UF is just one of many public universities in Southern states that use prison labor in agricultural programs and on other parts of campus, or rely on products made by incarcerated people. Students and activists have pressured universities and companies to end these programs for years, but data on how public universities use prison labor is scarce.
Category: Food & Agriculture
‘Treated as expendable’: Migrant farmworkers fall through gaps in the rural South’s patchwork health system
The health care system and workplace safety regulations weren’t set up to help the people who harvest our food. The pandemic has only deepened the problem.
‘The culture manifests the landscape’: A Q&A with Southern writer Janisse Ray
The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood author talks the pandemic, climate change, and why we need to fall in love with our places.
Without emergency alerts in Spanish, Latino immigrants in rural North Carolina can’t prepare for storms
Each hurricane season, eastern North Carolina braces for the worst. But emergency planning, response and recovery efforts neglect a major marginalized population: rural Latinos.
COVID-19 pounded Arkansas poultry workers as government and industry looked on
Emails obtained by Facing South reveal that as workers and community advocates begged for the closure of poultry plants, government and company officials worked closely to present a united front — and keep them open.
Replanting roots in a Southern food desert
Farmers, activists and city planners nationwide are pivoting in light of the pandemic’s impact on food access. In Mississippi, that also means restoring a fraught connection with land.
‘They didn’t tell us anything’: North Carolina poultry plant workers say Butterball isn’t protecting them from COVID-19
As the virus spreads through meatpacking plants across the U.S., immigrant communities struggle to get answers from the company or state about cases at a Mount Olive facility.
