Salamander Springs Farm/Permaculture Organics

Thanks to Brandon and Phyllis at Save-A-Lot for saving the CSA boxes for us.  On the lid, you’ll see “Six L’s Co., Immokolee, FL.”  Supermarket & restaurant tomatoes shipped from FL in these boxes have a history which you may not know.  Intensive pesticide & herbicide use and post-harvest chemical ripening of green tomatoes is only part of the story.   
Susana worked with the Coalition of Immokolee Workers in its early years, translating and traveling across the country educating folks about the extreme farm worker exploitation, human rights abuse and modern-day slavery.  She travelled with CIW from YUM Brands in Louisville to California with 2 busloads of migrant farmworkers. They marched with thousands of supporters from 44 miles from East Los Angeles to Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine, CA.  Articles in the NY Times and National Geographic helped expose the exploitation and cases of modern-day slavery in the fields, and CIW won its first victory finally in 2005, with Taco Bell & YUM Brands finally coming to the table with an agreement.

"For the last 20 years, there’s been a quiet revolution in the tomato fields of Florida.  The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a group of immigrant farmworkers has been organizing to eradicate human rights abuses, wage theft, sexual assault and modern day slavery which have been rampant in the tomato industry, and to improve working conditions and wages for people who pick the tomatoes we eat... Many fast food and supermarket chains and have finally signed on to the CIW’s Fair Food Program and have agreed to only buy from fields where workers’ human rights are respected and to pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes to raise wages above the prevailing 1970’s sub-poverty level...”

On the back is a recent article from the Washington Post.
Learn more at:  http://ciw-online.org/!