The American farmer is waking up, but it's too late

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — At least 4,800 chicks shipped to Maine farmers through the U.S. Postal Service have arrived dead in recent weeks after rapid cuts hit the federal mail carrier’s operations, U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree said.

Pingree, a Maine Democrat, is raising the issue of the dead chicks and the losses farms are facing in a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and U.S. Department of Agriculture Commissioner Sonny Perdue, The Portland Press Herald reported.

Pauline Henderson, who owns Pine Tree Poultry in New Sharon, Maine, told the newspaper she was shocked last week when all of the 800 chicks sent to her from a hatchery in Pennsylvania were dead.

“Usually they arrive every three weeks like clockwork,” she said. “And out of 100 birds you may have one or two that die in shipping.”

Thousands of birds that moved through the Postal Service’s processing center in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, were also dead, impacting several farms in Maine and New Hampshire, Henderson said.

Steve Doherty, a spokesman for the USPS, said the agency “can’t locate a claim being filed for this loss.” Some animals, including live chicks, can be mailed safely under proper conditions.

“It’s one more of the consequences of this disorganization, this sort of chaos they’ve created at the post office and nobody thought through when they were thinking of slowing down the mail,” Pingree said, adding that her office has received dozens of complaints from farmers and others trying to raise a small flock of chickens in the backyard.

Pingree said she isn’t sure if Perdue is aware of how the changes in the Postal Service are impacting smaller poultry farmers in the U.S.

“This is a system that’s always worked before and it’s worked very well until these changes started being made,” Pingree said.

DeJoy, a Republican donor who’s the first postmaster general who did not come from the ranks of the Postal Service, took control of the agency in June and has since swiftly engineered cuts and operational changes that are disrupting mail delivery operations. In Maine, two mail-sorting machines were dismantled at the state’s postal distribution hub.

He announced Tuesday he would halt some changes to mail delivery that critics blamed for widespread delays and warned could disrupt the November election, which is expected to bring a surge of mail-in ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic.

DeJoy is scheduled to testify before the Senate on Friday.

President Donald Trump made clear last week that he was blocking $25 billion in emergency aid to the Postal Service, acknowledging he wanted to curtail election mail operations, as well as a Democratic proposal to provide $3.6 billion in additional election money to the states to help process mail-in ballots.

Those funds are tangled in a broader coronavirus aid package that was approved in the House but stalled in the Senate.

The Postal Service is the only entity that ships live chicks and other small animals and has done so since 1918, according to the service’s website.

“Rural Americans, including agricultural producers, disproportionately rely on USPS for their livelihoods, and it is essential that they receive reliable service,” Pingree said.

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Maryland farmer Trey Hill pulled in a healthy haul of corn last fall and then immediately planted rye, turnips, clover and other species, which are now spreading a lush green carpet over the soil. While his grandfather, who started the family farm along the Chesapeake Bay, always planted in the spring in a clean field, in Hill’s approach to farming, “you never want to see the ground.”

As the winter cover crops grow, they will feed microbes and improve the soil’s health, which Hill believes will eventually translate into higher yields of the crops that provide his income: corn, soybean and wheat.

But just as importantly, they will pull down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in the ground. Hill is at the cutting edge of what many hope will provide not just a more nature-friendly way of farming, but a powerful new climate solution.

Soil carbon building practices, loosely gathered under the term “regenerative agriculture,” have been practiced for decades, or centuries in some places. Planting without tilling the soil took off after the devastating Dust Bowl in the 1930s spurred a search for ways to avert further soil loss, and the practice now includes more than a fifth of U.S. farmland. Maryland has paid farmers to plant cover crops since the 1990s to stanch the flow of nitrogen into the Chesapeake Bay. Some livestock producers rotate animals on pastures of grasses and legumes, whose roots pull carbon underground. And though rare in the United States today, farmers elsewhere in the world mix trees into fields and pastures.

Hill, who farms 10,000 acres, admitted he got into cover crops purely because the state paid him. “We had no intent of doing it for climate,” he said.


Hill sells most of his corn to the chicken producer Mountaire Farms, which pays him the same market price other suppliers get. If farmers were paid for the carbon accumulating in their soils, they would have greater incentive to adopt climate-friendly practices, Hill said.

But implementing that idea is challenging. Carbon accumulates slowly in soil, and past attempts to pay farmers for it have failed when the costs of verifying carbon gains exceeded what buyers were willing to pay. Backers of new, private-sector carbon markets hope that computer models fed by data from farm fields, satellites and handheld carbon sensors can measure and predict soil carbon gains more cheaply and reliably.

Hill connected with one of those markets, a Seattle-based tech start-up called Nori. After lengthy negotiations, credits representing carbon stored in some of Hill’s fields went on sale in October 2019 at $16.50 a ton — around the most an acre of his farmland might capture in a year, Hill said. Buyers included the e-commerce company Shopify, Arizona State University and individuals looking to offset the carbon their activities produce.

Nori eschews traditional soil tests, which can cost thousands of dollars for a large farm, and instead relies on third-party audits and a U.S. Agriculture Department computer model called COMET-Farm that estimates greenhouse gas emissions from farms.



“We’re seeing market formation in real time,” said David LeZaks, a senior fellow at the Croatan Institute, a nonprofit organization that researches sustainable investment.

The maturation of soil carbon science has complicated matters. Reduced tillage, already practiced by thousands of farmers, was once considered a major climate win because researchers saw carbon accumulate near the surface of untilled soils. But studies that sampled deeper soil layers revealed that carbon was lost there, wiping out most of the apparent gains.

Cover crops, whose roots and stalks add organic matter to the soil, have become the hotter item. A recent global meta-analysis estimated that if cover crops were planted on 15 percent of the world’s cropland, soils could soak up between 1 and 2 percent of all fossil fuel emissions. In December, Biden announced he wants to pay farmers to plant cover crops, and his USDA transition team has called for setting up a “carbon bank” within the first 100 days of his administration that would pay farmers, ranchers and forest owners for climate-friendly practices.

[Storing carbon in prairie grass]

The USDA already offers three-year grants to encourage farmers to grow cover crops, but those have had limited impact. A 2017 USDA census found that cover crops were grown on less than 4 percent of American cropland.

Some researchers have questioned the practice’s climate benefits. In papers published last year based on long-term research plots in Iowa and California, scientists reported that when they measured carbon in soil to a depth of a meter or more, the gains of cover crops largely disappeared, similar to what had happened to no-till. By contrast, organic farming may do more to build deep reserves of carbon, those and other studies suggest.

Last year, the World Resources Institute, a leading Washington environmental nonprofit organization, stirred debate when it published two blog posts strongly questioning whether farming practices could make a meaningful dent in climate change.

Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University and senior fellow at WRI who was the lead author of both posts, says cover cropping and other regenerative practices are good for soil and the environment generally, but their carbon drawdown rates are too low to play a major role in averting climate disaster.

“An overfocus on soil carbon is a diversion from the climate strategies that can have a bigger impact,” Searchinger said in an interview. These include restoring carbon-absorbing peatlands, reducing methane emissions from cattle and other ruminants, and increasing the productivity of existing farmland to discourage deforestation.


Still, regenerative agriculture practices appeal to many experts because they’re field-tested and ready to be implemented.

“They are relatively inexpensive, relatively easy to adopt, and have a huge area of land where they’re suitable, and they have tremendous momentum and provide huge benefits to farms,” said Eric Toensmeier, a consultant with Project Drawdown and author of a recent report comparing the climate benefits of dozens of farming practices.
“Cover cropping is one of the lowest hanging fruits.”

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In the months since Congress included around $4 billion in the latest stimulus bill to forgive loans for Black and other minority farmers, thousands of them have been pushing to finally see the money. The Department of Agriculture promised to start paying for loans this month.

But now, that relief is again on hold thanks to a lawsuit brought by a conservative group on behalf of White farmers, who argue the program is unconstitutional because it discriminates against them.

On Thursday, a federal judge in Wisconsin sided with the plaintiffs and issued a temporary restraining order on the program.

“The Court recognized that the federal government’s plan to condition and allocate benefits on the basis of race raises grave constitutional concerns and threatens our clients with irreparable harm,” Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which filed the lawsuit, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

A spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Agriculture did not immediately respond to a message from The Washington Post late on Thursday.

The assistance program, which was passed by the Senate in March as part of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion stimulus relief package, sought to correct long-standing disadvantages faced by Black, Latino, and other minority farmers in getting loans from banks and the government. As covid-19 disproportionately affected communities of color, those groups also had a more difficult time accessing relief programs due to systemic racism and other issues, the Biden administration argued.

“Over the last 100 years, policies were implemented that specifically twisted in a way that disadvantaged socially disadvantaged producers,” U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said. “There’s no better example of that than the covid relief efforts. Billions of dollars went to White farmers, because the system is structured in a way that gives them significant advantages.”

Relief bill is most significant legislation for Black farmers since Civil Rights Act, experts say

When the package passed, advocates told The Post that it was a major step toward correcting a century of mistreatment of Black farmers, with some describing it as reparations for a long history of racial oppression.

“This is the most significant piece of legislation with respect to the arc of Black land ownership in this country,” said Tracy Lloyd McCurty, executive director of the Black Belt Justice Center, which provides legal representation to Black farmers.

But the program, which was opposed by all 49 GOP senators, faced quick legal challenges. In April, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative group based in Milwaukee, sued on behalf of five White farmers and ranchers, including Adam Faust, a double amputee and the owner of a dairy farm near Chilton, Wis. (The suit has since grown to include 12 farmers as plaintiffs.)

“There should absolutely be no federal dollars going anywhere just based on race,” Faust told the Journal Sentinel after joining the suit.

USDA to start debt forgiveness and payouts to some 13,000 Black, Hispanic and other minority farmers in June

White farmers in other regions of the country have also sued against the debt relief program.

In April, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller formed the America First Legal Foundation to sue in Texas on behalf on behalf of Sid Miller, a White farmer who is also the Texas agriculture commissioner. The lawsuit claimed that the USDA program “disrupts our common progress toward becoming a more perfect union.”

The Wisconsin group’s lawsuit noted that the White farmers could make additional investments in their property, expand their farms, and purchase equipment and supplies if they were eligible for the loan forgiveness benefit.

“Because plaintiffs are ineligible to even apply for the program due solely to their race, they have been denied the equal protection of the law and therefore suffered harm,” according to the lawsuit.

On Tuesday, Judge William Griesbach of Wisconsin’s Eastern District, who was appointed by George W. Bush, issued the temporary restraining order.

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https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/usda-data-nearly-all-pandemic-bailout-funds-went-white-farmers

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Three Berries said:

Americas farmers in Central Illinois are 100% behind Trump. This is total Leftist BS. Maybe the grape and almond growers in Cali....

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Three Berries said:

Americas farmers in Central Illinois are 100% behind Trump. This is total Leftist BS. Maybe the grape and almond growers in Cali....

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HGCC said:

Do you feel that st Louis is a vastly safer city than Chicago?

Edit: central Illinois is the exact location I base my view on Republicans on. That is some hardcore ass trump country.

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HGCC said:

Well I give you props for at least being consistent. That always drove me nuts, everyone loved stl since they just went to the landing, but Chicago was a crime ridden shithole (and full of black people)...and the Springfield folks not grasping that their city ranks way up there in murder rates.

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