Tag Archives: veteran

A Vet Turns to Farming to Heal His Wounds

by VictoriOConor Posted on May 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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Alex Sutton sorts through all of his prescribed medications. His regimen at the time included anxiety medication and pills that helped him deal with depression, nightmares, and low energy issues.

Alex Sutton is a decorated US Army veteran who served three tours in Iraq. Raised by his grandparents in Iowa, he joined the Army at 17, and served 13 years in the military. He has been wounded in combat and received the Purple Heart for his injuries. In 2011, he was honorably discharged and medically retired, and took up residence on an isolated farm in rural North Carolina with his fiancée Jessica. They raise heritage breed chickens, along with some pigs and sheep.

Beyond his physical wounds, Alex carries the weight of serious, and chronic, post-traumatic stress. The couple is dead set on healing his mental wounds through rigorous farm work and the space of time; however, healing from PTSD is a nonlinear process. In Alex’s case, it encompassed periods, even weeks, of progress punctuated with deep periods of depression and the constant fear of flashbacks and nightmares.

It’s a story playing out in similar ways in thousands of homes around the country. More than 393,000 US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with PTSD by the Veterans Health Administration. Meanwhile, a majority of US farms are in their last generation with no family members to carry on the tradition—40 percent of farmers are over the age of 65. Groups like SAVE Farm and the Farmer Veteran Coalition are pushing to reintegrate vets into civilian life and the workforce through farming.

The new film Farmer/Veteran follows Alex and Jessica’s story as they attempt to soothe some of the mental wounds of war through agricultural therapy. Farmer/Veteran premieres on Independent Lens Monday, May 29th.

Alex decided to sell some of his tactical weapons as a result of discussions with his psychologist. He has a kid on the way, and he says he is trying to leave the soldier part of his life behind. He will keep a few handguns and hunting rifles, but feels that selling his military style weaponry will help in his recovery.

Alex holds one of the many birds on his farm. Alex and his fiancée Jessica initially raised hundreds of heritage breed birds before the workload became too difficult to manage.

Jessica sits on her four-wheeler as Alex fishes. When he has bad days, he goes down to the pond on the farm to settle his mind and try and calm down.

On the way to a fishing trip on Badin Lake, Alex stops for bait fish.

Alex baits a hook while fishing on Badin Lake. Fishing is one of the few things that can calm his nerves.

A shot pheasant waits to be cleaned at a Patriot Hunts event for veterans from the Airborne and Special Forces communities. Alex served with the 82nd Airborne and has attended a few of these events that bring together vets from the region.

Jessica stands at the bed of the Sutton’s truck after a Patriot Hunts event.

A rifle cartridge sits on a table at the Sutton residence next to a mailer about veteran medical benefits.

Cattle push and bellow in a pen at a livestock auction in rural North Carolina. The Suttons came to try and a buy a cow or two and ended up with two alpacas, which Alex bought on a whim.

Alex and Jessica wait for the birth of their first child. After losing custody of his first daughter (from a previous marriage) after returning from his third tour in Iraq, Alex has always wanted, but feared, the arrival of his first child in his new relationship.

Alex shows his new haircut.

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A Vet Turns to Farming to Heal His Wounds

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Rescinding the Cuts to Veteran’s Pensions Was In the Cards From the Start

by Teofil1vo Posted on February 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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December’s budget deal between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray included a bit of relief from the 2011 sequestration cuts, with the relief split evenly between domestic and military budgets. That even split was one of the guiding principles of the deal. But part of the military relief was paid for by $7 billion in cuts to veterans’ pensions, something that immediately prompted a storm of protest and, eventually, a move to rescind the cuts. Jared Bernstein comments:

True, that’s not huge bucks in the scheme of things. But the violation of this budget principle should not be taken lightly. A key point of the budget machinations that brought us to where we are today is that automatic spending cuts should be split between evenly between defense and non-defense (forget for a moment, that it’s not the discretionary side of the budget that’s responsible for our longer term fiscal challenges anyway). If Congress starts stealing from domestic programs to boost defense, it will unfairly and unwisely exacerbate already unsustainable pressures on domestic spending.

I’d take a slightly different lesson from this: Democrats got snookered. Only a little bit, and they knew they were being played, but they still got snookered. It was obvious from the start that cuts to veterans’ benefits would be unpopular and unlikely to stand, but Democrats agreed to them anyway in order to get the budget deal across the finish line. Maybe that was the right thing to do, but it was no accident. They did it with their eyes wide open.

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Rescinding the Cuts to Veteran’s Pensions Was In the Cards From the Start

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Today’s USDA Meat Safety Chief is Tomorrow’s Agribiz Consultant

by Apollinaryial Posted on December 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Deloitte Touche is one of the globe’s “big four” auditing and consulting firms. It’s a player in the Big Food/Ag space—Deloitte’s clients include “75% of the Fortune 500 food production companies.” The firm’s US subsidiary, Deloitte & Touche LLP, has a shiny new asset to dangle before its agribusiness clients: It has hired the US Department of Agriculture’s Undersecretary for Food Safety, Elisabeth Hagan. She will “join Deloitte’s consumer products practice as a food safety senior advisor,” the firm stated in a press release. The firm also trumpeted her USDA affiliation:

“Elisabeth will bring to Deloitte an impressive blend of regulatory level oversight and hands-on experience, stemming from her role as the highest ranking food safety official in the U.S.,” said Pat Conroy, vice chairman, Deloitte LLP, and Deloitte’s U.S. consumer products practice leader.

Last month, Hagan announced her imminent resignation from her USDA post, declaring she would be “embarking in mid-December on a new challenge in the private sector.” Now we know what that “challenge” is. It’s impressive that Deloitte managed to bag a sitting USDA undersecretary—especially the one holding the food safety portfolio, charged with overseeing the nation’s slaughterhouses. Awkwardly, Hagan is still “currently serving” her USDA role, the Deloitte press release states. I’m sure the challenge of watchdogging the meat industry while preparing to offer it consulting services won’t last long. The USDA has not announced a time frame for replacing Hagan.

Hagan won’t be the only member of Deloitte’s US food-safety team with ties to the federal agencies charged with overseeing the food industry. You know those new poultry-slaughter rules that Hagan’s erstwhile fiefdom, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, keeps touting, the ones that would save Big Poultry a quarter-billion dollars a year but likely endanger consumers and workers alike, as I laid out most recently here? Craig Henry, a director within Deloitte’s food & product safety practice, served on the USDA-appointed National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection, which advised the FSIS on precisely those rules, as this 2012 Federal Register notice shows.

Then there’s Faye Feldstein, who serves Deloitte as a senior adviser for food safety issues, the latest post in what her Deloitte bio call a “33-year career in senior positions in the food industry and in federal and state regulatory agencies.” Before setting up shop as a consultant, Feldstein served a ten-year stint at the Food and Drug Administration in various food-safety roles. Before that, she worked for 12 years at W.R. Grace, a chemical conglomerate with interests in food additives and packaging.

Apart from Hagan’s new career direction, some food-safety advocates have offered praise for her tenure at USDA. They point out that, under her leadership, the FSIS cracked down on certain strains of E. Coli in ground beef, an an important and long-overdue move explained in this post by the veteran journalist Maryn McKenna. On his blog, Bill Marler, a prominent litigator of food-borne illness cases on behalf of consumers, called Hagan “one of the very best who has ever held that position,” adding that she’ll be “sorely missed.”

But if the USDA does make good on its oft-stated intention to finalize those awful new poultry rules, I think Hagan will be remembered most for pushing them ahead, to the delight of the poultry industry and the despair of worker and consumer-safety advocates.

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Today’s USDA Meat Safety Chief is Tomorrow’s Agribiz Consultant

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