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Should government's child labor plan be scrapped?

By Peggy Lowe

20 Feb 2012
Kurt Winter (left), 13, and Phillip Winter, 16, get ready to deliver hay to a neighbor from their father's farm near Wichita, Kan. (Peggy Lowe/Harvest Public Media)

It took 18,000 public comments and the opposition of 98 lawmakers, but the U.S. Department of Labor has backed off on those controversial plans to limit kids under 16 from some farm work.

I’ve been covering this issue since last September, when I first asked folks from the Harvest Network what they thought of the plans. I spent time in Boone, Iowa, with Julie and Scott Wilber and I also got to meet up with the Winter family near Wichita, Kan.

This has been a big issue in farm country and I hear about it when I travel to conferences and shows. People wonder how they will run their farms if their kids can’t drive a tractor or work around animals. And they wonder how their kids will earn money if they can’t work on their neighbors’ farms and ranches.

What's happening to the climate in your backyard?

By Peggy Lowe

15 Feb 2012
(Twitter)

I was a bit nervous when I moved back to the Midwest after six years in Southern California. The weather along the West Coast can lull you into a pleasant-Prozac-like sense that its always just about to turn from spring to summer -- sunny, but not sweaty, and you still need a sweatshirt at night.

But my first winter back in the Midwest after 22 years has been really nice -- even reaching into the 60's in January. I was joking about the global warming business on Twitter, but I will admit that I'm happy I haven't had to bust out my ski jacket too many times.

This change in the weather has had people talking about climate change for some time now. There’s drought, theres flooding -- heck, Kansas City has warmed up so much that the USDA moved it up to Zone 6 from Zone 5 on the plant hardiness scale.

This all got the PBS News Hour folks wondering. They want to hear your firsthand perspective about the climate in your backyard – which you can tell them by clicking here.

Was Chipotle's ad 'eloquent' or ignorant?

By Peggy Lowe

13 Feb 2012

You first hear the tweet of a bird, the dark screen lightens up and a pastoral scene passes by that looks like it was built by Fisher Price.

Mr. Farmer and Mrs. Farmer, who is holding Baby Farmer, gazes on a pink cylindrical pig. A guitar starts to play and our story takes off, with the pig reproducing more little pink ones, buildings appearing to house the animals and Willie Nelson beginning to sing. By the time the pigs are manufactured into little pink boxes, I was involved…and wincing.

Did you see the Chipotle commercial last night during the Grammys? For the first time, the ad, set to a Coldplay tune called “The Scientist,” aired during a commercial broadcast. It’s been on YouTube and in movie theaters since last summer – as well as creating lots of negative buzz among some ag advocates.

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by FarmerHaley | February 13, 2012

I thought the add was thought provoking in several ways. The message the add sent to me was that chipotle only supports one type of agriculture and all other forms are bad and should go "back to the start". Living in agriculture all my life I know most farmers of all sizes care about their land and livestock, this add seemed to portray that's not so. Unlike what I saw from Chipotle, I appreciate all forms of agriculture and each farmers ability to find a way to supply an array of choices from individuals to choose from.

Caring for the animals, land and the environment is something I take seriously and will continue to do, even if Chipotle may disagree with how I do so.

by Peggy Lowe | February 14, 2012

Well said, Mike. As many have said, it's a bit simplistic. And as one person told me via the Harvest Network yesterday: "Not eloquent. Odd.” I thought this post was interesting today, from the Food Integrity Campaign:

http://foodwhistleblower.org/blog/23-2012/290-chipotle-ad-criticizes-ind...

Should ag businesses get a state program for undocumented workers?

By Peggy Lowe

3 Feb 2012
Immigrant workers picking green beans in an unidentified state. (BigStock image)

The hot-button issue of filling tough jobs in the country’s dairies, feedlots and fields — jobs typically held by illegal immigrants — has landed in the heartland.

A Kansas business coalition that has watched the devastating toll that anti-illegal immigration laws have taken on the agriculture industry in states like Arizona have come up with what it calls a sensible approach to managing undocumented workers.

On Thursday, a bill was introduced in the Kansas Legislature that would create a state program to assist undocumented workers in getting federal authorization to stay and work here.

But critic Kris Kobach — the Kansas Secretary of State who helped draft the Arizona law – calls it a “political fantasy.”

Who will be the farmer of the future?

By Peggy Lowe

2 Feb 2012

So just like virtually everybody else, I’m a sucker for babies and puppies. If you are, too, you’ll want to watch Clay Masters’ excellent video feature about Bart Hall, a Kansas farmer who has taken on an apprentice. (The babies and puppies you'll have to discover yourself.)

Actually, this video could be viewed as a trailer for a documentary that Clay is working on about the farmer of the future.

It’s an interesting question: who will feed the nine billion people expected to populate the world by 2050?

We took that to the Harvest Network, which is where we found Bart. He answered our query: Who is the farmer of the future?

Bart has an interesting story and it hooked me with another thing I’ll always read about – family farms. He and his wife, Margit, are worried that their 11-month-old daughter won’t be ready to take over for them soon enough. So they found an apprentice.

Watch Clay’s piece to meet an interesting young man from the ‘burbs, as the apprentice puts it, who feels grateful to have a gig in farming. And expect Clay’s documentary to be aired sometime this Spring.

Hungry Midwest vegetarians? Not on this map

By Peggy Lowe

31 Jan 2012

I wonder if Arthur Sulzberger, the New York Times correspondent based in Kansas City, thought his first-person piece on the difficulty of being a vegetarian in the Midwest would create so much attention.

I wrote about this a couple weeks ago (The ‘Mecca of meat?’ Who, us?) and posed this question via the Harvest Network: Is there really a “startling lack of fresh produce here? I asked you to fact check his piece, and boy, did I hear back from some good reporters.

Those who responded were mostly offended by this tempest in the tempeh and came through with many suggestions for the obviously hungry Sulzberger. I received so many thoughtful responses, in fact, that I decided to share them with you, via this map, created by Harvest web wunderkind Jeremy Bernfeld.

Why the floating globes of green iceberg lettuce? Well, that’s just my sparty-pants nod to this paragraph in Sulzberger’s piece:

“This is a part of the country — and there’s no polite way to put this — where the most common vegetable you’ll see on dinner plates is iceberg lettuce."

When ‘local’ goes loco for McDonald’s

By Peggy Lowe

25 Jan 2012
(Twitter)

Old McDonald’s had a farm (campaign). Why’d it go so low?

Twitter-types have had a lot of fun in the last couple weeks with McDonald’s new ad campaign that attempts to link its products to farmers.

I first asked you about it earlier this month, when Mickey D’s launched commercials focused on a potato farmer and a beef rancher. McDonald’s said it was about “telling our farm-to-fork story about our food.”  I asked: What do you think of the McDonald’s farmers ads?

Let’s just say my polite question, compared with the, um, dietary and paranoid pothead response, makes me look as prim as Miss Manners.

The folks who answered my Harvest Network query were also polite and offered thoughtful responses.

The 'Mecca of meat?' Who, us?

By Peggy Lowe

18 Jan 2012
We have BBQ, the blues and blue cows...at Kansas City's historic 18th & Vine. (jimmywayne/flickr)

We were trying to mind our good Midwestern manners but even we can’t ignore the outraged din since the New York Times knocked our meat-filled dinners and diners.

Last week, the Times’ man in Kansas City, Arthur G. Sulzberger, wrote a first-person piece about how difficult it is to be a vegetarian in the Midwest. He called us a “Mecca of meat” (guilty as charged), that the safest option at Arthur Bryant’s BBQ is a mug of Budweiser (don’t forget the souvenir cup), and that “bacon comes standard in salads” (hell, yeah).

Even though the region boasts some of the finest farmland in the world, there is a startling lack of fresh produce here. This is a part of the country — and there’s no polite way to put this — where the most common vegetable you’ll see on dinner plates is iceberg lettuce.

Well, I didn’t know that the term “iceberg lettuce” is now a dirty word, but I am a little miffed that he would mock the American Royal World Series of Barbeque as “perhaps the most important event on Kansas City social calenders.” Really? He’s not excited when the BBQ smoke blots out the sun that last weekend of September?

Bringing health care to rural Kansas, one doc at a time

By Peggy Lowe

11 Jan 2012
(Photo courtesy of ashlandks.com)

Here’s how you get to Ashland, Kansas: drive south out of Kansas City for 178 miles, take a right at Wichita. Go another 117 miles straight west, take a left onto a two-lane highway at the crossroads of four pieces of cropland. Go another 55 miles and you can’t miss it: the water tower with “Ashland” painted across its broad front is like a pop-up pin planted on this flat plain.

For the geographically challenged (that includes me), Ashland, population 855, is in southwest Kansas, near the Oklahoma border.

I drove down here Monday, and after my left and right turns, respectively, I covered 352 miles over five hours, thanks to my lead foot and a natural ability to dodge the state troopers. I’m here to do an interesting story about a chronic problem – the difficulty in finding doctors to live and serve in remote areas to serve a dwindling population.

Are you from a small town? Do you have insight into recruiting and retaining doctors in rural areas? Click here to tell your story to the Harvest Network.

I’m from a small town and I get it. It’s hard to lure young doctors out here in hopes that they serve vast areas of prairie populated by just a few people, at least according to the standards set on the coasts. Will young men and women fresh from med school be attracted to the low home prices, good schools and friendly people?

How does fracking affect farming?

By Peggy Lowe

4 Jan 2012
A natural gas drill over Marcellus Shale deposits in the eastern U.S. (BigStock image)

You know it’s a hot controversy when the celebrities get involved, right?

First Mark Ruffalo started organizing opposition to horizontal drilling for natural gas in New York, featured in this NY Times story that also quotes Debra Winger. Recently Mario Batali joined a bunch of chefs who are urging the New York governor to oppose fracking in that state. (And kudos to our public media pals at New York Public Media for the active verb in this swell headline: “NYC Chefs: Don’t frack with our ingredients.”

So when my editor, Donna Vestal, and I started talking about doing a story on fracking – the new, eight-letter F-word -- we wanted to know something much more important than just who supports it and who doesn’t.

We wanted to know how horizontal hydraulic fracturing will affect farmers. Will it be a boon to land-rich, cash-poor farmland owners seeking a profit? Or could it be a contaminant to the precious groundwater used for production in parched parts of the Midwest?