TM
Volume 29 | Number 6
Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service
November | December 2021
Naima Dhore discusses the challenges emerging organic farmers face By Bayard Godsave
Naima Dhore’s organic farming operation started very small, growing microgreens and herbs in her Eden Prairie apartment. Now, twelve years later, as the Executive Director of the Somali American Farmers Association (SAFA), she works alongside community members in south Minneapolis to increase access to organic produce, much of it native to east Africa. Dhore’s interest in organic food coincided with the birth of her first child, and in 2016 led her to lease farmland and participate in the Farmer Education Program at Big River Farms in Minnesota. She spent three years at Big River Naima Dhore is a Minnesota farmer and the Executive Director Farms, taking classes and working the land, “learnof the Somali American Farmers Association. ing to put theory into practice,” she said. By 2019, she felt ready to work her own farm, but the process husband had paid for, among other things, the inspecof gaining land tenure has proven to be a challenge. tion, money that the buyer does not get back in such When I talked to Naima Dhore recently, she’d situations. “But, you know, it’s a seller’s market,” she taken time out of a busy schedule that includes her said, “so he walked away.” work with the SAFA, farming, and serving on the Before that, another land deal collapsed after mulMinnesota Department of Agriculture’s (MDA) tiple delays along the way, delays she said grew out of Emerging Farmers Working Group, all while holding down a full-time job. Looking back on her journey, she the process established by the USDA for setting up a describes her two unsuccessful purchase attempts with loan. I mentioned that, in previous interviews, she’d talked about being frustrated trying to work with the a real sense of perspective; several times she told me, “I’m doing okay now, I’m in a different place, I’m going USDA. “Frustrated�” she said, laughing a bit. “I was probforward.” Still, she said, “it’s been a challenge finding ably restraining myself when I said that.” Again, she a place where we can live, and where people can have told me she was in a different place now, but that her access to the food we grow.” experience working with the USDA, especially on that Her most recent purchase attempt, earlier this initial attempt, had opened her eyes to a lot of probsummer, fell through when the appraisal on the proplems embedded in the loan process. “They give you so erty came back lower than expected. Dhore and her
Striketober solidarity
many hurdles to jump over, and there’s no support system.” Though Dhore, at that point, had experience farming, and had learned a great deal about managing a farm from her time at Big River Farms, she did not come from a farming background. “As a first-generation farmer, I was blind to a lot of things,” she said. Applying for the USDA loan was a slow and tedious process. “I’ve seen it twice that I was asked to verify and re-verify all kinds of things, and the seller may not always be patient.” In working with Farm Service Administration (FSA) agents, she sometimes felt as though, despite the fact that both parties were native English speakers, there was a language barrier, with the agent fluent in the language of bureaucracy while she was sometimes not. “Some policies,” she also told me, “are just not designed for BIPOC farmers.” When I asked her how she would like to see the process changed, she said, “There should be a way for the other person to be able to recognize that I’m coming from another place than they are.” She added that she wanted to see people come together to create a process that facilitates rather than hinders the transition of land to young farmers who are eager to build healthy food systems. Doing that means, at the very least, streamlining the system. “Farmers don’t want to deal with all these papers,” she said, “they want to grow. Changes in the farmland market A few months ago, I spoke with Chuck Anderas, Naima Dhore continues on 6
By Julie Keown-Bomar
PO Box 339, Spring Valley, WI 54767
This promises to be a very good year for the executives and shareholders at Deere & Company. The Iowabased farm and construction equipment manufacturer says it’s earned more in the first nine months of its 2021 fiscal year than during 2013, its best year. The corporation’s third-quarter results are nearly $4.7 billion.1 John May, the company’s CEO, made over $14.7 million in total compensation in 2020 with a salary of almost $1.2 million, over $3.7 million in bonuses, $2.6 million in stock options, $6.8 million in stock, and $310,125 from other compensation.2 Reports are that
his salary increased 160% during the pandemic while manufacturing workers laid off during the pandemic saw their “incentive” pay cut.3 On Oct. 13, 10,000 unionized skilled manufacturing employees at Deere initiated their right to bargain by rejecting the contract put forth by management and going on strike. Does it surprise anyone that skilled workers are striking after the company agreed to bump their pay by slightly more than $1 per hour over the next six years� Deere management also proposed cutting pensions and creating a two-tiered workforce so new employees don’t have the same benefits. You may have heard reports that the company pays skilled workers $30 per hour, or nearly $60,000 per year. One has to take the company’s propaganda with a grain of salt because their salary figures include “incentive pay,” which is very problematic according to workers at the plants. For example, the average real pay for an assembler is about $22 per hour, while welders make an average of $28 per hour. A fulltime employee earning $22 per hour would make an annual salary of $45,760. The median necessary living wage across the entire U.S. is $67,690 before taxes for a family of four. So, most Deere workers would need to receive “incentive pay” to even make a living wage. Farmers have their own standoff with Deere & Company about the right to repair. Just ask Montana Farmers Union President Walter Schweitzer about his horrible experience trying to get his tractor fixed. Walter said, “These equipment manufacturers are holding me hostage to them, forcing me to use their dealerships to repair my equipment - on their schedule, on their time, and at their rates. That’s wrong.” 4 Farmers have led the charge to have right-to-repair
laws passed in 12 states. With a tight labor market, worker exhaustion, and record corporate profits during a pandemic, unionized workers are using some of their collective muscle to exert pressure on employers to pay and treat workers better. So many workers are striking this season that it has been dubbed Striketober. It is not just low pay. Labor is also fed up with corporate mistreatment. Union workers at Frito-Lay went on strike this summer, citing forced overtime, working conditions over 100 degrees, and “suicide shifts” with less than eight hours between shifts, as concerns. Frito-Lay also exceeded its profit goals during the pandemic. Before you dunk that Oreo cookie in a milk bath of sad despair, note that Mondelez International, parent conglomerate of Nabisco, drove its employees crazy when it proposed changes that include turning eight-hour shifts into 12-hour shifts without overtime. Striketober continues on 7