy machinery; the results are frequently catastrophic. In 2010 alone, five kids under 16 died in grain silo accidents where the corn acted like quicksand, sucking them down and suffocating them within minutes. In July, two 14-year-old girls were electrocuted by an irrigation system. According to Human Rights Watch, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that out of the 35 children who died of work-related injuries in 2010, 19 had been working in crop production.

Teen agricultural workers already operate under different standards from their counterparts bussing tables and bagging groceries — farmworkers can get a job before age 16 and put in much longer hours. Currently you only have to be 16 to perform “hazardous work” in agricultural employment, compared to 18 in other types of jobs. The new rules would not have constituted some sweeping new mandate; but by adjusting what counts as “hazardous work,” they would have created the first updates to this set of regulations since 1970.

We wouldn’t want standards for non-agricultural labor to come from an era when electric typewriters and Xerox machines represented cutting-edge technology and most female office workers wore pantyhose and pumps — so why shouldn’t we expect regulations for farm work to keep up with the times as well?

But — like Palin — people from all over the industrial agriculture world stayed on message in the media, beginning last fall, when headlines read, “Child labor change under fire in farm country” and “Labor Dept.’s overreach could threaten life on the farm.” Even somewhat progressive sources like Natural News reported that the laws would somehow “criminalize small farmers” and drive them away from the land.

And this media storm worked. The Labor Department’s statement announcing its withdrawal of the rules played directly to false claims that the regulations threatened family farms: “The Obama administration is firmly committed to promoting family farmers and respecting the rural way of life, especially the role that parents and other family members play in passing those traditions down through the generations.”

Children on family farms have always been exempt from labor regulations, the assumption being that, in addition to learning the family business, they’re probably much safer anyway when working alongside mom and pop. Nothing changes for those kids, and for now, nothing will change for the others kids, either — the ones who are four times more likely to be killed while performing farm work than those in all other industries combined — toiling under miserable conditions to support their own families and put food on America’s table.

Photo by Stromness Dundee.

What do dairy and drug policy reform have in common? Working together, the two could fuel renewal that mutually benefits urban and rural communities — or so think the folks at Milk Not Jails, a “volunteer-run, grassroots campaign working to build a new urban-rural alliance in New York State.” The group’s founders have made the connection between urban blight — particularly the massive numbers of low-level drug arrests that create cycles of recidivism, unemployment, and crime in already-impoverished minority communities — and rural blight tied to the struggle of family farms to stay afloat as agriculture is consolidated and corporatized and farmland is gobbled up by sprawl. For down-on-their-heels communities in upstate New York — like for rural towns in every state — the war on drugs has been an economic boon, as the need for more prisons to contain skyrocketing numbers of nonviolent drug offenders brings vital jobs to areas once supported by agriculture.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Milk Not Jails. Why should the survival of rural, mostly white communities be dependent on the devastation of urban, mostly minority communities? The group wants to bring New York back to the days when small dairy farmers could make a living by selling their products to urban eaters. “We want New York’s urban residents to support its rural residents by buying their milk, not going to their prisons,” Milk Not Jails cofounder Brenden Beck told GOOD magazine recently.

Milk Not Jails sells products from independent dairy farms via community-supported agriculture sites in New York City, and offers subscriptions of its wares to workplaces, childcare centers, cafes, and institutional housing. The group works with farmers who, in addition to running sustainable, humane operations, support Milk Not Jails’ policy agenda, which comprises four “rural and farm demands” (such as “Stop Dean Foods’ Monopoly”) and four “criminal justice demands” (such as “End Racist Marijuana Arrests”). The farms offer strategic political support in exchange for being connected with a customer base downstate.

Cofounder Lauren Melodia has been in the trenches of prison reform for a few years now, so she’s experienced the challenges of trying to make progress on such a politically and racially charged subject. Criminal justice reform is a hard pill to swallow for rural residents who see it as a liberal threat to the economic promise a prison brings to their community. The brilliance of Milk Not Jails is that it offers an alternate path to rural recovery as well; it refuses to see the revitalization of inner cities and small towns as mutually exclusive.

The day may come when you can drink your raw milk and smoke your marijuana, too, and both city and country folk will be better off.

Evgenia Chirikova. (Photo by Goldman Environmental Prize.)

In just a few short years, Evgenia Chirikova, 35, has transformed from a middle-class engineer raising her young family in a Moscow suburb into a nationally and now internationally recognized environmental crusader. On Monday, she was honored as one of six recipients of the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s most prestigious award for grassroots environmental activists.

It all started in 2007, when Chirikova and her daughter went for a walk in Khimki Forest — 2,500 acres of federally protected parkland known as the “green lungs of Moscow,” one of the last old-growth forests in the region, and one of the main reasons Chirikova and her husband had moved their family to a suburb north of the city. They noticed trees marked with a red X for removal — and then found out about the government’s plan to build a road from Moscow to St. Petersburg (reported here on Grist in 2010) that would tear right through the middle of this environmentally and culturally important haven.

Not only was the plan unnecessary — the government could have considered alternate, non-forest-destroying routes — but it was also illegal: Russian law doesn’t allow parks to be converted for roads or industry. And the scheme stank of corruption: The contract for the road eventually went to Vinci, a French company with business ties to the Russian government. In 2009, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin issued a special executive order approving the project in spite of the law.

Chirikova and one of her daughters walk in Khimki Forest. (Photo by Goldman Environmental Prize.)

Chirikova started writing letters and then organizing protests, uniting and giving voice to growing public opposition to the project. Defend Khimki Forest, the group she quit her engineering job to form, attracted 5,000 people to its first protest — one of the largest environmental demonstrations in Russia’s history.

This is no suburban activism lite: Their work puts Chirikova and other protesters in real danger. In 2008, an outspoken journalist allied with the activists was brutally attacked by still at-large thugs, who left him permanently paralyzed, brain damaged, and missing a leg and four fingers. Activists protesting similar forest-clearing developments in other parts of Russia have been murdered. Demonstrations frequently veer toward violence, as Erik Hoffner wrote for Grist in 2010:

Probably hired by the logging company’s owner … thugs trashed the activists’ gear and threatened to kill them. When the police were called, the cops turned up late, tarried just long enough to see that the masked men were not currently attacking anyone, and tried to leave. At this point, Chirikova laid down under their wheels so they could not leave, thereby protecting her friends. And who went to jail that day? You guessed it, Chirikova and company.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called a halt to construction at one point, but lifted it six months later. The activists did succeed in getting the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank to pull their support for the project. More symbolically, Chirikova has come to represent a growing popular movement toward social and political change in Russia, which boiled over in the form of mass demonstrations last winter. Writes The Washington Post:

By [last summer] she was seeing her struggle as part of a larger battle to make Russian government representative, its courts law-abiding and its people conscientious and active citizens. In December she was cheered by many thousands protesting unfair elections in Moscow.

She has become a champion for besieged environmentalists all over Russia, finding them lawyers, publicizing their battles, flying hundreds of miles to rally behind them.

The Goldman prize comes with a $150,000 award. Chirikova’s fellow recipients include a woman who stood up to Monsanto in Argentina, a Kenyan woman fighting dam construction, a man who mapped polluting factories in China, a Catholic priest organizing against a mine in the Philippines, and an Alaska native fighting offshore oil and gas drilling.

Watch a video about Chirikova:

Elizabeth Thacker Jones, creator of the Food Book Fair.

As more people spend time thinking, writing, reading, and talking about food, the need for in-person forums to enhance the kinds of idea-sharing that already happen online only seems natural. The latest of these events will be aimed specifically at those whose love for reading rivals their interest in food. Elizabeth Thacker Jones, a graduate student in Food Studies at New York University, started thinking about creating a food-focused book fair over a year ago, and from May 4 to May 6 in Brooklyn, she’ll finally see it come to fruition.

For some, it’s a little hard to believe Food Book Fair 2012 is the first of its kind. “People react to say, ‘I can’t believe this hasn’t already happened,’” Jones said.

It won’t be a book fair in the strictly traditional sense. As Jones describes it on her website: “Permeating through art, design, fashion, architecture, activism and publishing, the Food Book Fair is a festival of food culture.” The panels she has planned speak to that, with titles like “Food + Design + Tech,” “Food + Cities,” and even “Food + Porn.” Celebrated figures in the food world like Marion Nestle, Tamar Adler, and Bryant Terry will give talks and book signings. Saturday evening, a “Foodieodicals” event will showcase over 10 independent zines and quarterlies, followed by a Pecha Kucha Night — a tradition started in Japan involving short slideshows, in this case of creative food projects. Sunday’s schedule includes a Hemingway-inspired literary dinner.

The fair is designed to offer something for everyone, not just those already deeply immersed and invested in food issues. “This word ‘foodie’ — there’s kind of a negative undertone to it,” Jones said. “[The book fair] is meant to challenge that concept. We want it to be accessible to everybody.”

To that end, interested parties who may not have the funds or time to commit to a weekend-long festival can pick and choose individual events to attend.

Jones has been working and learning in the food world for over a decade now; she’s had jobs doing everything from cooking, to farming sturgeon in California, to, most recently, working for New York’s Greenmarket farmers market organization. She’s also worked in publishing, so the Food Book Fair seems right up her alley. But Jones understands how far away the foodie world, with its elitist connotations, can seem from the reality of so many Americans. “My experience growing up was [that] we rarely ate as a family,” she said. “The microwave was how I cooked as a child.”

It wasn’t until a decade ago, when Jones moved to the Bay Area — a longtime “hub for food-systems thinking,” as she describes it — that she became drawn to the ways food, politics, and culture interact. “You can easily observe the overarching history of our country through the lines of the food system,” she said.

That kind of realization is happening all over the country now, sped along by influential works like Food, Inc. and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dielmma. The Food Book Fair offers a platform for the conservations it sparks, among people for whom “food is on the spectrum of what they feel passionate about, but maybe not the first thing they’re addressing,” Jones said.

Jones plans to expand the event beyond New York. She hopes to host a Food Book Fair in San Francisco in early 2013, and maybe one in Chicago, too.

“The dialogue can continue to grow, and we can connect the dots,” she said.