If ripened green beans aren’t picked, the whole bean plant begins to wither. In 2014, as a farm intern in Northern California’s Mendocino County, I went to harvest beans, despite the thick smoke from a fire 10 miles away. The farm couldn’t afford to lose the plants for the rest of the season; we needed to get the produce to the farmers market where the farm earned a third of its revenue.
I wet a handkerchief and tied it around my nose and mouth, donned my hat and gloves, and began picking. The last thing I remember was a haze thicker than smoke before my coworkers found me slumped over a bucket half-full of beans.
Farmers are experiencing climate change in our fields, our communities, and our lungs. The increasingly long periods between rains force greater reliance on a lowering water table that hardly replenishes our wells. And a drier climate means more fires. This year, our eyes sting and chests ache, not only from the smoke of the Mendocino Complex, Camp, and Woolsey Fires but also because of what our California neighbors have lost.
There are immediate ways we can stave off fire damage to farms. First, we can reconsider how farmers and loggers make... Read more
