The Big Picture

Published October 19, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the fourth report from the Reedley Peace Center’s Speakers Series “In the Struggle.”  Interested readers can learn more about the series by visiting www.reedleypeacecenter.org.

            In a piece I wrote for the Bee last month, I started with the fire at the Suntreat packinghouse in Lindsay, describing the loss of jobs and income for the community.  I speculated on the problems for rebuilding that plant due to the changes in crops and land ownership occurring on the land surrounding our town.  And I lamented the problems I’ve had since I came here getting city leaders to realize there’s a connection between the problems our farmers face and the economic difficulties inside the city limits.  

            Dean MacCannell was the fourth speaker featured at the Reedley Peace Center’s forum. Dean was full professor of Applied Behavioral Sciences at UCD when I moved to Davis to work with him in 1985.  For almost 10 years he had been conducting statistical studies on the relationship between farm structure and rural community development using techniques called “macrosocial accounting” developed at Cornell.  I hoped his knowledge and support would help me finish the more qualitative study I had begun at UCB under Paul Taylor’s influence.

            In different ways we both were updating Walter Goldschmidt’s seminal study of farmland ownership and community development in his comparison of two towns, Arvin in Kern County and Dinuba, here in Tulare.  That study documented the positive socio-economic contributions of smaller, owner-operated farms to the quality of rural communities, as well as the negative impacts of large-scale, absentee farm operations.  Goldschmidt published his study in late 1946, followed in 1947 by the publication of his book As You Sow, which described his first study in Wasco as well as two brief chapters on Arvin and Dinuba (although the towns were not identified by name.)  

            The book was republished in 1978 under the title As You Sow:  Three Studies in the Social Consequences of Agribusiness.  It contains the full Arvin-Dinuba study as well as a chapter describing the political history of the studies, which was marked by suppression in the early years, repudiation in later years.  That story included the success of the large growers in killing the plan for a follow-up study of many communities in the San Joaquin Valley, which would have removed all doubt about the negative consequences of large-scale, absentee-owned farming operations on the development of rural towns.

            MacCannell began that study shortly after he arrived at UCD in 1975.  Telling that story in Reedley, he described the academic hindrances to that research, as well as some of the miracles that helped him avoid being stopped.  He described some of the difficulties building a data base that incorporated farm size and structure variables with social, economic and political data, and his efforts to ensure the scientific validity of the research.  

            The stories people appreciated most were about his encounters with Westlands growers.  His UC superiors had advised MacCannell that these folks had intense interest in suppressing the evidence he’d uncovered, and went to some length to shut him up.  He also mentioned the “one bad thing” he did in his entire career, which was to release a study he conducted on Westlands to the National Farmers Union, which helped preserve the acreage limitation provisions in a battle to eliminate them in 1982.   But in one of my favorite anecdotes, he told of his first field trip into the Valley when he realized that anyone could see the differences between small-farm and large-farm towns with their own eyes.

            MacCannell’s conclusions from an academic career spent swimming upstream and sharing his results with audiences mostly unfriendly to the notion of public policy supporting the small farm were these:  The science is done.  Goldschmidt’s Hypothesis has been proven correct, and those who contend otherwise are simply waging war on the truth to keep their own interests intact.  “It’s time to organize,” he said, even knowing the limitations of previous efforts to organize when we had many more small family farms than we have now.

            This Friday we’ll hear about organizing from one of the premier academic practitioners of that art:  Isao Fujimoto, also retired from UCD’s Applied Behavioral Sciences, beloved friend and advocate for the power of diversity.  Please join us at 6:30 for the potluck in the First Mennonite Church’s fellowship hall, followed at 7 pm by Isao’s empowering presentation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a researcher-in-residence who writes from her outpost in Lindsay.  You can send her your reflections on small town life c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

We Can Change

Published Oct. 12, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Friday I flew home from work, changed my socks, grabbed the potluck plates, and jumped in the truck to haul it to Reedley for the third presentation in the Peace Center’s speakers series, ”In the Struggle.”  Don Villarejo, who formed and directed the California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis where I was employed before moving to Lindsay, was scheduled to speak on the question “Can we achieve an ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just agriculture?”  I didn’t want to miss one minute of it.

           

     The truth is, anyone living here in the San Joaquin Valley with even one eye open can see that the answer is “no.”  Too much would have to change, it seems.  Too many bolts holding the current system in place would have to be loosened and removed, and there’s no guarantee that chaos would not overtake us before that new, beautiful and right thing would take hold.  Housing developments gobbling up farmland, bullet trains delivering commuters to their concreted plots, mechanization replacing workers and farmers faster than we can count – these things are already pushing the margins of the old system toward extinction.

     But there he was, eating from his plate of homemade salads and hot dishes, preparing to speak to a mixed, mostly hopeful crowd of friends and strangers, bringing a message that no one could really imagine.  Almost 80, Don’s smile and laugh are as disarming and infectious as the first time I met him.  And his 60-year story of inviting people to join him in this struggle, that stretches well beyond one lifetime, delivered this message:  we can change.

           

     He himself went through several transformations in order to become the change agent he is.  Son of a single-mother labor organizer, his childhood was spent frequently living under other people’s roofs and sets of rules.  Don’t ask me how, but he went to college anyway and graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from Chicago, a big enough life change for most people.  Then, while teaching physics at UCLA, he found himself drawn into the student politics of change.  There, at one critical moment before 12 TV news station cameras, with the whole country watching and most of the university’s administration waiting to hear calming words of conventional reason,  he tossed that life aside and said “Strike!  Shut this place down!”  His mother must have known then that he was a chip off the old she-block.

     But what Don brought to the world of social change was a tremendous respect for facts and figures and the truths they represent.  In his talk he told stories of discovering the untruths told with shoddy facts and figures, and how he amassed data, over and over, to uncover the truths the old numbers belied:  the numbers and sizes of farm ownerships and operations in the state, the public subsidies and financial returns to farms in federally-supplied water districts and the family structure of most operations.  He documented the outcomes of various attempts to get laws changed governing farm labor, noting the victories within apparent defeats.  He named names of people who contributed their lives over the years, the tiny but critical roles they played at just the right moments.  By the end we could see that our view of the unchangability of our current agricultural system is obscured by fear – or, perhaps, by lack of faith.

           

     The questions people brought to the microphone afterward were mixed with awe and appreciation for what we had just learned, still sinking in.  One person thanked Don for including farmers and their unpaid family members as two categories of farm labor, his own hands showing the work of his life.  Another queried Don’s opinion on the recent state legislation increasing farm workers’ compensation, including overtime, to which he replied that it’s 70 years overdue, although he has no idea how it’s going to work out.

           
     But the last question took my breath away.  A man, a newcomer to the group, described the dilemma we face with the drought-driven explosion of deep-well pumping of groundwater, of the extraction for private purposes of a precious resource held in common, noting the lack of legal recourse.  Although Don had been standing for almost two hours, it was as if he jumped to his feet.   “We can change that,” he said firmly.  “We can change the laws.  People like us in this room, we can change that.”
           
     I give him the last word on that subject.
____________________________________________________________________
Trudy Wischemann is a writer and remedial change agent who lives in Lindsay, once the Olive Capitol of the World.  You can send her your thoughts on change c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Town and Field

Published Oct. 5, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


This is the second report from Reedley, where the Reedley Peace Center at First Mennonite Church is sponsoring a public speakers series called “In the Struggle.”  The speakers are presenting information about past and present attempts to promote a better agricultural system in this valley, and will conclude with prospects for the future.
 

     The second speaker in our series (Friday, Sept. 30,) was Dan O’Connell, whose doctoral dissertation forms the core of the series. His research covered the public contributions of 6 California scholars who examined the social, economic and political costs of our industrialized agricultural system.  Friday night he discussed three of those scholars, now deceased:  Paul S. Taylor, Walter R. Goldschmidt, and Ernesto Galarza.

           

     Paul Taylor, professor of economics at UC Berkeley, began his academic career researching farm labor, and ended it documenting the ways agribusiness giants prevented the enforcement of the acreage limitation and residency provisions of federal reclamation law.  He also advocated for enforcement of the law and worked politically to prevent its demise.  He supported research efforts demonstrating the importance of the acreage limitation, such as the studies documenting the community development impacts of large-scale farms and the positive contributions of small-scale farm cooperatives.  He also supported non-profit groups such as Fresno’s National Land for People, led by George Ballis and individuals like Ben Yellen, M.D. in Imperial Valley, who were working politically and through the courts to get the law enforced.

     Paul’s early efforts documenting Mexican farm labor in Imperial Valley (1920’s) transitioned to documenting the in-migration of Dust Bowl refugees in the 1930’s.  Like their Mexican predecessors, the Okies were former farmers-turned-farm laborers when they were swept off the land.  With his wife, photographer Dorothea Lange, Taylor documented the terrible conditions of these refugees and then helped create government labor camps and resettlement programs to begin to alleviate these conditions.

     Paul’s work in the field of farm labor was followed by the heroic efforts of Ernesto Galarza, who documented the Bracero Program and worked to organize a union for farm laborers.  Through this work Galarza recognized first-hand that the Bracero Program, which was begun during WWII to provide Mexican farm laborers for California’s farms while Americans were away at war or occupied in the arms factories, was being use to prevent union organizing efforts from succeeding.  Galarza’s efforts to create a union failed, but he succeeded in bringing the Bracero Program to an end in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of WWII.  Shortly thereafter, the United Farm Workers under Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta began, as well as efforts to provide the legislation needed to make union protection of farm workers possible in this state.

 

     Paul Taylor’s research on farm laborers, Mexican and Okie alike, took him to his work on the acreage limitation provisions, which, if enforced, could have provided the doorway for those laborers to return to their real occupation as farmers.  During the battles in Congress to authorize and make appropriations for the Central Valley Project, which California’s large farmers claimed should be exempt from the acreage limitation provisions, he helped construct and then supervised the examination of the effect of farm size on rural communities, which became known as the Arvin-Dinuba Study.  The study was conducted by a young anthropologist, Walter Goldschmidt, who determined that small farms created communities that were much healthier economically, socially and politically than the towns surrounded by large-scale (and often absentee) farm operations.   Goldschmidt, whose career as an anthropologist included studies of multiple indigenous tribes and cultures on three continents, was called back to testify at Congressional hearings on the results of this study from the beginning of his career until a few years before his death at age 96.

     What we see, looking at the active, engaged scholarly careers of Taylor, Goldschmidt and Galarza, is that the hidden impacts of our industrialized agricultural system cover the entire range of concerns in this valley, from the development of the towns to the conditions in the fields and back into the towns again.  In the next two talks, we will see how other scholars have continued this work, from Don Villarejo’s research to document the increasing agricultural concentration of power and wealth and farmworker advocacy (Oct. 7^th) to Dean MacCannell’s extension of Goldschmidt’s community research at the macrosocial level, examining the influence of farm size on 70 San Joaquin Valley towns (Oct. 14^th.) 

     Come join us. For more information on the series, visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on “calendar.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a rural community researcher and advocate who writes.  You can read last week’s column below.  Many thanks to Chris Brewer for his lifelong devotion to the history of our region.

Report from Reedley

Published Sept. 28, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


For the next few weeks I will be reporting on a speakers’ series called “In the Struggle” being held at the Reedley Peace Center, a program of the First Mennonite Church.  The idea for the series came from the Cornell dissertation of Dan O’Connell, who served as Sequoia Riverlands Trusts’ conservation easement officer in Visalia.  He transferred to a similar position with American Farmland Trust, working out of Fresno where he also helped start Food Commons, a non-profit linking small producers with local consumers.  Dan’s dissertation portrays the contributions of a handful of California college professors who, despite the resistance of their academic institutions, lack of research funds, and political opposition, documented the need for a more sustainable agricultural system in this state. The series goes beyond academic contributions and includes some of those workers in that field today.
 

     We drove to Reedley on the first cool Friday night of fall, through the clouds of dust from walnut harvesting, past vineyards with stacks of brown paper sheaves at the ends of the rows, ready to make raisins from grapes.  The evening light reflected lightly off water in furrows between rows of trees getting their last drink, through the fine mist of sprinklers running, the produce of our lands looking secure despite the drought.

           

     The peacefulness of the scenery contrasted with the subject of the presentation we were headed to hear: the struggle over the past 80 years to make sense out of the great contradiction we live with in this Valley, that we are the most agriculturally productive region of the world with the nation’s highest rates of poverty.  In many places, among many people in this precious valley of ours, just speaking that contradiction will either clear the room or provoke hostility. Yet we live with its consequences daily, whether we consciously recognize it or not.

           

     The first speaker in this series was from Cornell University, Dr. Scott Peters who served on Dan’s dissertation committee.  His field is history, with expertise in the public mandates of the land grant colleges, which range from Ithaca, NY where he teaches to the west coast locations of UC Berkeley and Davis.  We learned a great deal about the development of these institutions and the men (largely) who shaped them.  His understanding about the evolution of education in this country was mind-opening.

           

     But it was his understanding of the different types of history that helped me most.  Historical narratives, he called them, the storylines that lead our thinking, the storylines that shape our lives as individuals and communities.  He began with his own story, a son of two people who grew up on small farms.  That’s a critical thread we hear in many lives: how many generations you have to go back to get to the ancestors who farmed.  Many in this valley don’t have to go back.  I have friends who farm on small portions of land.  Our best Valley writers can still taste the peaches they raise or feel the handle of the hoe their grandfather used to run furrows and chop weeds.

           

     According to Dr. Peters, the first kind of history we write is the heroic one, the one where only good comes from human efforts.  We came, we ploughed, we dug, we built.  See what we accomplished.

           

     The second kind (he called the counter narrative) responds to the omissions in the first.  Yes, we came, and we took, we trampled, we depleted, we abused, and then we reinforced the pattern so that it takes an act of Congress (or God)  to change.  See what damages we have wrought in our fervor to build.

           

     The third kind Dr. Peters named as “prophetic,” and it is the one I identify as my own part of this history-making.  What could it have been like if we’d done it differently, and what can that imagination tell us about how to proceed? 

           

     In my own history in this struggle, following Paul Taylor’s indomitable lead, carrying his baton, the question is this.  What if we had enforced the acreage limitation of federal reclamation law on the Central Valley Project, not to mention the Kings-Kern Army Corp dams and the State Water Project?  What if we could now find some way to revoke the power we’ve given those large landowners far too long by delivering them water courtesy of the pubic treasury and the rightful, common claim we all hold to that resource?

           

     Join us for these discussions at the Reedley Peace Center.  Visit www.reedleypeacecenter.org and click on “Calendar” for the speakers schedule and descriptions or call (559) 994-4297.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can contact her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Sticks and Stones

Published Sept. 21, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I walked into the post office the other day to pick up my mail and received a new bile aperture in the process, which some of you doubtless think I deserve.

           

     “I’ve been reading your articles,” the younger woman started carefully, realizing she’d just been handed the opportunity she’d been dreaming of:  telling me face to face what she thought.  It turns out she’s a Trump supporter and was offended by my anti-Trump sentiments being expressed in print.  "I don’t think you should say those things in the paper.” she continued.  “Everyone knows you're a liberal already.  You don’t have the right.”

           

     She grew angry as she developed her argument, and shaky as a result.  I could empathize, since the same thing happens to me when I suddenly have the opportunity to express my discontent to the person I think is causing it.  As we left the post office, she ended her testimony with a string of expletives about the presidential candidate she assumes I am supporting, all unprintable even as a quotation.  As we parted, she told me her name, which I think was Patricia, although, to be honest, her name disappeared as I digested what she had spoken.

           

     People are entitled to their opinions.  People are entitled to express their opinions in print, so long as they are identified as opinions and not a news article or a factual report.  There are other limiting criteria as well, like profanity and libel, for instance.  But as long as the speaker/writer claims his/her words as their opinion, the hearer/reader can keep opinion separate from fact.  The airwaves are kept free, and it maintains equality in a way:  each of us is entitled.

           

     Equality can be damaged by the presentation of opinion as fact:  it sets up a kind of authority that is unearned.  Reporters and even researchers sometimes slip their opinions into so-called factual writings, and detecting those becomes the art of critical thinking.  It is a painful art to practice because it leaves a person at odds with the promoters of these “facts,” as well as those who have bought into them as truth.  But without critical thinking we are simply sheep on the way to being shorn.

     Which brings me to the subject of name-calling.  I don’t know if kids these days still hurl this little saying around the playground, but when I was young we truly believed the rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”  On the east coast or in previous generations, they might have said “harm me,” but we used the word “hurt.”  The truth is, that was a lie.  Being called a name over and over again, especially a name that demeans, can cause long-lasting harm which can take decades to mend, far longer than it takes bones.

     And that’s what I’ve got against your candidate, Patricia.  He name-calls.  He name-calls over and over again until people start to believe it because nobody’s made him stop.  It’s libelous, what he’s done with “Crooked Hillary” and all the other disparaging names he made up for his Republican rivals.  It’s also juvenile.  It reflects an unwillingness to debate the facts, which he also avoids by spouting “facts” that he’s made up just for the fun of watching otherwise serious people scramble to identify the false portions of his half-truths, the most serious one being the promise that he’s on your side.

     It’s a con job, friend.  If you-all elect him, it’s going to be a rude awakening and a serious disappointment when his policies take you to the cleaners along with the rest of the country, while his rich friends (and himself) get richer.

           

     In my never-very-humble opinion (and that I admit,) Donald Trump is a name-caller.  And in order not to get hurt in this election, we’ve got to remember what we learned on the playground:  how to avoid being hurt by name-callers.  The lesson is simple in principle, but difficult in practice:  don’t listen. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a rural resident writer who still has to practice what she preaches.  Thanks to Patricia for speaking to me directly.  You can send your anti-name-caller experiences c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.