Food vs. fracking, Dutch farmer protests, and the cost of consolidation
Before the Cutting Board: July 21, 2022
Hey there,
Welcome back to Before the Cutting Board, your weekly roundup of food + supply chain hot topics to help keep you up to speed on what’s going down with your food.
If you’re new to Before The Cutting Board, here’s how it works: The “This Week” section focuses on news and current events. Occasionally, I’ll include a “Food Fights” section that explores some of the interesting debates flying around the food news world.
Without further ado, let’s dig in.
-This Week-
Food vs. fracking
This week, Civil Eats released an investigative report on the large-scale conversion of farmland into silica sand mines in rural Illinois. Fracking - a process to obtain fossil fuels from the ground through blasting, cracking, and drilling the ground - relies upon silica sand for oil extraction. As the report points out, high oil and gas prices have driven up the demand for “frac sand” to unprecedented levels. The transformation from farmland into sand mines is not only changing the geographic landscape of the communities at hand, but also putting locals at increased health risks from exposure to sand-driven particulate matter.
The story reminds me of a similar farmland conversion issue in Ghana. When I was living there, cocoa farmers were being swindled out of their farmland by both legal and illegal gold mining operations at alarming rates. Converting the land to mines has taken an irreversible, devastating environmental and created safety risks - all in the name of extracting a finite resource.
Dutch farmer protests
For the last month, tens of thousands of Dutch farmers have been protesting government plans to reduce pollution by 50% nationwide over the next decade. The pollution reduction proposal calls for farmers to drastically reduce their nitrogen oxide and ammonia emissions, and thus, the amount of livestock in the country. The Netherlands has the highest livestock concentration in the EU, and one of the highest sources of nitrogen emissions in the country comes from livestock urine and manure. This isn’t the first time that Dutch farmers have protested government-driven nitrogen cuts.
The cost of consolidation
I spoke with journalist Ruth Conniff about her new book Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers for Civil Eats. Milked documents the bond between two communities experiencing mirroring rural crises in the US and Mexico. I asked her about the impact of NAFTA for farmers in both countries, Midwestern electoral politics, and the realities Mexican farmworkers face in the dairy industry.
Coincidentally, this week, the US Senate has been negotiating around immigration policy that would expand visa opportunities for temporary workers - a move geared toward the dairy and pork industries in particular. The point of debate has been to what degree temporary workers will be protected by labor laws.
That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed reading this, please forward to a friend. Even if you didn’t enjoy reading it, still tell your friends - misery loves company :)