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    Virginia Farmers Are Reviving a Tradition of Harvesting Herbs

    The forest behind Ryan Huish’s home doesn’t look like a traditional farm, but beneath the bright green canopy in southwest Virginia, he’s nurturing a thriving garden of medicinal herbs.On a warm afternoon in April, Dr. Huish, a biology professor at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, led a troop of students along a footpath that wove through part of his family’s 60-acre property near Duffield. He encouraged students to pick edible plants like ramps (hints of garlic, they reported), pluck the leaves of trout lilies (sort of like kiwi) and dig up roots like Appalachian wasabi (yes, spicy).For centuries, these forest plants have been a part of Appalachian cultural heritage, used by local people for food, traditional medicine and extra income. But the market has long been poorly regulated, which has led to low prices and overharvesting.50 States, 50 Fixes is a series about local solutions to environmental problems. More to come this year.“The trade of forest botanicals has been going on for the past 300 years in the Appalachian Mountains,” said Katie Commender, director of the agroforestry program at a local nonprofit organization called the Appalachian Harvest Herb Hub. “When we talk to ginseng dealers and root buyers, a lot of the concern we hear is that tradition is dying out and not necessarily being passed on to the next generation.”Tell Us About Solutions Where You Live More

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    An Afrikaner Farming Family Trades South Africa for Alabama

    Errol Langton and eight members of his family were among the first group of white South Africans to arrive in the United States this week after President Trump created an expedited path to citizenship.The Afrikaner family of nine looked around the small office space in Birmingham, Ala., feeling jet-lagged as they took in their new surroundings. Errol Langton, the patriarch of the white South African family, had spent much of his time so far with a pen in hand, signing required documents at a refugee coordinating office.His granddaughter played with toy blocks on the floor. His oldest son watched over her. They had just eaten noodles. Later, they would spend time looking for apartments.“Everybody still doesn’t believe that we’re actually standing here,” Mr. Langton, 48, said in an interview, about 40 hours after landing at Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. His family was among the first group of 59 South Africans who arrived in the United States this week, about three months after President Trump signed an executive order establishing refugee status for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid.The president essentially halted all refugee admission programs on his first day in office. But he soon created an expedited pathway for Afrikaners, who claim they have been discriminated against and subjected to violence because of their race, or have reason to believe they will be.Now, the Langton family has traded its South African hometown on the beach, Hibberdene, for a southern American city thousands of miles away. But Mr. Langton said he felt much safer already, as did his extended family who had joined him: his wife, son, three daughters, son-in-law and two grandchildren.Mr. Langton has a brother in Birmingham. But he said another factor had also drawn his family to the state.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Maryland Hit Its 30×30 Goal

    Nine states have set goals to conserve 30 percent of their land by 2030. Maryland got there first.The protected land includes a one-acre fish hatchery at Unicorn Lake in eastern Maryland and the sprawling Green Ridge State Forest in the west. It includes shorelines, farms and woods around Naval Air Station Patuxent River, and the Chesapeake Forest Lands, some 75,000 wooded acres that are home to species like bald eagles and the once-endangered Delmarva fox squirrel.None of it can be developed, and all of it has helped Maryland reach a landmark conservation goal six years ahead of schedule, before any other state that’s joined an effort known as “30 by 30.”The program is part of a global initiative to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s land and waters by 2030. In 2023, Maryland joined the effort and a year later, Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, announced that the goal had already been met. Nearly 1.9 million acres of land has been permanently protected from development, and the state has set a new target, to conserve 40 percent of its land by 2040. More

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    Mother and 3 Children Detained by ICE at Upstate N.Y. Farm Are Released

    The family was returned to New York after being taken into custody last month and held at a detention center in Texas, officials and advocates said.Three children and their mother have been released from federal custody after being detained by immigration enforcement agents last month at an upstate New York dairy farm, officials said on Monday.The case sent shock waves through tiny Sackets Harbor, N.Y., a village of about 1,400 people on Lake Ontario where the children were enrolled, and well liked, at the town’s school.The family’s detention was another move amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown to touch off protests. About 1,000 people rallied on the family’s behalf on Saturday, according to North Country Public Radio.The release of the woman and her children — a third grader and two high school students — was announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and the local state assemblyman, Scott Gray, a Republican“We are open to working with federal immigration enforcement to crack down on gang members or violent criminals,” Ms. Hochul said in a statement. “But I will never support cruel actions that rip kids out of school or tear families apart.”Mr. Gray said in a separate statement that “we are all profoundly grateful” that the family had been returned to New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Nutritionist Marion Nestle Meets Her Moment, At 88

    On a dreary February afternoon in Westchester County, N.Y., the cooks, farmers, servers and other staff of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture convened over a roast beef dinner to hear Marion Nestle hold forth on the state of food politics.Dr. Nestle, one of the country’s foremost experts on nutrition policy, was still trying to get her head around the political realignments of the prior months. After his win in November, Donald J. Trump selected Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run his federal health department. The partnership produced a new take on an old slogan, “Make America Healthy Again.” It also led the McDonald’s-loving Mr. Trump to publicly criticize the “industrial food complex.”The phrasing stood out to Dr. Nestle, a molecular biologist turned nutritionist who has spent decades pushing for stricter regulation of food additives and removing conflicts of interest from government health policy.“He sounds just like me when he talks!” Dr. Nestle, who describes herself as “firmly left-wing,” told the crowd, eliciting laughter. “How is that possible?”Dr. Nestle (pronounced NESS-ul) is not a name on the level of the chef Alice Waters or the food writer Michael Pollan. But among food activists and academics, she is considered one of the most influential framers of the modern food movement. She was among the first, in 2002, to lay the blame for America’s obesity epidemic at the feet of the food industry when she released “Food Politics,” a book of case studies illustrating how the industry manipulates government policy and the scientific establishment to its own ends.Dr. Nestle was 65 when the book came out, and she could have stopped then. Instead, she has been on a run ever since, publishing a dozen more books, globe-trotting to deliver speeches and serving as a go-to source for journalists. But only now, at 88, does she seem to be reaching her peak. For years, Dr. Nestle’s ideas placed her in food policy’s progressive camp. But today, fears about food additives and environmental toxins are rampant, and some of her longest held and most passionate beliefs — about topics like regenerative agriculture, school lunches and additives — are marching toward the bipartisan center.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Caretaker of Muncy Farms

    In November 1940, four children showed up after dark at a stone farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania. They arrived by car down a long dirt driveway. The headlights illuminated the tall elm trees surrounding the manor house, and the rooms inside were lit up brightly.Brian, Susan, Sheila and Malcolm Barlow, ages 12 to 5, had just endured the blackout of the London Blitz, the German bombing during World War II.To protect her children, Violet Barlow, their mother, had placed them on a boat from England to Canada, a 3,000-mile journey. The children then took a train to New York City, where they spent several weeks in immigration limbo, and then got on another train to the small town of Muncy, Pa.Awaiting them was Margaret Brock, who owned the farmhouse and country estate called Muncy Farms, dating to 1769 and set on more than 800 acres of fields and woods along the Susquehanna River. Muncy Farms was once part of a 7,000-acre estate. The original stone farmhouse dates to 1769. Some 85 years later, Malcolm Barlow, the youngest sibling, still remembered the menu that first night. “It was leg of lamb, brussels sprouts, roasted potatoes and apple pie à la Mode,” he said. “A very British dinner.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Roy L. Prosterman, 89, Dies; Worked to Secure Land for the Rural Poor

    Seeing land rights as the key to lifting up the impoverished, he pushed authoritarian governments as well as emerging democratic ones to distribute farmland.Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who left a lucrative corporate law practice to champion land reform in the underdeveloped world, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Seattle. He was 89.His death was announced by the Seattle land-rights institute Landesa, of which he was a founder. The organization did not specify a cause.Mr. Prosterman worked with governments in some 60 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America over nearly six decades, crafting plans to give a degree of ownership to peasant families. Sometimes the governments he worked with obtained land by expropriating large tracts, with compensation to the owners. At other times, the government simply gave away land it owned.Seeing land rights as the key to lifting up the world’s millions of rural poor people, he pushed authoritarian governments in places like Vietnam and El Salvador, as well as emerging democratic ones in countries like India, to distribute farmland to impoverished farmers.Mr. Prosterman, center, conducting interviews in China in an undated photo. Beside him is Tim Hanstad, his longtime colleague and a co-founder of Landesa.via LandesaIn an obituary, Landesa said that millions of people had benefited from the programs created by Mr. Prosterman and his group. Landesa, which was founded in 1981 as the Rural Development Institute at the University of Washington and became an independent organization in 1992, was “an early, and often lonely, voice recognizing the importance that access to land and security of land has in uplifting the lives of the poor in agrarian economies,” the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the preface to “One Billion Rising: Law, Land and the Alleviation of Global Poverty” (2009), a book edited and partly written by Mr. Prosterman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Joan Dye Gussow, Pioneer of Eating Locally, Is Dead at 96

    An indefatigable gardener, she was concerned, a colleague said, with “all the things that have to happen for us to get our food.”Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and educator who was often referred to as the matriarch of the “eat locally, think globally” food movement, died on Friday at her home in Piermont, N.Y., in Rockland County. She was 96.Her death, from congestive heart failure, was announced by Pamela A. Koch, an associate professor of nutrition education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where Ms. Gussow, a professor emeritus, had taught for more than half a century.Ms. Gussow was one of the first in her field to emphasize the connections between farming practices and consumers’ health. Her book “The Feeding Web: Issues in Nutritional Ecology” (1978) influenced the thinking of writers including Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.“Nutrition is thought of as the science of what happens to food once it gets in our bodies — as Joan put it, ‘What happens after the swallow,’” Ms. Koch said in an interview.But Ms. Gussow beamed her gimlet-eyed attention on what happens before the swallow. “Her concern was with all the things that have to happen for us to get our food,” Ms. Koch said. “She was about seeing the big picture of food issues and sustainability.”Ms. Gussow, an indefatigable gardener and a tub-thumper for community gardens, began deploying the phrase “local food” after reviewing the statistics on the declining number of farmers in the United States. (Farm and ranch families made up less than 5 percent of the population in 1970 and less than 2 percent of the population in 2023.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More