Kathy Webb stands in front of a group of 20 people in the dining room of her Asian restaurant, talking about locally grown food. As she describes how nearly all the ingredients in the five-course dinner she’s about to serve — from the tomatoes and herbs in the salad to the berries in the dessert — are from Arkansas, she educates her listeners while whetting their appetites.

Webb, a newly elected state legislator and owner of Lilly’s Dim Sum, Then Some in Little Rock, says a connection to food is something Americans have lacked over the last several decades. “When you know who has picked your peach, when you know the story about that peach, you will appreciate it and have a connection to that peach,” Webb says. “That’s important. We don’t have that connection to food anymore, but we need to, and we need to know where our food comes from.”

So, you from around here?

Photo: iStockphoto

It’s people like Webb who have begun to ask whether the produce they buy at the Little Rock farmers’ market is serving that purpose. That’s because the market, unlike many in the U.S., allows vendors who don’t grow their own produce to sell products — most of which come from outside the state. And that doesn’t sit well with local farmers.

This summer, farmers who rent stalls twice a week at the downtown market have questioned why “peddlers” — as the farmers call them — are allowed to sell the same produce they do: tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons. The peddlers’ items are cheaper and come from boxes marked as originating in Georgia, California, Mexico, and points in between, not rural Arkansas. Farmers who spend hours babying their crops believe this is misleading to consumers who think they are supporting local farmers and stimulating the local economy by shopping at the market.

Several farmers — including Christian Shuffield, who grows organic and biodynamic specialty greens and legumes, and Jody Hardin, a well-known Arkansas farmer and a fixture at the market — are tired of the unfair playing field. “Is this a farmers’ market or a global bazaar?” Hardin asks. “Peddlers are lying, saying they have gardens. That is irritating. They don’t put any money into growing their product.”

Shuffield agrees. “The commercial vendors don’t have overhead like diesel or labor,” he says. “It’s important to buy locally for the farmers’ benefit.”

Both say it is hard to educate people to buy locally when consumers see imported produce at a farmers’ market, just as they do on the grocery store shelf. So they approached Shannon Light, the market’s manager, to discuss changes. Since the 15,000-square-foot pavilion that hosts the market is so vast, Light responded by moving Arkansas farmers to one end, peddlers to the other. Now Arkansas farmers have signs promoting their Arkansas produce.

But the farmers say this isn’t enough. And they worry that some peddlers may still be passing themselves off as local farmers because they sell a few items grown in-state, even though many of their wares come from fsrther afield. Light admits she doesn’t know how many of the 200 registered vendors are actually Arkansas farmers; she doesn’t “exactly divide them that way,” she says. And she doesn’t seem to care much about the distinction. She says there is room for everyone in what she describes as “the special event I am having … like a little circus.” Indeed, the market under her management is more akin to a yuppie street fair featuring mimes and bongo players than a down-home event.

“Some people don’t care about buying local, they just want fresh,” Light says. “[The peddlers] wouldn’t be bringing watermelons in May if it wasn’t selling. It’s profitable and something that people want. If you are dipping strawberries and you can get big and beautiful ones from California while buying your winter squash, you should go ahead and get them for your party on Tuesday.”

But Arkansas farmers raise strawberries, too, says Hardin, and he has seen his profit cut on seasonal produce because peddlers sell it a week before he does. “As farmers, we need a pent-up demand for a product,” he says. “We need people anxious to get it when it comes in season. We can’t sell as much because the peddlers are competing. Other farmers will bring in California strawberries, and it kills the demand.”

Not From My Back Yard

Should a farmers’ market offer only locally grown items? Many people who care about good food and a healthy environment say yes, especially as concerns mount about fuel costs and food miles, or the distance food travels before it reaches your mouth.

A farmers’ market conjures up images of mom-and-pop operations that load up the pickup truck with homegrown squash, tomatoes, and eggplants and deliver them to the city for urbanites to buy without a middleman. While local doesn’t necessarily mean organic, it does mean fresh, not transported thousands of miles before reaching its buyer. According to California-based Local Harvest, a national directory of farms and farmers’ markets, most produce in the U.S. is picked four to seven days before it is placed on supermarket shelves, and is shipped an average of 1,500 miles before it is sold. It takes even longer if the produce comes from outside the country.

“What is happening in Arkansas would never happen in California,” says Guillermo Payet, president of Local Harvest. California has a certification program for farmers’ markets, which allows only in-state growers. The United Kingdom has a similar program. But in Arkansas, as in many other states, each local community polices itself.

Some never strayed from strict rules. The market in Fayetteville, Ark., which began in 1974, allows only farmers who live and grow within a four-county area to sell. Even artisans who sell crafts in the market must follow the same rules. The same type of guidelines apply to the market in Boulder, Colo. The market in Portland, Ore., after which the Little Rock market modeled itself, allows products from throughout the state as well as neighboring Washington, but makes few other exceptions.

The Little Rock market began the same year as its counterpart in Fayetteville, in a downtown parking garage. Then, the farmers governed themselves and “enforced a producer-only rule and allowed only the sale of Arkansas-grown produce,” according to a 1999 USDA review of the market.

In 1996, the operation moved to a wood-and-steel pavilion in the heart of the $300 million revitalized and tourist-driven River Market District near the William J. Clinton Presidential Museum and Park. At that point, the rules were relaxed to include out-of-season produce and exotics such as pineapples and avocados that cannot be grown in Arkansas. As the USDA review noted, “consumer favorites such as melons, peaches, greens, and tomatoes from outside the state may be sold at the market when locally unavailable.”

A Matter of Scale

Between 1994 and 2004, the number of farmers’ markets in the U.S. increased 111 percent, from 1,755 to 3,706, according to the USDA. Arkansas has almost 50 markets. Across the country, those figures are expected to keep rising over the next decade.

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, says farmers’ markets could be the only viable alternative in a world forced to be less dependent on oil. “We are going to have huge problems feeding ourselves as the world slips into a permanent global energy crisis,” he says. “Industrial-style agriculture, featuring giant farms and heavy applications of oil-and-gas-based soil ‘inputs’ and massive use of diesel fuel, is going to fail — and sooner rather than later. We are going to have to grow much more of our food locally, and on a smaller, finer scale. The people who are doing that now must be supported. Your lives will depend on them a few years from now.”

Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Association, also predicts a throwback to the 1940s, when people tended victory gardens in their backyards. “If we are going to stabilize the climate and have an adequate food supply, we are going to have to go back to the way it was,” he says. “That means also eating seasonal.”

Arkansas, with its vast farmland and mild seasons, is in a prime spot to make this happen. Agriculture is the state’s leading industry, thanks mostly to major crops such as rice, soybeans, and cotton. While it has its share of factory farms and vegetable producers, including the mammoth Riceland Rice, the state is also home to thousands of small farmers who want to make a living — however modest — by doing what they love.

According to the USDA, those who benefit from farmers’ markets are small farmers with less than $250,000 in annual gross receipts who work and manage their own operations. Local Harvest points out that only 18 cents of every dollar from sales at large supermarkets go to the grower, with the balance going to various unnecessary middlemen.

Hardin would like to see Little Rock’s city board of directors bar out-of-state produce from the farmers’ market. He says that because of the controversy over who’s permitted to sell at the market, more farmers are looking for alternative venues. That leaves only a small core to fight the peddlers.

While the city is likely to leave the resolution of this issue to those who manage the market, farmers might get help from the state. Richard Bell, secretary of the recently created Arkansas Department of Agriculture, says there is a need to closely examine farmers’ markets. He suggests that some sort of future legislation could address the issues that worry farmers like Hardin.

“My goal is to increase the amount of produce that is coming from small Arkansas farms,” Bell says. “A good part of a farmers’ market is a good economic development plan. It is a way of providing an amenity to people in your community, and I do think we need some more formalized guidelines to make that work.”

Not yer pappy’s chicken coop.

Photo: USDA.

“There’s a horrible odor, a stench, and I have flies and rodents digging in, trying to get into my house,” says Bernadine Edwards, whose 39-acre farm near Owensboro, Ky., is surrounded by 108 chicken houses within a two-mile radius. “It is unbelievable.”

The 65-year-old school bus driver, who recently bought a purifier to help her breathe easier in her home, says the value of her property has plummeted since the chicken houses arrived in the early 1990s. “I’m too old to start over,” she says. “I can’t afford to. My house is paid for.”

Edwards is not alone. Over the last 15 years, the country has seen a boom in chicken farming. Today, the industry is serving a cocktail of injustice and pollution to rural residents, and most of them aren’t in a position to fight back.

Growing Pains

Since the early 1990s, observers say, thousands of chicken houses have cropped up across the South as consumer demand for poultry has grown. Today, the U.S. is the world’s poultry leader, with production of broilers, turkeys, and eggs valued at $29 billion in 2004, according to the National Chicken Council. Broilers — chickens raised for meat — generated $22 billion of that. The leading broiler production states in 2004 were Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas, which is home to the world’s largest poultry producer, Tyson Foods.

Like chemical companies and industrial hog farmers, poultry producers don’t tend to place these concentrated animal-feeding operations, or CAFOs, in ritzy neighborhoods beside multimillion dollar McMansions. Instead, chicken houses commandeer spacious rural areas, where local residents need the income and their neighbors won’t speak out against them — or are unaware of the factories’ environmental and health consequences.

“These companies seek rural areas where unemployment, or underemployment, is high and people are desperate for ways to stay on the farm,” says Aloma Dew, a Sierra Club organizer in Kentucky. “They assume that poor, country people will not organize or speak up, and that they will be ignorant of the impacts on their health and quality of life.”

The companies provide local growers, who work under contract, with chicks, feed, medicine, and transportation. Growers take care of the rest, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in construction, maintenance, and labor costs. When the company requires upgrades, the costs fall to the growers. The massive amounts of manure, too, are their responsibility. (In Arkansas alone, chicken farms produce an amount of waste each day equal to that produced by 8 million people.) Payment is results-oriented, based on measures like total weight gain of the flock. It’s a system, says the United Food and Commercial Workers, that leaves 71 percent of growers earning below poverty-level wages.

A far cry from free range.

Photo: USDA.

If growers protest, companies can cancel their contracts, leaving farmers responsible for incurred debt, says Laura Klauke, director of contract agriculture reform at the North Carolina-based Rural Advancement Foundation International. And that debt can be substantial: since banks in the region will more readily loan money for poultry houses than other types of agriculture, Klauke says, some farmers put everything on the line, mortgaging their property to make a living this way.

“If those contracts are canceled — and they can be if the farmer doesn’t do what the industry wants — then that farmer could literally be homeless,” said Klauke. “I know farmers who have been in that situation.” (Industry representatives did not respond to requests for comments on this or any of the concerns expressed in this story.)

Pecks and Effects

More frightening than the economic balancing act may be the health and environmental hazards posed by chicken farms, from the arsenic, ammonia, and other chemicals found in feed and manure to threats from diseased animals. While traditional farming can carry similar risks, CAFOs are especially hazardous because of the tight confinement that defines them. “The fact is, you put hundreds of animals in a very small area, that creates problems that would not exist if these animals were distributed across the countryside,” says Barclay Rogers, who successfully litigated a pollution case against Tyson in Kentucky in 2003.

Rogers says the industry grew rapidly with little regulatory constraint, and has been “riding roughshod” over land and people. While CAFOs must follow federal environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, he says, many growers try to “duck and weave” regulations. “The industry may stand up and say we are over-regulating, and that we have all of these permits, but the practical aspect is that they have devised many ways to avert pollution controls,” said Rogers. “That’s why we are seeing the fouling of water and air. We just now are coming to grips with these consequences, as people are catching up and realizing what has happened to them.”

Last year, Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson (D) filed suit against Tyson, Cargill, and several other poultry companies, seeking to stop water pollution caused in his state by soiled chicken litter dumped in Arkansas. Polluted runoff, also known as non-point source pollution, is the biggest remaining water pollution problem in the U.S., according to the EPA, which cites agriculture as the largest source of such pollution. Edmondson described the problem as “an economic development issue, an agricultural issue, and a quality-of-life issue.” Not to be outdone, Arkansas Attorney General Mike Beebe (D) — who is running for governor — countered in November by suing the state of Oklahoma directly, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to prohibit Oklahoma from forcing his state’s poultry farmers to adhere to the stricter standards. Both cases are still pending.

This messy interstate situation is just one indication of the many unknowns at stake. “Some of the [environmental] consequences of these CAFOs are just not clear,” said Van Brahana, a geologist at the University of Arkansas who studies groundwater. “What we do know is when you have a lot of organisms living in close conditions and you have a buildup of chemicals, you might get a cause-and-effect relationship. The scary thing is we just don’t know right now.”

The effects on those who work directly with the animals are clearer. “In rural America, the poultry companies can get workers for a song, and the workers are so grateful to get the jobs,” says Jackie Nowell of the United Food and Commercial Workers. These workers — usually poor, and often African American or Hispanic — “are exposed to feces [and] any disease the chicken has,” Nowell says. “There are also horrible levels of dust and dander inside these houses.”

Nowell adds that researchers in the region are currently exploring the possible crossover of various viruses from poultry to humans, like avian flu. “That’s a real concern. These workers and people who live near these houses will be on ground zero of an outbreak.”

Flies cluster around a pile of
carcasses in Missouri.

Photo: USDA.

Workers in poultry processing plants also face serious dangers from machinery, carpal tunnel syndrome, and health hazards such as contaminated microorganisms and dust. “There are huge health and safety violations in every plant,” says Jennifer Rosenbaum, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. In 2004, for example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued citations to Tyson for alleged violations after an employee was asphyxiated when he inhaled hydrogen sulfide, a gas created by decaying organic matter. OSHA fined the company $436,000.

Poultry companies “hire relatively low-income people, immigrants who have less of an understanding of rights and health issues,” Rosenbaum says. Simply put, she says, the companies are hurting the South’s small towns while they fatten their own wallets.

Chicken Fight

Katie Tillinghast lives in rural northwest Arkansas. In early January, she received a call from a neighbor who told her he planned to put three large turkey houses on his property, 200 yards away. Tillinghast wants to stop the project, but the only plausible choice would be to buy her neighbor out at $3,000 an acre — and he owns 73 acres. She can’t afford that, and knows it’s highly unlikely that a rich buyer will step in to help.

You’ll never look at chicken nuggets
the same way again.

Photo: USDA.

Like other states, Arkansas does not yet have a law to protect residents from these operations, though several states have considered such legislation. So Tillinghast can’t do much but worry — about her drinking water, about avian flu, about noise and light pollution, about air quality. “I agree someone should be able to do what they want to do on their land,” Tillinghast says. “But I don’t think you should be able to do something that hurts your neighbors.”

Many others agree with her, but local dynamics can make it hard for activists to issue a battle cry. “Often these plants are the only major industry in town,” says SPLC’s Rosenbaum. “Everyone goes to church together or went to high school together. Everyone knows everyone, and it’s hard to fight that.”

Groups like the Sierra Club have fought the poultry industry for many years, but only recently have they begun to collaborate with people on the ground. In 2004, a group of growers, workers, and environmental, public-health, religious, and social-justice organizations created the National Poultry Justice Alliance.

The idea came from the Glenmary Commission on Justice in Ohio, a group of Catholic brothers and priests who have worked in the South since 1939. Marcus Keyes, the commission’s director, says he was inspired by a statement from the Catholic Bishops of the South in 2000 about workers’ rights. “These are moral issues — the rights of workers, conditions of workers, pay and benefits,” said Keyes. “These are human rights issues, and environmental [issues, but] in the end they are all moral issues.” The group’s members are working to strengthen the alliance before launching a major campaign.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit may come to trial in early April that could up the ante. While previous suits have dealt with pollution and workers’ rights, this one tackles the issue of health effects on residents. In 2003, a group of citizens from Prairie Grove, Ark., a town of 2,500, filed a lawsuit against several poultry producers. Citing a connection between the community’s high cancer rates and arsenic contamination from chicken litter spread as fertilizer, they are seeking damages from the companies that own the birds (not, it should be noted, from the local growers). Their lawyers say cancer rates in the small town are 50 times higher than the national average.

The Prairie Grove effort has grown to include about 100 plaintiffs in multiple suits, each of which will be tried separately. Supporters say that legal action may be the only way to bring these issues to light and hold the industry to higher standards. If the court rules in Prairie Grove’s favor, the decision could provide ground for others to stand on. Until then, the only ones winning in this despair-filled industry are the mammoth corporations.

Rep. Richard Pombo meets the press in April.

Photo: U.S. House of Representatives.

You have to want to get to Nacogdoches, a Texas town that’s not on the way to anywhere. This eastern outpost, nearly 150 miles from Houston, is the oldest town in the state, with enough lore to fill volumes. It’s the site where, in the 1700s, the legendary Father Margil struck a rock twice during a drought and water flowed. In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated overhead. And in late July, the town served as the perfect out-of-the-way location to host a congressional hearing on the National Environmental Policy Act.

That landmark legislation, signed by President Nixon in 1970, requires federal agencies to study and disclose the environmental effects of major projects on public land. It also stipulates that the decision-making process for such projects must include the opportunity for public comment. The three-page law enshrines caution.

But lately, NEPA has come under fire. In April, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), chair of the House Committee on Resources, created a congressional “task force on improving” the act. Through a series of six regional hearings, the task force is reaching across America to hear comments before issuing a report in the fall.

But while NEPA strives to bring every concerned party to the table, observers say these hearings do not. They are being held in obscure locations, at odd times, and with little advance warning. Witnesses are handpicked, with the lineup revealed on the task force’s website only days before each event, a move some critics see as an attempt to stifle debate.

“They have decided to have a birthday party where they invite the guests they want,” says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “They want to hear what they want to hear.”

Participants say the first session, held in Spokane, Wash., in April, yielded support for the act. The Earth Day-weekend event, publicized locally by community groups, drew 175 people, many wearing stickers that read, “I Support NEPA: Democracy in Action.” Task-force member Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), who led the hearing with task-force chair Rep. Cathy McMorris (R-Wash.), says he thinks some of his colleagues were shocked by the results. “I think what I observed in Spokane, much to [Pombo's] surprise, was an overwhelming support by the American public that their government fairly looks at their actions,” says Inslee.

Rep. Cathy McMorris is listening.

Photo: U.S. House of Representatives.

According to Inslee, Pope, and others, the strategy shifted after Spokane. The next hearing’s venue was changed several times before it was held in Lakeside, Ariz., on June 18. The Nacogdoches hearing was also moved, from Houston; and an early-August hearing, the most recent, was moved from Albuquerque to Rio Rancho, N.M. — and held at 10 a.m. on a Monday.

Representatives from the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity were invited to testify in Arizona, but only a few days prior to the hearing; they were given one day to prepare and submit their comments. The event also conflicted with a long-planned dam-decommissioning celebration deemed a NEPA victory. “Given the impossible deadline … both groups had to decline, but offered written testimony a few days later for the record,” says Neha Bhatt, a Sierra Club representative in Washington, D.C.

As a result, no environmentalists testified in Arizona. Who did speak? Representatives of the forestry, cattle, construction, mining, and energy industries. Now, says Bhatt, “The task-force website makes a point to say we were invited to testify, but didn’t. They don’t give the public access to [our written testimony]. It’s frustrating.” She adds that the Sierra Club asked to testify at the hearing in Nacogdoches, but was not invited.

Rep. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), the task force’s ranking member, didn’t attend the Texas hearing either. He said he received only two weeks’ notice. Like most politicians in Washington, his schedule is planned months in advance, and he had commitments in his home state. “It’s helpful to have [the hearings] in communities out in the country,” Udall says, “but the task force needs to be better at publicizing where they will be and including all people who have a stake in this issue.”

The Nacogdoches hearing was hosted by McMorris and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) in a concert hall at Stephen F. Austin State University. After an invocation asking God for protection for Gohmert and his family, and the singing of the national anthem, the invited witnesses got down to business in front of an audience of about 70 people. (Members of the public, while welcome to attend the hearings, can submit only written comments.)

The panel of witnesses consisted of seven industry representatives and two environmentalists: Larry Shelton, a trustee from the Texas Committee on Natural Resources, and Sandra Nichols, a staff attorney with WildLaw in Montgomery, Ala. Shelton said NEPA did not need to be changed. But Nichols said “real solutions” were needed to make the law more effective. She added that environmental groups were urged by Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) “to come out of the trenches” and meet halfway. That’s what she hoped to accomplish at the hearing, she said.

Representatives for the oil, mining, and timber industries spoke about economic interests and the interference caused by too many regulations. As Victor Carrillo, the state’s railroad commissioner, put it, “When the federal government does pass a law or regulation, it should be simple, clear, understandable, limited in scope, reasonable, practical, and pass the commonsense test.”

Common sense — and the notion that NEPA lacks it — was the theme here, along with the general agreement that too much environmental assessment and too many stakeholders result in lawsuits and red tape. “NEPA doesn’t sit on a pedestal that can’t be touched,” Gohmert said.

When asked about the selection of witnesses, McMorris said the NEPA hearings are intended to offer a better understanding of the 35-year-old law and its economic impacts. “We don’t need to have 10 people say nothing needs to be improved,” she said. “We want to hear from the people who have problems with NEPA.” That kind of comment disturbs Inslee. “Right before [Pombo] created this task force, right out of the gate, the chairman tried to strip NEPA and reduce it in the energy bill,” he says. “That diminishes the effectiveness of this task force. It has not been very effective at getting a broad perspective of Americans. It’s a dud in that regard.”

Many people believe NEPA is sound legislation. Oliver Houck, who directs the environmental-law program at Tulane University’s law school, cannot imagine what the task force’s fuss is about. “NEPA [instituted] one very simple, modest device,” says Houck. “It didn’t shut down anything, didn’t set up a review board. It just required an environmental impact statement. A more modest requirement would be hard to imagine.”

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.), a well-known conservationist who has received accolades from several environmental groups, sits on the Resources Committee with Pombo but is not a task-force member. While he believes NEPA’s application may need to be more logical — a conclusion also reached by a NEPA “modernization” task force created in 2002 by the White House Council on Environmental Quality — he says the law allows for innovation, a crucial component as the world faces global warming. With innovation comes ingenuity and intellect, he adds: “NEPA expands those characteristics. If you shut down NEPA, you lose that.”

Some environmental advocates predict the real battle will begin next year, when NEPA-weakening legislation will almost certainly be introduced. If the act is gutted, they say, it might mean the very result Pombo seeks to avoid: more lawsuits. “When we aren’t listened to by the government, we have the right to legally challenge,” says Bianca Encinias of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. “Our communities have a right to know, and a right to participate.”