On Farm Workers
Posted by garth on 10 Mar 2009 at 05:49 pm | Tagged as: tools, washington
So, thanks to a great post at Civil Eats about Petaluma, CA, I became aware of a tool called a “short hoe.”
Stolen shamelessly from the Smithsonian.
The short hoe is a particularly brutal piece of equipment that forces a farm worker to bend double in order to use it for weeding.This offends me on a number of levels.
As a gardener, I’m pissed off because Cesar Chavez’s hoe (the one shown above) is a piss-poor design of a hoe that’s no good for any sort of weeding. As a human being, I’m pissed off that someone would willingly force their employees to use a tool that is so debilitating and cruel. What do you think is going to happen when you force a grown person to work bent double all day? And that’s an agricultural day, not a white-collar day.
I remember when I did two-and-a-half years of a four-year stretch in Walla Walla (what others would call my undergrad) and I saw farm workers bent double in the fields cutting asparagus. I have never since been able to eat asparagus without thinking about the labor that it takes to bring it to my table. And I’m extremely privileged. I don’t eat asparagus until it’s locally available and, in all likelihood, harvested by a hard-working upper-class graduate of Evergreen University’s excellent agriculture program. But still…
In our neck of the woods, the farmers’ markets have started handing out bumper stickers that read “No Farms, No Food” which is absolutely true, but at the last Tilth Producers of Washington conference I saw a bumper sticker that read “No Farmworkers, No Food,” which might be even more true. We owe the food that we eat to the mostly Mexican, mostly immigrant people that labor for our food. The business plan that Lauren & I have right now doesn’t involve employees, but if we do have to hire someone it’s going to be a real challenge to do right by her.
I fail at making hyperlinks.
I fixed them for you. Also some of your spelling and grammar. Readers: I did this with permission. I don’t usually do it. I just can’t stand “Lauren and my plans” or whatever it said.
I must say, I’ve jumped at the chance in previous years to finance farmworker housing. No, not the shacks that were once used as barracks back in WWII now being used to house workers, but new, clean, energy efficient buildings with archtectural design and comfortable amenities. Shame it had to be a 100 unit project, rather than a 1,000, but it was all that could be done by that program.
It is a shame that the only people that make good money from farming is the chemical companies. All the rest suffer in some fashion or another.
Good post. Makes you think!
This is a very real issue, even for organic farmers and market gardeners. If we can’t afford to pay our workers minimum wages or have to chose between paying them or ourselves we don’t really have a business- but an expensive, doomed hobby.
Relying on wwofers is not sustainable, either.
Sinfonian, that’s fascinating — does the project have a website or any news articles or anything? I’d love to learn more. Where was this?
[...] by Lauren on 02 May 2009 at 11:07 pm | Tagged as: internets We posted on the day, but didn’t realize it was the blog’s first anniversary. Thanks, Garth, for kicking [...]