Fb2 Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic ePub

Important book for NY organic farmers and their supporters to read! Gray's study underlines the importance of keeping fairness (fair pricing for farm products and fair treatment and living wages for all food workers) as an integral part of organic farming.

Unlike most books that totally glorify the food movement, Gray takes an interesting stab at labor conditions of farm workers. This book kept me entertained the entire time while also informatively revealing another side of "local" that's important to keep in mind.

The singular book for learning about New York farmworkers...and beyond. Meticulously researched and well articulated. Highly recommended for folks who want to learn about the men and women that provide our food.

Very thoughtful and thought-provoking book. Goes where the silence is in the local food movement and offers practical solutions to a challenging problem.

Good

This book is her hideous dissertation warmed over. It is rife with misinformation, distortions of fact and outright falsehoods.

Here is my standard boilerplate response to Gray's typical tripe:

My name is Chris Pawelski and I am a 4th generation family farmer from Orange County, N.Y. I'm also the Executive Director of a public policy organization that focuses on issues connected with specialty crops called Farmroot. For roughly 18 years I have been dealing with the issues raised by Gray and the organizations she has primarily partnered with, Rural and Migrant Ministry. What they state and claim is frequently rife with misinformation and gross distortions of fact. Allow me to elaborate.

The organizations driving this, especially Rural and Migrant Ministry (RMM), act as self-appointed advocates. Genuine farmworkers have not asked these organizations or their leaders to represent them or to speak on their behalf. Most real farmworkers do not attend these organizations' meetings or heavily orchestrated public events. Testifying before the state Lobbying Commission in 2001 (the organization was subsequently fined by the Commission for significant NYS lobby law violations), Rural and Migrant Ministry's executive director Richard Witt admitted that when farmworkers do participate, including their annual farmworker lobby day held in Albany, they're usually paid to participate.

The fact is there are approximately a dozen local, state and federal governmental agencies enforcing a plethora of laws that govern both the living and working conditions of farmworkers. This makes them probably the most protected work force in New York. In NYS they earn, on average, more than $10 an hour. Most receive free housing and utilities. Additionally, farmworkers benefit from a number of government-funded social service programs that, in many cases, exist only for their benefit, including free health clinics, free day-care centers for their children and free child and adult migrant education programs.

What we are talking about are five or six exemptions that exist in state and federal labor law. These exemptions also apply to some other workers as well, including employees of religious organizations and other non-profits driving this legislation, the groups primarily driving this "faux" movement. If Gray and her religious allies behind this were so concerned about workers getting overtime why aren't they calling on the NYS Legislature to end the overtime exemption that exempts their workers as well? The hypocrisy is astounding. New York's unemployment and overtime exemptions match the federal standard, making us competitive with neighboring states. I know of no other industry that provides free housing for its employees, except clergy. Agricultural labor law is crafted within the context of agriculture's production and marketing realities. Farming does not take place in an enclosed building with a regulated environment. We have a limited time to plant and harvest. Farmers do not control the prices we receive and cannot pass on increased costs. We absorb it or go out of business. And because of pricing and weather disasters, much of New York's agriculture is reeling. In four of the past seven years, my farm income was below the federal poverty line for a family of four. In 2009 and 2011 my employees earned more than I did.

This isn't about Democrats versus Republicans. This is about "downstate" versus "upstate." The bulk of the legislators that have voted in favor of the Farmworker Fair Labor Practices Act over the years reside either in NYC or other urban areas in the state. Most no votes come from rural based legislators In fact, the last two times the bill has been voted on in the NYS Assembly it has been a very close vote, with most upstate Democrats voting against it. They understand agriculture's production and marketing realities and what the passage of this bill will do to their farming communities and the upstate economy as a whole. Most of the legislators that are listening to RMM and Ms. Kennedy have never stepped on a farm in their lives.

A number of farms in Orange County have switched from mono-cropping onions to growing a variety of vegetables. These farms supply the local farmers' markets and the green markets in New York City. To grow those vegetables. they have had to rely on a much bigger labor force than needed for the more mechanized onion farming. End the overtime exemption and they will be unable to afford their labor bill. They will go back to mono-cropping onions, if they can continue to farm at all. You can kiss that local fresh produce goodbye as New York farmers will be unable to compete with New Jersey or Pennsylvania farmers who don't have to pay overtime. And many farmworkers will lose their jobs.

We spend less than 11 percent of our disposable income on food and farmers typically receive less than 20 percent of the retail dollar. This is the contextual reality that the self-appointed advocates never deal with. Good public policy is crafted within the framework of the world we live in, not in a vacuum, and based on facts, not emotion or misinformation.

This website provides a more detailed response to Gray's "work." It is a response I wrote after I found a portion of her dissertation on the internet. She used it for an academic conference presentation. Much of her paper dealt with my wife and I and the work we had done responding to the drivel of persons like Gray and the organization she spoke in behalf of, Rural and Migrant Ministry.

http://nyfarmworkerprotectionbill.com/The%20Players/margaret%20gray/index.html

The pipe dream that we can all come together and feed the world is a cruel joke. Mankind's biggest problem in the 21st century is overpopulation and dwindling natural resources. The altruistic idea that by becoming localvores distracts scientists, politicians and economists from trying to come up with realistic solutions because very few people will admit and attempt to address the population-resource crisis. Is there a solution that won't get religious or altruistic leaders in a snit? None that I can think of in today's vast amount of information dealing with climate change, agriculture, water supplies and factory farming.
We have to have factory farms because they are the most efficient method of mass producing food for our overpopulated planet. Cities cram packed with high density dwelling units like apartments and condominiums are the most efficient way to monitor, generate, allocate and deliver utilities to our overpopulation. Slowly we will hear more about overpopulation and over allocation of natural resources. Water is the most critical natural resource that wars will be fought over. Superpower nation's aren't building super armies because of religious or philosophical differences, it's because war over natural resources is inevitable will and these wars will be more important, vicious and frequent than any of the wars of mankind in the past.
Books like this one do a tremendous disservice to people trying to deal with ways to locate and maximize the efficient distribution of water and in it's wake food for the masses. There is no way to create finite natural resources to keep mankind alive and healthy. There's a big buzz about science and gene modification that might create drought resistant foods for man but they can't manufacture or create a process to create finite natural resources, the main one being water. If all the city dwellers moved to communes and grew and rationed their own food and made their own shelters and clothes, they'd still have to deal with a way to find and efficiently use water and simply put, it can't be done.
Factory farms, genetically modified plant and animal food stocks along with hyper-efficient energy production and use still can't solve the finite natural resource conundrum. So, what's the solution to dwindling finite natural resources and overpopulation? Colonization of other planets and population control here on earth, both of which are too anti-altruistic.
I'm still rooting for mankind but the more misleading or distracting information I come across the less optimistic I become. Real solutions to the overpopulation and finite resource problem won't be pretty but they will be necessary. Perhaps that's why climate change was tossed out by Clinton and Gore. Climate change can be directly linked to overpopulation. Unfortunately, like man's ability to create more finite natural resources, I strongly doubt man's ability to control the climate. Climate change is often talked about like we're dealing with something like cleaning up a large polluted lake. The scope of managing and controlling our climate deals with cleaning up our atmosphere. Something so large that its size is measured using time rather than distance. We can't manage or change something as small as a lake or an ocean, let alone something as massive as space quantified using time.
Our big problems are finite natural resources and overpopulation. Who has a solution for this issue?

Good quality!! it was as explained!!