Farmer's Legal Action Group, Inc.
Saint Paul, Minnesota

Multi-Program Grant - $250,000

Program Contributions:
$150,000 - Environment Program
$100,000 - Interprogram Initiatives for Social and Economic Justice

Taking On Corporate Agriculture

A single factory-style hog farm can house tens of thousands of hogs, producing as much waste as a city with 200,000 residents. Run-off from farms over-saturated with hog waste and spills from huge manure lagoons pollute groundwater, rivers, and lakes. The emission of toxic gases and offensive odors affect the health and lifestyle of the surrounding communities. Among other gases, factory hog farms emit hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas that can cause serious respiratory and neurological illnesses and threaten the health of the facility employees and area residents. No more efficient than family farms, and, according to some studies, less efficient and unsympathetic in its treatment of animals, the factory farm model for hog production is devastating to the quality of the surrounding air and water resources. The Farmer's Legal Action Group (FLAG) is the premier legal strategies and litigation center for the family farm movement. FLAG's work has been central to the strategy of promoting appropriate scale, family and community supporting, and environmentally sustainable agriculture. This grant will provide badly needed support for one of the most important legal cases relating to factory-style hog farming. It will also support related policy and education work on a variety of corporate concentration of agriculture issues.

The Labor Institute New York, NY

$300,000

Green Labor: Building the Base for Environmentalism within the Labor Movement

In the US, cooperation between labor and environmental groups is sporadic, especially at the national level. Seldom is it possible to address controversial yet crucial issues like global warming, the phase-out of toxic substances, and other conflicts that may pit jobs against environmental protection. The Labor Institute is an independent educational center that works primarily with unions. For years, the progressive unions have relied on the Labor Institute to carry out large-scale educational programs with their members on everything from toxins in the workplace to how to stop sexual harassment in the workplace. The Labor Institute, working with the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), is now teaming up with three unions (the Service Employees International Union, the United Steelworkers of America, and the Union of Industrial and Needle Trades Employees) in a pilot program to educate the unions  members across the nation about key environmental issues. In the first year, they aim to put several thousand rank-and-file union members through the program.