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Farmers facing PFAS pollution struggle for solutions; new book details rise of "dystopian agricultural horror show."
Farmers facing PFAS pollution struggle for solutions
When Jim Buckle and his wife, Hannah Hamilton, started their 18-acre organic vegetable farm in Unity, Maine more than a decade ago, they wanted to grow the healthiest food possible. But after a wholesale buyer asked them to test their operation for toxic chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in 2022, the couple was in for a shock.
The soil tests came back clean, as the couple expected. But Buckle’s heart sank when the results arrived for the well water they used to wash and irrigate their vegetables. Through no fault of their own, the farm Buckle and Hamilton had carefully cultivated for nearly a decade was contaminated with PFAS-laced sewage sludge that had been used as fertilizer on land nearby years earlier.
Faced with evidence that their harvests were also likely contaminated with potentially hazardous PFAS toxins, he and Hamilton made the decision to close down their farming operations, at least temporarily, as they wrestled with how they might clean up their farm and protect it from future contamination.
“We said, ‘wow, this is crazy. We actually have this problem,’” Buckle said.
About a year earlier, first-generation organic farmers Katia Holmes and her husband faced a similar crisis on their 700-acre Misty Brook Farm in Albion, Maine, where they raise livestock and grow grains. In their case, the well water was fine, said Holmes. But testing of their cows’ milk – and the hay they bought from a neighbor to feed the cows – came back with elevated levels of PFAS.
Further testing revealed that a previous owner of the Holmes’ land had spread sewer sludge on certain fields 20 years ago, leaving behind PFAS in the soil.
“We called all the stores and pulled all our products,” said Holmes.
Buckle’s and Holmes’ stories are, sadly, becoming more common. (Read the rest of the story.)
New book details rise of “dystopian agricultural horror show”
(This article first appeared in The Daily Yonder.)
(Opinion columns published in The New Lede represent the views of the individual(s) authoring the columns and not necessarily the perspectives of TNL editors.)
Few books about America’s industrial agriculture system and food industry uncover the billionaires behind its biggest corporations. But a new book by Austin Frerick, a former tax economist at the US Treasury Department and current Fellow at Yale University’s Thurman Arnold Project, reveals the
amassed fortunes of Big Ag’s most powerful families. Barons: Money, Power, and Corruption of America’s Food Industry exposes these ill-gotten gains and a cadre of complicit government players who made it all possible.
With the recent release of the USDA’s dismal report Census of Agriculture (February 13, 2024), Frerick’s book is well-timed. The Ag Census disclosed that 141,733 farms shuttered between 2017 and 2022. Barons reveals that these losses happened at the same time that big food producers and merchants garnered both stunning profits and government handouts.
Frerick is an expert in agriculture policy with an antitrust law focus. He served as a co-chair for the Biden campaign’s Agriculture and Antitrust Policy Committee. In Barons, Frerick steers his experience and scholarship into a pointed denunciation of Big Ag’s unbridled and monopolistic wealth. It’s an overduecensure. In fact, many times during the book, I was surprised by a recurring sense of personal validation.
Being from rural Iowa and witnessing the 1980’s Farm Crisis take hold of my family and neighbors, Barons made me feel like somebody was standing up for the farm community of my youth. It’s a painful loss knowing that today’s industrial food system rises from the ashes of America’s family farms. And it is no accident. (Read the rest of the book review.)