Working For Jobs

by Kerry Trueman.

It’s been a long time since farmers congregated in downtown
Manhattan—around 350 years, to be exact. The folks who
populate Wall Street and rural America don’t cross paths much these days. It’s
easy to forget that Wall Street used to be rural America; in
1644, the area contained so many cows that the Dutch colonists had to erect a cattle guard to keep them
from straying. Livestock farmers literally established the boundaries of Wall
Street.

Today, the bronze bull—that icon of the OWS movement—is
the lone farm animal you’ll find in the financial district. And the barricades
are back, but only to keep Zuccotti Park’s mic checkers in check. That
surprisingly fertile concrete plaza has yielded a bumper crop of grassroots
activists, to the discomfort of (most of) the 1% and the shills who bill them. But the voices of
farmers—a.k.a. the 1% that grows the food that 100% of us eat—have been largely missing from this movement to reclaim our democracy, despite
the fact that food has become a commodity that enriches a few at the expense of
the many.

That all changed this past Sunday, though, when a group of farmers from around the country marched
to Zuccotti Park accompanied by their allies: food justice
activists, community gardeners, and other advocates for a more equitable,
ecologically sound, re-localized food system.

The march, organized by Occupy Wall Street’s food justice committee and Food
Democracy Now, began with a rally at La Plaza
Cultural Community Garden in the East Village, where hundreds of folks gathered to hear
fiddlers and drummers give the event a festive kickoff, followed by a panel of
urban and rural farmers.

Speakers included: Karen
Washington, urban farmer and the founder of City Farms Markets, who grew up just blocks
away from the community garden; Mike Callicrate, a Colorado rancher and a lead
plaintiff in a lawsuit against the world’s largest beef packer; Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the filmmaker
behind Greenhorns and a farmer who’s worked tirelessly to promote the young farmer
movement; Jalal Sabur, a founding member of the Freedom Food
Alliance, which unites black urban communities with black rural
farmers; renowned permaculture expert Andrew
Faust; Jim Goodman, a Wisconsin dairy farmer who organized a “tractorcade” to Madison earlier this year
to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation; and Jim Gerritsen, a
Maine organic farmer who is president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade
Association and the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against Monsanto.*

Gerritsen, who was recently named one of “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World” by Utne Reader, noted that he had “never had a reason” to come New
York City before. Now, at age 56, he came to tell organizers that “Occupy
Wall Street is the conscience of America,” adding that “rural America
stands behind you.”

A movement that’s been denigrated by some as a motley mob of
lazy, dirty hippies got a boost from hardworking Americans who’ve chosen one
of the most demanding, least lucrative vocations imaginable—producing our
food. Don’t tell these folks to get a job; the majority of small family farmers
have to hold down at least two jobs just to make ends meet or
get health care.

Jalal Sabar expressed his desire to foster a deeper awareness of
the issues facing both urban and rural farmers:

A lot of times the farmer in Iowa doesn’t know that the
kid in the hood is getting stopped and frisked every day … I understand that
farmers can barely survive, that they have to work a job outside of the farm …
We want to make sure that the foodies understand what the farmworkers go
through.

Sabar also pointed out that land
grabs, a problem seen as occurring mainly in developing nations, are happening
here as well. He cited the recent raid on the Morning Glory Community
Garden in the South Bronx by the NYC Department of Housing
Preservation & Development. (On Saturday, a protest by Occupy The Bronx at the site
of the ransacked garden resulted in several arrests.)

Severine von Tscharner Fleming addressed another kind of land
grab that’s threatening our farmlands: fracking. In the wake of Hurricane Irene,
which destroyed many local New York state crops, von Tscharner Fleming described
the way representatives from natural gas companies had turned up promptly,
checkbooks in hand, pressuring desperate farmers to lease their drilling rights.
She echoed last week’s devastating New York Times exposé, “Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases,”
by saying:

Those of us who are running farms in different parts of the
region are having to compete with the drillers and are then surrounded by the
tanks and the effluent and the pipelines and the huge rigs of trucks, the
millions of gallons of contaminated, radioactive water that are pumped out of
these wells and the fumes that are in the wind and when you’re trying to grow
gorgeous produce it’s not so wonderful.

Dairyman Jim Goodman availed himself of the peoples’
microphone to explain his motivation to attend the march:

We were told in the ‘60s that there comes a time when the
machinery becomes so odious … that you have to throw yourself into the machinery
and make it stop.

They tell
me I must feed the world. But I’m not going to. I want to feed you.
I want the world to feed itself. And they can. They’ve been farming longer than
we have. They’re smarter, they’re younger, they’re stronger, they’re women,
they’re people of color.

The
corporations want them out, they want the good land. They give them the poor
land. And then they say, “See? They can’t feed themselves.” A
self-fulfilling prophecy.

… Take the
power away from Wall Street! Remake Washington.

The rally culminated in a seed swap with farmers and gardeners
exchanging packets of heirloom, open-pollinated seeds, including some donated
by the
Hudson Valley Seed Library founders, who’ve done so much to
revitalize New York’s regional seed trade and inspired similar endeavors around the
country.

Kneeling
on the pavement there at Zuccotti Park, sorting through the seeds under the glow
of the twinkly holiday lights, we couldn’t help feeling that the Farmers’ March
was marking the beginning of a greater affinity between city and country folks.
Here’s hoping the farmers won’t wait another few centuries to come back to our
neck of the woods.

* Speaking of taking action against Monsanto, the folks at Occupy
Big Food are organizing a protest on Wednesday in Times Square, where Monsanto’s
CFO will be speaking at the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch conference.

Related Links:

Hungary destroys 1,000 acres of Monsanto maize

Amazon deforestation decreasing … but not for long

Small farmers crave horse power

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