The big headline from the summer of 2023 not about indictments or blockbuster movies is the weather. It was the hottest July on record. Parts of the country are suffering from weeks of triple-digit temperatures and drought while others are experiencing severe storms and flash flooding.

If Wisconsinites felt a sense of safety from the worst effects of climate change, smoke from Canadian wildfires that made our air quality among the worst in the world for a spell upended that notion. Not surprisingly, this has people wondering what it means for their loved ones, neighbors and the world around them. It’s one of the reasons the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is teaming up with Wisconsin Watch and the Sustainability Institute of La Crosse for an event in La Crosse next month.

Look at a map of the midsection of the country, and the one thing that stands out is the Mississippi River. The vast network of rivers and streams that feed the river drains the waters of 42% of the continental United States. The river carries more shipping traffic than an interstate highway, provides an enormous habitat for fish, waterfowl and other wildlife, and supplies drinking water to more than 50 cities. Food grown in the basin accounts for more than 90 percent of the nation’s agricultural exports.

Yet despite this footprint, there hasn’t been any large-scale news coverage of this area until the launch of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk last year. The desk is a collaboration of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Report for America and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Ten journalists from news organizations across the region are now providing in-depth stories and sharing them widely across media outlets.

“We’re trying to do something that’s kind of unique, which is to take an ecosystem approach to reporting,” explains Sara Shipley Hiles, executive director of the desk and an associate professor at the university. “This kind of takes us outside of our usual, state level orientation or our media market orientation where we’re really thinking just what impacts us locally and helps us kind of fly at a 40,000 foot level and think about well, how are these impacts playing out around me?”

There are two Wisconsin-based reporters that are part of the initiative Madeline Heim, from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Bennet Goldstein, from Wisconsin Watch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization. The pair will be among the panelists at an event open to the public in La Crosse from 7 to 9 p.m., Sept. 21 at the Lunda Center at Western Technical College.

Get free tickets for “Wisconsin Waters: Issues & Actions” here.

Goldstein and Heim will be joined by JC Nelson, acting center director for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center, Lee Donahue, a supervisor from the town of Campbell on French Island, where residents have been drinking bottled water since 2021 because of because of PFAS contamination in private wells, and a representative from the La Crosse Urban Stormwater Group.

Casey Meehan, director of Sustainability and Resilience at Western Technical College will moderate the panel discussion and a question-and-answer segment with the audience. Lee Rasch, executive director of LeaderEthics a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting integrity in American democracy, will serve as the emcee.

The Wisconsin-based stories over the last year have touched on many of the same topics making headlines this summer: flooding, drought and wildfire smoke. They’ve also touched on issues that affect water quality, such as PFAS contamination and pollution from nitrates and road salt.

Hiles said as the initiative enters its second year, organizers want to explore more solutions reporting as well as spark additional conversations like next month’s gathering in Wisconsin. There is no shortage of issues to discuss in La Crosse after an unusual summer to say the least.

“Especially when the smoke started and that was such a shocking development for many of us here in the Midwest and then the extreme heat, you know, that was raging across the region, you know, if the very dangerous levels in the South and, you know, high levels in the North and, you know, ridiculous humidity and the the flooding that’s happened and the drought that’s happened,” Hiles said. “We’re bouncing all over the place with this crazy weather and it’s just becomes very clear, you know, you can see what’s happening so much more easily when you understand that these are major patterns, not just regionally, but globally.”

Jim Fitzhenry is the editor of the Ideas Lab at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Reach him at (920) 993-7154 or jfitzhen@gannett.com. Follow on Twitter at @JimFitzhenry, Instagram at @jimfitzhenry or LinkedIn. 

Summer of weather records one reason we’re talking water quality in La Crosse Sept. 21 is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

At the junction of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa, there’s a place called Reno Bottoms, where the Mississippi River spreads out from its main channel into thousands of acres of tranquil backwaters and wetland habitat.

For all its beauty, there’s something unsettling about the landscape, something hard to ignore: hundreds of the trees growing along the water are dead.

Billy Reiter-Marolf, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, calls it the boneyard. It’s a popular spot for hunting, fishing and paddling, so people have begun to take notice of the abundance of tall, leafless stumps pointing to the sky.

“Visitors ask me, ‘What’s going on, what’s happening here?’” Reiter-Marolf said. “It just looks so bad.”

Floodplain forests play a pivotal role in the river ecosystem – creating wildlife habitat, improving water quality, storing carbon and slowing flooding.

But they’re disappearing.

As their name indicates, these forests generally withstand flooding, which happens on the Mississippi every year. In the last few decades, though, they’ve been swamped with high water from long-lasting floods, soaking the trees more than they can stand and causing mass die-offs. And once those taller trees die, sun-loving grasses take over the understory in thick mats that make it nearly impossible for new trees to grow.

Even before high water began to take its toll, the Upper Mississippi River floodplain had lost nearly half of its historical forest cover due to urban and agricultural land use, as well as changes to the way the water flowed after locks and dams were installed in the 1930s. A similar tale is true along the lower Mississippi.

The recent losses are worrying to scientists and land managers – especially since climate change will make extreme flooding a more frequent threat.

There’s money available to make a dent in the problem. The challenge is finding the right solution before things get much worse.

“It’s really difficult to say, ‘Why here? What caused this?’” said Andy Meier, a forester with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “How do you restore it, being confident you won’t just have the same thing happen again?”

High waters hit floodplain forests

The forests on the upper river were historically made up of maple, ash and elm trees. That began to change with the onset of Dutch elm disease, first discovered in the U.S. in the 1930s. Several decades later, the emerald ash borer began to kill ash trees.

“All you’re left with is the maple,” said Bruce Henry, a forest ecologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service. “The maple gets hit with a flood, and you know, boom chicka. You’ve got a big dead forest.”

Most places on the river don’t look as bad as Reno Bottoms. There are still many trees in the floodplain, and the average person may not notice that much is wrong.

But losses can add up quickly. According to a 2022 report on ecological trends on the upper Mississippi, forest cover along the stretch of the river from Minnesota down to Clinton, Iowa had decreased by roughly 6% between 1989 and 2010. Its next segment, which bottoms out before St. Louis, had lost about 4% of forest in that time.

In some spots, those losses have escalated. Along the river between Bellevue and Clinton, Iowa, for example, forest cover dropped nearly 18% between 2010 and 2020, said Nathan De Jager, who researches the upper river’s floodplain forests for the U.S. Geological Survey.

Though it was a wet decade overall, a massive flood in 2019 caused the majority of damage, particularly in areas where the river forms the border between Wisconsin and northern Iowa, De Jager said. That flood was unusual not just for its intensity but for its duration – some trees were partly submerged for 100 days or more.

In 2020, when Reiter-Marolf was conducting a forest inventory in a stretch of floodplain near Harpers Ferry, Iowa, 35% of the trees there were dead.

It’s pretty clear that excess water is causing forest loss, De Jager said. What exactly is driving the high water isn’t as well sorted out.

But climate change, as well as changes in agricultural and urban land use, are likely factors. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which can produce more intense rainfall. And that water is running off the landscape faster than it used to. One example De Jager gave is the use of drainage tiles – networks of underground pipes that suck excess water out of soil. The practice can increase crop yields for farmers, but it also sends water more quickly to the nearest river or stream. 

High water is hurting forests at both ends of the life cycle, killing adult trees as well as the seedlings struggling to grow up in the understory. And it’s triggered some other unexpected consequences, too – when the water is high, beavers can reach parts of trees they weren’t tall enough to gnaw off before.

Add to that the threats of tree diseases and invasive plants, and the distress signals are clear.

“It’s hard to pinpoint which of these stressors are the most important ones,” said Lyle Guyon, a terrestrial ecologist at the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center. “But the fact that we’ve got so many of them piled on top of each other, all happening at the same time, is certainly not helping.”

Forest loss degrades habitat, water quality, flood control

Unlike the wildfires that burn through forests and homes out west, forest loss in the Mississippi River floodplain doesn’t impact very many people’s day-to-day lives, Meier said.

But it is impacting the many creatures that call that floodplain home.

In the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley – the historic floodplain of the lower river – a 2020 study estimated that about 30% of today’s land cover is forest, which used to be continuous across the valley. Loretta Battaglia, director of the Center for Coastal Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said wildlife species loss illustrates the damage.

Battaglia, a Louisiana native who has studied forest restoration in the river valley, pointed to the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that once lived in the valley’s floodplain forests but is now considered by many to be extinct.

“The loss of this forest played a huge role in the extinction of that bird that needed a lot of area to fly around and do its thing,” Battaglia said.

The once-endangered Louisiana black bear faced the same hardship, she said, after deforestation fragmented the long stretches of floodplain forest it preferred to roam in.

Beyond providing habitat, trees in the floodplain also capture pollutants that would otherwise run into the river – a critical role along the Mississippi, which suffers from excess nitrogen and phosphorus that collects in the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

The forests along the uppermost parts of the river usually don’t act as flood buffers because there isn’t much private property that abuts them, but that changes downriver in Iowa and Illinois, where big levees protect profitable farmland and towns from the river’s whims.

A study in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association found that the ability of forests to slow water played a big role in reducing levee damage on the lower Missouri River, which feeds into the Mississippi, during the river’s historic 1993 flood. More than 40% of levee failures during the flood occurred in segments of the floodplain with no “woody corridor,” as the study describes it, and nearly 75% occurred in segments where the woody corridor was less than 300 feet wide.

“The federal government could potentially save millions of dollars through management of floodplain forests,” the study’s authors wrote in their conclusion.

It’s unlikely that forest cover along the river will ever return to its original levels, Meier said. For all the usefulness it provides, though, he said “we need to do everything we can” to maintain what’s there now.

How to do that, though, can be a hard question to answer.

Restoration efforts are a learning process

On a hot day in early June, Meier and fellow Army Corps foresters Sara Rother and Lewis Wiechmann planted small trees on Goose Island in La Crosse County. Mud squelched under their feet – a reminder that the river had flooded to near-record levels a month earlier – and cottonwood seeds fell from above like snowflakes.

By Meier’s estimate, none of the falling seeds would successfully grow to be adult trees. The site had too much competing vegetation, much of it reed canary grass, an aggressive species with a thick root layer that prevents trees from being able to establish in the soil.

The young trees they planted, honey locust and river birch, can handle more flooding than some other tree species. Deciding what to plant at each site is a careful calculation of how much water could pool there, how much sun it gets and which animals could potentially come through and chomp away their hard work.

Much of the time, Meier said, it’s trial and error.

A U.S. Geological Survey effort could help eliminate some of that uncertainty. Scientists have modeled flood inundation decades into the future to see which swathes of floodplain forest could thrive, and conversely, which ones will get too wet to survive.

De Jager’s team recently completed modeling for Reno Bottoms. Next year, the Army Corps and other agencies will begin a $37 million habitat restoration project to rehabilitate forests in the area.

The project, funded with federal dollars from the Upper Mississippi River Restoration program, includes close to 550 acres of forest restoration, clearing away aggressive vegetation from the understory and planting new trees. It also includes more than 50 acres where agency staff will raise the elevation of an island to give trees a fighting chance at withstanding future floods.

A little boost in elevation makes a huge difference in the floodplain, Henry said. That’s what they’re betting on.

Now seems to be a good time to do the work. Interest is growing in forest restoration, Meier said, and along with it, funding. In addition to the Reno Bottoms project, the Army Corps and the Fish and Wildlife Service have their own budgets to spend on tree planting, including millions from the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year.

The hard part, of course, is that working with trees is a long game. It could be 20, 50 or 100 years before the seedlings growing today become the mature forests of tomorrow – and in that time, the river could change, too.

It means that foresters will have to work with precision, but also with a little hope that they’re on the right track.

“You don’t really know what the result’s going to be,” Henry said. “You’re setting things in action that you’re not going to see the fruit of.”

The Mississippi River’s floodplain forests are dying. The race is on to bring them back. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is part of the series A Changing Basin from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Take a quick survey and let us know how extreme weather is affecting you.

A hot summer and dry spring have brought drought to a large part of the Midwest.

The lack of moisture has far-reaching implications, including on agriculture and water levels on the country’s largest rivers.

“Rain is essential — it is where drought starts and ends,” said Illinois State Climatologist Trent Ford. “As we were going into drought from April through June, we just weren’t getting rain.”

The situation highlights the complexity of exiting drought when a state or region can slip into it relatively easily, Ford said. Rainfall across parts of the Midwest in recent weeks is helpful, but it may not be enough to alleviate the dryness, he said.

Different kinds of rain

One complicating factor is the changing climate, which is causing increasingly sporadic rain events that can drop inches of rain in only a few hours when they do come, said Jason Knouft, a biology professor at St. Louis University who studies the impacts of human activities on freshwater resources.

“Those seem to be more common than these long soaking rains,” he said. “When we get these intense rainfall events, you’ve got a lot of water hitting the landscape really quickly.”

The Northeast — especially Vermont — and parts of western Kentucky both experienced intense rain events this month, which spurred significant flooding. The dry ground cannot absorb all the water that comes in these kinds of storms, Knouft said.

“When you dump a huge amount of water onto a surface, even if you’re dumping it onto soil, there’s only so much the soil can absorb,” he said.

The rest runs off, meaning a local watershed is capturing only a fraction of all of the rain that fell, Ford said. He points to the St. Louis region as an example, which is close to the anniversary of historic rainfall last year.

The nine inches that fell in late July helped propel last summer to rank as the sixth wettest of all time for St. Louis, even though the region was quite dry beforehand, Ford explained.

“The majority runs off. It’s down the Mississippi, down to the Gulf. It’s gone” he said.

What’s in the ground

Soil conditions also play an important role in drought relief. But what’s growing in the ground isn’t always the best at capturing water, Knouft said.

“We’ve got these row crops that don’t have particularly deep roots,” he said. “So when the rain falls, there’s not as much stability in the soil.”

The water just washes the soil away.

Cover crops, when a field isn’t in active agricultural production, can help soils retain more water from rain, Knouft said. Perennial crops aid, too, because their roots are deeper and maintain the soil integrity, which in turn makes it easier to hold onto water, he added.

Various crops also respond to drought differently. Corn and soybeans can bounce back from early season dryness if given some rain, though current forecasts have some worried about severe crop damage.

Other crops aren’t as resilient on an annual basis, Ford said.

“We’ve seen more widespread impacts to pasture and hay conditions,” he said, explaining that grasses often stop producing when they are dry.

Those pasture lands may not return to productivity until next year, Ford added, which highlights how complicated it can be for an area to get out of drought.

He said if rainfall increases to normal amounts, the Midwest will see relief for corn and soybean crops this season. But it takes much longer for groundwater reserves to recover from being drawn down.

Flow on the nation’s biggest rivers

This year’s drought is also raising concern about low flows on rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri.

“It’s really the third summer in a row where we’ve had some sort of classification of drought in the majority of the basin,” said Mike Welvaert, service coordination hydrologist for the North Central River Forecast Center. “Most of the reservoirs, lakes, and some of the smaller rivers and such just don’t have that much water in them.”

Water is trickling out of those resources, but only the minimum to sustain river flows, Welvaert said. That’s been the case already for weeks, he explained.

Already some states have issued water restrictions because of the prolonged dryness, Welvaert added.

“The fact that we’re so low, so early in the year,” Welvaert said, “…that is where our concern lies.”

It comes ahead of the Mississippi River’s natural low point of the year in the fall.

“It’s the lowest time for rivers because it’s the cumulative effect of all the evaporation that happened in the summertime,” Ford said, in addition to surface water being used for irrigation of lawns and agriculture.

The drought conditions are affecting the Mississippi’s levels because there’s less overall water in the ground that contributes to the base flow in the river and its tributaries, Welvaert said.

In more normal springs and summers, precipitation falls frequently and percolates into the ground, sometimes deep into the soil, he explained. It can then return to the surface as a spring or another source of groundwater, Welvaert added.

“That’s how most of the rivers maintain their certain level of water even when it’s dry out,” he said. “They’re getting water from underground sources.”

But the dryness across the upper Midwest and Great Plains means the top layer of soil is soaking up rain when it does fall, Welvaert said.

“We just don’t have any additional water to send downstream even when it does rain,” he said. “The same thing is happening in the Missouri Basin.”

Both Welvaert and Ford stressed that the Mississippi’s fate for this year isn’t sealed yet. The weather patterns can still shift and produce a string of thunderstorms that drop consistent rain across the entire basin, Welvaert said.

“We really need more prolonged rainfall, but we can keep it at bay if we get the right amount of rain in the right places at the right times,” Welvaert said. “We’re still hoping for some of that to happen.”

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Most of the Midwest is in drought – and there’s no simple way to get out of it is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

After a developer began eyeing rural northwest Wisconsin for a large swine farm, five small towns enacted ordinances aimed at curbing environmental and health impacts.

Then, the state’s biggest business and agricultural interest groups fought back. They engaged disaffected residents. Some locals sued. Others ran for political office. New leaders in one Polk County town rescinded regulations on concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.

Now, officials in the remaining towns with livestock regulations wonder whether they, too, are in legal crosshairs. 

The Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation and Wisconsin Dairy Alliance have filed a far-reaching public records request for documents from an advisory group that shaped the municipalities’ CAFO rules.

In 2019, a developer proposed an operation, known as Cumberland LLC, that would have housed up to 26,350 pigs — the region’s first swine CAFO and what would be the largest in Wisconsin. Residents later formed the advisory group, believing that state livestock laws insufficiently protect health and quality of life.

In October, two farm families, represented by WMC Litigation Center, sued one municipality in the advisory group: Laketown, population 1,024. The town’s livestock, crop and specialty farms make up almost two-thirds of the landscape.

The plaintiffs, later joined by the Farm Bureau, argued that Laketown’s ordinance diminished property values and prospects for future expansion, a government overreach that could “essentially outlaw mid-to-large sized livestock farms.”

Scott Rosenow, the Litigation Center’s executive director, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

The records request follows the dismissal of that lawsuit, but some residents wonder if the lobbying organizations are “fishing” for another case, the latest effort to prevent local governments from regulating farming in America’s Dairyland.

Pig farm proposal roils northwest Wisconsin 

Cumberland’s proposal sparked heated public meetings, dozens of letters to newspapers and the formation of a nonprofit opposition organization.

The CAFO would be constructed in Trade Lake, north of Laketown in neighboring Burnett County. Sows would be bred and piglets trucked elsewhere after weaning, where they would grow until slaughter.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources rejected Cumberland’s application in March. The developer recently pitched a scaled-down project that would house 19,800 swine.

CAFO opponents in Laketown include back-to-the-landers, who view such farms as inhumane to animals. Others fear the health impacts of the millions of gallons of manure facilities generate annually, to be spread on farm fields.

About 90% of all nitrate groundwater pollution in Wisconsin comes from fertilizer and manure application, according to the DNR. The naturally occurring nutrient helps crops grow, but scientists associate exposure in drinking water with birth defects, thyroid disease and increased risk of developing certain cancers.

Other concerns are rooted in economics. Some Laketown farmers say CAFOs threaten smaller operations; others fear shrinking property values.

“It’s nothing more than big corporations getting together with the government and putting the screws to the little people,” said Vietnam Army veteran and recently ousted Laketown supervisor, Bruce Paulsen, who, like many opponents, speculates that the pork will be exported to China.

Laketown’s ordinance explained 

The town ordinances regulate not where, but how CAFOs operate.

Laketown’s rules applied to new operations housing at least 700 “animal units,” the equivalent of 1,750 swine or 500 dairy cows, and required applicants to submit plans for preventing infectious diseases, air pollution and odor; managing waste and handling dead animals.

It also mandated traffic and property value impact studies, a surety for clean-ups and decommissioning and an annual $1-per-animal-unit permit fee — atop costs to review the application and enforce the terms of the permit.

The ordinance did not affect existing livestock facilities as long as the farms did not change owners, alter their animal species or expand beyond 1,000 animal units. But several residents believed the strict requirements amounted to a CAFO ban that would bar existing farms from growing.

Others protested government spending on the advisory group. Some said the smell of manure comes with living in a rural area.

Polk County Supervisor Brad Olson asked why farming gets blamed when excessive road salt and wastewater treatment plant overflows also taint water.

“I don’t think anybody denies that agriculture is part of the problem — or has the potential to be part of the problem in pollution,” said Olson, who farms crops and used to be a dairy farmer. “If we’re going to look at pollution, let’s look at the bigger picture.”

Clothing-optional campground owners Jen and Scott Matthiesen initially signed onto the lawsuit before attorneys requested they withdraw out of concern their business — “we’re not a nudist camp,” Jen said — would distract from the case. The couple worried that singling out farming could pave the way for special regulation of other businesses.

New Laketown Sup. Ron Peterson ran on the promise of overturning the ordinance. He believes it unlawfully superseded state laws. Those laws ban local authorities from regulating livestock more strictly than the state — unless they can prove a need to protect health or safety.

“The Wisconsin Legislature has been very clear in the statute that it’s their intent that they want uniformity in the regulation of animal agriculture,” said Peterson, a former attorney.

Gaps in DNR regulations 

But supporters of Laketown’s ordinance say it merely corked regulatory leaks.

The DNR acknowledges it lacks legal authority to manage how livestock farming affects odor, noise, traffic and other issues unrelated to water quality. The agency also has struggled to keep pace with the proliferation of CAFOs, defined as farms holding at least 1,000 animal units.

The vast majority of Wisconsin’s 337 operations form the backbone of the state’s dairy industry. Just a dozen house swine.

As the DNR sees more proposals for large farms in recent years, staff shortages and turnover have fueled a backlog in permitting, delays in CAFO inspections and inconsistencies in violations enforcement, according to legislative reports.

As of June, the DNR’s permitting backlog totaled 20%, slightly less than this spring when administrators said they would need an additional 2.25 full-time-equivalent staff to handle the growing workload.

Sidestepping ‘right-to-farm’ protections

Wisconsin’s “right-to-farm” and livestock facility siting laws protect farmers from nuisance claims and generally rebuff local control over CAFOs.

Regulating livestock operations, but not banning them or restricting their locations, could enable communities to sidestep the laws — with major implications for the state’s $104.8 billion agricultural industry.

The strategy, successfully deployed in 2016 in Bayfield County, appears to be spreading. Facing the prospective expansion of a dairy CAFO in Pierce County, about 60 miles south of Laketown, residents are urging county supervisors to enact a CAFO moratorium until they can develop an ordinance.

“The problem is, we’re a disease for them,” said Trade Lake resident Rick Painter, a retired attorney who opposes Cumberland’s construction. “We’re a cancer, and they can’t afford for the cancer to metastasize.”

When confronted with legal threats, Laketown was among the few Wisconsin local governments to stand its ground, perhaps due to the deep expertise of its full- and part-time residents.

Trade Lake property owner and trial lawyer Andy Marshall and his brother David agreed to represent the town at no cost. If the other towns requested assistance, Andy Marshall said he would offer his services. Without money for a good legal defense, he said, small towns can get “steamrolled” by wealthy interest groups.

“It shouldn’t be the community that suffers because these companies can’t safely operate,” Marshall said.

Farmers want expansion options 

Farmer Sara Byl views the anti-CAFO chorus with increasing skepticism. 

Her family owns Northernview Farm, growing about 600 acres of corn and alfalfa to feed their herd of Holsteins in Laketown. Before Sara and her parents sued over Laketown’s ordinance, she served on the town’s livestock facility licensing committee, which studied whether it needed CAFO regulations.

Byl felt the effort evolved into a push against all large-scale farming rather than one hog CAFO.

“It was all about the hog farm — hog farm this, hog farm that,” she said. “Then they left off the word ‘hog’ and they just kept saying ‘farm.’ ”

The Byl family, three generations of farmers, doesn’t operate a CAFO, but Sara says the farm might grow if her son, nieces or nephews pursue agriculture careers. 

Farmers expand for multiple reasons, said Michael Langemeier, a professor in the agricultural economics department at Purdue University.

Farm expansion and consolidation help lower production costs, increase efficiency and satisfy demands for safe, low-cost and uniform agricultural products. Larger farms also can financially support multiple owners and obtain favorable prices on supplies. 

But CAFO opponents argue the consumer gains are offset by the federal policies that support large livestock farms, including taxpayer funded subsidies, and other costs resulting from their health and environmental impacts.

Bracing for next lawsuit

Although newly elected Laketown officials rescinded the rules in April, the CAFO regulations of four other towns remain intact.

That same month, the Dairy Alliance submitted public records requests to all towns in the advisory group for communications from current or former town supervisors about the group’s work. The Farm Bureau also requested records from all advisory group members related to its work, as well as its expenses.

Asked for comment, Cindy Leitner, the Dairy Alliance’s president, ceased correspondence with Wisconsin Watch after being provided with questions. H. Dale Peterson, general counsel to the Farm Bureau, did not respond to interview requests.

“I see it as a great opportunity to show the Farm Bureau all the great work we’ve done,” quipped Lisa Doerr, the advisory group’s chairperson.

Doerr, who grows forage on her 80-acre Laketown farm, contends the group was not a governmental body and lacked decision-making powers, so its members aren’t subject to Wisconsin’s public records law. She denied Peterson’s request.

“If they want to push me, then bring it on,” Doerr said.

Bone Lake town Chairman Andy Brown already fulfilled the records requests.

“I don’t have anything to hide,” he said. “If they want to see my emails back and forth about how to make this happen, then fine.”

With a defense team at the ready, Brown says he isn’t worried. “This is an important test case, and somebody’s gonna have to be in front of that firing squad some time or another,” he said.  “And so if it’s us, it’s us.”

Wisconsin towns brace for next fight on local control over large farms is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is part of the series A Changing Basin from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Take a quick survey and let us know how extreme weather is affecting you.

Masks made a comeback in Wisconsin this week. 

As smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed the state, health officials urged people to wear face coverings – previously worn en masse to reduce transmission of COVID-19 – if they had to spend time outdoors. This time, they blocked out smoke particles. 

At Madison’s Pinney Library staff handed out N95 masks. The building was busy Wednesday, especially the children’s section, in part because poor air quality had caused the school district to cancel summer school and community recreation programs for the day.

“After COVID, this seems like another big thing that we haven’t experienced before,” said library page Nancie Cotter. “It’s almost a little scary.” 

The lingering presence of wildfire smoke has made for an unusual start to summer across the Midwest. It also comes during a near-record drought crisping fields across the Corn Belt and the threat of hotter summers to come. 

Many have thought of the region as a climate haven, rich with water resources and shielded from sea level rise and powerful hurricanes.

This summer is clouding that picture. 

“When we think of both climate and air quality, we often think of it as something that happens to other people,” said Tracey Holloway, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. “As climate changes, it’s changing everything for everyone.” 

Smoke deluge catches people by surprise

Forecasters say a perfect storm of factors have caused the smoke to settle over the Midwest, including atmospheric conditions. The way Canada manages its wildfires also plays a part. 

And the changing climate is bringing higher temperatures, periods of drought and more volatile winds that yield wildfires that burn faster and stronger than before. They also start earlier in the year. 

The severity of the problem over the past month has been a shock to the public, curbing much-anticipated summer activities. In Minneapolis in mid-June, the city’s air quality was among the worst in the world. When another wave of smoke washed over the city at the end of the month, beaches around Cedar Lake – normally packed on summer afternoons – were deserted.

“In most people’s lifetimes, this is the worst it has been,” said Matt Taraldsen, who supervises a team of air quality forecasters and researchers at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Smaller smoke incursions from Canada in 2018 and 2021 gave forecasters indications of what was to come – but nothing compares to this summer. The only real analogue stretches back over a century, Taraldsen said, when a series of fires in 1918 ripped across northeastern Minnesota, roughly from Bemidji to Duluth.

Minnesota officials have been offering advice to colleagues in several surrounding states, which had not had the experience of warning the public in recent years about smoke, Taraldsen said. But even if Minnesota had a head start in refining its public communication, the actual predictions are posing a major technical challenge.

The American, Canadian, UK and European weather models used by forecasters don’t always show with fine detail how air is moving between different levels of the atmosphere, making it hard to guess whether choking smoke will be pushed to the ground, or held harmlessly aloft.

The smoke and its effects have surprised people. Mark Hayward, an arts performer from Madison, said he nearly had to cut short a yo-yo performance at the iconic Milwaukee music festival Summerfest because he couldn’t stop coughing. 

“It’s nuts,” Hayward said. “I have family in southern California, but I never thought I’d have to deal with this in the Midwest.”

Experts say Midwest won’t be a climate ‘haven’

Though it’s not clear yet how much smoke the region will have to contend with in summers to come, other indicators of climate change are emerging. 

“Weather whiplash,” as Wisconsin state climatologist Steve Vavrus described the events of the past six months, is one. 

The Mississippi River flooded to near-record levels this spring. Now, much of the Midwest is gripped by drought, setting farmers on edge during the growing season. 

In Illinois and Iowa, which together produce more than a quarter of the nation’s corn and soybeans, at least 90% of those plants face drought conditions. Arid conditions are expected to persist through September. 

Climate models predict more extreme jumps like this between wet and dry periods, Vavrus said. Volatility is something the public will have to get used to. 

Future summer temperatures are a little less certain. Although summers in the Midwest aren’t heating up as fast as other parts of the country, the region is still likely to see more extremely hot days. That will be exacerbated in places like Milwaukee, which suffers from the urban heat island effect, which happens when large cities hold in more heat than surrounding areas.

Cities around the Great Lakes are often floated as climate destinations – places where people imagine they’ll be safe from the worst impacts of the changing climate. In some senses, that will remain true. The lakes won’t dry up, wildfires don’t burn here like they do in California, and hurricanes that strike the south hard usually show up as just a little rain.

But the region isn’t immune. Anna Haines, who leads a subcommittee of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts focused on climate migration, said her group favors throwing out the term “haven” to describe Midwest climate. 

“When you look up the definition, it’s a shelter, a refuge … a safe place,” said Haines, also the director of the Center for Land Use Education at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. “We don’t think that is correct.”

Bennet Goldstein of Wisconsin Watch contributed to this story. 

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Midwest states, often billed as climate havens, suffer summer of smoke, drought, heat is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is part of the series A Changing Basin from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Take a quick survey and let us know how extreme weather is affecting you.

A dusty Nick Stanek stepped off his tractor after an evening of round baling hay.

Conditions in La Farge, Wisconsin, are currently great for the crop, but not much else. The weather has been so dry, the grass crunches beneath Stanek’s feet.

Members of a three-generation farm family, he and his brother also grow corn and soybeans across 400 acres.

But the weather isn’t cooperating like the siblings do.

A recent rain shower coaxed some of the soybeans to germinate, but it wasn’t enough; many have struggled to emerge from the “bone dry” ground.

“Of course, if we don’t get any rain, our crop will be a complete loss,” Stanek said.

Farmers are struggling all across the Corn Belt. Drought expanded rapidly throughout the Midwest in June — doubling within the first week after significantly less rainfall than normal. Forecasters say the region is not likely to get relief anytime soon.

Through September, arid conditions are expected to persist or even expand in eastern Iowa and Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin. 

More than 80% of corn and soybean crops in Illinois and Iowa — which together produce more than a quarter of the nation’s total — face drought conditions. Farmers are gritting their teeth as their crops dry up and deteriorate.

“Although it’s probably too early to declare massive losses in crops just yet, that potential is certainly there unless we get some decent rainfall,” said Mark Fuchs, a hydrologist at the St. Louis National Weather Service forecast office. 

But most of the Midwest, excluding Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, can expect an inch of rain or less in the next seven days.

“It’s not a jaw-busting outlook,” he said.

Todd Shea, with the NWS forecast office in La Crosse, Wisconsin, said dry weather can beget more dry weather “because you don’t have as much water around to add to the atmosphere which can help fuel thunderstorms.”

Circumstances in Missouri are among the worst in the Midwest, with nearly 16% of the state under extreme drought.

“We’ve heard a lot from farmers and ranchers, especially ranchers who are having to sell off cattle before they wanted to because they don’t have enough food, hay, grass — things cattle usually feed off of — to sustain their herds,” Fuchs said.

But Stan Nelson is holding onto optimism.

The southeast Iowa native farms just 12 miles west of the Mississippi River near Burlington and serves as the first vice president on the Iowa Corn Promotion Board.

In his 40-plus-year career, this drought is one of the earliest he recalls. Nelson sees nearby producers irrigating their fields a month earlier than they typically do. And the variety of corn he plants is currently 10 to 20 inches shorter than it should be at this point in the growing season.

“Our crop is being hurt,” he said. “I just don’t know how much.”

But new varieties of row crops can compensate for a lack of water, Nelson said.

“I’m not panicked yet.”

Conditions are not yet so dire as those experienced in late 2022 when persistent drought disrupted Mississippi River barge traffic and drew salt water from the Gulf of Mexico upstream, threatening New Orleans’ drinking water supply. But other impacts are evident.

U.S. Geological Survey water gauges have measured below-normal streamflow throughout the upper Mississippi River basin compared to this time last year, including all-time lows at St. Cloud, Minnesota, on the Mississippi River, and in Valley City, Illinois, along the Illinois River.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard has begun issuing safety advisories for barge traffic.

Low water has impacted the size and capacity of barge loads, driving up costs, according to Deb Calhoun, senior vice president of Waterways Council Inc., a national lobbying group. 

“But many in the industry believe there is the capacity to compensate for the inefficiencies in the near term,” she said in an email. 

Dredging within the vicinity of Memphis, Tennessee, an occasional bottleneck for Mississippi River barge traffic, is expected to help.

It’s not possible to specifically attribute the current drought to climate change, scientists said, but it falls within a pattern of more extreme weather events.

Models project that in coming years both precipitation and precipitation variability will intensify in some Midwestern states.

The region overall could get wetter at longer timescales, according to University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign researchers, with more intense month-to-month fluctuations, leading to increasingly frequent flooding or periods of drought.

A world of extremes leaves open the possibility of a meteorological rebound. And forecasters already predict some improvement this summer in parts of Minnesota along with the western halves of Iowa and Missouri.

“Hope is not lost because we could certainly regain rainfall back to normal, or potentially even surplus,” said Steve Vavrus, interim Wisconsin state climatologist.

If the worst comes to pass in Wisconsin, though, Stanek hopes to “ride it out” and make do with the money he earns from hay and repairing antique tractors, trucks and cars. He doesn’t have crop insurance. 

“It’ll be nip and tuck,” he said.

He must pay a monthly $2,000 mortgage on several properties he owns, and his savings will only last until October.

But, “soybeans are very tough,” Stanek said. “They can sit in the ground for a couple of months and still sprout.”

Tough, just like him.

Tegan Wendland contributed to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Midwest drought: Corn and soybeans suffer as forecasters expect no quick relief for farmers is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Seth Petersen was at his grandmother’s funeral, and his phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

Three hours away in the village of Luck, Wisconsin, where he served as director of public works, there was an emergency. Petersen was getting calls repeatedly, asking for his expertise.

Petersen and two other employees were responsible for drinking water, wastewater, street maintenance, park and cemetery maintenance and picking up stray dogs, he said. The job never stopped.

“Seth, what the (expletive) are you doing?” his brother-in-law said to him as he came back to the family gathering from another call. “Why are you living like this?”

Petersen left that job at the end of last year. Now, he helps train water operators in small communities for the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.

Luck is not an outlier. In small and rural communities across the U.S., water system operators are stretched thin, covering around-the-clock responsibilities to keep water running safely and reliably despite aging and underfunded infrastructure.

The consequences of a water system falling behind have received the national spotlight, infamously in Flint, Michigan, and most recently in Jackson, Mississippi, where majority-Black communities bore the brunt of mismanagement and aging infrastructure.

Thousands of under-resourced systems risk a similar fate, and small water systems — defined by the EPA as serving fewer than 10,000 people, and making up more than 90% of the nation’s community water systems — are in a particularly precarious position.

Their staffing is often sparse and underpaid. Infrastructure, in many places, is crumbling and underfunded, and though there is a fresh infusion of federal money on the table, it’s a challenge to access.

The American Rescue Plan Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and other programs represent a historic investment in the country’s water infrastructure, totaling billions of dollars.

But the total available funding, even after it’s all been doled out, still won’t be enough. One report from 2020 estimated that the U.S. would need to invest nearly $3.3 trillion in water and wastewater infrastructure projects between 2019 and 2039 to keep systems updated.

Many communities will also face increases in their water bills to keep up with infrastructure and staffing needs. Yet raising the price of water may prove unworkable in rural and historically-underinvested communities like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, some of the most impoverished in the country.

No one in the U.S. should have to worry about having safe drinking water, said Chris Groh, executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Water Association.

“But a town doesn’t take care of itself.”

Small community water systems falling behind

Over the last two decades, water systems in the ten states bordering the Mississippi River violated U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations for drinking water more than 438,000 times.

That figure includes thousands of instances of heightened levels of harmful chemicals in water each year. Nitrates, trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids, which have all been linked to various cancers and other health hazards, were top contaminants in the EPA’s violation data in 2022.

Nitrates are an indicator of agricultural runoff, common in rural areas. And trihalomethanes and haloacetic acids appear as byproducts of the water treatment process, when chlorine reacts with organic contents.

Addressing these issues can require expensive treatment technology. But in the last two decades, small and large utilities alike have reined in the number of violations.

However, an Ag and Water Desk analysis of EPA Safe Drinking Water Act violation data nationwide found small water systems have been slower to reduce their violations than larger systems. And these violations only represented those reported; there could be many more incidences of unreported issues.

In the ten states along the Mississippi River, both small and large water systems saw increases in violations newly reported during 2022. For small water systems, that increase was more significant.

That disparity is, at least in part, an indicator of the disadvantages facing small and rural water systems, according to Jennifer Sloan Ziegler, a Mississippi-based engineer serving as vice president of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Environmental and Water Resources Institute.

And recent injections of federal infrastructure funding won’t be enough, she said. They’re not sustained funding, she added, and “the sad thing about it is: It still doesn’t catch us up.”

‘I don’t have a day off’

The working conditions that drove Petersen to leave his position in Luck are a trend reflected in small communities across the country.

“I don’t have a day off,” said Nathan Taylor, lead operator of a small water plant in Wax, Kentucky. The days he’s not on-duty, his phone is constantly ringing as issues come up at the plant, he said.

Ziegler pointed out a water operator she knows nearby in the Mississippi Delta, whose responsibilities span four different water districts — “a huge, huge area,” she said.

Water system operators serve as a first line of defense for a community’s public health, and must have working knowledge of chemistry for licensing tests.

Yet operator pay in many small communities is about neck-and-neck with wages at the local McDonald’s. Other trades, like construction, often pay far more.

“You can go swing a hammer for 25 bucks an hour,” said Petersen, in Wisconsin, “...and you can ice fish all winter.”

A workforce survey last year in Kentucky found water utilities in the state pay as low as $10 per hour for an entry level position, with an average closer to $18. But 72% of managers reported losing staff to better pay in another job opportunity or other, often larger utilities.

The water workforce nationally is also aging overwhelmingly. Seventeen million workers are expected to leave the industry in the next decade, Ziegler said, and bringing young people into the profession has proven challenging.

“We’re losing people,” she said, and “we’re not getting them back.”

Federal money on the table, if you can get it

Widespread water workforce shortages make accessing infrastructure funding an even bigger task for small water systems’ overworked staff, despite desperate needs.

And the application process for federal funds often looks very similar in a village of 1,000 or a city of half a million, according to Ziegler.

“It is extremely extensive,” she said. “Not just the application, but the amount of background documentation that you have to provide them. It takes… I would say, months, to get it together.”

Smaller systems are at an inherent disadvantage. Larger utilities, with more ratepayers and bigger budgets, often have experts on staff to go after competitive funding pots.

“Their applications are shiny,” Petersen said. “And they’re written by someone with a Master’s degree.”

During his tenure as director of public works, Petersen worked through the application process to access federal infrastructure funding for Luck’s streets. Even with help from a consultant and phone calls with the state, he described it as overwhelming.

“You don’t even know where to begin,” he said. “Things are this far behind.”

Luck didn’t get that money. And in cash-strapped communities, paying large sums for the help of consultants in applying for funding that isn’t guaranteed is a big gamble.

“Let's just be honest. If they can't afford to upgrade and maintain and operate their systems with the money they have,” Ziegler said, “do you think they have money left over to hire somebody, to pay somebody to put together this application…? They don't.”

Poorer communities facing higher water bills

Without sustained infrastructure funding, communities in turn face a rising water rate. In many rural areas, it’s a bill they can’t afford.

In Martin County, Kentucky, where communities are built along snaking creeks and between the rolling mountains of Appalachia, residents still don’t trust the tap.

Decades of water district mismanagement, including chronic reports of discolored water and burdensome service shutoffs, eventually culminated in a state takeover. In 2020, authorities shifted control to Alliance Water Resources, a private firm, hoping to get the county’s water provisions on the right track.

At the peak of the crisis, the system’s aging water lines were leaking up to 90% of the water they were carrying, according to the estimates of Craig Miller, who now oversees the county’s water operations as division manager for the firm. For Martin County, that meant tens of millions of gallons of water going to waste every month.

In the years since the change in management, Martin County’s water system has made progress. In a recent stakeholder workgroup meeting, Miller reported improvements in water loss, as well as new hires and licensing for staff.

“There’s a good story here,” Miller said in the meeting. “But it is not over.”

Improvements came with a 24% rate increase, effective last year, piling onto already steep prices. More than a fifth of Martin County lives below the poverty line, according to recent census data.

“That's a huge burden on our poorest people,” said Nina McCoy, an advocate with Martin County Concerned Citizens, in the workgroup meeting. She pointed out that local water rates are far higher than in wealthier Louisville, where median income is 50% higher than that of Martin County.

The region’s mountainous terrain piles onto water infrastructure challenges, said Lindell Ormsbee, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Kentucky who’s paid close attention to the state’s water system struggles. And as in many rural areas, there are miles of water lines for relatively few homes, compared to cities like Louisville.

In Eastern Kentucky, many counties have historically relied on taxing the coal industry to fund water and other infrastructure needs. As the coal industry has declined, that funding has dried up, Ormsbee said, turning the burden over to ratepayers.

Even if systems are able to access one-time federal infrastructure funding, once it’s spent, they’ll return back to current levels of funding. In small communities, Ziegler said, that just won’t be enough.

“They're serving less affluent areas. They're serving older populations on fixed incomes,” Ziegler said, citing high rates of poverty in the rural and disadvantaged communities of her state of Mississippi. “Their customers cannot afford to pay more.”

With billions on the table for water infrastructure, small communities risk being left out to dry is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Leer en español: Lo que se pierde en la traducción: Como las barreras producidas por el USDA (Departamento de Agricultura de los EEUU) dejan abandonados a los agricultores y los ganaderos inmigrantes

With dirt crunching under his feet, Max Chavez trekked across his 10 acres of land, grasping wooden stakes in his hands. They were marked with his handwriting: “Bell pepper” on one, “green beans” on another. Every few paces, he stuck a stake in the soil — marking where his harvest would sprout months later.

Chavez grew up farming in Mexico. He moved to California at 13 years old, and then to Iowa in 1999. After planting and pruning grapevines around the state, he saved enough money to rent land, growing tomatoes, zucchini, peppers and more.

When asked what it takes to run his farm in Carlisle, named Sunny Valley Vegetables, 55-year-old Chavez had a quick response: “Money.”

Between record-high farm production expenses and declining farm income, producers are facing higher financial burdens than ever before.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is there to help. Most farmers receive some sort of support from the USDA — from cash subsidies for commercial farmers to microloans for small-scale farmers, and conservation services to crop insurance. The department shells out billions of dollars a year for such resources. 

But, like many other immigrant farmers and ranchers in the United States, it’s hard for Chavez to access — or even find out about — those opportunities. He said he’s still waiting on funding from the USDA’s Coronavirus Food Assistance Program that he was approved for, which would help him purchase needed equipment and materials.

Max Chavez, a farmer and immigrant from Mexico, surveys his land as he decides where to plant this years crops on Tuesday, April 25, 2023, at his farmland in Carlisle, Iowa. Markers are placed in order to organize planting. Chavez, along with many other immigrant non-native English speakers in the agricultural and ranching community, has struggled to receive grants, loans and other funding opportunities. (Geoff Stellfox / The Gazette)

“I don’t believe in them anymore,” he said of the USDA. “If I don’t have that money, how am I going to feed the people?”

The USDA has made steps toward increasing accessibility for historically underserved producers, including immigrant farmers and ranchers. But producers and advocates say it’s not enough. They want more solutions included in the forthcoming Farm Bill to level the playing field.

Language barriers

Samuel Patiño, 74, grew up in the Mexican countryside, where his family grew corn, green beans and other produce. He moved to the U.S. in 1973 and started farming 16 years ago. He now owns 21 acres of land in southwestern Missouri, raising livestock, poultry and produce.

Patiño only discovered the USDA around 2014. But he hasn’t successfully applied for farm operating loans or funding for a new fence. He said that’s due to the language barriers he faces: Patiño can understand basic information in English, but not anything technical related to farming — including how to apply to USDA programs. 

Even for producers proficient in English, applying for USDA resources isn’t simple. Applicants must decipher what programs they’re eligible for and then navigate through a series of steps to be approved. They need to provide the correct paperwork — which could mean years of data to keep track of. Some even hire grant writers for assistance.

Working through the maze grows even more difficult when the forms and their instructions aren’t in a producer’s native language.

“Sometimes, I feel that we are ignored,” Patiño said in Spanish. “We sometimes get stuck because we don’t communicate very well.”

Language barriers are among the biggest challenges for immigrant producers, said Eleazar Gonzalez, a small sustainable farm state extension specialist at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Since 2011, he has worked with Latino farmers — including Patiño, whom he helped secure funds for a small greenhouse — to improve their agribusiness literacy, profitability and access to USDA programs.

Most immigrant producers don’t have a college education; many didn’t finish high school, Gonzalez said. So their literacy is limited — especially in English. That makes successfully applying to USDA programs difficult: Applicants may not understand the requirements necessary to qualify, like keeping records of transactions, nor the intensive paperwork.

To add to the difficulty, most USDA applications and materials are only available in English. Translations may be available only upon request to the local USDA service center. As a result, many immigrant producers don’t fundamentally understand how USDA programs work.

“They don’t have the knowledge and information to access the resources,” Gonzalez said.

The language barriers work both ways: English-speaking USDA representatives have trouble building relationships with immigrant producers.

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern is a senior research associate and associate professor at Syracuse University. While researching for her book — “The New American Farmer,” published in 2019 — she met with local USDA offices and staffers in several states around the country. Only one had a Spanish speaker. The other offices acknowledged barriers to communicating with immigrant producers.

“The USDA is limited, especially in terms of funding and outreaching to farmers that aren’t reaching out to them,” Minkoff-Zern said.

Failed efforts leave many immigrant producers discouraged, said Filiberto Villa-Gomez, a research associate at Michigan State University and the Spanish-speaking outreach coordinator for Michigan Food and Farming Systems. 

He has worked with hundreds of Latino farmers in Michigan for about 15 years, connecting them with USDA representatives to promote applicable programs and application resources. But even with his help, producers aren’t frequently successful.

“When the farmers make their applications, the representative says, ‘It’s not completed. You need this, this and this.’ The people go back to the farm … and they don’t come in again,” he said. “The people are frustrated a lot of times.”

Cultural barriers

Barriers for immigrant producers transcend language: Many still rely on cultural and agricultural habits from their home countries. Some don’t trust the government enough to ask for resources; others don’t think they need the support.

Those cultural barriers, paired with the lack of successful outreach, mean the USDA may not even be on the radar for immigrant producers. And, in turn, they make it difficult to calculate how many immigrant producers there are in the United States. 

“There are a lot of (immigrant) farmers, but we don’t know where they are. They may not know what the USDA is,” Gonzalez said. “When we go to the community and talk with the farmers, that is one reality. And when you see the census data, that is another reality.”

The help that is available may not be accessible to them. Some USDA training opportunities take place during the week — when many immigrant producers are working full-time jobs.

“They don’t receive enough money to work full-time at the farm,” Villa-Gomez said. “They are hoping to get more money and live better and eat fresh fruits and products. But they must be working on the side because it’s not enough.”

Joseph Malual is a community and economic development specialist with Illinois Extension at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He originally moved to Iowa as a war refugee from South Sudan, where food and agriculture were vital parts of his upbringing. 

Throughout his time in the Midwest, he has worked with Hmong, Latino, refugee and beginning farmers to overcome their barriers to agricultural resources. He said many immigrant producers are socially isolated — from both their neighbors and from local, state and federal resources.

“It’s just so hard for immigrants to be able to clearly independently liberate those resources,” he said. “They have to find some other allies.”

USDA efforts — and shortfalls

The USDA has taken several steps to help increase access for immigrant producers, said Gloria Montaño Greene.

She is the Deputy Under Secretary for the USDA Farm Production and Conservation mission area that covers the agency’s farmer-facing agencies, including the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Risk Management Agency. It oversees 2,000-plus service centers in the U.S. and its territories.

Montaño Greene said the USDA is working on translating its programs for producers in their native languages. Some of the higher-demand items, like parts of the Inflation Reduction Act and factsheets, already appear in different languages. Some items are translated on a state level. 

Last year, the agency had more than 730 documents — including fact sheets, news releases, contracts and forms — translated into 30 languages. But not all USDA materials are translated.

Applications, for instance, are typically only offered in English, except for a few that have been translated into Spanish or have directions in Spanish. Translated press releases are few and far between.

The USDA also provides free interpretation services for 14 languages, including Spanish, Korean and French Canadian — the most requested, so far. Producers must go to their local USDA service center, where a staffer can make a call to an interpreter for simultaneous translation during the discussion. 

As a whole, those services aren’t seeing a huge demand yet, Montaño Greene said. Last year, there were 109 interpretation calls made: 86 for the Farm Service Agency, 22 for the Natural Resources Conservation Service and one for the Risk Management Agency. 

The USDA is trying to promote them to customers and employees to increase use.

“I know that’s not the most perfect solution, but it also does help with a language barrier,” Montaño Greene said. “I think we’re trying to figure out how to do the language access and then complement it with our outreach and education.”

The USDA is also funneling funds to community-based organizations that can serve as trusted connections between the department and immigrant producers.

Universities can receive funding for such work through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Its Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program, for instance, supports beginning producers in the U.S. and allocates at least 5 percent of its funding to projects helping producers that are socially disadvantaged, have limited resources or are farmworkers transitioning to farming. The program helps fund Gonzalez’s work with Latino farmers in Missouri.

These steps are just the beginning, Montaño Greene said.

“We have more work to do,” she said. “I think we will always have work to do.”

Future steps

Maximino Perez knows the barriers for immigrant producers all too well. The 52-year-old grew up on a farm in Mexico. He started his own ranch in southwestern Missouri 10 years ago and now has 20 cattle.

After a drought, he received emergency support from the USDA to buy grass and hay for his livestock. The English-speaking staffer helped Perez through the application process. But when he tried applying for similar disaster relief after an ice storm, he was rejected: He didn’t know he had to take photos of the five newborn calves that had died.

“I feel very sad because everything is about money,” Perez said in Spanish. He had to wait another year for his cattle to produce more calves.

Community organizations are pushing for USDA improvements in the forthcoming Farm Bill, which is a legislation package that is renewed every five years. It provides funding for various programs, spanning from commodities to conservation and crop insurance to rural development.

The Center for Rural Affairs is asking Congress to release non-English versions of program announcements simultaneously with English versions. It’s also asking that educational materials and program sign-up forms be available in other languages. Additionally, the center wants Congress to create a list of reliable interpreters in each state that can help producers maintain a longer-term relationship with USDA service centers. 

“We want to make sure that information is baseline accessible,” said Kate Hansen, senior policy associate for the Center for Rural Affairs. “So, expanding it more fully… is actually our end goal here.”

Gonzalez said reducing the number of requirements and paperwork for USDA opportunities could make them more accessible to immigrant producers. More in-person agent-to-farmer outreach could encourage more participation, too.

As the number of farms declines while the average age of farmers creeps higher, the future of American agriculture hinges on the success of beginner producers — like immigrant farmers and ranchers. To get the support they need, producers and advocates alike say USDA accessibility must improve.

“This is one thing for economic reasons, but also socially, we want to see equity in food systems in the country,” Malual said. “Why not position immigrants who are U.S. residents and citizens to get that equity?”

Lost in translation: How USDA barriers leave immigrant farmers and ranchers behind is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is part of the series A Changing Basin from the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Take a quick survey and let us know how extreme weather is affecting you.

Smoke from Canadian wildfires that turned skies along the East Coast a sickly yellow also brought air quality alerts to much of the Midwest this week. State health departments cautioned people with heart and lung conditions to reduce outdoor exposure.

It’s likely more days of bad air will come — not only are fires burning in the west in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and in the east in Quebec, but new blazes have erupted in Ontario, directly north of Minnesota, according to Minnesota Pollution Control Agency air quality meteorologist David Brown. The next plume could arrive Friday.

“We’re kind of surrounded at this point. Any wind direction is likely going to bring some smoke now,” Brown said.

In mid-May, sustained winds blew wildfire smoke in from the West, then a few slow-moving weather systems brought stagnant air that triggered ozone advisories.

“It’s been a very unique spring,” said Craig Czarnecki, outreach coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource’s air management program.

Climate experts say that as the planet continues to warm, this kind of spring will become less and less of an anomaly. In the process, air quality will continue to worsen, as will its impact on human health.

The largest fires have historically been concentrated in the West, and though there are examples of damaging fires elsewhere, wildfire scientists assumed the eastern part of the continent was immune from the worst effects, said Erica Smithwick, director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State.

That’s proving untrue.

Higher temperatures, periods of drought and more volatile winds are yielding wildfires that burn faster and stronger than before, Smithwick said. Wildfire season is also getting longer, as rivers in the West dry out sooner and the East sees stronger storms mixed with drought. Some scientists question whether the whole idea of a wildfire season still applies.

“I’ve studied wildfires for decades, and I’m quite alarmed by the changes that we’re seeing to the wildfire systems,” Smithwick said.

The severity of the fires is even affecting how far their smoke can travel. Smithwick said the stronger the blaze, the higher into the atmosphere the smoke can waft, being picked up by winds that travel long distances and ultimately push it into places it wouldn’t normally go.

Air pollution worsens respiratory, heart problems

Fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, is one of the main pollutants released from wildfire smoke, which are so tiny they “penetrate pretty deep into our lungs and get into our bloodstream,” according to Katelyn O’Dell, a researcher at George Washington University.

Hotter summers are also making stagnant air days more frequent, according to an analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on climate science. During those stagnation events, pollutants like ozone get trapped and make breathing more difficult.

Both fine particles from wildfire smoke and ozone can cause respiratory issues like coughing, difficulty breathing and aggravated asthma. People doing physical activity outdoors, particularly those who already suffer from respiratory problems, will usually find it harder to do.

On top of that, PM2.5 can have more dramatic effects because the particles are small enough to get deep into the lungs and even the bloodstream.

“Particulate matter is one of the most well-studied types of air pollution, and it is incredibly dangerous to the body,” said Dr. Neelu Tummala, a clinical assistant professor of surgery and co-director of the Climate and Health Institute at George Washington University.

While short-term exposure typically results in respiratory concerns, chronic exposure brings worsening impacts like increased risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke, Tummala said.

For Black, brown and low-income communities, which already bear a higher burden of air pollution, the recent short-term exposures could further elevate their risk.

Both fine particle and ozone exposure can also result in pregnancy complications like preterm births and babies with low birth weights, Tummala said.

And a 2021 study in the journal Pediatrics found that the particles in that smoke are 10 times more harmful to children’s respiratory health than other types of air pollution. Smithwick, who is also a representative of the Science Moms campaign, said kids are vulnerable because they are more active, play outside more and are still growing.

“We’re definitely going to be seeing this play out in our health systems for many years to come,” she said.

Protect yourself from dirty air

Pay attention to air quality. The Air Quality Index, or AQI, measures risk from dirty air on a scale of 0 to 500. The AQI doesn’t measure the amount of a specific pollutant but generally reflects health impact.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow site offers real-time readings of AQI and also shows where fires are burning and where smoke is wafting. Purple Air, a company that makes air sensors, also has a network of AQI sensor readings at map.purpleair.com.

People should start paying attention at the orange category of AQI — readings between 101 and 150. That’s when sensitive groups like children, the elderly and those with breathing or heart conditions can encounter problems, said Brown.

He added that relatively healthy people might start to feel headaches or chest tightness at the higher end of orange readings.

In the red category from 151 to 200 AQI, all people, regardless of health, may start to feel effects; the purple category from 201 to 300 is considered very unhealthy; and maroon readings of 301 or higher are hazardous.

Avoid time outdoors when the air is bad. Jesse Berman, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, said it’s safest to stay inside with windows closed and air conditioning on. In a car, run the air conditioner set to re-circulate in the interior of the vehicle, he said.

Put those N95 masks back on. For those who have to be outside for work or commuting, try to relocate tasks or reschedule them, reduce strenuous activity, take breaks in a place free of smoke, and wear a well-fitting mask designed to filter out small particles, like an N95.

The Centers for Disease Control warns, however, that N95 masks are not made to fit children and will not work effectively to protect them from smoke.

Filter your indoor air. In the home, air purifiers with high-quality HEPA filters can help remove pollution that sneaks inside, Berman said.

It may also be worth switching out the filter on a home HVAC system. Airflow filters with a higher MERV rating, an industry measurement of how effective the screen is in capturing small particles, can also help. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends MERV 13 or higher.

Berman warned, though, that tighter filters can clog more quickly and may need to be changed more often. For a cheaper option, O’Dell recommended creating one at home with some filters taped to the four edges of a box fan — a do-it-yourself method known as a Corsi-Rosenthal box.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Wildfire smoke is new hazard in upper Midwest is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Read in English: Lost in translation: How USDA barriers leave immigrant farmers and ranchers behind

Con el crujido de la tierra bajo los pies, Max Chávez camina por sus diez acres de tierra con estacas de madera en las manos. Escrito en su letra decía uno “Pimientos”, y “Ejotes” decía el otro. Cada par de pasos, metía una estaca en la tierra para indicar donde aparecería su cosecha en los próximos meses.

Chávez se crió como agricultor en México. A los trece años se mudó a California, y en 1999 a Iowa. Después de plantar y podar vides alrededor del estado, ahorró lo suficiente para alquilar terreno y cultivar tomates, calabacines, pimientos y más vegetales.

Cuando se le pregunta lo que se requiere para mantener su finca en Carlisle, llamada Sunny Valley Vegetales, Chávez, de 55 años de edad, tiene una respuesta rápida: “Dinero.”

Entre los gastos altos de producción agrícola record y la disminución de los ingresos agrícolas, los productores se enfrentan con cargas económicas más altas que antes.

El Departamento de Agricultura de EEUU (USDA) existe para ayudar. La mayoría de los agricultores reciben algún tipo de apoyo del USDA, sea como subsidios para los agricultores comerciales a micropréstamos para los agricultores que cultivan en escala menor, y servicios de conservación a seguros de cultivos. Cada año el departamento brinda billones de dólares para estos servicios.

No obstante, como muchos agricultores y ganaderos inmigrantes en los EEUU, es difícil para Chávez tener acceso, o hasta enterarse, de estas oportunidades. Dijo que todavía está esperando fondos del Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (Programa de Ayuda Alimenticia por el Coronavirus) patrocinado por el USDA. Lo aprobaron para que pudiera comprar materiales y equipo necesarios.

“Ya no creo en ellos,” dijo sobre el USDA. “Si no recibo este dinero, ¿cómo voy a producir comida para alimentar a la gente?”

El USDA ha progresado al mejorar la accesibilidad para los productores históricamente pocos servidos, que incluyen a los agricultores y ganaderos inmigrantes. Sin embargo, los productores y los defensores dicen que no es suficiente. Quieren más soluciones incluidas en la siguiente Legislación Agrícola (Farm Bill) para ser más justos e igualitarios.

Las barreras del idioma

Samuel Patiño, de 74 años, se crio en el campo mexicano, donde su familia cultivaba maíz, ejotes, y otros vegetales. Vino a los EEUU en 1973 y hace 16 años que comenzó con los cultivos. Ahora es dueño de 21 acres de terreno en el suroeste de Missouri, donde cría ganado y aves de corral además de cultivar vegetales.

Patiño sólo se enteró del USDA por el año 2014, pero no ha tenido éxito en obtener préstamos para sus operaciones o fondos para una cerca nueva. Dijo que se debía a barreras lingüísticas que enfrenta: Patiño comprende información básica en inglés, pero no un lenguaje técnico que tiene que ver con la agricultura, y esto incluye cómo solicitar participación en los programas del USDA.

Aún para los productores muy competentes en inglés, solicitar los recursos del USDA no es sencillo. Los solicitantes deben descifrar para cuáles programas son elegibles, y luego tienen que navegar por una serie de pasos para ser aprobados. Necesitan proveer los documentos correctos, que pueden significar años de datos a los que hay que seguir el rastro. Algunos hasta emplean especialistas en pedir subvenciones para ayudarles.

Progresar por este laberinto se hace aún más difícil cuando los formularios y las instrucciones no están en la lengua nativa de los productores.

“A veces creo que nos ignoran,” dijo Patiño en español. “A veces nos quedamos estancados porque no nos expresamos muy bien.”

Las barreras lingüísticas cuentan entre los desafíos más grandes para los productores inmigrantes, dijo Eleazar González, un especialista en granjas pequeñas y sostenibles que forma parte de un programa de extension estatal en Lincoln University en Jefferson City, Missouri. Desde 2011 ha trabajado con agricultores latinos — inclusive Patiño, a quien ayudó para recibir fondos para un invernadero pequeño — para mejorar su conocimiento del negocio agrícola, sus ganancias y su acceso a los programas del USDA.

La mayoría de los productores inmigrantes carecen de una educación universitaria; muchos no han terminado la escuela secundaria, dijo González. Como resultado, su nivel de alfabetismo es limitado — sobre todo en inglés. Este hecho hace más difícil tener éxito en las solicitudes de los programas del USDA. Puede ser que los solicitantes no comprendan los requisitos para calificar, como mantener la documentación de sus transacciones, ni el papeleo intensivo a que están sometidos.

Para añadir a las dificultades, la mayoría de las solicitudes y los materiales del USDA sólo están disponibles en inglés. Las traducciones pueden ser disponibles, pero solamente después de pedirlas de un centro de servicio local del USDA. Como resultado, muchos productores inmigrantes no comprenden de modo básico cómo funcionan los programas del USDA.

“Carecen del conocimiento y de la información para tener acceso a los recursos,” dijo González.

Las barreras del idioma existen del otro lado también: muchos representantes angloparlantes del USDA tienen dificultades para establecer vínculos con los productores agrícolas.

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern es una investigadora principal asociada y profesora asociada de Syracuse University. Mientras investigaba para su libro, “The New American Farmer” (El nuevo agricultor norteamericano), publicado en 2019, ella se encontró con administradores de varias oficinas locales del USDA en varios estados alrededor del país. Sólo una oficina tenía un hispanoparlante. Las otras oficinas reconocieron barreras al comunicarse con los productores inmigrantes.

“El USDA es limitado, especialmente en términos de fondos y divulgación para los agricultores que no se ponen primero en contacto con los del USDA,” dijo Minkoff-Zern.

Los esfuerzos fallidos dejan a muchos productores inmigrantes desalentados, dijo Filiberto Villa-Gómez, un investigador asociado de Michigan State University y un coordinador de la divulgación a los hispanohablantes para Michigan Food and Farming Systems (Los sistemas de alimentación y agricultura de Michigan).

VIlla-Gómez ha trabajado con cientos de agricultores latinos en Michigan durante unos quince años, conectándolos con representantes del USDA para promover programas aplicables y recursos disponibles. Sin embargo, aún con su ayuda, frecuentemente los productores no tienen éxito.

“Cuando los agricultores preparan sus solicitudes, el representante dice, ‘No está completa. Falta esto y aquello.” La gente vuelve a sus granjas…y no regresan,” dijo Villa-Gomez. “La gente está frustrada muchas veces.”

Las barreras culturales

Las barreras para los productores inmigrantes trascienden el idioma: muchos todavía dependen de hábitos agrícolas y culturales de sus países nativos. Algunos no confían en el gobierno lo suficiente para pedir recursos; otros creen que no necesitan el apoyo.

Estas barreras culturales, junto con la falta de una divulgación exitosa, significa que el USDA no está en la conciencia de los productores inmigrantes. Y, como resultado, es difícil calcular cuántos productores inmigrantes existen en los EEUU.

“Hay muchos agricultores inmigrantes, pero no sabemos dónde están. Puede ser que no sepan lo que es el USDA,” dijo González. “Cuando vamos a una comunidad y hablamos con los agricultores, esto es una realidad. Cuando uno ve los datos del censo, esta es otra realidad.”

La ayuda disponible puede ser de difícil acceso para ellos. Algunas oportunidades de entrenamiento ofrecidas por el USDA toman lugar entre semana — cuando muchos productores inmigrantes tienen empleos de tiempo completo.

“Ellos no reciben el dinero suficiente para trabajar tiempo completo en la granja,” dijo Villa-Gómez. “Su esperanza es ganar más y vivir mejor y comer fruta y productos frescos, pero deben tener trabajos adicionales porque lo que produce la granja no es suficiente.”

Joseph Malual es un especialista del desarrollo comunitario y económico con Illinois Extension (la extension de Illinois) de la Universidad de Illinois de Urbana-Champaign. Originalmente se mudó a Iowa como refugiado de la guerra de Sudán del Sur, donde la alimentación y la agricultura eran partes esenciales de su crianza.

A lo largo de su tiempo en el Medio Oeste, ha trabajado con agricultores hmong, latinos, refugiados y principiantes para superar las barreras que enfrentan para llegar a recursos agrícolas. Dijo que muchos productores inmigrantes están aislados socialmente — sea de sus vecinos y de recursos locales, estatales y federales.

“Simplemente es muy difícil para los inmigrantes llegar a estos recursos por cuenta propia,” dijo Malual. “Tienen que encontrar otros aliados.”

Los esfuerzos del USDA — y sus fallos

El USDA ha tomado ciertas medidas para mejorar el acceso para los productores inmigrantes, dijo Gloria Montaño Greene.

Ella es diputada subsecretaría para el área de la producción y conservación agrícola del USDA (USDA Farm Production and Conservation) que incluye las agencias con contacto a los agricultores, que abarca la agencia del servicio agrícola (Farm Service Agency), el servicio de conservación de recursos naturales (Natural Resource Conservation Service) y la agencia de gestión de riesgos (Risk Management Agency). Ella administra más de dos mil centros de servicio en los EEUU y en sus territorios.

Montaño Greene dijo que el USDA está trabajando para traducir sus programas en idiomas nativos para los productores. Algunos artículos en alta demanda, como partes del Acto de la Reducción de la Inflación (Inflation Reduction Act) y hojas informativas, ya aparecen en diversos idiomas. Algunos artículos están traducidos al nivel estatal.

El año pasado, la agencia logró traducir más de 730 documentos — incluyendo hojas informativas, comunicados de prensa, contratos y formularios — a treinta idiomas. No obstante, no todo el material del USDA está traducido.

Las solicitudes, por ejemplo, típicamente sólo se ofrecen en inglés, excepto algunos que han sido traducidos al español o tienen instrucciones en español. Los comunicados de prensa traducidos son pocos y poco frecuentes.

El USDA también ofrece servicios gratuitos de interpretación en catorce idiomas, incluyendo el español, el coreano y el francés canadiense — los cuales son los más pedidos hasta ahora. Los productores tienen que ir a su centro local de servicio del USDA donde un asistente puede hacer una llamada para conseguir un intérprete para la traducción simultánea durante una discusión.

Por lo general, estos servicios no experimentan una gran demanda todavía, dijo Montaño Greene. El año pasado se hicieron 109 llamadas para servicios de interpretación: 86 para la Agencia del Servicio Agrícola (Farm Service Agency), 22 para el Servicio de Conservación de Recursos Naturales (Natural Resource Conservation Service) y uno para la Agencia de la Gestión de Riesgos (Risk Management Agency).

El USDA está intentando promoverlos a sus clientes y empleados para aumentar su uso.

“Sé que no es la solución más perfecta, pero también ayuda con la barrera lingüística,” dijo Montaño Greene. “Me parece que estamos intentando averiguar cómo superar los problemas lingüísticos y entonces complementar con nuestros servicios de divulgación y educación.”

El USDA también dirige sus fondos a las organizaciones basadas en las comunidades que pueden actuar como puntos de contacto confiables entre el departamento y los productores inmigrantes.

Las universidades pueden recibir fondos para este tipo de trabajo mediante el Instituto Nacional de Alimentación y Agricultura del USDA (National Institute of Food and Agriculture). Su Programa de Desarrollo para Agricultores y Ganaderos Principiantes (Beginning Farmer and Ranchers Development Program), por ejemplo, da apoyo a productores en EEUU que están al comienzo de sus carreras y les da al menos cinco por ciento de sus fondos a proyectos que ayudan a productores que están socialmente desfavorecidos, tienen recursos limitados o que son trabajadores agrícolas que están convirtiéndose en agricultores. El programa ayuda a mantener el trabajo que hace González con los agricultores en Missouri.

Estos pasos son sólo el principio, dijo Montaño Greene.

“Tenemos más trabajo que hacer,” dijo. “Me parece que siempre vamos a tener más trabajo que hacer.”

Los próximos pasos

Maximino Pérez conoce demasiado bien las barreras que enfrentan los agricultores inmigrantes. De 52 años de edad, creció en un rancho en México. Hace diez años comenzó su propia ganadería en el suroeste de Missouri y ahora tiene veinte cabezas de ganado.

Después de una sequía, recibió ayuda de emergencia del USDA para comprar pasto y heno para su ganado. El personal angloparlante le ayudó a lo largo del proceso de solicitud. No obstante, cuando intentó recibir ayuda parecida después de una tormenta de hielo, su solicitud fue rechazada. No sabía que tenía que tomar y entregar fotos de los cinco novillos que habían muerto.

“Uno se siente muy triste porque todo funciona con dinero, y en este caso, uno pierde,” dijo Pérez. El tuvo que esperar otro año para que su ganado produjera más novillos.

Las organizaciones de comunidad están presionando para mejorar el USDA a través de la Legislación Agrícola (Farm Bill) en gestión, que es un conjunto de leyes que se renuevan cada cinco años. Provee fondos para varios programas que abarcan materias primas para la conservación, seguros de cultivos y desarrollo rural.

El Centro para los Asuntos Rurales (Center for Rural Affairs) está pidiendo al Congreso que se lancen los anuncios de programas simultáneamente en inglés y en otras idiomas. Ellon también piden que los materiales educativos y los formularios para apuntarse para los programas sean disponibles en otros idiomas. Asimismo, el centro quiere que el Congreso cree una lista de intérpretes confiables en cada estado que pueda ayudar a los productores a mantener relaciones a largo plazo con los centros de servicio del USDA.

“Queremos garantizar que hay un nivel básico de accesibilidad de la información,” dijo Kate Hansen, asociada mayor de política del Centro de Asuntos Rurales. “Entonces, nuestra meta final es ampliar esto más.”

González dijo que reducir el número de requisitos y trámites para recibir oportunidades del USDA pueden hacerlas más accesibles a los productores inmigrantes. Asimismo, más contacto directo entre los agentes y los agricultores pueden alentar más participación también.

Mientras que el número de granjas disminuye y la edad promedio de los agricultores sube, el futuro de la agricultura en los EEUU depende del éxito de los productores principiantes — como los agricultores y ganaderos inmigrantes. Para recibir la ayuda que requieren, tanto los productores como los defensores dicen que el acceso al USDA tiene que mejorar.

“Por un lado, es por razones económicas, pero por otro lado es por lo social, que queremos ver equidad en los sistemas alimenticios en el país,” dijo Malual. “¿Por qué no posicionar a los inmigrantes que son residentes y ciudadanos de los EEU. para obtener esa equidad?”

Story translated by Frances Jaeger and Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco. Photo captions translated by Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco.

Lo que se pierde en la traducción: Como las barreras producidas por el USDA dejan abandonados a los agricultores y los ganaderos inmigrantes is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

The Mississippi River flowed lazily under the Centennial Bridge, which connects Illinois and Iowa in the Quad Cities. Cars cruised past on a Saturday afternoon in early May, waving and occasionally honking at a long line of environmentalists who say the river is alive.  

Glenda Guster was among the roughly 80 people to join the Great Plains Action Society’s Walk for River Rights — the centerpiece of a three-day summit earlier this month for Black and indigenous organizers from across the Mississippi River basin, who, among other things, want to grant the river legal standing. 

Like many making the march across the river, Guster, who held a sign saying  “water is life” over her head, said the river needs more protection. 

“The river has rights, just like human rights,” said Guster. “Nature has rights and it’s up to us to preserve these rights.”

According to Sikowis Nobis, the founder of the indigenous rights organization, the goal of the summit was to build a riverwide coalition to rethink the legal framework they believe imperils life on and in the Mississippi River. The way she sees it, the existing legal system cannot confront the types of environmental disasters that are increasingly imminent  – but “Rights of Nature” might. 

The idea is that natural entities like rivers, trees and wildlife have the same rights as humans and thus have legal standing in a court of law. Natural entities, the legal principle holds, constitute living beings with legally enforceable rights to exist that transcend the category of property. 

“The earth is really suffering, and rights of nature would basically give personhood to the river,” said Nobis. “It would allow us to have more power to keep it safe.”

The legal movement to grant natural entities like forests and rivers the same legal rights as humans has won meaningful success abroad, and has in recent years picked up steam in the United States. Largely indigenous-led campaigns to recognize the legal rights of natural entities like wild rice in Minnesota, salmon in Washington, and the Klamath River in northern California are setting the stage for a nascent movement for the Mississippi River. 

The implications of rights of nature as a legal instrument are far reaching. Companies could be taken to court for damaging ecosystems, and construction projects with the potential to cause environmental damage could be stopped. 

That’s exactly what happened in Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania. Thomas Linzey is a senior attorney at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights and drafted the document to grant the small borough rights.

“It may be a radical concept, or it was 20 years ago, but we’re rapidly coming to a place where without this kind of new system of environmental law, we’re all kind of done, we’re kind of cooked,” said Linzey.

Ultimately, locals were able to stop sewage sludge from being dumped in Tamaqua using the new ordinance. 

Linzey said that before the rights of nature movement made its way into the mainstream, it was born from the cosmologies of indigenous people that recognized the natural world as made up of living beings – not just resources or commodities.

In 2008, Linzey consulted the Ecuadorian government while it drafted its new constitution, the first in the world to ratify the Rights of Nature. In 2021, an Ecuadorian municipality appealed to the constitutional protections to overturn mining permits that they said violated the rights of nature of the endangered Los Cedros rainforest. 

“The work has spread to other countries, and in the U.S. to about over three dozen municipalities at this point,” said Linzey.

Ecuador remains the only country in the world to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. A similar proposal was considered in Chile last year, and the island nation of Aruba is currently reviewing its own amendment addressing the inherent rights of nature. Court decisions in countries like Bangladesh, Colombia and Uganda have successfully held up the rights of nature. Local laws and treaty agreements recognizing the rights of nature are emerging across the globe, particularly in the U.S. 

Lance Foster, a member of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and a speaker at the Mississippi River Summit, said that a couple years ago, the success of rights of nature in South America got his and other tribes thinking, why not us?  

“And we wondered why haven’t the big rivers, like the Missouri River, and the Mississippi River, gotten those rights?” said Foster.

He said his tribe and others have created an inter-tribal resolution for the rights of the Missouri River. They hope to use it to fight industrial scale agriculture and deep mining operations.

“If the Mississippi had those rights recognized… it would be able to have standing in court for an advocate on its behalf to help clean it up,” said Foster.

Two years ago in Minnesota, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe brought a suit against the Enbridge corporation’s Line 3 on behalf of wild rice, called Manoomin. And last month, the city of Seattle settled a case with the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe over the claim that salmon had the right to spawn, among other rights.

Because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers flow through so many states and tribal lands, experts said it would be prohibitively complicated to secure legal standing for them in the courts. 

But Foster said if corporations get legal rights in the U.S., why shouldn’t rivers? Afterall, they were here far before humans. 

States like Idaho, Florida and Ohio have moved to preemptively ban the possibility that nature or ecosystems can have legal standing. Even so, Foster said the rights of nature isn’t as unthinkable as it once was. After all, children, women, Black and indigenous people were denied rights once too – what’s stopping the river.

“It gives us a chance,” said Foster. “Now, will we take that chance as a society? I’m dubious most days, but we have to keep trying, we have to keep going to the bitter end.” 

Does the Mississippi River have rights? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an editorially independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report For America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation. Wisconsin Watch is a member of the network. Sign up for our newsletter to get our news straight to your inbox.

Scientists have released their 2023 forecast for the so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico — predicting it will be around 4,100 square miles this summer. That’s much bigger than last year, but still smaller than average. 

The dead zone is a hypoxic area where low oxygen can kill fish and other marine life. It’s caused by excessive nutrient runoff, largely from fertilizer used on farm fields in the Midwest, which ends up in the Mississippi River and flows south to the Gulf. 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses models and data from the U.S. Geological Survey to forecast the size of the dead zone each year. Data from river and stream gauges showed that nitrate and phosphorus discharges were below average in the Mississippi River and Atchafalaya River, which splits off in south Louisiana. 

While some see this season’s forecast as good news, it is still well above the federal Hypoxia Task Force’s goal of shrinking the dead zone to 1,900 square miles or smaller by 2035. The area’s five-year average size is 4,280 square miles, more than double that target, and has trended mostly larger over time.

Don Scavia is an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan and leads one of several research teams partnering with the federal government on the annual forecast. 

“Lack of a downward trend in the dead zone illustrates that current efforts to reduce those loads have not been effective,” he said. “Clearly, the federal and state agencies and Congress continue to prioritize industrial agriculture over water quality.”

A NOAA press release said the results were due to lower river flow rates. Despite lots of rain and flooding in the upper Midwest early this spring, discharge in May in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers was about 33% below the long-term average. 

Lauren Salvato, policy and program director at the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association, said she’s hopeful about the projections. “It’s certainly positive,” she said. “Our states are working hard and they want to meet their nutrient reduction goals.”

Most states within the Mississippi River basin have developed their own plans, in concert with the Hypoxia Task Force, to reduce nutrient runoff. 

Salvato said new funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will help advance those goals. The task force has received $60 million for its action plan, $12 million per year for five years. Some states are using their portion of the funds to institute more sustainable farming practices, like cover crops, others are beefing up staffing, Salvato said.

“It’s monumental,” she said. “We’ve never had this program authorized, we’ve never had this kind of money put towards nutrient reduction strategies.”

However, she said the results of those new efforts won’t be measurable for years, maybe even decades. 

NOAA’s press release about this year’s forecast touted it as being “below-average.” But Matt Rota, senior policy director at the environmental advocacy group Healthy Gulf, remained disappointed in the results and called NOAA’s description “misleading.” 

“It’s twice the size of the goal,” he said. “It’s too big. It’s not smaller than anything.” 

He said reducing the size of the dead zone will require either enforceable regulatory actions – rather than the opt-in programs on which most states have relied to reduce farm runoff – or billions of dollars of federal investment. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding is a great start, Rota said, but it’s nowhere close to enough to solve the ongoing problem. 

And he said dead zone forecasts aren’t just a numbers game. The livelihoods of thousands of people on the Gulf Coast are tied to fisheries, which are imperiled by the dead zone.

“It isn’t just about these numbers and these models – but how do we create a livable ecosystem?” he said. 

NOAA and its research partners conduct a monitoring survey of the dead zone each summer, with results released in early August.

Gulf “dead zone” predicted to be twice the size of national goal. Again. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.