It was like “being in a homeless shelter, without the infrastructure,” said Rodrigo, who is part Mohawk, a member of the Native American Committee of the American Bar Association, and legal and operations director for We Do Better Relief.

Rodrigo was handing out food boxes as part of a pandemic relief effort led by a new Pacific Northwest coalition called The Wave. Efforts started earlier that day at an event in Cascade Locks, Oregon, in collaboration with the Columbia River Inter-tribal Fish Commission and other groups, before moving out to the in-lieu fishing communities. The event focused on tribal members but was open to the public.

Rodrigo brought 850 pounds of fresh-frozen Alaskan lingcod, a type of groundfish, to provide alongside U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farmers to Families Food Boxes provided by the Oregon Food Bank. The Wave also provided a food truck, KOi Fusion, that served 400 free teriyaki fish rice bowls, cooked with more of the lingcod.

A partnership with the community-supported fishery (CSF) Alaskans Own, the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust, and the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, the Wave’s fish donation program involves a slew of Northwest food security groups, tribal organizations, chefs, food trucks, and seafood groups. The groups received funding from a nonprofit accelerator group, Multiplier, to purchase 130,000 pounds of fish from small boat, Alaskan fishermen to provide to food-insecure communities in Washington and Oregon.

The KOi Fusion food truck during the event at Cascade Locks. (Photo credit: Bobby Rodrigo)

While the program focuses on rural, and/or predominantly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), communities, it’s recently pivoted to feeding firefighters and evacuees as deadly wildfires sweep Oregon. Getting seafood—or, truly, any fresh and healthy food—to communities like those in-lieu settlements in Oregon and Washington poses additional challenges, but those are precisely what these partners aim to solve.

The partnership is one of six U.S. fish donation programs funded by Multiplier through its Catch Together program, which supports community-based fishermen. At its core, Catch Together’s grant program aims to provide fishermen a living wage to help feed food insecure families a highly nutritious, lean protein—locally caught seafood—that is rarely, if ever, included in food relief efforts.

“My real hope is that we can start seeing fishermen as part of the food system again.”

But the fishermen groups it supports, from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, view the program as a bigger opportunity to reconnect local fishermen with their communities, at a time when many feel disconnected by global markets that whisk their catch from the dock to far-flung corners of the world. And they seek to leverage the grant funds to overcome barriers that have made it difficult to integrate their sustainably harvested catch into local and regional food systems.

“All of these different organizations and fishermen, they’re really getting excited about . . . how do we get a little bit closer to the people we’re feeding, and how do we support our communities,” said Ben Martens, executive director of the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, one of the grantees. “My real hope is that we can start seeing fishermen as part of the food system again.”

Shoring Up Fishing Communities

Prices paid fishermen have plummeted everywhere during the pandemic as restaurants have closed or scaled back services. Bristol Bay sockeye salmon, for example, is selling for half the price fishermen were paid in 2019, according to Elizabeth Herendeen of Alaskans Own.

A bag of vegetables including a recipe for “one pot fish stew” distributed in Oregon. (Photo credit: Bobby Rodrigo)

The Catch Together funding allows the groups to buy sustainably harvested fish and pay fishermen a stable price to keep them fishing at a time when one in eight households don’t have enough food to eat. In some cases, as with the lingcod fishermen in Alaska, the grant funds have tipped the balance: Without that funding, the fishermen wouldn’t have been able to go out fishing.

Catch Together encourages its grantees to use its funding as seed money to help them achieve longer term goals to shore up their resiliency—such as by creating a sustainable value-added product, like a fish cake or fish soup, that they can eventually market or get the USDA to purchase for one of its national food assistance programs.

“Our hope is that they’re able to use our grants to create a runway to a sustainable product, or think through how they can serve underserved parts of the community,” Paul Parker, Catch Together’s managing partner and president, told Civil Eats.

Describing Catch Together as a “hub in the middle,” Parker said it’s “uplifting to watch all the different fishing communities come up with ideas about how to serve this need, and then building the programming and cross-pollinating to one another.”

Figuring out the food donation piece can be challenging, however. First the groups need to select the species and harvest the fish, which isn’t always easy. Then they need to turn the fish into a product that’s readily usable by food assistance programs, which can also be tricky: Some programs don’t want seafood because their clients aren’t accustomed to eating it. Last, they need to work out the logistics of the distribution.

Paul Parker, head of Catch Together, at Chatham Harbor on Cape Cod. (Photo credit: Meg Wilcox)

“Most of the organizations of fishermen we’re working with have deep experience in one or two of those areas, but not all three,” said Parker.

That’s why Alaskans Own and the Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust, which received a grant to harvest lingcod and sablefish, teamed up with the Wave, said Herendeen. “We knew the Wave had the structure in place to help move the fish to families in need.”

Reaching In-Lieu Fishing Communities

The Wave program aims to feed more than 600,000 people in rural and BIPOC communities through early November with a combination of hot meals and fresh-frozen fillets, and it piggybacks off the efforts of other food relief organizations. That means “things change on the daily,” notes Keri Johns, a manager at The Wave.

It’s currently providing fresh frozen fish to Feed the Mass, which is preparing hot meals for firefighters and wildfire evacuees, among other activities. In-lieu fishing communities remain a priority, however, and it has adapted to their needs by following the tribal fishermen as they move up river with the salmon harvest, providing hot meals from a food truck, via Food Fleet, and also providing a one-pot stew bag with the fish that their families can easily cook.

Johns said that the Wave’s immediate focus areas are supporting tribal fishermen with hot meals during their busy salmon harvest and getting technical needs sorted out for kids for online schooling. But over the longer term, “we’re looking to make a food system that works for the little guy and the health of our nation,” she explained. “How people look at seafood, how fish gets distributed, and where it goes is part of what needs to change. It’s a great protein source.”

Nailing that approach could go a long way to helping feed communities that have been doubly disadvantaged—first by generations of neglect and underinvestment driven by systemic racism, then again by the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19.

A Range of Efforts

Like the Wave, most Catch Together grant recipients are donating fish in frozen, vacuum-packaged, individual servings and/or collaborating with food assistance programs to produce hot meals. Many are also including recipe cards and information about the fish and the people who caught it.

The Maine Coast Fishermen’s Alliance, for example, received funding to purchase 80,000 pounds of hake, a groundfish species, and pay a processor to fillet and package the fish for distribution through Good Shepherd Food Bank and potentially through Maine schools.

In other parts of the country, the Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United, is purchasing up to 20,000 pounds of shrimp, and paying a processor to prepare it for distribution through the Mississippi hunger relief organization Extra Table.

The Alaska Sustainable Fisheries Trust received funding for two initiatives, both of which focus on feeding BIPOC communities: the Wave partnership and a program to purchase salmon from Bristol Bay fishermen. Alaskans Own (a project of the Trust) and Northline Seafoods will bring 45,000 pounds of Bristol Bay sockeye salmon to Alaska Native villages experiencing record-low salmon returns this year, according to Herendeen.

And the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fishermen Shareholders Alliance is running a pilot program involving 40 fishermen in Tampa Bay that it hopes to eventually expand throughout the Gulf States. Grouper, red snapper, and up to 10 other species harvested by the fishermen will be filleted, flash-frozen, and packed for distribution through two Tampa Bay food banks.

Donated fish will be run through the group’s Gulf Wild program, a seafood traceability system that applies a unique QR code that people can scan on their smart phone to see the path the fish took to get to into their hands—from the boat, to the fish house, to the processor, to the charitable group—as well information on the fisherman who caught it.

Fishermen participating in the program will also help distribute the fish they harvest at events coordinated by food banks.

Mississippi fishermen took this approach at an event in June. The Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United (MCFU) collected 1,500 pounds of king mackerel left over from a Biloxi fishing tournament and teamed up with the hunger relief organization Extra Table to clean, fillet and distribute the fish. “Everybody pitched in . . . and made it happen,” said Ryan Bradley, MCFU’s executive director. “It was really good to see the fish go to people who needed it.”

Creating a Value-Added Product

The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is the only grantee thus far to create a value-added product, a fish chowder made with locally caught haddock. The alliance will eventually introduce the chowder to retail outlets under the brand name Small Boats, Big Taste. Sales will go toward sustaining the program after the philanthropic support ends.

The group is purchasing 100,000 pounds of haddock from its members and paying a Boston fish processor to fillet the fish, and a Massachusetts food producer to produce the chowder, using milk and cream sourced from New England dairy farms.

Already, the group made its first donation of frozen chowder to Massachusetts’ four food banks. Created from about 33,000 pounds of fish, the donation included more than 18,000 containers, each with three six-ounce servings.

A fisherman inspecting freshly caught haddock. (Photo courtesy of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance)

The alliance hopes the Small Boats, Big Taste brand will gain recognition, like Newman’s Own, for both its quality and social mission. If they succeed and grow, other kinds of chowders, including quahog or oyster stew, could be added to the line.

Creating such a value-added product is an effective way to sustain efforts to bring local seafood into regional food systems, and make it more accessible to distressed communities over the longer term, Tyson Rasor, the fisheries and food systems program manager at the environmental and food systems nonprofit Ecotrust, told Civil Eats.

“We’re learning that this is more than just moving food around; this is about approaching human health in a more holistic way.”

Seafood products such as fish cakes, fishermen’s pies, or soups are generally more affordable than fillets because they’re cut with other, less expensive foods and the seafood portion is smaller, said Rasor. They’re also easier for institutions like schools or hospitals to handle than frozen fish fillets, and people are also “leaning into ready-to-go foods.”

Ecotrust, a member of the Wave coalition, is currently working with the Oregon State University Food Innovation Center and Health Care Without Harm to create seafood products that large institutions could purchase to bring in healthy, nutrient-dense fish in a way that’s tasty and attractive.

Opportunities for Systemic Change

Many of the fishermen’s’ groups have an eye toward USDA programs to sustain their donation efforts. The Cape Cod Fishermen’s Alliance, for example, is seeking to get the USDA to buy its chowder for programs providing food assistance to schools, food banks, and other institutions.

With the USDA recently committing to purchase $30 million of Gulf shrimp for its food assistance programs, Bradley of Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United similarly hopes to leverage the Catch Together effort to get into that program. He’s also eyeing a state program, Genuine Mississippi, that promotes food produced in the state.

Other groups, including the Wave, are seeking out private philanthropy to continue and/or expand their efforts, based on the needs they’re seeing on the ground.

“We’re learning that this is more than just moving food around; this is about approaching human health in a more holistic way and using food as the starting point when we’re delivering Alaska seafood to tribal communities,” said Herendeen. “We’re looking at how  we can bring in other partners and other resources to support these families in a bigger way.”

Wave executive director Justin Zeulner says the coalition’s approach to Catch Together is “a bit of an FDR model. We’re doing pandemic relief, and that’s important right now. It’s equally important that we’re looking at these opportunities for systems change.”

Zeulner envisions the food donation systems that the Wave is helping to create turning into a future revenue model for communities. He envisions cultural institutions stepping up and purchasing the local foods that are now being bought with grant funds, and selling them to their customers and employees.

“We’re paying culinary leaders to put food boxes together,” Zeulner says. Perhaps in the future, he adds, “we can work with a tribal leader and pay people to put boxes together. [Then,] when the pandemic is over, they’re set up to actually sell.

“Think about it: tribal, BIPOC, small-boat harvested seafood and local grains that we can offer via the Wave Coalition to the general public [could] create a whole new economic opportunity,” he says.

The post Connecting Fishermen with Hungry Communities Can also Benefit Local Food Systems appeared first on Civil Eats.

Stephen Jones. (Photo courtesy of WSU)

Jones doesn’t miss working with the commodity market. “I like the model of keeping value where it’s produced,” he told Civil Eats “If we grow wheat here, let’s use it here in a way that makes sense economically and environmentally.”

The Bread Lab recently produced the “approachable loaf,” a whole grain bread made with just seven ingredients that’s soft, sliced, and retails for no more than $6 anywhere in the country. Jones said he was inspired to create the bread after learning that people frequenting the Skagit Valley food pantry weren’t taking his lab’s artisanal loaves because they didn’t recognize it as bread—that is, it wasn’t soft, sliced, or packaged in a recognizable wrapper.

Since the pandemic began, the lab has stepped up its production of the approachable loaf, producing 10 times more than usual to help feed families in need, said Jones.

Jones’ practical research is supported in part by a novel $1.5 million endowment for organic agriculture research from Clif Bar & Company and King Arthur Flour. The endowment pays the lab’s managing director’s salary and provides Jones with a pool of discretionary funds. But more broadly, Jones says that the endowment “allows us to do unrestricted discovery. That is, we can go in directions that have no predetermined end. This is rare in today’s science.”

The endowment has become a lifeline to the Bread Lab since it lost its financial support from area restaurants, bakeries and chefs after coronavirus hit. then. “If we didn’t have the endowment, we wouldn’t be here,” said Jones.

The endowment is Clif Bar’s third—in 2015, the company provided the University of Wisconsin with a $500,000 endowment (matched by Organic Valley, and an additional $1 million from alumni), and earlier this year, the company made headlines with a $500,000 endowment for the University of California’s first-ever organic research institute.

Clif Bar is the most prolific funder in this space, but it isn’t alone. Companies like Organic Valley and King Arthur are also seeking to finance open-source, university research into organic seeds and plant varieties as a way of scaling up organic agriculture and to act as a counterbalance in a university research system awash in hundreds of millions of funding from companies like Bayer and Cargill. (Disclosure: Civil Eats has received financial support from the Clif Bar Family Foundation and Organic Valley in the past.)

These endowments are ever more critical as universities face collapsing revenues brought on by the pandemic, and many researchers brace for impending budget cuts.

Such efforts may help to overcome the barriers to expanding organic production in the U.S. while combating the outsized influence that conventional agribusiness has over agricultural universities and their affiliated cooperative extension services for on-farm education. That’s important for multiple reasons, from reducing the enormous environmental and health impacts associated with pesticide and synthetic fertilizer use, to diversifying plant breeds to better withstand climate change and drought, while also offering better nutrition. Many of today’s crops are bred for yield at the expense of all else, while research suggests that organic agriculture may be more resilient.

“Our goal is to try to develop a new generation of ag professionals to serve the maturation of the organic sector,” Matthew Dillon, senior director of government relations and agricultural programs at Clif Bar & Company, told Civil Eats. He emphasized that the importance of an endowment is that it says, “this research is so important that we’re putting a stake in the ground and we’re going to make sure there is funding in perpetuity for these programs.”

The pandemic is not slowing Clif Bar’s plans to continue funding university researchers. It expects to announce its fourth endowment by fall, according to Dillon, and recently celebrated the appointment of a research director to California’s new organic agriculture research institute.

Lack of Organic Seeds and Breeds

One big barrier to expanding organic production is the limited number of high-quality, high-yielding organic seeds and plant varieties available for farmers.

“For a lot of crops, [especially fruit and vegetables], we don’t have breeds that were made for organic. We’re using conventional seeds that . . . weren’t bred to withstand pest pressures, or for use with organic fertilizers,” said Diana Martin, director of communications and marketing at Rodale Institute. She noted, however, that Rodale’s 40 years of trials on grains show organic to be just as competitive as conventional if the seeds are bred to work with the farming system.

Endowments from companies could help fill that gap, and it’s one of the reasons why Clif Bar turned to them as it sought to expand its use of organic ingredients, said Dillon.

Because endowments go on in perpetuity, when individual researchers like the Bread Lab’s Jones step down, the organic plant breeding will go on, and continue to churn out new organic plant breeders.

These endowing companies’ efforts contrast with those of General Mills, Danone, and others, which focus on regenerative—not necessarily organic—agriculture in their supply chains.

Limited Research Dollars

Organic farming research is woefully underfunded in the United States and globally. In 2019, it received just $20 million out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) $2.9 billion research budget. While the 2018 Farm Bill committed steady increases in funding for organic research up to $50 million by 2023, it’s still a tiny sliver of the entire budget. No wonder, then, that only around 1 percent of U.S. farmland has received organic certification, even though 5 percent of all food—and 14 percent of the produce—that we eat in the U.S. is organic.

“We’re importing a lot of our organic food, which is a missed opportunity for our domestic farmers who are struggling in the commodities markets when we have this market right here in the U.S. that’s demanding [domestic] organic over importing that food,” said Martin. Organic farmers have seen demand rise for their products during the pandemic, added Martin, because consumers are cooking more meals at home and turning to healthier foods. Organic produce sales are up by double digits.

USDA’s organic funding comes out of its Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative (OREI), which provides grants to university researchers ranging in size from about $50,000 to $2 million for multi-university collaborations.

Oregon State University (OSU), for example, is the lead on a large project called the Northern Vegetable Improvement Collaborative (NOVIC). The collaborative is conducting long-term research into 10 organic vegetable crops across five states. Founded in 2009, NOVIC is now on its third four-year funding cycle, with each cycle bringing in $2 million in USDA grant funds.

Lane Selman.

Long-term funding is critical for breeding new plant varieties, but it “is really unheard of,” said Lane Selman, professor of practice at OSU and a NOVIC researcher. Instead, she spends a lot of her time writing shorter-term grants.

What’s more, the $2 million is split among six institutions, and the university takes half the funds earmarked for its researchers. That leaves Selman scrambling to find supplemental funds to help connect local farmers with the new varieties. Without that, adoption of organic agriculture is even slower.

Selman turns to a handful of companies, including Clif Bar, Organic Valley, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Vitalis, High Mowing Seeds, and Burgerville, to fund her outreach to farmers and chefs, through the Culinary Breeding Network.

“You have to be an out-of-the-box thinker in this university system,” Selman told Civil Eats. “All of these amazing people are fighting for the same funds,” she added. “There’s not enough.”

California State University at Chico hasn’t even sought USDA Organic funding for its applied organic research projects, including the Organic Vegetable Project (OVP), an Organic Dairy Unit that studies soil carbon in an integrated organic livestock and cropping system, and a study evaluating organic production in no-till systems.

Instead, Chico State solicits other funding from USDA, such as its Conservation Innovation Grant program, and “makes it work for the kind of work we want to do,” said Cindy Daley, professor and director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture & Resilient Systems (CRA) at Chico State. “If we call it regenerative or organic, it’s less fundable from USDA,” she said, “but if we call it sustainable it’s more fundable.”

Several foundations that are part of California FoodShed Funders also provide research dollars for Chico State’s work. The OVP also runs a three-acre community-supported agriculture operation, which educates and feeds its subscribers while raising funds for the project as they run field trials and provide local organic farmers with data to help them become more competitive.

A System Stacked Against Organic Research

USDA funding for agricultural universities has long been outpaced by private sector funds, which come largely from conventional agribusinesses with strings attached. But the balance shifted even more in the private sector direction after the passage of the 1982 Bayh-Dole Act.

A major change to U.S. patent law, Bayh-Dole incentivized universities to partner with the private sector on research by allowing them to collect royalties for patents and other types of intellectual property they developed. The shift came at a time when public funds were diminishing.

Bayh-Dole, explained Clif’s Dillon, paved the way for agribusinesses to approach researchers and say, “Let’s identify corn genetics that can improve nutrient use efficiency, and let’s patent our new understanding of the genetics, and together we can collect royalties any time varieties with these genetics are used.”

Companies’ stepped-up funding for agricultural research at land-grant universities led to public institutions increasingly serving private interests at the expense of the public good, according to a 2012 report by nonprofit advocacy group Food & Water Watch.

The impact, said Rodale’s Martin, is “we’ve seen a lot of scientists get bullied into not publishing results that aren’t favorable to the funder or the industry.” Scientists have also been discouraged from conducting research on organics.

As Clif Bar, a small, privately owned B Corporation, began shifting to sourcing organic ingredients in the early 2000s, the people behind the company couldn’t help but note this influence. “We could see big chemical companies endowing chairs or being on the boards of public universities, and we thought, ‘Wow, we could never do that,’” because of their more limited resources, Elysa Hammond, Clif’s vice-president of environmental stewardship, told Civil Eats. But, ultimately, the company leadership decided to make it a priority.

Endowment Ripple Effects

Bill Tracy, a plant breeder specializing in sweet corn at the University of Wisconsin Madison, said that the endowment he received from Clif Bar and Organic Valley created a “teachable moment,” as many colleagues both within and outside the university questioned its necessity. “A gift of this magnitude” he said, “shines a very bright light on the need.”

As a result of the endowment, the university established its first permanent graduate program for plant breeding of organic crops, and interest in organic plant breeding has boomed at the UW-M Tracy said. There are now at least five faculty members breeding organic crops, whereas before there was only one. The university is now attracting a steady stream of graduate students interested in organic plant breeding and is developing a certificate in organic agriculture.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Jones said the endowment shows leaders at the university that there’s national interest in what he does and also helps create local interest and support. A local honey producer, for example, donated 800 pounds of honey to help the lab step up production of the approachable loaf during the pandemic.

But he’s most appreciative that the endowment allows for “unhindered” inquiry and science for the public good. “We help students go out in the world with a doctorate who will be better people and make for better communities,” he said.

The post Food Companies Step Up Funding for Organic Farming Research appeared first on Civil Eats.

Earlier this month, President Trump traveled to Maine to announce plans to reopen a vast marine preserve, created by President Obama in 2016, to commercial fishing. While ostensibly aimed at helping New England fishermen catch more fish and expand their businesses, Maine fishermen—and fishermen across the United States—are grappling with a sobering reality that the president’s controversial plan won’t solve: They can’t sell their fish.

As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, only half of the fish harvested by Maine fishermen in May sold, and prices averaged 18 percent less in comparison to May the prior year. Landings were also down by more than half, at 44,495 pounds, because many fishermen aren’t going out to sea while the restaurants that are their main markets remain shuttered.

“It’s been a difficult slog over the past couple of months,” says Ben Martens, executive director of Maine Coast Fisherman’s Association, emotion rising in his voice. “It’s just really scary right now, with the marketplace and COVID, and thinking about how we protect the fishing heritage.”

For Martens, the president’s visit was a missed opportunity to address the real problems facing Maine fishermen. Very few, he says, even fished in the Northeast Canyon and Seamounts stretch of deep ocean before Obama designated it a marine monument to protect its fragile ecosystem and the sea turtles, mammals, and other life it supports.

Since March, Martens’ organization has been helping Maine fishermen create business plans that will build resiliency into their future, as they face a multitude of challenges, including the pandemic, climate change, competition over ocean resources, and uncertainty over pending regulations to protect the endangered right whale.

Small-scale fishermen in coastal communities across the U.S.—from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Alaska—continue to face daunting challenges during the pandemic. Recent policy actions—including the reopening of Northeast Canyons, the president’s aquaculture executive order from last month, and the coronavirus relief programs passed by Congress—have failed to address the problems or provide real support.

And they’re not alone. A recent Conservation International report spotlights how small-scale fishers around the world, many of whom already experience food and livelihood insecurity, are facing an uncertain future.

Market disruptions and fishing closures; increased risk of COVID-19 infection from working in close quarters on small boats; and climate change stressors—from storm events to ocean acidification to fish population shifts—are creating extreme hardship among small-scale fishermen. This group contributes one-half of the catch worldwide and provides social, economic, and cultural benefits to coastal communities.

“Let’s get money into the hands of fishermen so they can pay their bills, but let’s also build a system that’s more resilient to the next global health pandemic that comes down the road.” 

One bright light highlighted by Conservation International—and previously reported by Civil Eats—is an increase in fishermen selling direct to consumers, whether at the dock, online, or through community supported fisheries. While many view direct sales as a stopgap measure to get fishermen through the season, some fishery groups want to leverage the momentum they’ve gained to solidify consumer preferences toward locally caught, wild-harvested seafood—and away from imported, farmed fish.

But, as the report underscores, small-scale fisheries need more than that to survive; they need financial support from government and private donors, as well as nonprofit and supply chain collaboration and a host of other measures.

“Let’s get money into the hands of fishermen so they can pay their bills,” says Eric Brazer, deputy director, Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance. “But let’s also figure out how we build a system that’s more resilient to the next global health pandemic that comes down the road.” For Brazer, that means investing in “better infrastructure and working waterfronts, and a stronger seafood supply chain,” as well as including more seafood in U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) commodity purchasing programs and a nationwide effort to promote consumption of U.S. seafood.

Yesterday, Trump signed an executive order that added the lobster industry to the USDA’s $30 billion agricultural bailout fund, aimed at supporting food producers affected by his trade war with China; it’s unclear how much of those funds will end up in lobstermen’s hands, and experts think it’s unlikely to make a long-term difference in the economic viability of the industry.

Fishermen in Dire Need

Most U.S. fishermen are independent workers, which means if they don’t work, they don’t get paid. They’re “among the working class of our country who are the lowest paid, most likely to die on the job, and most likely to go without health insurance,” says J. J. Bartlett, executive director of Fishing Partnership, a nonprofit that supports 20,000 New England fishing families.

All of the fishing groups that Civil Eats spoke with said few if any of their members were able to access the U.S. Small Business Administration’s pandemic-prompted Paycheck Protection Program or Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs because the typical employment structure of a fishing crew didn’t allow for it.

Captain Garry Libby doing a test tow for cold-water shrimp. The fishery collapsed in 2014 and was shut down. (Photo credit: Ben Martens)

And while $300 million was directed to fishermen through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, “fishermen have yet to see a penny of that,” says Brazer. In early May, the Commerce Department allocated money to the states, which are each now deciding how to equitably disburse the funds to fishermen.

For Brazer, it’s been a frustrating process. “Nobody will tell us how the states are going to distribute that money to fishermen. We’ve had to reach out to the gulf states to say, ‘Here are some guidelines, some things you should consider whenever you get around to figuring out however the fishermen who desperately need this get some economic relief,’” he says.

Beyond the delay in getting money into fishermen’s pockets, fishing groups—while grateful for the support—say it isn’t enough.

Seth Rolbein, director of the Cape Cod Fisheries Trust, says, “$28 million is not going to solve any big problems,” about the funds awarded to Massachusetts. “Once it gets divided out among everybody, it’s hard to see how big of an impact it’s going to have.”

National fisheries, continues Rolbein, have received “a tiny fraction of the relief that’s been offered to other areas of the economy that is in no way commensurate to its economic impact.”

In fact, for every dollar that the agriculture industry received from pandemic relief, the seafood industry got a penny and a half, he says.

Trump’s Executive Order Undermines Wild Fisheries

With fishermen struggling, the Trump administration issued an executive order last month to promote American seafood globally, largely by boosting offshore aquaculture—farming fish in open-water pens—and relaxing fishery regulations. It calls for the identification of “aquaculture opportunity areas” and sets up a structure to streamline permitting for aquaculture in federal waters, such as through short timelines and reduced environmental safeguards.

“Deregulation is not the way to get fishermen back to work.”

While aquaculture proponents largely cheered the order, U.S. wild fishery groups were dismayed.

“Deregulation is not the way to get fishermen back to work,” said Brazer, and in fact, strong regulations, meant to protect fish populations over the long-term, “provide [fishermen] with the opportunity to build a business that’s going to last . . . something they can pass on to their kids.”

Fishermen groups worry that relaxing regulations for offshore aquaculture will lead to increased marine pollution and disease among wild fish populations, whose migration routes often come close to the net pens of the farmed fish.

“It’s a disaster for fisheries,” Linda Behnken, executive director of the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association, noted bluntly. “If you look anywhere around the world where’s there’s open-water aquaculture, native wild runs have been eliminated. Alaska’s fisheries are healthy because we’ve protected habitat and we’ve protected the wild stock,” she says.

Finfish aquaculture is banned in Alaska waters, but the state allows what it calls mariculture, or small-scale aquaculture operations for shellfish and seaweed.

Linda Behnken holding a halibut. (Photo © Josh Roper Photography)

Behnken supports mariculture, which she says complements wild fisheries and provides an alternate source of income for local people. Fishermen’s groups in other coastal areas generally support such small-scale aquaculture, but worry about the industrial-scale operations envisioned by the executive order.

“Our focus on aquaculture is near shore and decentralized,” Rolbein told Civil Eats. “It’s family-based. It’s small farmers working . . . with no environmental interventions, no antibiotics, no permitted structures, no food other than what the tides brings. It’s all completely in the natural habitat and in our communities.”

“The president’s Executive Order was nice,” he continued, “but it didn’t really address that, and it did make us wonder about the long-term implications of very large aquaculture offshore, which is very different from how we do it.”

Resisting large-scale aquaculture will be tough, however, if we also want to increase fish production as the executive order calls for, says Halley Froehlich, an assistant professor at U.C. Santa Barbara. Some 85 percent of U.S. wild-caught fisheries are presently fished at or near maximum sustainable levels, leaving little wiggle room to increase catch, she says.

In fact, half of the seafood that Americans eat today is farm-raised, and much of it is imported from countries with weak environmental safeguards, says Froehlich. “If you don’t want it in your backyard, then it’s coming from somewhere else.”

Froehlich sees a role for U.S. aquaculture—managed with strict environmental safeguards—in providing a healthy, sustainable source of protein. But, she thinks systematic integration between aquaculture and wild fisheries, which are now regulated separately, is critical, as well as a robust stakeholder process that includes local fisherman.

“Ultimately, it really matters what stakeholders want,” she says.

A Future for U.S. Wild Fisheries?

Overall, the majority of seafood consumed in America is imported—about two-thirds, in fact, according to recent research by Jessica Gephart, assistant professor of environmental science at American University. What’s more, Americans stick largely to the same products, and that, Gephart says, “opens the door to not really caring where your seafood comes from, just looking for the least expensive product.”

Landing a halibut in Alaska. (Photo © Josh Roper Photography)

To get more people interested in eating wild-caught fish, Brazer would like to see a national campaign to promote wild, sustainably harvested U.S. seafood, and the people and communities who harvest it. He points to Alaska’s Seafood Marketing Institute, which is funded in part by a tax on fishermen, and runs consumer campaigns and other activities to promote Alaskan seafood, as an example of what’s possible.

There’s momentum now for that kind of push, says Rolbein. “We’re seeing a really dramatic increase in the number of people who are . . . going down to the ports and buying directly from their captains and their crew. It harkens back to the way fish moved 100 to 200 years ago.”

“Anecdotally, people love it,” he continues. “There’s such a great connection between someone who comes down to a boat and actually sees the boat and the captain—and off comes the freshest possible thing.”

But direct sales to consumers alone won’t keep fishermen in business. That’s why fishery groups would also like to see the USDA make seafood purchases to distribute through schools, food banks, and nutritional assistance programs, as it does now for beef, pork, vegetables, and fruit.

Expanding USDA procurement of seafood is one measure the Fishing Communities Coalition is calling for in response to the policies of the Trump administration. The coalition released its plan to “save America’s fish economies,” shortly after Trump’s visit with Maine fishermen, stating that “opening up a national monument to additional fishing . . . won’t solve the very real and immediate needs of our nation’s fishermen.”

The coalition seeks a $5.4 billion package in relief funds, half of which would go for immediate relief, as outlined in the CARES Act. The other half would go for longer-term relief, and would be channeled through existing government programs that currently underserve fishermen.

In addition to increasing seafood purchases by USDA, fisheries groups would like better access to USDA programs that support small producers, such as by helping them build local markets. Fisheries groups would also like to tap into Department of Transportation funds to improve supply chain infrastructure for processing and transporting seafood.

This is the kind of support that Martens and others are identifying as critical, as they help fishermen to create long-term business plans that will increase their resiliency.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that our fishermen will come back from this,” says Rolbein. “In fact, if we’re fortunate, we may find ways to take this real crisis moment and turn into an opportunity to make our fisheries even stronger longer term.”

Brazer agrees. “This COVID-19 global health pandemic is going to fundamentally change human behavior,” he says. “If we can harness that . . . and show consumers it’s not just salmon, shrimp and tuna—it’s snapper, it’s rock fish, it’s crab, it’s herring. . . . I think we’re going to see greater appreciation for wild-caught fish and the people who bring it to you.”

Top photo courtesy of Ben Martens.

This article was updated to correct Eric Brazer’s title and the name of his organization.

The post Fishermen Hope for Change as the Seafood Industry Faces a Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.

Luckily, Howrigan didn’t have to dump her milk, as other dairy farmers around the country have had to do. That’s largely because dairy industry stakeholders in Vermont quickly came together on a collaborative initiative to recover farmers’ raw milk and process it into gallon jugs of milk, yogurt cups, and butter for the Vermont Foodbank.

Coordinated by the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets, the collaboration includes Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), the nation’s largest dairy cooperative; three processors, Green Mountain Creamery, HP Hood, and Ploughgate Creamery; and several nonprofits, including the Vermont Community Foundation, New England Dairy, and the Vermont Foodbank. It’s one example of how dairy industry partners are coming together in New England to help both struggling farmers and families in urgent need of food assistance.

A $60,000 grant provided by the Vermont Community Foundation will cover the costs of buying three truckloads of milk from the St. Albans Cooperative Creamery, now merged with the DFA, and producing it into 11,500 gallons of 2% milk, 42,000 cups of yogurt, and 440 pounds of butter that will be delivered to the Vermont Foodbank to distribute across its 215 sites and partner organizations. The milk donations will be spread out over 10 weeks and the yogurt and butter donations are for one month only.

“We want to help the farmer here and limit disposal of that milk and also find a good market for it. This is one avenue to do that,” said Anson Tebbetts, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets, who spearheaded the initiative.

Vermont is laser focused on protecting its dairy industry, which accounts for roughly 70 percent of the state’s agricultural sales, and brings in additional, vital tourism dollars. “People come to Vermont for the landscape and the beauty and the farms,” said Tebbetts. All told, it’s a $2 billion industry.

Rebecca Howrigan with her children outside her dairy in St. Albans, Vermont. (Photo courtesy of Manning Dairy)

Though Vermont is small enough that its dairy producers and processors largely all know each other, its approach of bringing in private money to rapidly mobilize key stakeholders is a model other states and regions could adopt to help support farmers and get a range of foods to those who urgently need them. While the program is short-term—and a band-aid solution to the deeper dairy crisis—all partners in the collaboration told Civil Eats they were interested in continuing the program if the demand for food assistance keeps growing over the coming months, as it likely will.

“There are families who won’t be recovering economically in the next six months, next year, or even the next couple of years. It’s going to have a long tail,” Nicole Whalen, communications director at Vermont Foodbank, told Civil Eats.

How Vermont Brought Everyone Together to Make it Happen

When Tebbetts saw that farmers were dumping milk, his first step was to find private dollars to pay for buying the milk and processing it to get it into the food bank. Unlike other farm to food bank efforts, processors are essential when donating dairy—and their costs also need to be covered. “Making sure everyone is whole on this” was top of mind, Tebbetts told Civil Eats.

Tebbetts reached out to the Vermont Community Foundation, which had launched a fundraising drive for statewide coronavirus relief. Aware of dairy’s impact “on our economy, our landscape, our culture, and our brand,” the foundation was quick to get on board, said Sarah Waring, vice president of grants and community investment at the foundation.

Once the funding was secured, the other pieces fell into place. Money was the catalyst that brought everyone together, said Jenny Karl, director of the nonprofit New England Dairy. “Everybody wants to do the right thing but they all need to … at least break even,” she said.

Whalen agreed. In the past when it was a matter of preventing food waste, bringing on processors hasn’t been easy, she said. But, “in this instance, people really came together in a new way.”

New England Dairy helped the agriculture agency convene the key players. Each had been having individual conversations with producers and processors, so they decided to join forces. “I thought of it like Match.com,” said Karl. “Hood had extra milk capacity and DFA had excess milk.”

“The easy part is getting people to the table,” added Karl. “The more challenging part is who is going to do what.”

But, because Vermont is such a small state, “it didn’t take long for everyone to agree on the process,” said Kiersten Bourgeois of St. Albans Cooperative Creamery, in an email. The cooperative represents more than half of Vermont’s dairy farmers.

“Everybody wants to do the right thing, but they all need to at least break even.”

Organic milk producers aren’t part of the effort because they haven’t been hit as hard by the pandemic. That’s largely because organic milk doesn’t rely as much on institutions and restaurants for sales, said Ed Maltby, executive director of the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance. Organic retail sales remain stable and are actually increasing in the Northeast, he said.

“Even outside of dairy, organic food sales overall are up [now]—which many believe is due to a rise in consumer awareness,” agreed Rolf Carlson, vice president of milk sourcing at Lactalis US Yogurt, the owner of Green Mountain Creamery, in an email.

Still, organic dairy producers face the same low prices as conventional producers. “It’s a stable, bad market,” said Maltby.

Program funds will pay farmers the price they’d get on the market. Green Mountain Creamery and Ploughgate are getting paid to cover their processing costs, though Ploughgate reduced its price to help the program. HP Hood declined the funds, and is absorbing the cost of the processing.

While Tebbetts admits that the program is “not going to change wildly the price that the farmer is paid, it’s important because [the milk] isn’t going to waste. The farmer is getting some return on it and it’s going to people who really need it.”

Milk’s short shelf life posed the biggest logistical challenges. It needs to reach the food bank shortly after it’s processed so it can be distributed to partner programs, some of which operate only once a week, and then provided to people in need—all while giving people enough time to consume it before it sours. On top of the shelf-life issue, the Vermont Foodbank faces capacity concerns, as are foodbanks around the country.

Adding yogurt, with its longer shelf life, to the program, was one way to try to address those issues.

Other states could replicate Vermont’s program, says New England Dairy’s Karl, but the key is finding a foundation or perhaps a grant program from the state to pay for it. When funds are limited, “it’s challenging,” she says, “because who’s going to take the hit? If you have only, say, $5,000, how do you divide it amongst deserving folks who are trying to do the right thing? [More] funding makes things move further and faster.”

Anchor funding for a program can be supplemented with other pools of money, such as the USDA’s milk donation reimbursement program, which covers fluid milk, but not yogurt or cheese.

Another concern, particularly in larger states, is avoiding the appearance of picking winners and losers. “How do you make it so that it seems like enough people were at the table to participate,” and not bog down the process, asked Karl. Bigger states may need to take a regional approach, with multiple programs statewide.

Regional Milk Giveaways

In Vermont, and elsewhere, farmers are also taking other approaches to keep milk from going to waste.

A donation of 2% milk from HP Hood. (Photo courtesy of the Vermont Foodbank)

Food banks’ stretched capacities have led to milk giveaways, as a way for the dairy industry to get milk directly into the hands of people who need it. DFA has partnered with HP Hood and other processors in New England on a number of these events, at which milk jugs are handed out to people from the back of dairy processor trucks, in big parking lots.

DFA buys the milk from farmers through a national fund it created, the Farmers Feeding Families Fund, and donates the milk to dairy processors, who distribute the final product. At one event at Boston College, Hood HP gave away 8,600 gallons of milk.

Tebbetts participated in a Vermont giveaway, and said he was moved when one woman cried as he handed her the milk. “The need is extraordinary,” he said.

DFA’s Farmers Feeding Families Fund also aims to raise $500,000 for community food banks to help them buy dairy products. It has donated 9,500 half-gallons of milk to a Connecticut food bank, in partnership with Guida’s Dairy. DFA also collaborated with HP Hood’s Concord, New Hampshire plant, donating milk that Hood then processed into 12,000 half-gallons that were delivered to food banks, soup kitchens and restaurant relief programs.

“Those programs are being replicated all over,” said Sarah Barow, communications director at HP Hood.

DFA has donated more than 250,000 gallons of milk across the country, according to Bourgeois.

Other larger dairy processors such as Danone and Chobani are similarly working to get surplus milk into food banks nationally. But concerns remain that these efforts aren’t enough to sustain dairy farmers through the ongoing pandemic.

Addressing Vermont’s Long-Term Needs

The Vermont Community Foundation is open to a second round of funding for the program, but the state has many other priorities for COVID-19 relief, and the foundation is reserving half of the $4.8 million it’s raised for longer-term recovery programs, said Waring.

Vermont’s “economy is so dependent on tourism and global supply chains for milk. One of the conversations when we look to the second phase of our grantmaking is, how do we go back to … a resilient regional food system that enables us to weather this kind of thing when it comes again,” said Waring.

The Rotary Club in Brattleboro is raising money to keep the program going, said Tebbetts. Dairy processors are on board for another round.

“The good thing is we have a really good working group now, so I think everything and anything is on the table as we look forward,” said Kyle Thygesen, former director of milk sourcing for Lactalis U.S. Yogurt. The creamery is particularly interested in providing yogurt to summer school programs, he added.

But Tebbetts is worried about the bigger picture for Vermont’s dairy farmers if milk prices don’t rise soon. It costs $1.70 on average to produce a gallon of milk, he says, and the price is now about $1.00 per gallon. Efforts to get milk that would otherwise be wasted into the charitable food system can’t alone close the gap in supply and demand that would raise prices. While the market may rebound by fall, between now and then, he says farmers will need some assistance.

The USDA is providing direct payments as part of the CARES Act, but “the checks won’t be big enough to cover the losses,” said Tebbetts. “Federal government, state government, private folks are going to have to intervene or we’re going to have mass losses of dairy farms.”

For now, Rebecca Howrigan is doing her best to find ways to cut back production and keep her farm whole. She’s proud her milk is going to people who need it, especially when the only other option is dumping it. And she says, “even though our pay prices are low, we do still have jobs we can go to every day, and hopefully a job we can go to when this is done.”

The post To Avoid Dumping Milk, Dairy Farmers Find New Market at Vermont Food Banks appeared first on Civil Eats.

“It’s a pretty small space [for] three or four people. If one of us gets it, we’re all going to get it,” he told Civil Eats. Still, MacAllister (pictured above) is grateful that the regional wholesaler who buys his catch, Red’s Best, still wants to buy his product.

Other fishermen in New England’s billion-dollar industry, which employs some 34,000 people, aren’t as lucky. Markets for lobster, oysters, and shellfish have collapsed along with restaurant closures and a sharp downturn in trade, leaving many fishermen struggling to make ends meet.

“There are certain things there are no markets for,” said Jared Auerbach, founder and CEO of Red’s Best, which buys solely from small, dayboat fishermen. While Red’s Best usually sells seafood fresh, the company is freezing fish in the hopes that international trade will eventually pick back up—or that the product will find new, domestic uses.

The crisis that’s gripping New England’s fishing communities is playing out in coastal areas from Alaska to California and the Gulf of Mexico as the coronavirus pandemic disrupts domestic and international supply chains and seafood consumption plummets. At least 90 percent of the seafood eaten in the U.S. is imported—and much of what we catch is sent overseas. The domestic market in the U.S. relies heavily on the hospitality industry; before the pandemic, two-thirds of seafood in the U.S. was eaten in restaurants and hotels.

Wholesalers, fishermen’s associations, and fishermen themselves are struggling to find new avenues and methods to sell U.S.-caught fish—which tends to retail for considerably more than its imported counterpart—and keep boats in the water, fearful that the pandemic might forever alter how people eat fish. They’re finding new retail markets, keeping a toe in what’s left of wholesale markets, and accepting short-term losses in the hopes they can ride out the pandemic. Assistance from the stimulus package—some $300 million in relief is earmarked for fisheries—may also help carry them through. And an alliance of companies with a stake in seafood have urged the Trump administration to direct up to $500 million in additional federal funds to purchase surplus seafood from struggling fishermen.

In Cape Cod, skate wings, monkfish and dogfish have become bread-and-butter species for fishermen as global warming and changing ocean conditions make cod and haddock harder to find. Popular in Europe, those species are lesser known in the U.S. What sells best now, are “the easiest and most well-known items,” staples like cod, salmon, and shrimp (largely imported) and lobster, according to Alex Hay, co-owner of Mac’s Seafood, which operates several restaurants and fish markets on Cape Cod, as well as wholesale businesses that sell lobster and shellfish.

To eat more U.S. caught fish, domestic consumers would have to start to buying these lesser-known species— a shift that was already being promoted by chefs and fishermen on a small scale before the pandemic. But those campaigns have taken on a new urgency now.

“We have supply chains, and they may fall apart, but people are going to need to eat,” Auerbach said.

“What gives me hope is that [last month], I had the best seafood company in the world with all A players,” he continued, choking back emotion. “Whatever the puzzle is, we’ll do our best to solve it. But I don’t have the pieces yet.”

Keeping Harvesters Harvesting

Wholesalers like Red’s Best, which buys direct from fishermen and sells to restaurants and supermarkets, are laser-focused on keeping their supply chains from grinding to a halt.

“What’s depressing is we have the most sophisticated group of farmers, fishers, and harvesters ready to bring food to the dock on a daily basis, and they’re sitting at home,” said Hay.

Photo courtesy of Red’s Best.

Massachusetts fisheries are not under a lockdown order, but some of those fishers might be choosing to stay home because they feel virus testing is inadequate and hospitals are ill prepared to deal with the onslaught of cases that are expected.

Still, some are risking going out alone, said Pierre Juillard, international and domestic seafood director at Marder Seafood, a New England wholesaler. Many want to be out at sea.

“Right now, to keep these [fishermen] going, we’re cutting it and freezing it and hedging our bets that in two to three months, it’ll start to slowly come back, and we’ll have the inventory to sell it,” said Juillard. Marder is selling some fish to European supermarkets now, though demand has dropped 50 percent there, and 95 percent in the U.S., over the past month, he said.

Auerbach admits that it’s risky buying fish and freezing it for later sale. “There’s a backlogs of ships and containers in different places in the world. A lot of fish moves through airlines, [and] that’s all messed up right now,” he says. But Auerbach also thinks that frozen fish, which easily lasts up to six months, could help feed people locally if global supply chains start to break down.

“I think we’re going to have serious food security issues coming down the pike,” Auerbach told Civil Eats.

Retail as a Stopgap

In the absence of healthy wholesale markets, fishermen are trying especially hard to drum up sales through retail channels. Red’s Best is making fish and shellfish available to consumers through a number of online channels, including its own website, Facebook, the upscale home delivery website Mercato, and a national website connecting consumers to fishermen during COVID-19. Locally, it’s enabling people to pick up fresh seafood at the Boston fish pier. [Editor’s note: During the editing process for this article, Red’s Best sent an update noting that their direct to consumer business “has really blown up,” and that Auerbach has seen the customer support as a bright spot.]

Auerbach is also teaming up with one of Boston’s top chefs, Jeremy Sewall of Island Creek Oyster and Row 34, to teach people how to prepare fish at home through online videos. “We’re putting up really high-quality [frozen] fish,” Auerbach said. “You don’t have to eat it right away. Take it out of the vac-pack, put it on a paper towel and let it dry off. Cook it and put anything you want on it—soy sauce, barbeque sauce, whatever flavor,” he says.

Elsewhere in Cape Cod, Mac’s Seafood is offering curbside pickup at two of its restaurants and three of its retail fish markets remain open. While gift cards to its restaurants have been a big seller, it’s still reeling from the loss of wholesale markets for shellfish and lobster.

And Marder Seafood is continuing to sell to a handful of retail fish markets, including Fulton Fish Market in New York City and Newburyport Fish in Massachusetts, which offers curbside pickup. Fulton is struggling to stay afloat, as are other fish markets in cities hit hard by the virus, such as Pike Place Market in Seattle.

Located in a small seaside community, Newburyport Fish draws customers from neighboring towns and has steady business now, according to its owner Fred Derr, who helps Marden sell lesser-known, locally caught fish species to the public. “We’ll hand them a recipe card for monkfish and clams marinara or white pepper skate,” said Derr. “It makes it a little bit easier for folks.”

Marder is also thinking about getting an early start on its annual family pantry program, which offers low-cost frozen fish to the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance to provide to people in need. Marder usually participates in the program as a charitable function, but this year the program could also help Marder to keep its supply chains going.

The Alliance, which has supported and promoted small-scale and independent fishermen since 1991, has stepped up its “Stories from the Sea” posts about local fishermen and their catches to promote locally-caught fish during the pandemic. “There are a lot of people supporting local restaurants… but we are also asking people to try to cook more fish at home, Doreen Leggett, a community journalist and communications officer at the Alliance, explained by email. “Retail markets selling local fish are going to matter a lot in the coming weeks.”

Though all agree that retail is critical now, it’s unlikely to make up for the collapse of wholesale markets. “We’re just trying to survive, [to] find every avenue we can,” said Juillard.

Federal disaster assistance earmarked for fishing communities will provide fishermen with grants and other investments. In an email, Ashford Rosenberg, policy analyst for the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders’ Alliance, said the assistance was “an important first step” in helping commercial fishermen…[and] it’s likely that more resources and assistance will be needed down the road as we continue to understand the full economic impacts of COVID-19 on the commercial seafood industry.”

Re-shuffling Markets

The industry’s struggle to respond to the coronavirus crisis is exposing the fault lines in our fisheries: climate change and historic overfishing are already bringing many to the brink, and the global supply chains that encourage, say, New Englanders to eat Asian shrimp, while their local catch is exported abroad, are ultimately unsustainable.

In the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen are still recovering from hurricanes Irma and Charlie and fresh-water flooding that led several states to declare fisheries disasters last year, according to Rosenberg.

Photo courtesy of the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders Alliance

Wholesalers and fishermen are especially worried about losing some supply chains permanently. They fear that restaurants selling domestic fish may never reopen when the pandemic abates, or that the restaurants that have simplified their menus for curbside pickup might not return to offering their catch. It’s also possible that restaurants could switch to imported, mostly farmed seafood, in a downturned economy.

Take the Gulf of Mexico region, where 80 percent of snapper and grouper that’s landed by commercial fishermen goes into restaurants. “It’s so expensive, it ends up being a nice plated dinner. It found its niche,” Jason Delacruz, a Florida fisherman and wholesaler, told Civil Eats. “If we end up losing 50 percent of the restaurants in the U.S., say even 20 percent, it’s going to change the world that we sell fish to,” he said.

When Delacruz was left with 16,000 pounds of fish and no buyers two weeks ago, he was lucky to be able to sell some of his fish to grocery store chains, but he had to drop his price low enough to out-compete imported grouper from Nicaragua. He also sold fish to a restaurant owner who set up a retail operation in his restaurant parking lot, cutting, processing, and vacuum-packing single portion filets.

Like the New England fishermen, such retail markets are tiding him over. But, Delacruz said, “the wholesale side is what always made everything make money—retail was a side thing.”

Auerbach says he hopes this moment provides an opportunity to tweak the seafood supply chain for the better. On top of cooking seafood at home, he says he hopes “[imported] offers in big box stores’ seafood cases might get in line with what’s being landed locally.”

“The world was so flat” before the pandemic, he said, in a reference to the globalization of supply chains, “but, maybe it’s not.”

Top photo: Scott MacAllister, courtesy of the Cape Cod Commercial Fisherman’s Alliance

The post As Coronavirus Disrupts Seafood Supply Chains, Struggling Fishermen Seek Other Markets appeared first on Civil Eats.

Fall is a busy time for Knorr Farms, a family operation that grows peppers, corn, cotton, and other crops on 3,000 acres in Pinal County, one of Arizona’s top growing regions.

Owner Rob Knorr is preparing for a big October pepper harvest and mapping out plans for the next planting season—what to grow, where, and how. Water, as always, is the linchpin. Like other farmers in this parched county, which stretches for more than 5,300 square miles across the Sonoran Desert, Knorr depends entirely on irrigation water from the Colorado River. He receives it from the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a 336-mile canal system that Knorr calls the “lifeline to Arizona agriculture.”

Knorr Farms owner Rob Knorr holding irrigation piping. (Photo © Meg Wilcox)

But this year, Knorr’s lifeline is slipping away. A landmark agreement reached this spring between three of the states that share the lower basin of the Colorado River (Arizona, California, and Nevada) calls for deep cuts in river water allotments through 2026. The Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) aims to prevent the already dangerously low water levels in Lake Mead—the beating heart of the Colorado River delivery system—from dropping further. Arizona, with the most-junior water rights, is absorbing the bulk of the cuts, and Pinal County farmers like Knorr will be among the first to feel the pain of shortages.

The DCP “not only impacts the crops that we grow, it impacts the number of acres,” said Steve Todd, an advisor to Knorr Farms. “There will be acres left fallow,” in the years ahead.

That may be an understatement. Water experts estimate that up to 40 percent of non-Native land in Pinal County will eventually be fallowed as Arizona embraces the drier future that climate change will bring. And that future is coming soon: As of 2022, farmers in Pinal County—ranked in the top 2 percent of all U.S. counties for agricultural sales with $908 million in annual, on-farm direct sales—will lose their guaranteed access to CAP water, and will have to turn to more limited groundwater supplies.

As climate change forces the Southwest to face new rainfall and temperature baselines, agriculture is in the crosshairs. Farming uses, on average, 80 percent of ground and surface water supplies in the U.S., and rapid population growth, over-allocation of a finite resource, and a rapidly changing climate are leaning heavily on those supplies.

Nowhere is this more evident than the Colorado River system, which supplies water to 40 million people in seven U.S. states and two states in Mexico. While it’s still too early to see the DCP’s impact on Arizona farmers, the state’s approach to helping farmers adapt, stepping up water conservation, and spreading the pain—all while honoring Native communities’ senior water rights—could offer a useful example for other arid regions.

A map of the upper and lower Colorado River Basin.

“The past 20 years of drought have taught us that there is risk in the system,” said Chuck Cullom, Colorado River Programs Manager at CAP. “We have to pivot to a mindset where we all have to make contributions. We need to manage our destiny together.”

The Epicenter: Pinal County

Arizona is the nation’s second-largest producer of lettuce, broccoli, and cantaloupe. Its warm climate allows for year-round vegetable production, and earned it recognition as the U.S. winter lettuce capital. Arizona is also a big producer of dairy and cattle, which are important to the state economy.

Pinal County is the state’s powerhouse for dairy and beef, producing 45 percent of Arizona’s cattle and calf sales and 39 percent of its milk. Cotton, hay, corn, and barley are also important crops. Farmers in the county (and neighboring Maricopa and Pima counties as well) are at the epicenter for CAP water cutbacks because they’re among the lowest-priority users of CAP water.

As Cullom explained, western water law follows the “prior appropriation doctrine,” which essentially means, “first in time, first in right.”

Though non-Native farming dates back 150 years in Central Arizona, farmers in Pinal didn’t tap into the Colorado River until the 1980s, when the CAP canal system was built. Initially Pinal farmers used groundwater resources and surface water from Arizona’s Salt, Verde and Gila rivers. Todd’s grandfather, in fact, was among a group of farmers who convinced the federal government in the early 1900s to loan them money to build a dam on Arizona’s Salt River to store irrigation water. That initial dam led to the creation of the Salt River Project, which today provides electricity and surface water to the region.

In the past half century, competition increased for Arizona’s water supplies. Metropolitan Phoenix’s population boom—from barely 100,000 in 1950 to more than 4.5 million today—has resulted in less water for farmers. And as farmers retired, urban expansion gobbled up the land, which essentially transferred the water rights to municipalities, according to Todd.

Farmworkers in the Knorr Farms fields. (Photo © Meg Wilcox)

By the 1960s, over-pumping groundwater by farmers led the state to cut a deal: It would provide farmers access to Colorado River water if they would relinquish their rights to groundwater. The resulting CAP system became fully operational in the 1980s.

CAP delivers 1.6 million acre-feet of Colorado River water to 50 cities and towns, 10 Native tribes, and 17 irrigation districts. Another annual tranche of 1.2 million acre-feet of Colorado River water is delivered largely to farmers in Yuma County and the Colorado River Indian Tribes, who hold higher priority rights, according to Jim Holway, director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. All told, the Colorado River provides about one-third of Arizona’s water.

To pay for the CAP system that delivers water to their irrigation districts, farmers took out loans, Cullom explained. When they had trouble repaying those loans, their debt was forgiven in 2004—in exchange, the farmers accepted the lowest priority to CAP water, with a commitment to receive Colorado River water through 2030. Climate change and overuse have simply accelerated that timetable: Under the DCP, Central Arizona agriculture is facing immediate cutbacks, and an end to their guarantee of CAP water supplies as of 2022.

In 2020, farmers will take a 15 percent water cut, according to Cullom. Water-sharing agreements with higher-priority users, such the city of Tucson, will make up for farmers’ shortfalls through 2022. Such agreements allow cities to store, or bank, excess water in groundwater aquifers, which provides a credit for water districts serving farmers.

“We all recognized the benefit of the ag economy to the communities we serve, and found a way to provide a bridge of water supply to help them to transition in central Arizona,” said Cullom.

Farmers are expected to transition to groundwater over the next three years, and the state is providing $30 million to help them do that, while seeking to leverage additional funds through the farm bill. Groundwater supplies are more limited for a number of reasons, according to Holway. The aquifer is already overdrawn; water quality may be poor, or pumping uneconomical, in some areas; and farmers who’ve redesigned their irrigation systems for CAP’s higher water flows may have trouble using groundwater. “It’s akin to a trickle of water as opposed to a torrent of water coming in,” he said of the difference between well water and CAP water.

Given farmers’ three-year cushion to transition to groundwater, Todd says, “We don’t see any real curtailment in our acres in the 2020 crop year at Knorr Farms.” But he added that, knowing that water cuts are just around the corner, Knorr is spending a lot of time trying to convince landlords to cut him slack on the rent when he does turn to land fallowing.

Ripples of Impact from Fallowing Land

The impact of fallowing land in Pinal County could result in more than $200 million in lost agricultural revenues, and job losses up to 6 percent of the workforce, according to a study by the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension that did not factor in mitigating measures, like switching to groundwater, because of the uncertainty of supplies.

Study author George Frisvold said that, while neither consumers nor commodity markets were likely to feel a price impact, the job losses were significant, and not just for farm laborers, but for people in industries that support agriculture. “There are ripples across the whole local economy that are bigger than just the direct effect on farmers,” Frisvold said.

“If I’m selling seed, or machinery or fertilizers to those farms and they fallow their acres, I’m losing out on those sales,” he continued. Similarly, if a farmer fallowing land could no longer, say, afford to buy a new truck, that could hurt the local truck dealership.

Frisvold further noted that recovery can be hard in rural economies. “Economists historically assumed that in rural areas when people lost their jobs, they just went on and did something else, but there’s more and more evidence that the effect of these job losses, if they hit one place all at once, it’s harder than economists had appreciated 10 or 20 years ago.”

There are also questions of what becomes of fallowed land. Dust storms are already an issue in central Arizona, says Holway. What will happen when the land is no longer irrigated? California’s Public Policy Institute has examined this issue for the San Joaquin Valley, which is similarly facing imminent land fallowing with the implementation of the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Proposals for alternative land uses in California may not apply to Arizona, however, according to Chris Kuzdas, the Arizona-based Water Program manager at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

Drilling alone won’t solve farmers problems because groundwater supplies are expected to be more limited, and Arizona’s Groundwater Management Act, a response to over-pumping in the 1960s, sets a “water duty,” or limit on how much groundwater farmers can use.

Irrigation on Ak-Chin farmlands. (Photo courtesy of the Ak-Chin Indian Community)

Many groundwater wells have been idled since the 1980s and will require substantial refurbishing and investment to become operational again. In addition to all that work, there are energy costs to lift water 300 to 400 feet to the surface, says Todd, ballparking the additional expense of groundwater at about $20 more per acre-foot. Water quality concerns, like higher salinity, can also impact crop yields.

Eking out more irrigation efficiencies is only a partial answer as well. “The farms in Pinal Country are already really efficient as to how they deliver water,” said Kuzdas.

Knorr Farms, for example, uses drip irrigation on most fields. State-wide, increased irrigation efficiency has helped reduce agriculture’s share of the water pie to 68 percent, far below the U.S. average of 80 percent.

Finding alternative crops with higher margins that allow less ground to be irrigated can also be a challenge, explained Brian Betcher, general manager for the Maricopa-Stanfield irrigation district that serves Pinal.

EDF has been working with farmers in Pinal County to conserve water, including by bringing high-value, water-efficient crops like guayule, a rubber alternative, to market. Kuzdas said that EDF will soon announce a partnership that it helped to broker between a farmer and a large buyer. “We need to continue ramping up collaboration and creativity to find ways that all sectors can use less water,” he added.

It’s too early for Todd to say what crops Knorr Farms might shift to as water supplies tighten. But, he says, “we would think long and hard about [whether to grow] cotton. It takes more water, more time to grow and it takes longer to get your cash back.” Cotton is a thirsty crop that requires six times more water to grow than lettuce, but federal subsidies have made it lucrative to grow in Arizona.

Native American Communities Emerge as Water Brokers

One group of Central Arizonan farmers who aren’t yet facing water cuts are the Ak-Chin and Gila River communities. The tribes share higher-priority CAP supplies with the cities and they also received water settlements from the federal government, in 1984 and 2004, respectively, locking in their senior water rights.

Returning to their traditional O’odham farming roots, both communities have been building large agricultural enterprises and conserving water by installing more efficient irrigation systems and restoring lost riparian habitats.

The Ak-Chin community in Pinal County, for example, grows potatoes, pecans, corn, sorghum, wheat, cotton, alfalfa, and barley on 16,000 acres of its 20,000-acre reservation. It sells potatoes to Frito-Lay and In-N-Out Burger in the state.

“Tribal well-being has always been linked to farming and agriculture, the traditional lifestyles of our people,” said Ak-Chin chairman Robert Miguel. “Historically our ancestors maintained seasonal camps based on the harvest schedule for cholla buds, prickly pear, saguaro, squash.”

Ak-Chin Chairman Robert Miguel surveys flooding after monsoon rains. (Photo courtesy of the Ak-Chin Indian Community)

Farming is now a primary source of income for the Ak-Chin, and half of that income is invested in community housing, education, and elder assistance.

“All we ever asked for was water to survive,” said Miguel. “We want everyone to know that we were given so little and we’ve done so much with that. To be able to produce crops that would benefit the whole U.S. and world has given us a sense of pride.”

Initial DCP proposals in Arizona would have protected non-Native farmers, and risked potential shortages for tribes and other high-priority users, but that created a ruckus, according to Holway. Contentious negotiations dragged on for two years, and led Governor Stephen Roe Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community to make an impassioned plea at a stakeholder meeting in fall 2018.

“We see ourselves as a moral compass in regards to water,” he said, “because out of all the groups here, the indigenous people were the only ones who had water taken away from them. We have stories, oral history of the devastation that brought to our people. Some of the social, medical, historical trauma is still with us today.”

Learning from history’s past mistakes, the state honored tribal water rights. That made the Gila River Indian Community, with its sizable federal water settlement of 653,500 acre-feet, a powerful water broker in the state.

“The Gila River community came forward as a major water leader in the state, their leadership with the Colorado River Indians was critical in getting the drought contingency plan across the finish line in Arizona,” said EDF’s Kuzdas. Both nations have agreed to either lease some of their excess water and sell water credits to towns and water districts, or leave a sizable portion of their water allotment in Lake Mead over the next three years, in exchange for water payments or credits for future use.

Meanwhile Knorr Farms is preparing for a drier future. Recalling how central Arizona has changed so dramatically since his boyhood, Todd wonders: “Where is this going to go? If it’s changed that much in my lifetime, what does it look like in one more lifetime? It’s all changing, but isn’t that what life is—change and adaptation?”

Top photo: A farmer adjusts siphon tubes on furrow irrigated lettuce near Phoenix, Arizona. (NRCS photo by Tim McCabe) 

Update: This article was updated to correct the location of the Ak-Chin community; it is in Pinal County, not Maricopa County.

The post As Water Sources Dry Up, Arizona Farmers Feel the Heat of Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

That message reflects one of Thiruvengadam’s core goals in founding Eastie Farm four years ago—using food as a vehicle for bringing together neighbors who might not otherwise know one another to hang out, do something productive, and build community resilience in a city vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal flooding. Thiruvengadam, who grew up in southern India outside of Chennai, says he hopes that people will get to know each other so well through Eastie that they’ll give each other a hand in times of emergency.

Kannan Thiruvengadam checking the plants at Eastie Farm.

Already, hundreds of nearby residents face regular flooding, according to the neighborhood resilience plan produced as part of the Climate Ready Boston effort, and within 50 years, half of East Boston—which is built on five islands connected by landfill and surrounded on three sides by water—will be at risk for flooding during a major storm.

About 56 percent of East Boston residents are Latinx who followed the first immigrant wave to the neighborhood from Italy a century ago. East Boston community activist Chris Marchi says the neighborhood needs environmental justice because its proximity to the airport and its industrial waterfront “block access to clean air and water.”

Eastie Farm’s community-building approach is common among urban farms, but its emphasis on climate resilience and environmental education is unique. “Most have gone the social route, worrying about people not having enough food, or people of color or lower-income people not getting healthy food,” Thiruvengadam told Civil Eats. “Unfortunately, it’s almost seen [by other urban farms] as a luxury worrying about the environment, a concern for tomorrow.”

But Thiruvengadam sees the problem of climate change today. Extreme weather events, like the 2018 spate of “nor-easters” that hit East Boston, are causing more frequent flooding. Research shows that neighborhoods with strong social cohesion fare better during emergencies. During Superstorm Sandy, for example, neighbor-to-neighbor connections were critical for getting aid to elderly and disabled people.

East Boston waterfront flooding during January 2018 Nor’Easter storm. (Photo credit: Kannan Thiruvengadam)

“People [in East Boston] don’t have a lot of options for dealing with an emergency,” Thiruvengadam said. “And if you don’t know your neighbor, you’re going to think of your friends or your family, but they may be far away.”

A Wild Oasis on the Verge of Expansion

Eastie Farm is a tiny oasis, a 3,100-square-foot lot lodged between two triple-decker homes, in the rapidly gentrifying Jeffries Point neighborhood of East Boston, where swank new condos, restaurants, and yoga studios are popping up alongside Italian pizzerias and Spanish-American grocery stores.

Unlike the tidy Joe Ciampa community garden down the street by the waterfront, Eastie is a hurly-burly of open compost heaps and bins, potted flowers, rain barrels, uncultivated weedy areas, and more than 15 circular raised beds, sprouting a riot of zucchini squash, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, mint, oregano, and other herbs. A towering mulberry tree at the back of the lot provides cool canopy over a small wooden platform that’s used for musical performances.

Inside Eastie Farm.

The farm’s wild appearance reflects Thiruvengadam’s bent toward permaculture—that is, designing or restoring landscapes in harmony with nature—as well as his philosophy of collective ownership of the land. “I had the instinct to let people do what they wanted,” he said. Rather than divvy up the land into individual plots, he wanted to create a space where anyone who wanted to could come in and farm.

And they’ve come. Thiruvengadam counts some 200 volunteers who’ve participated in the farm since 2015, though its core group numbers about 30. Young professionals and students new to the neighborhood work side-by-side with Latinx and North African immigrants and older Italian families.

A core volunteer, Salvador Cartagena, is the son of Salvadoran immigrants who grew up in East Boston and works as an electrical engineer. He calls Eastie “a place to hang out and interact with the neighbors and learn about resilience.”

Eastie Farm is now a nonprofit organization that’s poised for big expansion. In a huge victory for the grassroots initiative, the city recently transferred ownership of the lot to the organization and granted it $140,000 to upgrade the lot and cultivate two additional parcels in East Boston that will increase the organization’s overall land area four-fold. Now the group can renovate the farm, by efforts including building permanent beds, bringing in a water line, and creating a sitting area in the front.

For its innovative blend of food justice and climate action, Eastie Farm received a “Greenovate” award from the Mayor’s Office, which this year also named Thiruvengadam the East Boston volunteer of the year.

“We find that it’s things like food and health that connect residents to climate change,” said Lauren Zingarelli, Mayor’s Office of Environment, Energy, and Open Space. “Eastie Farm has been doing that work, meeting people where they are when it comes to food access, and [using] local gardening, composting, and engaging youth so that future generations have the skills to be resilient.”

Over the long term, Thiruvengadam envisions creating more tiny farms throughout the city where people can easily access them. And as Eastie expands, he’ll have to find the right mix of community-led efforts and more centralized management.

From Trash-Filled Lot to Urban Farm

Every day on his way to the subway station, Thiruvengadam, who came to the U.S. to study computers and worked in software design, passed by the abandoned lot in Jeffries Point overflowing with trash and weeds. To him it sent a message: “Nobody cares about this space; therefore nobody cares about this block.” So, he said to himself, “Somebody had to do this. If not you, then who?”

Thiruvengadam and a few friends hatched a plan for the farm and approached the city, which he says “somewhat reluctantly” gave them permission to clean up the lot and plant a garden. The friends recruited 10 to 20 volunteers who met on weekends to clear trash and weeds.

It was “an amazing time,” Thiruvengadam told Civil Eats, with many people pitching in to help out. A neighborhood wood shop, for example, offered to deliver its waste sawdust free-of-charge so that the farm could use it to keep pests out of the compost bins, a key urban concern.

The neighbors had to be brought along. Some thought the farm would bring their property values down, according to Cartagena, who says that Eastie’s outreach to neighbors brought families together who’d never before spoken to one another, including an Italian family and a Salvadoran family on either side of the lot.

One way they secured their neighbors’ support, while also meeting the farm’s water needs, was by offering to set up rain barrels that would connect to the neighbors’ downspouts and divert water that in the past had flooded their lots during downpours. “If we weren’t collecting, their foundations would be getting damaged,” claims Thiruvengadam.

Each year the group managed to renew its lease with the city, but there were a lot of uphill battles that eventually convinced Thiruvengadam to leave his job in the IT sector to focus on the farm. The neighborhood association was also pressing the group for its long-term plan. Eastie Farm had to vie for ownership of the lot with two developers who wanted to build luxury condominiums. The group formed a nonprofit, drafted a formal plan, and campaigned hard to win the neighborhood’s trust. And, in the end, they prevailed.

Sowing Seeds for the Future

Eastie produced 700 pounds of fruit and vegetables over two months last summer, according to Thiruvengadam. It donates most of that food to the East Boston Community Soup Kitchen and leaves the rest for neighbors to harvest, but Thiruvengadam is quick to emphasize the garden’s priority: “We’re not trying to maximize food production,” he says. “We’re sowing seeds for future citizens. That’s more important to us.”

Volunteers Ben Koffel and Sean LaPorta build a greenhouse for the Adams Elementary School in East Boston on an evening after work. The greenhouse was requested by the school as part of its partnership with Eastie Farm.

Activist Chris Marchi, who formerly worked at a community development corporation in East Boston, says, “The genius of Eastie Farm is it allows people to roll up their sleeves to experience a different future in the present.” Eastie teamed up with two local nonprofit organizations to offer a hands-on educational program within the Boston school system for elementary school-aged children, for instance. The program teaches kids how storm drains function on their playgrounds, how compost and worm bins work on the farm, and takes them to Boston’s last remaining salt marsh to learn about tides and sea level rise.

“You gain a lot from the hands-on experience,” said Shani Fletcher, grassroots program manager at Boston’s Department of Neighborhood Development, of the program. “You soak it in more.”

The focus is on solutions because “climate talk scares kids,” says Thiruvengadam, who adds that working with younger children is a way to reach parents. After one class, for instance, the kids put up anti-idling signs at their school.

Children from the nearby Adams Elementary School in East Boston displaying the terrariums they created at Eastie Farm. (Photo credit: Kannan Thiruvengadam)

Eastie Farm also collaborates with immigrant organizations that bring teens to the farm; for community-wide education, it collaborated with artist Evelyn Rydz to create a display on the farm, and climate resilience, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, East Boston Annex’s larger exhibit on climate change.

Challenges Ahead?

The collective approach to running a farm is not an easy way to go, as even Thiruvengadam admits. “What do you do when there’s a lull in the energy to keep up the space? You can’t let plants die.”

Some volunteers enjoy that loose structure. Ben Koffel, who’s building a greenhouse at one of the elementary schools with which Eastie partners, works as a financial advisor for infrastructure projects in Latin America. Koffel says volunteering at Eastie Farm “is a huge contrast to people’s daily lives.” He likes the philosophy of, “if you see something that needs to be weeded, do it,” because it makes for a more interesting experience.

But keeping volunteers engaged has been a challenge, especially when Thiruvengadam himself is not full-time on the farm, taking on a number of side jobs including running a weekly radio show.

Thiruvengadam also finds that the city isn’t set up to support community efforts like Eastie, because it’s more accustomed to working with large developers. “It seems like you’re creating your own new world to do this work,” he says.

But, Fletcher told Civil Eats, “their model of community farming where everyone comes together to raise food for themselves and for others in need is really a creative and exciting model. It would be great to see more sites with this model.”

To scale up across multiple farms, Thiruvengadam says he’ll find hyperlocal leaders and connect young people who’ve recently moved into the neighborhood with local organizations. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that Eastie will have to raise operational funds to hire some staff. That’s likely on the agenda for next year, though Thiruvengadam says he’s torn about moving beyond a grassroots model.

“Thinking individually is how we created the climate crisis,” he said. “We need to think collectively now, even if it’s messy.”

Photos by Meg Wilcox, except where noted. Top photo: Kannan Thiruvengadam with Jessica Ventura, and the sign given by Ventura’s grandfather to Eastie Farm.

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