Is it possible to build a system of animal agriculture that deepens rather than distances our relationship with animals? One potential ideal might be a future where anyone who chooses to eat meat keeps a handful of chickens clucking through their backyards. When I raised this possibility with one epidemiologist, though, she cautioned that an expansion of such “small-holder” poultry farms could be its own pandemic risk: Now that influenza is endemic in wild birds, a more dispersed poultry production system means more potential sites for spillover.

The property sat in disarray. Massive trees were strewn about like a giant’s abandoned pickup sticks. The only road in and out became a car-stalling mud bath after rain. A two-story stable and other outbuildings stood dangerously dilapidated or encircled by brambles.

Sellars didn’t mind — she was envisioning what the onetime plantation, founded in the late 1700s and operated well into the twentieth century, could be. A former social worker who had headed Durham County’s extension office, Sellars had spent nearly a decade managing programs that helped home gardeners and farmers grow sustainable produce. Now she imagined a farm, where people could raise their own food and she could establish an incubator for new and future farmers through the nonprofit UCAN, short for Urban Community AgriNomics, which the sisters had recently launched to encourage gardening and fight food insecurity. “I was giddy,” Sellars, who is sixty-nine, recalls. “It was gorgeous.”

Patterson — Sellars’s younger sibling by two years — saw something quite different: a nearly insurmountable cleanup job. “I looked at Delphine and said, ‘Have you bumped your head?’” UCAN had less than $300 in the bank. But they agreed on one point: They wanted land. And they’d have to persuade TLC to help them secure it.

Now the sisters are on the cusp of finally fully getting their wish — not just to lease the spread, as they have the past five years, but for their nonprofit to own and manage it, in a deal that could model for the national conservation movement how to easily redistribute land to Black institutions and individuals. In time, the sisters hope this seemingly radical move, which would be one of the nation’s largest transfers of land-conservancy property to an African American–led nonprofit, will spark other such organizations to let go of acreage they’ve stewarded, to boost land access among Black people in a country that’s benefited from their dispossession.

Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.

Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.

Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.

At ten feet up the trunk of a date palm and rising, you’re still thinking about the ground receding beneath your feet, but at 20 feet your gaze shifts upward toward the approaching explosion of green above your head. At 40 feet the hydraulic platform shakes to a halt, and Yuval Shabo and the other workers at this Israeli date orchard grasp the trunks and leap into the fronds. It’s spring, when date palms reproduce, and the workers use curved knives to harvest pollen from male flowers, place the pollen in squeeze bottles and then apply it to the white petal clusters atop the female trees. It’s a different world at this height—birds gliding at eye level, the Jordan Valley stretching north toward Syria and south toward Egypt, the green frond sea waving in all directions. The workers stop on occasion to sip water or roll a cigarette. Ground-bound humans and their concerns seem irrelevant. Up here all that matters is the little brown fruit.

…

The same overriding sense of the date’s importance struck me several times during the past few months, sitting in air-conditioned libraries, hunched over books, looking at the ancient art and literature of this part of the world. When I began my research,  the date palm seemed to appear merely as a background detail in art, from pharaonic tombs and Assyrian palaces to a 2,500-year-old seal impression showing the Persian Emperor Darius shooting arrows at a lion. But after a while my perception changed. The date palms stopped looking like decorations and came to the fore. After all, the pharaohs are long gone and Darius no longer matters, but the date palm does, feeding multitudes, linking people with their ancestors, rising everywhere like millions of green fireworks frozen mid-blast. Maybe these trees are the stars in the story of this region, and we’re the extras?

When Christopher Columbus first encountered “Indians,” he formed the opinion: “These are very simple-minded and handsomely formed people.” As Robert Jago explains for The Walrus, this unjustified view of Native incompetence has persisted in some non-Natives to this day — even encountered in the way his tribe currently fishes the river named after them.

… in another news report, they advised that any salmon bought from us poses a “significant risk to human health.”

Our catch is fine for us to eat, apparently—it’s just a problem for “human” health.

Stó:lō means “river people,” and this river is full of salmon—or, at least, it used to be. It’s our staple food, eaten smoked, baked, boiled, and candied. My grandma prized the eyes, plucked out and sucked on till they popped and released their fishy goo. My nephew goes for the eggs; he quite literally licks his lips at the sight of them. My uncle takes the best cuts to smoke outdoors with a closely guarded, centuries-old family recipe.

It takes a lot of nerve to say we don’t know how to handle salmon—but I suspect the reality behind that claim is that a great many Canadians can’t imagine us knowing anything independently, as Native people.

In reality, Jago argues that it was only with the help of native knowledge and creations that non-Natives were able to create their world at all — alluded to in the name his ancestors gave to the new arrivals in Canada:  xwelítem — the hungry people. A name coined after starving white miners came begging for food during the Fraser River gold rush.

Indigenous people around the world were experts at food long before non-Natives made an appearance — responsible for developing the agriculture techniques that led to the potato, maize, avocado, tomato, chocolate, and quinoa, to name but a few.

European farmers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had to leave as much as half of their fields empty at any time so as not to exhaust their growing potential. They were also overreliant on grain as one of their few sources of nutrition. The result was that, in England alone, between 1523 and 1623, there were seventeen major famines. The addition of Indigenous agricultural methods and foods domesticated by Indigenous people changed that. Where in the past, a study in Nature found, European farmers could feed 1.9 people per hectare, with our help they could now feed 4.3. Writing in Smithsonian Magazine, Charles C. Mann concludes that, with Indigenous peoples’ sharing of their domesticated foods and agricultural technology, “the revolution begun by potatoes, corn, and guano has allowed living standards to double or triple worldwide even as human numbers climbed from fewer than one billion in 1700 to some seven billion today.” didn’t hand us the keys to the modern world—they took from us the tools that built its foundations.

Non-Natives like to think that the Mayflower had Wi-Fi, that the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María brought with them consumer goods, Facebook, and nuclear medicine. In reality, they brought very little from Europe that Natives wanted beyond weapons and metalwork.