A $60 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will support organizations across New York – including Cornell CALS – in building climate-smart farms and forests.
Every other week on NHPR's Morning Edition, the Outside/In team answers a listener question about the natural world.This week’s question comes from Maureen in Concord. For the past few years, Maureen’s been growing vegetables in a backyard garden. Sometimes, she finds chunks of coal in the soil when she’s digging.“I’m growing [vegetables] in the same soil as all of this coal… am I poisoning myself and my family?”
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Anu Rangarajan testifies during a New York State Senate hearing hosted jointly by the Committees on Agriculture, Labor and Social Services. Cornell experts advocate for ag diversity, food security
April 20, 2021
Only about 1% of New York state’s nearly 58,000 farm owners identify as Hispanic or Latinx, according to the Census of Agriculture, despite more than 80,000 such employees providing an essential backbone to the state’s farm sector.
“They’re highly experienced, have managed large farms, have all sorts of skills, and most plan to spend a lifetime in agriculture,” Anu Rangarajan, director of the Cornell Small Farms Program in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, testified during a recent New York State Senate hearing. “And yet few have transitioned to farm ownership.”
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Seminar to explore racial and food justice movements in New York
In the late 1960s, activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farm Cooperative. Now, local community organizations, activists, students and researchers will meet April 19 to delve into the historical significance of the movement and spur conversations around the contemporary resurgence of food justice and sovereignty movements in rural and urban spaces.
The seminar, “A Pig and a Garden: Fannie Lou Hamer, Agricultural Cooperatives and the Black Freedom Movement,” will be led by Monica White, associate professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In her talk, White will expand on the historical narrative of the Black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations and cooperatives that they formed.