In the good old days reporters and any “concerned” outsiders rarely came out to the Glades unless it was to discuss our widely acclaimed football players who were making it to Division I colleges and the NFL in great numbers.

However, once activists groups started making noise about their local water issues, it seemed like the Glades communities and the farmers here were in the news every day. We’ve been blamed when it was too wet, and again when it was too dry. Somehow, everything wrong with the water in the whole region was blamed on our area.

Even so, there was little to no concern for the people who live in the Glades communities. Although the state ended up taking huge chunks of land (like Talisman Sugar Co. and more) for Everglades projects that cost thousands of our residents their jobs and shuttered downtown storefronts, there still wasn’t much attention on our people. Certainly no one was worried about our health and safety or our ability to feed our families. As farmers do, they went to work under the new regulations, cleaned their water as required and continued providing jobs and being active community partners.

With farm water issues solved, we hoped things were settling down. But all these groups did was find another avenue of attack. First water, then air. Sierra Club opened an office here in 2015 and was suddenly “concerned” about the people of the Glades and the air we breathe. They started trying to turn neighbor against neighbor and turn all of us against our farmers. It didn’t work. Then a bunch of outside lawyers filed a lawsuit. Tried to convince local folks to sue our friends and neighbors that grow sugarcane. That didn’t work either. That case was dismissed for lack of actual evidence. And that has been their biggest hurdle—all of the objective science and data show that our air and water are clean.

Unfortunately, the facts and the truth don’t help them get what they want. So they have resort to making up their own “truths’ and for some reason, many in the media print it as gospel. When there were no valid health studies that linked local farming activities to poor health, these groups went out to various universities and think tanks and funded research to supply it. No surprise that the conclusions of this “funded” research came back with their version of the “facts” about farmers and health—parroting their rhetoric almost to the word.

One thing all of this new research they’ve paid for has in common—none of it deals with actual Glades people and actual day-to-day reality here in our community. Not one study or statement has shown that local residents are exposed to unhealthy levels of small particulates. Instead, the research is all based on reviews of other studies, primarily done in other countries, where who knows how they farm and what the conditions are…

These studies, like the recent Florida A&M researcher who used estimates, statistics and a lot of modeling sleight of hand to cook up his conclusion that sugarcane farming in the Glades causes asthma from Orlando to Key West. Ridiculous. His “health” study also found a way to include Friends of the Everglades’ (research sponsor) messaging on how the Everglades was drained for sugar farming, touts green harvest in Brazil (where they actually burn four times more acres than here), and other Friends’ political messaging that has nothing to do with farming or health.

The problem with this study is boldly stated on page 11 when they examine asthma diagnosis: (asthma is a very real health issue for some people) but remove personal habits like smoking, indoor pollutants, seasonality (which includes allergy season, winter cold & flu season) and a host of other issues to “ensure a possible causal relationship between sugarcane burning and asthma-related diseases.”

There is also a reason that the research included 20 counties in a study where sugarcane farming is mainly out here in the Glades, relatively isolated from the rest of the region. In fact, the whole Everglades is between our farms and the Florida Keys—yet their population and asthma incidents were included and blamed on sugarcane hundreds of miles away. It doesn’t take a scientist or a professor to know when the facts don’t fit your argument—you have to go out of your way to make them look like they fit.

In contrast, we have multiple air quality monitors that collect actual air quality data in our area. For decades, that data proved good air quality. Our local doctors and hospitals say that harvesting practices don’t make people sick. Tellingly, there was not one bit of evidence that anyone in the study had actually been exposed to sugarcane smoke.

As community leaders and residents of these farming communities, we welcome good, science-based air quality monitoring and inclusive, objective research that will inform our people and our business community. We reject the “junk science” that is polluting the discussion and preventing dialogue about real issues concerning our Glades communities.