As a Latina Vegan, I’m Decolonizing a Cruel & Racist Food System

Story by Lauren T. Ornelas, As Told To Nicole Froio •

Growing up in Texas in the 1970s, I spent long periods away from my mother. My parents divorced when I was 4 years old, so my mom raised my sisters and me by herself. To make ends meet, she spent long hours at work, trying to earn enough money to feed, clothe, and house us. That meant other people in the community took care of us during the day. While my mother was away, I would watch the cows on the hillside, and I would think about how sad it must’ve been for the mother cow to come home and not find her baby there anymore. In this sense, I saw myself in these animals, and I didn’t want to be responsible for disrupting any family of cows the way capitalism was interrupting mine.

As an elementary school student, it was my innate connection to non-human animals like cows, and my understanding of the harms of raising and slaughtering calves, that moved me to become a vegetarian. But, as a kid, it was difficult for me to stick with this diet, mostly because of my family’s financial restraints. Sometimes, all we could eat was what others donated to us or what our school served us, and that often included meals with meat. I realized then that poverty prevented me from eating my ethics and that I didn’t have the freedom to eat how I wanted to.

Being Chicana, I’ve long known that food is political, even if it shouldn’t be. My mom supported the Delano Grape Strike, a labor movement the predominantly Filipino organization Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) launched against the grape growers in Delano, California, in 1965, California, to fight against the exploitation of farmworkers. She boycotted non-union grapes and taught me about the impact of labor exploitation on the bodies and minds of farmworkers. By the time I got to high school, I was getting involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. I learned that I could make a difference from far away, that, like my mom, one of the things I could do was boycott companies with vested interests in the apartheid regime, so I did.

For me, food, animal rights, and racialized liberation struggles have always been linked, but I learned early that not everyone recognized the interconnectedness of this violence. In 1987, I was excited to get involved in the animal rights movement. But my elation was stolen by the reality of white supremacy within the movement. My colleagues regularly brought me out as a token Latina vegan in order to shame my people into veganism or to prove that the vegan movement wasn’t only white; however, these same folks rarely listened to me when I discussed why Latines don’t always have the access to plant-based foods or the labor struggles of farmworkers. Instead, they pitted animal rights and human rights against each other, as if I couldn’t care about and work on both at the same time. For decades, I did work I believed in while feeling exploited and misunderstood by organizations and people who were supposed to be my comrades.



As a Latina Vegan, I’m Decolonizing a Cruel & Racist Food System© Provided by Refinery29

Then, in 2006, while I participated in the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, I felt seen, understood, and affirmed for the first time. I was sharing space with people who looked like me, sounded like me, and shared both my passion for the work and grievance with how it was being carried out. They, like me, understood how the lack of human rights is inherently linked to the lack of rights for non-human animals. There, surrounded by fervor and gripe, I realized that if we wanted to be a part of a movement or organization that cared deeply for all living beings, we would have to take matters into our own hands.

Later that year, I founded the Food Empowerment Project, an organization that seeks to create a more just and sustainable world by recognizing the power we have as food eaters. Through the publication of free, accessible, and culturally sensitive resources on our website, we encourage ethical food choices. We published our first big resource, Vegan Mexican Food, in Spanish and English in 2007, making Mexican recipes available to everyone looking to practice veganism without losing their cultural foods in the process. But more than just veganized recipes, this resource discusses the changes in our diets that took place due to colonization, to explain the introduction of farmed animals into the Americas, and to take us back toward a food system that is free from the exploitation of humans and non-human animals.

Education, a people-animal-land liberation politic, and advocacy are all at the root of this work. Growing up experiencing food apartheid, I know that being vegan isn’t easy for people who are lower income or who live in food deserts. I also know that many people in my community, largely impoverished migrants and people of color, work in the food industry with little-to-no labor protections. As such, we often experience the harms of the non-ethical food production practices. In terms of food consumption, Black, Latine, and Indigenous people are the most impacted by lack of access to healthy foods and, as a result, struggle with higher rates of dietary diseases. When it comes to food labor, cycles of poverty leave our communities with few career paths outside of farm work, forcing us to toil for low wages and no paid time off at companies that break labor laws with impunity.

Through the Food Empowerment Project, we see how these struggles are interconnected and fight against abuses of both human and non-human animals. Through working with community organizations, conducting original surveys and studies, and sharing our findings with local politicians, we increase access to healthy food options where they are absent. Similarly, we advance the rights of farmworkers by supporting legislative and regulatory changes as well as corporate efforts led by the laborers. And we promote ethical veganism through education, outreach, and resources.

We owe young people direct changes, as quickly as we can, to make up for the horrors that we’ve been wreaking on each other, on the planet, and on non-human animals. With the Food Empowerment Project, I am committed to pulling at all of the threads of oppression, tugging at them until everybody’s free.

Libcom.orglibcom.org/article/beasts-burden-antagonism-and-practical-history

Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History | libcom.org

Beasts of burden - Antagonism and Practical History. An attempt to rethink the separation between animal liberationist and communist politics. (Published ...

Libcom.orglibcom.org/article/beasts-burden-review

Beasts of Burden - Review - Libcom.org

Jul 24, 2005 ... A review of the pamphlet Beasts of Burden by Antagonism Press (1999) from undercurrent #8. Author. Undercurrent. Submitted by libcom on July ...

Libcom.orglibcom.org/article/letter-animal-liberation-gilles-dauve

Letter on animal liberation - Gilles Dauvé - Libcom.org

Nov 18, 2005 ... This is a letter sent by French readers to the authors of Beasts of Burden. This pamphlet has the merit of addressing a vital question: If ...

Column: Inside the effort by two Beverly Hills billionaires to kill a state law protecting farmworkers

Michael Hiltzik
Thu, May 16, 2024 


Wonderful Co.'s billionaire owners Stewart and Lynda Resnick: philanthropists, industrialists and union adversaries. (Ryan Miller/WireImage)

Los Angeles-based Wonderful Co. — the world's largest pistachio and almond grower, the purveyor of Fiji Water, Pom pomegranate juice and Justin wines, and owner of the Teleflora flower service — wants you to know that it's committed to "sustainable farming and business practices" and sees its employees as "a guiding force for good."

Wonderful's owners, the Beverly Hills billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick, say their "calling" is "to leave people and the planet better than we found them."

Here's another side of the company. Since February, it has been engaged in a ferocious battle with the United Farm Workers over the UFW's campaign to unionize more than 600 Wonderful Nurseries workers in the Central Valley.

'We ask each of you firmly not to sign an authorization card.'

Anti-union script read to Wonderful Nursery workers by company officials

Having lost a series of motions before the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board to delay a mandate that it reach a contract with the UFW as soon as June 3 or have terms imposed by the board, Wonderful on Monday unleashed a nuclear attack: a lawsuit seeking to have the 2022 and 2023 state laws governing the unionization process declared unconstitutional.

If it succeeds, California's legal protections for farmworkers could be rolled back to conditions that prevailed before César Chavez's campaigns for farm unionization in the 1960s.

"This is an attack on farmworkers' rights," says Elizabeth Strater, the UFW's director of strategic campaigns. Farm employers "will do everything they can to prevent workers from empowering themselves and lifting themselves out of poverty."

Wonderful's lawsuit takes a page from arguments made against the National Labor Relations Board by Trader Joe's and Elon Musk's SpaceX. Both companies, facing NLRB regulatory actions, are contending that the NLRB, which Congress established in 1935, is unconstitutional.

Wonderful contends that provisions of the state's agricultural labor code violate its rights of due process guaranteed by both the state and U.S. constitutions.

At issue is a UFW drive to represent more than 600 of Wonderful Nurseries employees that began in early 2023. The UFW ultimately presented the labor board with signed cards from more than half the employees giving the UFW authority to represent them in collective bargaining on a contract, a process known as a "card check."

Read more: Wonderful Co. sues to halt California card-check law that made it easier to unionize farmworkers

The board certified the union as the workers' representative on March 1, triggering a tight deadline aimed at prompting the union and the company to reach a contract.

Read more: Column: The UAW sends a lightning bolt into anti-union states with a huge victory at a VW plant

As often happens in hard-fought union campaigns, this one has generated a cross fire of allegations of unfair labor practices from both sides — the company asserting that the union defrauded workers into signing the representation cards, the union asserting that the company browbeat more than 100 workers into revoking their authorizations to drive the approval rate below the required 50%.

Accounts from the workers themselves vary. As my colleagues Rebecca Plevin and Melissa Gomez have reported, there have been complaints about poor working conditions at Wonderful along with hope that a union would help upgrade standards. Other workers say they misunderstood that signing an authorization card was tantamount to joining the UFW.

Some workers said they had second thoughts about signing the cards after meetings with a company-hired union-buster, Raul Calvo, who told them the union would take 3% of their pay for dues. In late March, some 100 Wonderful workers staged an anti-union protest at the ALRB offices in Visalia, but the UFW has alleged that the rally was the product of company coercion. Wonderful said at the time that it had no involvement in the protest and didn't pay the workers for their time.

"These workers are so vulnerable," the UFW's Strater says. Many are undocumented or have other reasons to worry about job security, arguably making them receptive to management directives.

In this case, another party has weighed in — the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, an independent state agency. Following an investigation, the board's general counsel, Julia Montgomery, alleged that Wonderful trampled its workers' unionization rights through numerous anti-union actions, including coercing them to submit declarations rescinding their authorizations. Wonderful has denied most of the allegations.

Wonderful says that the workers submitted their declarations voluntarily, "without any request having been made" by the company. Montgomery's allegations, however, are mighty specific. She cites a series of meetings that were overtly aimed at persuading the workers to back away from the union.

That process began with employee meetings addressed by Calvo and proceeded to sessions in which workers met with Wonderful human resources personnel, Montgomery alleged. At those meetings, the company representatives read from a Spanish-language script stating that the union could have obtained workers' signatures without their knowledge, that they would be deprived of the opportunity for a secret vote on unionization and encouraging them to sign a declaration revoking their authorization cards.

Read more: Column: A Trump judge eviscerates a pro-worker regulation at the request of big employers

"We ask each of you firmly not to sign an authorization card," the script read. In a line that sounds like it came fresh out of the playbook of anti-union companies such as Starbucks, the script stated that the company wants "to be able to work one on one with you without the interference of a union."

Some workers were led into a large conference room, where company representatives were assigned "to help the worker draft the declaration" revoking the authorization cards, Montgomery asserted. Some agents typed up declarations for the workers and handed them to the workers to sign.

A few words about the plaintiffs in this lawsuit:

The Resnicks are prominent philanthropists and political donors (mostly to Democrats). Their companies' effects on the environment and California agriculture generally are checkered. Indeed, their most eye-catching charitable donation, a record-breaking $750-million pledge to Caltech in 2019 for research into climate change and “environmental sustainability,” isn't inconsistent with a desire to "greenwash" some of their other activities.

As I previously wrote, while it might be churlish to suggest that the gift was devoid of genuine altruistic impulses, it would be naive to assume that altruism is the whole story.

A few years earlier, the Resnicks' Justin Vineyards had been caught clear-cutting an oak forest near Paso Robles to make room for new grape plantings. The work was halted by San Luis Obispo County authorities, and the firm eventually agreed to donate the 380-acre parcel to a land conservancy.

Although the Resnicks say they are "dedicated to our role as environmental stewards," their Fiji Water subsidiary looks like the antithesis of environmental sustainability. It profits from transporting water in plastic bottles more than 5,500 miles from the island nation to California and beyond, places that already have abundant water.

Wonderful's pistachio and almond orchards have complicated efforts to apportion water among the state's competing stakeholders. Because the trees require watering in wet years or dry, their acreage can't be fallowed during dry spells.

That has made the water demand of the agricultural sector less flexible, and arguably has contributed to the devastating decline of the state's salmon fishery and the drying out of rivers and streams that once supported a diverse population of fish and birds.

Read more: Column: American unions have finally remembered how to win

This isn't the first time that the Resnicks have wrapped themselves in the U.S. Constitution to fend off a regulatory agency. In 2010, they asserted that the Federal Trade Commission infringed their 1st Amendment rights by holding that they made “false and misleading” and “unsubstantiated” representations about the health benefits of their Pom pomegranate juice, which amounted to unlawful marketing.

The company pitched the juice as “health in a bottle.” Wonderful put up billboards with the words “Cheat Death” next to a picture of the bottle. Its ads claimed Pom has beneficial effects on prostate cancer (“Drink to prostate health”), cardiovascular health and even erectile dysfunction — all of which claims were judged scientifically dubious by regulators. The company fought the FTC up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected its appeal.

The 2022 and 2023 laws that Wonderful is challenging — indeed, the very creation of the ALRB in 1975 — reflect a reality known in California for more than a century: Bringing labor rights to farmworkers is notoriously difficult.

The first major farm union organizing drive in the state, among hops pickers in Wheatland, north of Sacramento, was broken up by four companies of the National Guard called out by Gov. Hiram Johnson in 1913. A statewide dragnet for organizers from the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, ensued, followed by hundreds of arrests. No further significant farm organizing took place for 16 years.

In 1975, a state law passed at the urging of César Chavez's UFW gave union organizers the right to meet with workers on the farms where they toiled. But the Supreme Court, voting on partisan lines, struck it down in 2021—the law allowed organizers to "invade the growers' property," as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote.

To address the heightened difficulty agricultural unions faced, the state Legislature established the card check process in 2022 and 2023. The laws incorporated a tight timeline governing certification and contract bargaining, and stipulated mandatory mediation if no contract is reached with a set period.

Read more: Column: Julie Su would be a perfect Labor secretary. That's why Big Business hates her

The goal was to address "the basic failing of labor law both at the federal and state level, which is delay," said William B. Gould IV, emeritus professor of law at Stanford and a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board and the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board.

"Delay works against the interests of workers and unions, because employers hope that they'll grow weary," Gould told me. The tight deadlines were designed to place the burden of delay on the employers.

Wonderful maintains in its lawsuit, filed in Kern County state court, that the accelerated process has deprived employers of constitutionally protected due process rights by allowing a union to be certified by card check before the employers have a chance to object — effectively rendering the certification and the negotiating deadline faits accomplis.

That's not quite true, however. The law allows anyone to file objections within five days of certification. After that, any certification can be revoked if the employers' objections are later upheld at a hearing, and any mandated contract can be invalidated. Indeed, Wonderful filed its objections in time, citing the workers' declarations; an ALRB hearing on its objections has been underway for weeks.

What appears especially to irk Wonderful is that the board has twice rejected its motions to suspend, or stay, the certification and negotiation procedure until after it rules on the company's objections. The board responded that the law doesn't provide for such a stay.

The company's lawsuit thus amounts to an end run around the law. Gould is skeptical that Wonderful's constitutionality claims will win much favor from California judges, but the case may be aimed at the notoriously anti-union U.S. Supreme Court majority.

"This Supreme Court has indicated that they want to reverse much of what was done in the 1930s," a high-water mark for progressive labor and public interest laws, he said. In its lawsuit, Wonderful "has thrown buckets of paint against the wall in the hope that something will stick. Maybe they'll be right on some of it."

UTOPIAN SOCIALISM

As a Latina Vegan, I’m Decolonizing a Cruel & Racist Food System

Story by Lauren T. Ornelas, As Told To Nicole Froio

 • Refinery29

Growing up in Texas in the 1970s, I spent long periods away from my mother. My parents divorced when I was 4 years old, so my mom raised my sisters and me by herself. To make ends meet, she spent long hours at work, trying to earn enough money to feed, clothe, and house us. That meant other people in the community took care of us during the day. While my mother was away, I would watch the cows on the hillside, and I would think about how sad it must’ve been for the mother cow to come home and not find her baby there anymore. In this sense, I saw myself in these animals, and I didn’t want to be responsible for disrupting any family of cows the way capitalism was interrupting mine.

As an elementary school student, it was my innate connection to non-human animals like cows, and my understanding of the harms of raising and slaughtering calves, that moved me to become a vegetarian. But, as a kid, it was difficult for me to stick with this diet, mostly because of my family’s financial restraints. Sometimes, all we could eat was what others donated to us or what our school served us, and that often included meals with meat. I realized then that poverty prevented me from eating my ethics and that I didn’t have the freedom to eat how I wanted to.

Being Chicana, I’ve long known that food is political, even if it shouldn’t be. My mom supported the Delano Grape Strike, a labor movement the predominantly Filipino organization Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) launched against the grape growers in Delano, California, in 1965, California, to fight against the exploitation of farmworkers. She boycotted non-union grapes and taught me about the impact of labor exploitation on the bodies and minds of farmworkers. By the time I got to high school, I was getting involved in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. I learned that I could make a difference from far away, that, like my mom, one of the things I could do was boycott companies with vested interests in the apartheid regime, so I did.

For me, food, animal rights, and racialized liberation struggles have always been linked, but I learned early that not everyone recognized the interconnectedness of this violence. In 1987, I was excited to get involved in the animal rights movement. But my elation was stolen by the reality of white supremacy within the movement. My colleagues regularly brought me out as a token Latina vegan in order to shame my people into veganism or to prove that the vegan movement wasn’t only white; however, these same folks rarely listened to me when I discussed why Latines don’t always have the access to plant-based foods or the labor struggles of farmworkers. Instead, they pitted animal rights and human rights against each other, as if I couldn’t care about and work on both at the same time. For decades, I did work I believed in while feeling exploited and misunderstood by organizations and people who were supposed to be my comrades.

Then, in 2006, while I participated in the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela, I felt seen, understood, and affirmed for the first time. I was sharing space with people who looked like me, sounded like me, and shared both my passion for the work and grievance with how it was being carried out. They, like me, understood how the lack of human rights is inherently linked to the lack of rights for non-human animals. There, surrounded by fervor and gripe, I realized that if we wanted to be a part of a movement or organization that cared deeply for all living beings, we would have to take matters into our own hands. 

Later that year, I founded the Food Empowerment Project, an organization that seeks to create a more just and sustainable world by recognizing the power we have as food eaters. Through the publication of free, accessible, and culturally sensitive resources on our website, we encourage ethical food choices. We published our first big resource, Vegan Mexican Food, in Spanish and English in 2007, making Mexican recipes available to everyone looking to practice veganism without losing their cultural foods in the process. But more than just veganized recipes, this resource discusses the changes in our diets that took place due to colonization, to explain the introduction of farmed animals into the Americas, and to take us back toward a food system that is free from the exploitation of humans and non-human animals. 

Education, a people-animal-land liberation politic, and advocacy are all at the root of this work. Growing up experiencing food apartheid, I know that being vegan isn’t easy for people who are lower income or who live in food deserts. I also know that many people in my community, largely impoverished migrants and people of color, work in the food industry with little-to-no labor protections. As such, we often experience the harms of the non-ethical food production practices. In terms of food consumption, Black, Latine, and Indigenous people are the most impacted by lack of access to healthy foods and, as a result, struggle with higher rates of dietary diseases. When it comes to food labor, cycles of poverty leave our communities with few career paths outside of farm work, forcing us to toil for low wages and no paid time off at companies that break labor laws with impunity.

Through the Food Empowerment Project, we see how these struggles are interconnected and fight against abuses of both human and non-human animals. Through working with community organizations, conducting original surveys and studies, and sharing our findings with local politicians, we increase access to healthy food options where they are absent. Similarly, we advance the rights of farmworkers by supporting legislative and regulatory changes as well as corporate efforts led by the laborers. And we promote ethical veganism through education, outreach, and resources.

We owe young people direct changes, as quickly as we can, to make up for the horrors that we’ve been wreaking on each other, on the planet, and on non-human animals. With the Food Empowerment Project, I am committed to pulling at all of the threads of oppression, tugging at them until everybody’s free.

Children as young as 6 help harvest blueberries in America

Scripps News investigates child labor on farms, one of the least restricted and most dangerous places for kids to work.


Zach Cusson / Scripps News

By Patrick Terpstra and Karen Rodriguez and Zach Cusson

 Jul 11, 2023

A pint of blueberries begins its journey to the neighborhood grocery store in a field like many others found on thousands of acres in southeast North Carolina.

The fruit thrives on bushes growing in the acidic, black, sandy soil near the Atlantic coast.

At the beginning of each summer, clusters of farmworkers race to pick the berries at their sweetest during a season that lasts just two months.

A Scripps News investigation found children as young as 6 years old are helping to harvest one of America's favorite superfoods.

The discovery comes years after the U.S. Department of Labor fined six North Carolina blueberry farms in 2009 for violating child labor laws, according to federal Wage and Hour Department enforcement records reviewed by Scripps News.

Those records show no documented cases of underage work on blueberry farms in the state since 2017, even as the Labor Department reports a surge of illegal child labor across industries in recent years.

Scripps News met a mother who says two of her three children, ages 6 and 8, work alongside her picking blueberries at a North Carolina farm.

The mother agreed to share their story in the privacy of her rented home and requested her family not be identified out of fear of retaliation.

The mother said they are undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, and that her two children, a 6-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son, began picking blueberries when school let out for summer.

Her daughter stands beside her with small feet still caked in dirt from a day in the fields.

"I take them to work because my husband isn't in good health and is sick," the woman said in Spanish. "He went two or three months without working and we needed to pay rent."

The mother said on the farm she can also watch her kids while they help make ends meet.

Her son began working with her in sweet potato fields two seasons ago at the age of 6, she said. "It is sad because a child shouldn't have to work," she said.

Estimating how many kids are working in similar blueberry fields is difficult.

Many farms are fenced off or have towering "no trespassing" signs posted to keep visitors away.

And Scripps News confirmed that the North Carolina Department of Labor tracks child labor complaints, but not for farm jobs. North Carolina is one of 17 states that exempts agriculture from child labor laws.

Young children working on farms spans generations, said Yessie Bustos, a leader of the nonprofit Student Action with Farmworkers based in Durham, N.C.

"I think it goes back to the fact that farmworkers are not entitled to a fair minimum wage, so they're getting paid by the piece," Bustos said. "That's kind of why you will see a lot of family members out there in the fields, because you need to be able to at least make enough money to provide for the family."

Bustos, 30, recalls picking blueberries herself as a 12-year-old in Michigan.

"For our family, it was a way for us to supplement income," she said.

She looked at a photo shared by the mother of her 8-year-old blueberry worker son, bucket in hand.

"I think of my inner self, like my inner child at the time, not really knowing why I'm doing this, just knowing I have to," Bustos said.

Research from the federal government says about half a million children, age 17 and under, are working on American farms.

A failed attempt to stop child labor years before a raid

A Scripps News investigation discovers a failed effort to stop child labor among young immigrants in rural Minnesota.

"It's backbreaking labor," said Reid Maki, director of child labor advocacy for the National Consumers League and the Child Labor Coalition.

He has long pressed for stronger federal protections for kids in agriculture.

"We have a copy machine around the corner here in the office, and I can't bring in a 12-year-old nephew to work on that copy machine, but that same child can be put on a farm and work 12- or 14-hour days," Maki said.

Federal law allows youth as young as 12 to work in agriculture if they have their parents' consent and it's not during school hours.

There also are exceptions that allow children of any age to work on a farm owned by a parent or on other "certain very small farms" outside of school hours, according to a statement from the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor.

A Labor Department spokesman declined to answer whether the farm where the mother said she works with her children was violating any child labor laws.

Earlier this year the Biden administration announced a crackdown on employers hiring kids to work dangerous jobs in other industries, fining contractors illegally employing teens to clean meatpacking plants in the dead of night.

There has not been the same sweeping action targeting agriculture.

Scripps News Investigates: A city’s not-so-secret child labor problem

A Scripps News investigation found suspicions of child labor went back years before authorities took action against a Nebraska meatpacking plant.

"Monitoring the millions and millions of acres of U.S. farms is difficult," Maki said. "It's not impossible, though. I think that may be the case that they really could focus more on dangerous jobs."

A farm is a dangerous place to work, especially for minors.

One federally funded research study found about 33 children get hurt working on U.S. farms every day.

In 2018, a report from the federal Government Accountability Office found the "majority of work-related child fatalities were in agriculture" even though "agriculture employs a small percentage of working children."

The mother of the two young children helping with the blueberry harvest this summer said they sometimes complain about the summer heat.

"Yesterday my daughter had a lot of headaches," the mother said. "Last night she was complaining that her head hurt and she couldn’t stand it."

Bustos remembers the danger of heavy farm machinery.

"The example I always share is, I learned how to drive a blueberry picking machine before I even learned how to drive a vehicle," she said. "The thing is like three or five times the size of a regular car. They're huge."

Bustos and other advocates for farmworkers are pressing Congress to bring rules for employing minors on farms in line with other industries.

The CARE Act would raise the minimum age for work on commercial farms to 14 years old, while adding restrictions for all minors who work in agriculture.

It has not gained traction on Capitol Hill despite years of efforts to get it passed.

Bustos estimates there is a 50-50 chance children have had a hand in harvesting a typical pint of blueberries purchased by consumers.

"They should ask themselves, how are we putting them in a position where that's the only way to make ends meet?" she said.

After a day of work, the 8-year-old boy who goes to the blueberry fields still finds time to play.

He shows off his collection of Matchbox cars and, behind the house, his family’s pet chickens and turtles.

His mother said she sees education as a way for their children to eventually leave farm work behind them.

"I always tell my kids, first give thanks to God, and I tell them, I want you to take advantage of your time at school," the boy’s mother said. "I take them to the fields so they realize what working the fields is like and so they work harder in school."

They are lessons that come from a life of hard work beginning at a tender age.

Data analysis by Daniel Lathrop and Rosie Cima

Clues From Bird Flu’s Ground Zero on Dairy Farms in the Texas Panhandle

BY AMY MAXMAN

MAY 27, 2024
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Photo: USDA.

In early February, dairy farmers in the Texas Panhandle began to notice sick cattle. The buzz soon reached Darren Turley, executive director of the Texas Association of Dairymen: “They said there is something moving from herd to herd.”

Nearly 60 days passed before veterinarians identified the culprit: a highly pathogenic strain of the bird flu virus, H5N1. Had it been detected sooner, the outbreak might have been swiftly contained. Now it has spread to at least eight other states, and it will be hard to eliminate.

At the moment, the bird flu hasn’t adapted to spread from person to person through the air like the seasonal flu. That’s what it would take to give liftoff to another pandemic. This lucky fact could change, however, as the virus mutates within each cow it infects. Those mutations are random, but more cows provide more chances of stumbling on ones that pose a grave risk to humans.

Why did it take so long to recognize the virus on high-tech farms in the world’s richest country? Because even though H5N1 has circulated for nearly three decades, its arrival in dairy cattle was most unexpected. “People tend to think that an outbreak starts at Monday at 9 a.m. with a sign saying, ‘Outbreak has started,’” said Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the World Health Organization. “It’s rarely like that.”

By investigating the origins of outbreaks, researchers garner clues about how they start and spread. That information can curb the toll of an epidemic and, ideally, stop the next one. On-the-ground observations and genomic analyses point to Texas as ground zero for this outbreak in cattle. To backtrack events in Texas, KFF Health News spoke with more than a dozen people, including veterinarians, farmers, and state officials.

An early indication that something had gone awry on farms in northwestern Texas came from devices hitched to collars on dairy cows. Turley describes them as “an advanced fitness tracker.” They collect a stream of data, such as a cow’s temperature, its milk quality, and the progress of its digestion — or, rather, rumination — within its four-chambered stomach.

What farmers saw when they downloaded the data in February stopped them in their tracks. One moment a cow seemed perfectly fine, and then four hours later, rumination had halted. “Shortly after the stomach stops, you’d see a huge falloff in milk,” Turley said. “That is not normal.”

Tests for contagious diseases known to whip through herds came up negative. Some farmers wondered if the illness was related to ash from wildfires devastating land to the east.

In hindsight, Turley wished he had made more of the migrating geese that congregate in the panhandle each winter and spring. Geese and other waterfowl have carried H5N1 around the globe. They withstand enormous loads of the virus without getting sick, passing it on to local species, like blackbirds, cowbirds, and grackles, that mix with migrating flocks.

But with so many other issues facing dairy farmers, geese didn’t register. “One thing you learn in agriculture is that Mother Nature is unpredictable and can be devastating,” Turley said. “Just when you think you have figured it out, Mother Nature tells you you do not.”

Cat Clues

One dairy tried to wall itself off, careful not to share equipment with or employ the same workers as other farms, Turley recalled. Its cattle still became ill. Turley noted that the farm was downwind of another with an outbreak, “so you almost think it has to have an airborne factor.”

On March 7, Turley called the Texas Animal Health Commission. They convened a One Health group with experts in animal health, human health, and agriculture to ponder what they called the “mystery syndrome.” State veterinarians probed cow tissue for parasites, examined the animals’ blood, and tested for viruses and bacteria. But nothing explained the sickness.

They didn’t probe for H5N1. While it has jumped into mammals dozens of times, it rarely has spread between species. Most cases have been in carnivores, which likely ate infected birds. Cows are mainly vegetarian.

“If someone told me about a milk drop in cows, I wouldn’t think to test for H5N1 because, no, cattle don’t get that,” said Thomas Peacock, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute of England who studies avian influenza.

Postmortem tests of grackles, blackbirds, and other birds found dead on dairy farms detected H5N1, but that didn’t turn the tide. “We didn’t think much of it since we have seen H5N1-positive birds everywhere in the country,” said Amy Swinford, director of the Texas A&M Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory.

In the meantime, rumors swirled about a rash of illness among workers at dairy farms in the panhandle. It was flu season, however, and hospitals weren’t reporting anything out of the ordinary.

Bethany Boggess Alcauter, director of research at the National Center for Farmworker Health, has worked in the panhandle and suspected farmworkers were unlikely to see a doctor even if they needed one. Clinics are far from where they live, she said, and many don’t speak English or Spanish — for instance, they may speak Indigenous languages such as Mixtec, which is common in parts of Mexico. The cost of medical care is another deterrent, along with losing pay by missing work — or losing their jobs — if they don’t show up. “Even when medical care is there,” she said, “it’s a challenge.”

What finally tipped off veterinarians? A few farm cats died suddenly and tested positive for H5N1. Swinford’s group — collaborating with veterinary labs at Iowa State and Cornell universities — searched for the virus in samples drawn from sick cows.

“On a Friday night at 9 p.m., March 22, I got a call from Iowa State,” Swinford said. Researchers had discovered antibodies against H5N1 in a slice of a mammary gland. By Monday, her team and Cornell researchers identified genetic fragments of the virus. They alerted authorities. With that, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that H5N1 had hit dairy cattle.

Recalling rumors of sick farmworkers, Texas health officials asked farmers, veterinarians, and local health departments to encourage testing. About 20 people with coughs, aches, irritated eyes, or other flu-like symptoms stepped forward to be swabbed. Those samples were shipped to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All but one was negative for H5N1. On April 1, the CDC announced this year’s first case: a farmworker with an inflamed eye that cleared up within days.

Thirteen dairy farms in the panhandle had been affected, said Brian Bohl, director of field operations at the Texas Animal Health Commission. Farmers report that outbreaks among the herds last 30 to 45 days and most cows return to milking at their usual pace.

The observation hints that herds gain immunity, if temporarily. Indeed, early evidence shows that H5N1 triggers a protective antibody response in cattle, said Marie Culhane, a professor of veterinary population medicine at the University of Minnesota. Nonetheless, she and others remain uneasy because no one knows how the virus spreads, or what risk it poses to people working with cattle.

Although most cows recover, farmers said the outbreaks have disrupted their careful timing around when cattle milk, breed, and birth calves.

Farmers want answers that would come with further research, but the spirit of collaboration that existed in the first months of the Texas outbreak has fractured. Federal restrictions have triggered a backlash from farmers who find them unduly punishing, given that pasteurized milk and cooked beef from dairy cattle appear to pose no risk to consumers.

The rules, such as prohibiting infected cattle from interstate travel for 30 days, pose a problem for farmers who move pregnant cattle to farms that specialize in calving, to graze in states with gentler winters, and to return home for milking. “When the federal order came out, some producers said, ‘I’m going to quit testing,’” Bohl said.

In May, the USDA offered aid, such as up to $10,000 to test and treat infected cattle. “The financial incentives will help,” Turley said. But how much remains to be seen.

Federal authorities have pressed states to extract more intel from farms and farmworkers. Several veterinarians warn such pressure could fracture their relationships with farmers, stifling lines of communication.

Having fought epidemics around the world, Farrar cited examples of when strong-arm surveillance pushed outbreaks underground. During an early 2000s bird flu outbreak in Vietnam, farmers circumvented regulations by moving poultry at night, bribing inspection workers, and selling their goods through back channels. “Learning what drivers and fears exist among people is crucial,” Farrar said. “But we always seem to realize that at a later date.”

A powerful driver in the U.S.: Milk is a $60 billion industry. Public health is also bound to bump up against politics in Texas, a state so aggrieved by pandemic restrictions that lawmakers passed a bill last year barring health officials from recommending covid-19 vaccines.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said that when he heard that federal agents with the CDC and USDA were considering visits to farms — including those where farmers reported the cattle had recovered — he advised against it. “Send federal agents to dairy that’s not sick?” he said. “That doesn’t pass the smell test.”

From Texas to the Nation

Peacock said genomic analyses of H5N1 viruses point to Texas as ground zero for the cattle epidemic, emerging late last year.

“All of these little jigsaw puzzle pieces corroborate undetected circulation in Texas for some time,” said Peacock, an author on one report about the outbreak.

Evidence suggests that either a single cow was infected by viruses shed from birds — perhaps those geese, grackles, or blackbirds, he said. Or the virus spilled over from birds into cattle several times, with only a fraction of those moving from cow to cow.

Sometime in March, viruses appear to have hitched a ride to other states as cows were moved between farms. The limited genomic data available links the outbreak in Texas directly to others in New Mexico, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, and South Dakota. However, the routes are imprecise because the USDA hasn’t attached dates and locations to data it releases.

Researchers don’t want to be caught off guard again by the shape-shifting H5N1 virus, and that will require keeping tabs on humans. Most, if not all, of about 900 people diagnosed with H5N1 infections worldwide since 2003 acquired it from animals, rather than from humans, Farrar said. About half of those people died.

Occasional tests of sick farmworkers aren’t sufficient, he said. Ideally, a system is set up to encourage farmworkers, their communities, and health care workers to be tested whenever the virus hits farms nearby.

“Health care worker infections are always a sign of human-to-human transmission,” Farrar said. “That’s the approach you want to take — I am not saying it’s easy.”

This story was originally published by KFF Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Amy Maxman is public health local editor and correspondent for KFF Health News.