Places – Page 11 – GEORGE ROTHERT

The Changing Agricultural Economy

“This is amazing. I’m not afraid to touch the products without gloves.”

The 2019 wine grape harvest has been tabulated. The total value of the crop from the North Coast of California was down fifteen percent from the previous year. (Super-prestigious Napa Valley grapes did manage a four-percent price-per-ton increase.) California wineries crushed ten percent less tonnage than in 2018. That means 250,000 tons were left unpicked. Industry experts calculate that 50,000 acres need to come out of production for supply and demand to meet.

So what does this have to do with marijuana? you may ask. A lot if you’re a vineyard or winery worker.

Premium wine grapes thrive in the coastal climates of California: Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties. So does marijuana. Cannabis growers are poaching workers from wineries by using the underhanded methods of paying more — including health care and paid sick days — and providing better working conditions.

One marijuana grower put it thusly: “A lot of times in agriculture, the employees get used like a tool. ‘Oh, we’ve got to harvest so let’s bring in 20 people, have them work 10 hours a day and don’t come back tomorrow.’ They don’t care what your name is or how you get your groceries next week.”

That and less pesticide. Wine’s dirty secret is the amount of chemicals used in the vineyards. Cannabis, not so much.

Does this mean that eventually marijuana fields will be hip places to host wedding extravaganzas?

Internal Combustion Combusted?

Twenty-three states are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over the EPA’s revocation of California’s right to set its own automobile emission standards. The federal government is also fighting California over the state’s agreement with four auto manufacturers for more efficient mileage standards than required by the current administration’s recently-rolled back standards. The Justice Department, though, has just dropped its purported anti-trust investigation. (It’s a core tenet of the Republican Party that the federal government should be limited in its oversight of matters that can be handled by state governments… except when the Republican Party doesn’t like what a state government is doing. Then they want feds to take control. The same applies in Republican-controlled states if the Republicans don’t like what local governments are doing.)

This may soon be just academic, however.

Rosenwald Schools

In the first part of the twentieth century, with Jim Crow in full effect in southern states, before there was any pretense of the equal in “separate but equal,” it was up to African-American communities to take on the responsibility of educating their children. (In the North, there was a pretense.) A half-century earlier, custom and law prohibited teaching slaves to read and write. Taxpayer funding for segregated public schools in the South mostly went to white kids; white schools received more than five times the per-student funding as black schools. (In Mississippi the ratio was thirteen to one.) African-American citizens paid taxes, but were effectively barred from voting.

A black educator and a Jewish business entrepreneur joined together to do something about it.

More Bad News for Bees

“It’s like sending bees to war.”

Americans spent $1.2 billion on almond milk last year. Sales are two-and-a-half times what they were five years ago. Per capita almond consumption in the U.S. is two pounds per year. Eighty percent of the world’s almonds come from the Central Valley in California. Acreage planted to almonds has doubled since 2000. Giant corporate-owned farms predominate. Almond trees are thirsty and the subterranean aquifers underneath the fertile Central Valley are being sucked dry.

And almonds are killing the bees.

Black History: from the Great Pumpkin to Ellen DeGeneres

“The fad started with the hippies. I saw them in Haight-Ashbury. Wearing a beard or a mustache or long hair doesn’t necessarily make anyone look like the scum I saw there but it gives an empathy for a movement that certainly is the direct opposite of what we strive for in college football.”
– Ara Parseghian, Notre Dame

February is Black History Month. Ellen DeGeneres kicked it off a couple days early with DeAndre Arnold as her featured guest. The high school senior from a small town near Houston Texas has been in the national news for refusing to cut his dreadlocks. School officials told him that if he didn’t cut his hair they would not allow him to participate in graduation. Arnold said no, dreadlocks are part of his Trinidadian heritage.

To show support for the student, who — depending on whose story you believe — may or may not have been suspended from attending class, DeGeneres introduced Alicia Keys who came onstage carrying a giant check for $20,000, payable to Arnold, as a scholarship contribution for his college education. (DeAndre Arnold obviously is a student of history, one of the few in his generation who wouldn’t need to ask “What’s a check?”)

Water, In All the Wrong Places

You start the dishwasher, expecting an explosion. Instead, you get “like four drops of water.” You hear the toilet flush ten times, “Ten times right… Not me, of course. Not me. But you. Him.”

You’re probably thinking, What’s the deal with water?