Summary:
A change.org petition was begun that targets Marksbury Farm with false accusations. It claims that a New York Times piece exposed Marksbury for using child migrant labor to process chicken and pork for Whole Foods.
Here are the facts:
– Marksbury Farm has never employed an underage migrant.
– Marksbury Farm does not process chicken.
– Marksbury Farm does not sell either chicken or pork to Whole Foods Market.
– Marksbury Farm was not mentioned in the New York Times article
– Marksbury Farm was contacted by a New York Times journalist who concluded Marksbury did not belong in the article.
Full Details:
Recently Marksbury has been the recipient of negative publicity related to child labor violations. The genesis of the publicity is 7 child labor violations that the Department of Labor found in a June audit of our operations. The minors were all local high schoolers and the violations were almost entirely the result of misunderstanding the way in which processing plants are coded by the DoL. That is to say, the same tasks that are perfectly legal for a minor to perform in a restaurant setting are not allowed in a processing facility, even a small one like ours. The DoL’s finding exposed that misunderstanding and we learned from it, they levied a small fine and everyone moved on. For a more detailed explanation of the context of these violations here.
However, 7 months later, on February 14 the DoL published a press release of their findings. I don’t know if a press release is generated for every violation but nationwide there were 69 DoL press releases for February alone. In the context of its neighboring press releases the scale of our penalties ($8,893) is smaller than any other penalty that I found, and the number of affected individuals was fewer than all of the others that I read. Despite this, the press release covering Marksbury farm was longer than many and the only one that I was able to find in which it called out two prominent customers. You can link here to the DoL press releases here.
The press release was quickly picked up by trade publications and then local media. Not a single media outlet that reported on or reposted the press release contacted Marksbury for comment or clarification. Just a few days later there was a press release detailing a $1.5M fine assessed to a sanitation contractor for over 100 child labor violations at over a dozen locations. Just a few days after this the New York Times published a piece on the illegal use of migrant children in food processing facilities. Despite the clear difference in scale (7 vs 100s) and nature of the violations (In our case 7 local high-schoolers had summer or after-school jobs whereas the NYT article described what can almost be described as trafficking of migrant children) these stories became linked in at least some readers’ minds. The New York Times can be commended in that they alone among all media organizations contacted us, and finding that no migrant children were involved did not include anything about Marksbury. Nonetheless, this week a change.org petition was launched using utterly false, sensational, and defamatory language that conflated the details of the NYT piece with Marksbury Farm.
Almost literally nothing about the change.org petition was factual, but it caused us to become aware that people might reasonably accept its premise. I do not know the creators of the petition nor how they managed to be abreast of the news and yet get nearly everything absolutely and provably wrong. Nor do I know why out of hundreds of DoL press releases ours was picked up by media outlets. Nor do I understand why none of these outlets contacted us for comment.
In any event, I want to respond by saying that we are very very proud of everyone on our team in Garrard County and that, despite continuous opportunities to improve, we are proud of how Marksbury treats these team members.
The Marksbury founders started the company with a notion that local supply chains have certain advantages over global ones. That concentrating over 90% of America’s beef industry in just four companies represents a risk for America’s farmers, industry workers, and consumers. That natural methods of farming have benefits to farmers, livestock, environment and consumers that are not easily replaced by factory methods. That there is intrinsic virtue in having food that is produced, processed and consumed in the same communities.
Pursuing these ideals is still our mission and although we make many mistakes I sincerely believe we have made gains in the pursuit while also serving our customer’s business needs. The processing team at Marksbury is by far the most important fulcrum of our mission as well as a focus of that mission. We are very proud of each individual on it.