In recent years, curbing emissions from agriculture and the broader food system has become a bigger piece of the conference’s programming. And this year, the most influential group in American agriculture has been pointing to big strides made.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) annual emissions inventory report showed that emissions from the agricultural sector dropped by nearly 2 percent, falling from 10.6 to 9.4 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions between 2021 and 2022—the sharpest drop of all sectors in 2022. In response, the American Farm Bureau’s president, Zippy Duvall, attributed the shift to U.S. farmers adopting climate-friendly practices through “voluntary and market-based programs that support farmer efforts in sustainable agriculture practices.”

However, the report doesn’t support the conclusion that a bump in conservation practices drove the drop in emissions. Instead, while there is plenty of uncertainty, the most likely causes are fewer cattle burping methane and less fertilizer use. Concentrated feedlot cattle farming and fertilizer production are among the biggest drivers of emissions from agriculture.

It’s a significant conclusion, because in the past, industry groups have fought all efforts to draft climate policy around reducing meat and dairy consumption and chemical fertilizer use. Going into climate event season, with the clock ticking even louder, that could happen again.

Fewer Cattle

However, the impact of reducing methane is well understood. And in its report, the EPA explicitly states that the drop of methane emissions was “largely driven by a decrease in beef cattle populations.” Through no fault of their own, ruminant animals, like cattle and sheep, exhale methane as they digest their food. Known as enteric fermentation, this is a top driver of human-related methane emissions in the U.S. In 2022, these emissions decreased by 2 percent, contributing to the overall drop.

Why were there fewer cattle? The decline in numbers isn’t due to any regulations on methane or herd size—a frequent Republican talking point—but rather the impacts of climate change. The record-breaking drought since 2022 has dried the landscape and shrunk the available grassy pasture for raising cattle, explained Ben Lilliston, the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. As a result, farmers have had to make hard choices to prevent the overgrazing of this limited green pasture.

“The impact that the drought is having on pasture is forcing the culling of cattle and reducing the cattle herd,” said Lilliston. “So, when you have fewer cows, you’re going to have fewer enteric [fermentation] emissions coming from the cow itself.”

And it’s not just methane. The EPA also reported lower nitrous oxide emissions from feedlot manure, captured in manure lagoons, “which are major sources of both methane and nitrous oxide,” said Lilliston. “So, when you reduce the cattle herd, you affect both those sources of emissions.”

This relationship has generally held true over time. The EPA has observed a consistent relationship between the size of cattle herds and fluctuations in methane emissions from enteric fermentation. As the report states, “this increase in emissions from enteric fermentation from 1990 to 2022 generally follows the increasing trends in cattle populations.” The agency pointed to how “emissions increased from 2005 to 2007, as both dairy and beef populations increased.” Now, as cattle herds decrease, that trend has reversed.

The multi-year drought continues to devastate ranchers, which could mean further declines in emissions. “Based on USDA statistics, cattle populations have continued to decrease in 2023 and 2024, which tend to drive methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the enteric fermentation and manure management categories as described in the GHG Inventory,” wrote an EPA spokesperson in an email.

Reduced Fertilizer Use

This is likely especially true for farmers growing corn, the most widely planted crop in the U.S., primarily grown to produce ethanol. “Corn is the main driver of nitrogen fertilizer use,” said Lilliston. But as fertilizer prices surged, “a lot of commodity farmers responded by planting more soybeans, which doesn’t require as much fertilizer,” he noted.

Rather than a permanent shift, this suggests a more temporary fluctuation. Lilliston expects nitrous oxide emissions to rebound in the EPA’s next report, as fertilizer prices leveled in 2023 and the U.S. produced a record corn crop.

“Ultimately, it seems primarily the big story is that there’s less production of U.S. agriculture and [therefore] less emissions. Farmers aren’t necessarily producing food in much more climate-smart ways than they were in 2021, just producing a little bit less of it,” said Dan Blaustein-Rejto, the director of food & agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute.

“The EPA report is really not meant to assess the impact of conservation programs or specific farming practices,” added Blaustein-Rejto. “[It] certainly is not looking at the effect of specific voluntary programs or other efforts,” he said.

In general, agricultural emissions experts interviewed for this article agreed that the EPA’s annual greenhouse-gas emissions inventory reflects such a brief snapshot of time that it can be hard to tell if it indicates a larger shift in the food system or a fluctuation based on agricultural market changes and disruptions. The EPA also continually refines its methodologies for calculating emissions, which can make it hard to compare smaller shifts in emissions included in the reports.

‘There’s so much uncertainty in those predictions that I would hesitate to really read too much into any small variation from year to year, outside of demonstrable changes and practices out on the landscape,” said Steven Hall, a professor in the Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The emissions inventories published by EPA are subject to substantial uncertainty.”

“I think the EPA is doing an admirable job at trying to estimate this,” he added. “It’s sort of an impossible task.” The report, perhaps, most clearly shows that we still have work to do in transforming our systems for growing food.

And it points to two simple things that policy wonks and world leaders could be spending more time debating: How climate policy should and could tackle emissions from beef production and fertilizer use. “Unfortunately, the 2022 reductions were not part of a planned strategy to support farmers in a transition toward less emitting, more resilient agricultural systems,” said Lilliston in a commentary on the EPA report. “Instead, the reductions were the result of sudden shocks that caused enormous harm to farmers and their animals. Volatile prices make it nearly impossible for farmers to plan ahead or transition to more diverse cropping systems that require less fertilizer use.”

Going forward, he argued, policy conversations should prioritize transitioning away from industrial animal agriculture, which also depends on fertilized corn for feed. “Instead, policymakers continue to defer to the wants of powerful global grain and meat companies, while climate-related events, such as drought, wildfires, and floods, warn us that change is coming, ready or not.”

The post Why Are US Agricultural Emissions Dropping? appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2024/08/28/project-2025-calls-for-major-cuts-to-the-us-nutrition-safety-net/ Wed, 28 Aug 2024 09:00:41 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57389 While the ultraconservative vision has received much scrutiny, its proposal to sharply cut the federal nutrition safety net—and the devastating impacts this could have on food security and hunger—has largely flown under the radar. These plans are detailed in the project’s chapter on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which calls for drastically narrowing the […]

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Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for the executive branch, has gained feverish political attention in recent weeks as a central talking point of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and many speakers at the Democratic National Convention. The sweeping, 920-page document calls for drastic overhauls of federal agencies as well as the erosion of civil rights and the expansion of presidential powers. It’s an agenda many have described as authoritarian.

While the ultraconservative vision has received much scrutiny, its proposal to sharply cut the federal nutrition safety net—and the devastating impacts this could have on food security and hunger—has largely flown under the radar. These plans are detailed in the project’s chapter on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which calls for drastically narrowing the scope of the agency to primarily focus on agricultural programs. This would involve radically restructuring the USDA by moving its food and nutritional assistance programs to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“Proposing to reduce benefits to millions of people who are counting on food assistance for their basic well-being is alarming.”

Criticizing the USDA as “a major welfare agency,” the agenda takes issue with the agency’s long-standing nutrition programs that help feed millions of low-income Americans every year, including pregnant women, infants, and K-12 school children. It outlines policies that would substantially cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, and the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). It would also shrink federal support for universal school meal programs.

“We have really effective federal food assistance programs that are evidence-based, and there’s just a long history of seeking to continuously improve them,” said Stacy Dean, the former deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services at the USDA under the Biden administration. Project 2025’s plan would reverse that trajectory. “Proposing to reduce benefits to millions of people who are counting on food assistance for their basic well-being is alarming,” she said.

The proposal to restructure the USDA builds on a previous Trump-era proposal to consolidate federal safety net programs. This included moving SNAP and WIC–which it rebranded as welfare programs, a term often used pejoratively–from the USDA to HSS. It’s a move that experts pointed out would likely make these programs easier to cut, including by designating them as welfare benefits, often deemed unnecessary by conservatives.

“I think the effect would be to make [nutritional programs] more vulnerable to a kind of annual politics on Health and Human Services issues,” said Shawn Fremstad, a senior advisor at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who researches food assistance programs. He notes that the level of vulnerability would partially depend on whether these programs are mandatory or discretionary spending programs in HHS.

As Project 2025 has gained scrutiny, Trump has publicly distanced himself from the proposal. The project was assembled and published by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has long helped set the conservative agenda and informed previous Trump policies. For instance, Trump’s 2018 proposal to restructure the federal government and move nutritional programs to the HHS was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation.

Many of the policies in Project 2025’s USDA chapter are a continuation of the Trump’s administration’s previous efforts to dismantle the federal nutrition safety net. This agenda stands in sharp contrast to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s recent endorsement of Trump as a president who will “make American healthy again.” Instead, as Trump’s former administration assumed its duties, guided by a transition team that included 70 former Heritage Foundation officials, it repeatedly targeted food and nutritional programs without any sign of changing this policy directive.

This agenda includes another conservative policy goal that was pushed for by the previous Trump administration and has been gaining traction on a state level: imposing stricter work requirements as a condition for receiving SNAP benefits. The plan references a Trump-era rule—which was challenged in court and abandoned—that would make it more difficult for states to waive SNAP’s work requirement for able-bodied adults without young children in regions of the country with high unemployment rates or a lack of jobs.

While Project 2025 doesn’t specify how it would tighten work requirements, re-introducing the Trump-era rule is one avenue alluded to in its agenda. The USDA estimated that this rule would have forced 688,000 recipients, unable to meet the work requirement of at least 80 hours per month, to leave the federal assistance program. It’s a rule that experts have pointed out can be challenging for gig workers with inconsistent schedules, people with undocumented health conditions, and people simply struggling to find work.

“You’re taking a vulnerable group of people, and you’re removing their one critical access point to food, which is SNAP,” said Dean. The group of adults affected by this policy “might be unemployed, temporarily unemployed, or they might be in jobs where the hours fluctuate dramatically, or they might have medical conditions that make it harder for them to work but not access to health care to document their health condition,” she added.

The tightening of SNAP work requirements is often proposed under the assumption that receiving SNAP benefits disincentivizes work, but this isn’t supported by existing academic research.

“These rules basically penalize people who are in need of food assistance for no economic gain,” said Pia Chaparro, a public health nutritionist and researcher at the University of Washington who has studied the program. “Research shows that SNAP participation reduces food insecurity but does not act as a disincentive to work. Moreover, research shows that the work requirements don’t lead to increased employment.”

The amount of supplemental assistance people receive on SNAP can stretch a food budget, but isn’t enough to disincentivize working, noted Ed Bolen, the director of SNAP state strategies at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a progressive think tank. “The theory is that if you get $6.20 a day in SNAP, you’re not looking for work enough or not working enough hours. But $6.20 a day, it’s not going to pay your rent,” he said.

The Trump-era rule was struck down in 2020 by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, who determined that it “radically and abruptly alters decades of regulatory practice, leaving states scrambling and exponentially increasing food insecurity for tens of thousands of Americans.”

Since the rule was blocked, employment levels have improved, but food insecurity has not. In fact, the USDA found that levels of household food insecurity soared to nearly 13 percent in 2022, exceeding both 2021 and 2020 levels. This has been attributed to both inflation and the end of pandemic food assistance. In 2022, 44 million people lived in homes without enough food, including 7.3 million children.

“I see these [proposals] as really doing a lot of harm to working-class communities, rural communities, urban communities alike.”

The proposal to tighten SNAP work requirements is one of many that would collectively chip away at federal food assistance programs that have supported low-income Americans for decades. It would also eliminate some of the streamlined processes that allow participants in other social benefit programs to more easily receive SNAP benefits, including a cash-assistance program for low-income families and a program that helps low-income households with the often steep costs of energy bills.

The plan also calls for reforming the voucher program for infant formula under WIC, which provides nutritional benefits to pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and children under 6 years old. Currently, states award contracts to whichever infant formula manufacturer offers the lowest net cost in a competitive bidding process. Project 2025 proposes to regulate this process (though it doesn’t specify how), claiming it’s driving monopolies in the marketplace. At the same time, the plan calls for weakening regulations on infant formula labeling and manufacturing to, in theory, prevent shortages.

“Upending this process could result in a funding shortfall, jeopardize access to WIC for millions of parents, infants, and young children, and result in higher formula prices for all consumers,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the CBBP. “WIC’s competitive bidding process for infant formula saves the program between $1 billion and $2 billion each year.”

Bergh pointed to a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences on supply chain disruptions in the U.S. infant formula market. It concluded that the “competitive bidding process is not the driver of industry concentration at the national level,” while also finding that eliminating the program would lead to higher WIC costs and higher formula costs for all consumers.

In yet another cut to food assistance for children, Project 2025 would also threaten the future of some universal school meal programs. This plan specifically calls to eliminate the Community Eligibility Provision, which was established in 2010 to allow schools in districts with high poverty levels to provide free meals for all students. This provision is widely used across all 50 states, providing over 19.9 million school children with free breakfast and lunch. The alternative, used in schools without CEP or another universal meal program, is to individually assess each student’s eligibility for free meal tickets.

Fremstad, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points to how CEP reduces the stigma of students being sorted into a different lunch line based on their family’s income, which can be a source of shame and behavioral issues. It also removes the penalties that low-income parents face when they can’t provide their child with money for school meals.

“We have a situation where there literally is something called ‘school lunch debt collection,’ where some schools have been sending debt collectors after very low-income parents to pay for their [child’s] lunch,” he said. It’s one of the many nutrition program cuts in Project 2025 that would further hurt working families, he continued.

“I see these [proposals] as really doing a lot of harm to working-class communities, rural communities, urban communities alike,” said Fremstad. “And I also see them as bad for middle-class people, who are often insecure in the middle class themselves.”

Read More:
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WIC Shortfall Could Leave 2 Million Women And Children Hungry
‘It’s Not Enough.’ SNAP Recipients Struggle Amid High Food Prices

California poised to ban food dye in schools. The California Senate is expected to vote this week on a bill that would prohibit K-12 schools from serving food that contains synthetic food dyes. The bill would specifically ban six dyes—Blue No. 1, Blue No. 2, Green No. 3, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6 and Red No. 40. While the F.D.A. has maintained that these food dyes are safe, emerging research has found links between synthetic dyes and behavioral issues in children. The bill is the first of its kind in the nation, which could usher in more nationwide change and similar bills.

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Kamala Harris Proposes Ban on Price Gouging. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has proposed the first federal ban on price gouging in the grocery store industry, aimed at curbing high food prices. “My plan will include harsh penalties for opportunist companies that exploit crises and break the rules, and we will support smaller food businesses that are trying to play by the rules,” said Harris, at a campaign speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, on August 16, her first address on economic policies. This would be enacted through a Federal Trade Commission ruling, though details of the ban have yet to be unveiled.

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Food Prices Are Still High. What Role Do Corporate Profits Play?
How Food Inflation Adds to the Burdens Disabled People Carry

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/24/farmworkers-push-krogers-shareholders-for-heat-and-labor-protections/ https://civileats.com/2024/07/24/farmworkers-push-krogers-shareholders-for-heat-and-labor-protections/#comments Wed, 24 Jul 2024 09:00:47 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=57037 Farmworkers took this a step further at Kroger’s annual shareholder meeting in late June, directing their plea for stronger human rights to the major financiers whose dividends depend on the under-recognized labor of farmworkers. They called upon the company’s shareholders—whose top investors are Vanguard, BlackRock, and Berkshire Hathaway—to support a proposal that Kroger publish a […]

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For years, U.S. farmworkers have been pressuring Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket, to come to the table to establish stronger labor protections on the farms supplying its fruits and vegetables. Specifically, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker rights organization in Florida, has repeatedly asked Kroger to join its Fair Food Program, which has implemented the strongest heat protections in the nation.

Farmworkers took this a step further at Kroger’s annual shareholder meeting in late June, directing their plea for stronger human rights to the major financiers whose dividends depend on the under-recognized labor of farmworkers. They called upon the company’s shareholders—whose top investors are Vanguard, BlackRock, and Berkshire Hathaway—to support a proposal that Kroger publish a “just transition” report examining “how the risks to workers are changing due to rising temperatures” in its agricultural supply chain.

In a speech at the meeting, Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker and current organizer with CIW, painted a picture for shareholders of the stark reality faced by U.S. farmworkers laboring under record-breaking temperatures—with no mandatory right to shade, water, or breaks in most states. The proposal, introduced by Domini Impact Investments, one of Kroger’s shareholders, adds pressure to the company to address these growing risks.

“Kroger’s current supplier policies contain vague expectations and do not include binding obligations that effectively keep workers safe.”

“We must establish the gravity, indeed, the dire urgency of this resolution. The stakes of a just transition for Kroger are nothing less than life or death for the farmworkers who put food on all our tables,” Chavez said in his address to the shareholders. “Even just taking a break to drink water has been met with harassment and violence from a supervisor. I know this because it is the reality I myself have lived as a farmworker.”

Kroger did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the Biden administration unveiled a heat protection rule, the first federal standard of its kind, which would require employers develop an emergency plan for heat illness and provide outdoor workers with shade, water, rest breaks, and training to manage and identify heat risks. But its pathway to implementation is murky. The rule likely won’t be finalized until the end of the year. Also, it may be halted under a Trump administration, and it will likely be challenged in court by industries already fighting it.

Currently, only four states—California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado—have mandated similar rules to protect farmworkers from extreme heat. In the meantime, the consequences are dire: Farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die of heat stress compared to workers in other industries.

The investors supporting the proposal claim that Kroger’s existing policies are failing to protect workers from climate risks and other human rights abuses, pointing to the death of a worker at Kroger’s distribution center from heat stress in 2023. Investors also cited Kroger’s track record of supplying from multiple farms linked to modern-day slavery, including sourcing from a watermelon farm in Florida where workers—held against their will in a barbed-wire encampment—escaped by hiding in the trunk of a car.

“Kroger’s current supplier policies contain vague expectations and do not include binding obligations that effectively keep workers safe. For monitoring, Kroger relies on social audits or voluntary self-assessments, which have been widely critiqued and discredited for their failure to deliver human rights outcomes and remediate harms,” states the proposal.

Instead, the proposal encourages Kroger to join the CIW’s Fair Food Program, which it describes as “the only farmworker program with a demonstrated track record of success in protecting farmworkers in U.S. agriculture from climate-related risks.” (Previously, Domini Impact Investments filed a proposal asking Kroger to join the Fair Food Program as a pilot program, but it was determined to be against SEC rules.)

The Fair Food Program offers binding labor protections through a contract between farmworkers, farmers, and major food retailers, which is monitored by an independent council that operates a 24/7 trilingual complaint line. The program has been widely recognized for rooting out some of the most persistent abuses, including sexual assault and forced labor, that often plague corporate supply chains. The shareholder proposal asks Kroger to examine how its current policies compare to the Fair Food Program.

The investors’ proposal also took issue with the company’s “siloed approach” to environmental issues without considering workers. For instance, “Kroger’s recently released nature-based strategy, developed to reduce pesticides with the goal to protect pollinators and biodiversity, does not make any mention of farmworkers who apply pesticides,” shareholders noted in the proposal. It’s estimated that pesticide exposure unintentionally kills around 11,000 people per year, particularly farmers and farmworkers.

In the end, despite Chavez’s plea, just over 80 percent of shareholders voted against the proposal; while 460 million shareholders voted against the proposal, 98 million voted for it. Prior to the annual meeting, Kroger’s board of directors had advised its shareholders to vote against adopting the proposal, according to SEC filings.

“We will continue to encourage Kroger to join the Fair Food Program, because we think it will deliver meaningful human rights outcomes.”

“The company already provides robust annual reporting on sustainability and social impact topics and engages stakeholders to inform content,” stated Kroger’s board of directors, citing the company’s existing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy. “People are at the heart of Kroger’s purpose-driven approach and shared-value ESG strategy: Thriving Together. As outlined in our ESG report, we aim to advance positive impacts across three strategic pillars—people, planet, and systems.”

Mary Beth Gallagher, the director of engagement with Domino Impact Investments, the company behind the shareholder proposal, was still encouraged by the percentage of shareholders who voted in favor of adopting her proposal. “It signals that enough of their investor base sees this as a risk that they should be managing differently,” she told Civil Eats.

“We will continue to encourage Kroger to join the Fair Food Program, because we think it will deliver meaningful human rights outcomes,” Gallagher said. “It will protect against this risk, and it will strengthen its human rights programs and performance.”

Read More:
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Major Farmworker Union Endorses Vice President Kamala Harris. The United Farm Workers, the largest farmworker union in the U.S., endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris just hours after she announced her campaign for U.S. president. “Kamala Harris stood with farmworkers as CA’s attorney general, as U.S. senator, and as vice president. There is work to be done, and we’re ready. Sí, se puede!” said the union on the social platform X. The endorsement came hours after President Joe Biden’s departure from the race on July 21.

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U.S. Farmers Turn to Drinking When Stressed. A new study from the University of Georgia found that one in five U.S. farmers use excessive alcohol to cope with high levels of stress. “It really is a public health issue because there are drastic, traumatic outcomes associated with not being able to ask for that care, using alcohol to cope, and then feeling hopeless,” Christina Proctor, the study’s lead author, said in a press release. She identified mental health care stigma and lack of rural healthcare access as barriers to farmers receiving the care they need.

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The post Farmworkers Push Kroger’s Shareholders for Heat and Labor Protections appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/07/24/farmworkers-push-krogers-shareholders-for-heat-and-labor-protections/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/06/25/chiquita-found-guilty-of-murder-abroad-other-us-food-companies-may-be-next/ Tue, 25 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56711 The novel is a parable for how the United Fruit Company, the U.S. multinational giant that rebranded as Chiquita in 1990, sustained its banana plantations across Latin America through ruthless, bloody tactics, confronting consequences only rarely. The fictional massacre is based on real events: In 1928, Colombian troops killed striking United Fruit Company workers in […]

The post A US Court Found Chiquita Guilty of Murder in Colombia. What Does the Ruling Mean for Other U.S. Food Corporations Abroad? appeared first on Civil Eats.

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There is no justice for the families of massacred banana workers in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Their deaths are only remembered by the massacre’s sole survivor, José Arcadio Segundo, who spends the rest of his life trying to convince others in his town of what he witnessed. In the book’s final scene, even the town is “wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men.” The fictional banana company’s power is so vast that it can bend history and memory—and murder its workers with impunity.

The novel is a parable for how the United Fruit Company, the U.S. multinational giant that rebranded as Chiquita in 1990, sustained its banana plantations across Latin America through ruthless, bloody tactics, confronting consequences only rarely. The fictional massacre is based on real events: In 1928, Colombian troops killed striking United Fruit Company workers in a town not far from where Márquez grew up.

Despite this history, the banana giant’s pattern of violent repression wiped out by the wind has arrived at a new chapter.

After a 17-year legal struggle, survivors of Chiquita’s violence in Colombia received a rare, groundbreaking legal victory. A South Florida jury found the U.S.-headquartered agribusiness liable for financing murders carried out by the right-wing paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) between 1997 and 2004.

During these years, Chiquita secretly paid upwards of $1.7 million to the AUC, a designated terrorist organization, to act as a security force pacifying the banana-growing region in the midst of Colombia’s decades-long civil war.

This marks the first time a U.S. court held a corporation liable for human rights abuses committed in another country—which lawyers and advocates describe as a historic legal milestone against transnational corporate abuse.

“The level of this victory is so great,” said Charity Ryerson, a human rights attorney and the executive director of Corporate Accountability Lab. “I hope that we spend the next three decades unpacking what this means, and that it spurs many, many, many additional cases on this basis, so that we can try to redevelop an area of law that does actually keep up with globalization and really protects the people who are most vulnerable.”

The U.S. legal system has not kept up with the globalization of the economy, Ryerson continued, resulting in few legal mechanisms to address transnational corporate abuse, including the absence of a comprehensive U.S. federal statute. Even when U.S. corporations are under fire in a lawsuit, cases involving transnational crimes can be dragged out for decades and historically have evaded a public trial before a jury and a verdict.

“These big companies usually involved in horrific acts in other countries often settle rather than have those facts see the light of day in court,” said Marissa Vahlsing, a lawyer with EarthRights International, which represented the plaintiffs.

In this case, “[Chiquita] tried every defense under the sun,” she said. “They tried to bring it to Colombia. We had to fight for years to keep this in American courts. I think that they felt the plaintiffs would just get tired and the lawyers would get tired and give up.” But they didn’t. “It was a very tiring case, and we’re not done,” Vahlsing said.

The jury ordered Chiquita to pay the family members of eight victims a total of $38 million for its crimes. This is just one of many cases representing thousands of victims—the families of banana workers, social activists, and union organizers—seeking to hold Chiquita accountable for murders in partnership with the AUC. The plaintiffs include many wives and children of the men killed, who often “had to leave their homes, leave their farms, move to cities, take refuge somewhere,” said Vahlsing. “Their lives were turned upside down.”

Beyond its direct effect on its employees and their families, the United Fruit Company has been described as a “pioneer of capitalist globalization,” developing a business model for global, multinational food corporations operating often in resource-rich and poverty-stricken regions of the Global South. This model has continued to be linked to violence and horrific abuses and is rarely held accountable, let alone put on trial before a jury. Still today, many of the largest U.S. food corporations have subsidiaries or parts of their supply chain associated with ongoing human rights abuses.

For instance, the production of cocoa in the Ivory Coast has a long history of documented human rights abuses, including child slavery on the plantations that supply Mars, Nestlé, and Hershey, prompting a 2023 federal lawsuit against the Biden administration. In Indonesia, the supply of palm oil to U.S. commodity traders ADM and Bunge has been linked to deforestation, violent confrontations with state security forces, and land grabs. More recently, an investigation by The New York Times found that PepsiCo supplies its sugar from plantations in India that push young girls into receiving hysterectomies and entering into child marriages to work alongside their husbands in the fields.

The recent verdict illuminates one pathway—a feasible legal avenue for comparable cases—for holding U.S. corporations accountable for human rights abuses abroad. The case was litigated in the U.S. under Colombian law, relying on the bedrock legal doctrine that a U.S. court can hear a defendant in their jurisdiction for crimes anywhere in the world. It’s one of few legal options, following a 2013 Supreme Court decision limiting the capacity for cases of international corporate abuse to be heard under federal law.

“[The Chiquita verdict] helps reinforce that there’s no law-free zone,” said Agnieszka Fryszman, a human rights lawyer with Cohen Milstein, which represented the plaintiffs. “If companies are operating overseas, in an area where there’s a weak rule of law and weak institutions, they could still be held to account here in their home state and home jurisdiction.”

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Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster           
Environmental Defenders—Often Fighting Agribusiness—Are Being Violently Silenced Around the World

Wildfire Smoke Is a Health Emergency. The devastating health impacts of wildfire smoke are becoming clearer. A recent study, published in Scientific Advances, found that fine particulate matter from California’s wildfires led to between 52,500 and 55,700 deaths between 2008 and 2018. “These are very irritative, very small particles that could cause damage wherever they go in the body,” Dr. Thomas Dailey, who works in pulmonary medicine at the Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center, told CBS News. These health risks are concerning for farmworkers who work long hours outdoors, often with no guaranteed protections. Currently, only three states—California, Oregon, and Washington—have regulations to safeguard workers from wildfire smoke exposure.

Read More:
How Centuries of Extractive Agriculture Helped Set the Stage for the Maui Fires
What Impacts Do the West Coast Wildfires, Smoke Have on Crops?

Farmers Challenging Vehicle Emission Standards. Both the National Corn Growers Association and American Farm Bureau Federation are part of a new lawsuit challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rule for heavy-duty vehicle emissions standards, which aims to curb smog, soot, and greenhouse gas emissions. The groups claim that the standards transition to electric vehicles will cause economic harm, while leaving out the role of ethanol in lowering emissions from vehicles. It’s not a surprising claim coming from the National Corn Growers Association, which represents farmers growing the corn that is used to produce ethanol, a controversial biofuel.

Read More:
How Corn Ethanol for Biofuel Fed Climate Change

The post A US Court Found Chiquita Guilty of Murder in Colombia. What Does the Ruling Mean for Other U.S. Food Corporations Abroad? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/05/on-farms-plasticulture-persists/ https://civileats.com/2024/06/05/on-farms-plasticulture-persists/#comments Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:00:53 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56466 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. This is commonly regarded as the first introduction of plastic into agriculture, a move that would transform modern farming—and inadvertently deposit an untold amount of plastic in the soil. […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

In 1948, E.M. Emmert, a horticulturist at the University of Kentucky, was tinkering around with how to build a cheap greenhouse. He decided to use polyethylene sheets in lieu of the glass sides, bending the plastic film around a wooden frame. The plants thrived in the new environment; the plastic let in enough light while trapping in warmth.

This is commonly regarded as the first introduction of plastic into agriculture, a move that would transform modern farming—and inadvertently deposit an untold amount of plastic in the soil.

In the decades that followed, this cheap, pliant material spread through farms across the U.S. and world, becoming so widely used that plastics in agriculture gained its own name: plasticulture.

“Everything that we create as humans degrades to some degree over time. That’s the reason we’re facing such a massive issue.”

Today, it’s common to see farms covered in plastic. It lines the sides of greenhouses, blankets fields as “plastic mulch,” covers hoop houses, and winds through farms as irrigation tubes, among other forms. In satellite images, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has observed the typically golden and green agricultural fields turned white, as though dusted in snow, from all of the plastic.

Agriculture is responsible for 3.5 percent of global plastic production, a figure that may seem small until you consider the sheer volume of plastics produced: around 400 million metric tons per year.

Little did Emmert know that this plastic was also degrading over time, breaking down into tiny flakes and accumulating in the soil. Microplastics pervade every part of the Earth, from the bottom of the ocean floor to all forms of drinking water to the human placenta. Complicating matters, plastic doesn’t decompose; instead, it turns into smaller and smaller bits of plastic, eventually becoming invisible nanoplastics. A recent paper called the enormity of tiny plastic litter a “menace to the biosphere.”

“Everything that we create as humans degrades to some degree over time. That’s the reason we’re facing such a massive issue,” said Samuel Cusworth, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Lancaster in England, who focuses on microplastics in the soil. “And once they’re in the environment, they’re very hard to retrieve.”

The Earth’s soils have become a waste bin of the world’s plastics. Soil is thought to be even more polluted with microplastics than the ocean, which contains an estimated 358 trillion plastic particles. Agricultural soils have been called a “reservoir” for not just the plastic produced on farms, but also plastics from other industrial sources that enter the water to eventually wash up on farms during a flood, or are carried by the wind. In a world where all industries run on plastics, these fine particles can also find their way onto farms through poultry litter, sewage sludge applied to soils, and even fertilizer.

“There are currently no viable remediation techniques,” said Cusworth. “If you want to remove them from the soil, [the solution] is to stop producing them in the first place.”

The major producers of plastics, like ExxonMobil and Dow, continue to sell plastic to farmers as a way to adapt to extreme weather conditions like drought and flooding. For instance, ExxonMobil promises that plastic sheets, like those used by Emmert, will “protect and preserve harvests in even the most demanding weather conditions.” Yet the production of plastics—a derivative of fossil fuels, typically obtained through fracking—is a major contributor to climate change, responsible for over 5 percent of global emissions.

This creates a vicious cycle, where the production of plastic drives climate change, which drives up demand for plastics on farms. Extreme weather also causes plastics to degrade more quickly, causing microplastic litter. Indeed, a 2021 report from the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Administration noted that the demand for plastic on farms is projected to grow by 50 percent between 2018 and 2030.

Scientists are still trying to understand how microplastics in the soil impact global food systems and food quality. They do know, however, that microplastics can “greatly change the structure of the soil,” as a review study put it, possibly affecting the cycling of nutrients, the retention of moisture, the storage of carbon, and the overall climate adaptability of a farm.

Nearly every farmer will tell you that healthy soil is the foundation of a healthy farm. And studies have found that microplastic particles in the soil can enter plant tissues—through either the roots or the pores on the leaves—and disrupt the plant’s growth. Plastics can even accumulate in the edible parts of the plant, like its fruits and leaves, potentially threatening food safety.

Unfortunately, most farmers are not aware of how much plastic is in their soil, because tests are not widely available.

Cusworth recently conducted the first nationwide assessment of soil microplastics in Europe. He sampled soil from fields of carrots and potatoes across England, comparing farms that utilized plastic sheets to those that hadn’t used these sheets in at least 10 years. He found that all soils sampled contained microplastics, another indicator of agricultural soil serving as a sink for microplastics.

“It was quite shocking to see how high these concentrations are, even without the [recent] use of plastic,” said Cusworth. “That really surprised us.”

Despite the persistent presence of plastics in agriculture, cutting down on their use can still make a substantial difference in the load of plastic in the soil, noted Cusworth. He found that the farms that utilized plastic sheets contained, on average, a staggering 75 percent higher concentration of microplastics in the soil compared to farms without the sheets.

Unfortunately, most farmers are not aware of how much plastic is in their soil, because tests are not widely available. “That’s something that I’ll hopefully be working on in the next two years—a standardized approach [to microplastic soil sampling],” Cusworth said.

He noted, however, that most of the farmers he worked with in the study were really engaged, giving him hope that ingrained use of plastics on farms can begin to shift. “It would be interesting to see how they may change their practices going forward,” he added.

While there are no remediation methods, farmers may be able to reduce the amount of plastic that enters the soil through “going back to more traditional techniques of farming to work with the environment rather than against it,” said Cusworth. For instance, relying less on tractors and heavy machinery would create “less opportunity for rubber tires to degrade and get into the soil,” he said.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization also recommends shifting farming practices to minimize plastics, including replacing plastic irrigation drip tape with a more durable or permanent irrigation system. They advise farmers to return to organic sources of mulch or cover cropping to replace plastic mulch, the plastic sheets placed directly on the soil to suppress weeds and retain moisture. They also recommend a return to glass greenhouses, while launching incentive schemes to support these transitions.

There’s also a potential solution in bioplastics, which can break down into organic material. Yet there’s a major catch: It needs to be collected and composted properly. Otherwise, it will wind up in a landfill for perhaps centuries, much like regular plastic.

In general, “we need to use [plastic on farms] more sustainably,” said Cusworth, “making sure that it’s not used wastefully, and that it’s collected and processed properly, in the most environmentally friendly way possible.”

The post On Farms, ‘Plasticulture’ Persists appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/06/05/on-farms-plasticulture-persists/feed/ 3 https://civileats.com/2024/05/15/bird-flu-may-be-driven-by-this-overlooked-factor/ Wed, 15 May 2024 09:00:19 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=56260 Waterfowl—ducks, geese, and swans—are the primary host of the viruses, and large animal agriculture facilities are often found in close proximity to their remaining wetland habitats. For instance, California’s Central Valley and the East Coast’s Delmarva Peninsula are both critical wintering grounds for waterfowl, along major North American bird migration routes, and epicenters of U.S. […]

The post Bird Flu May Be Driven By This Overlooked Factor appeared first on Civil Eats.

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As federal officials grapple with how to contain the highly contagious strain of avian flu that has infected chickens, turkeys, and dairy cattle on farms across the U.S., a number of scientists are pointing to one factor that could be driving the spread of its virus and its spillover from wild birds to farm animals.

Waterfowl—ducks, geese, and swans—are the primary host of the viruses, and large animal agriculture facilities are often found in close proximity to their remaining wetland habitats. For instance, California’s Central Valley and the East Coast’s Delmarva Peninsula are both critical wintering grounds for waterfowl, along major North American bird migration routes, and epicenters of U.S. poultry production.

As a result, some scientists who track waterfowl question whether this geographic overlap—alongside the shrinkage of waterfowl habitats—creates more opportunities for the virus to spread between infected waterfowl and the animals in agricultural facilities.

In theory, the ongoing destruction of wetlands could also lead waterfowl to concentrate on the remaining “small postage stamps of habitat,” potentially driving the spread of the virus between birds too, said Michael Casazza, a research biologist who tracks waterfowl at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center.

“The basic idea is that the more you concentrate animals into a small habitat, there’s probably a greater opportunity for transmission between individuals, and then the greater chance for disease spread within waterfowl,” said Casazza.

Casazza and other wildlife scientists have documented waterfowl using agricultural facilities—from foraging for grain in feedlots to roosting in effluent ponds—but questions remain about why the birds seek out the facilities and the potential connections to the spread of avian flu. It is, however, broadly understood that biodiversity and habitat loss tend to drive the spread of infectious disease between animals, which has also been linked to the risk of spillover.

These are important questions considering how devastating the circulating H5N1 strain has been for the U.S. poultry industry, resulting in the death of over 90 million domestic birds since January 2022, when the virus was first detected in wild ducks in the Carolinas and then soon after in poultry. It also has spread to the cattle industry, infecting 42 herds to date. And while the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) still considers H5N1 to be low-risk to humans, the only two cases of the virus infecting humans in the U.S. have been farmworkers in the dairy and poultry industries.

“You really don’t want your poultry industry to be centered in really important wintering waterfowl areas where they’re concentrating in high numbers,” said Jeff Buler, who leads a research laboratory at the University of Delaware that uses weather surveillance and radio tags to track waterfowl. “Unfortunately, they overlap a lot.”

Buler is currently tracking wild geese that winter in the Delmarva, along the thousands of small wetlands known as Delmarva bays. These serve as an “important stopover and breeding ground for millions of waterfowl, waterbirds, and migratory birds,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The peninsula is also home to the $4.4 billion Delmarva chicken industry, which raised 600 million chickens last year on more than 1,000 farms, according to the Delmarva Chicken Association. Sussex Country, along the peninsula in southern Delaware, is the largest broiler chicken-producing county in the nation.

The poultry farms often grow corn and soy for chicken feed. Buler has been tracking snow geese and Canadian geese using telemetry, affixing a radio transmitter to the geese, which has allowed him to observe the wild birds venturing onto the poultry farms. With this highly precise technology, he has observed that these feed fields often attract waterfowl, who eat the leftover stubble. He’s also observed them using the farm ponds, nearby the long barns that house the poultry.

A female northern pintail marked with a solar powered GPS/GSM transmitter attached like a backpack. (Photo courtesy of Michael Casazza, USGS)

Over the last four winters, Buler says he has documented that one-third of all poultry facilities on the Delmarva have had radio-tagged Canada geese or snow geese spend time within 2 kilometers of farms. He also found that 84 percent of the 68 geese he is tracking have spent time within 2 kilometers of a poultry farm.

The wild birds don’t need to be directly in the barn to spread the virus. It more often spreads indirectly, such as through contaminated feed, footwear, and equipment. Given this indirect spread, the relationship between the proximity of wild birds to poultry facilities and the risk of avian flu remains unclear, a question Buler recently proposed studying in a grant application to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“We’re seeing higher prevalence of avian influenza in the environment, namely in water and soil associated with these water bodies, in watersheds, where there are a lot more waterfowl,” said Buler. “So, the concern there is that even though the waterfowl might not be in very close proximity—like directly interfacing with the poultry farms—they may be shedding virus into the environment.”

Like the Delmarva, California’s Central Valley is another critical wintering spot for millions of waterfowl. Given that the water typically doesn’t freeze, birds often settle there for months. “The Central Valley is kind of a one-stop shop for wintering birds,” said Casazza. Yet, it’s also a major agricultural basin, formed by draining and diking wetlands, the habitat of waterfowl. This low-lying stretch of land produces a quarter of the U.S. food supply, including as a major supplier of poultry, home to more than 600 commercial poultry farms.

In 2021, Buler and a team of researchers mapped waterfowl distribution relative to commercial poultry farms in the Central Valley. They developed a model that predicted that in the Central Valley, when the waterfowl population peaks in January, the exposure risk to commercial poultry facilities sharply increases—to a point where a third of the poultry farms were highly exposed to waterfowl.

“We have a lot of waterfowl that spend their winter [in the Central Valley], which is not a bad thing, but it just happens to be where we grow all of our commercial poultry,” said Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on disease modeling of the spread of avian flu from waterfowl to domestic poultry.

“Historically, that happened because the Central Valley is flat, the land [was] inexpensive, and it’s easy to transport corn and soy from the Midwest,” said Pitesky. However, “We’ve never really thought, ‘Oh, maybe we shouldn’t be growing commercial poultry right next to habitat for waterfowl.”’

But now, those consequences may be coming home to roost—quite literally—in the form of waterfowl roosting on agricultural facilities.

Wild ducks have been called the “Trojan horses” of H5N1 for their ability to spread the virus, sometimes without showing symptoms, to crowded barns of poultry. This is typically the death knell for the entire flock. If the virus is detected in a barn, “that leads to the best way that we know how to control the virus from spreading further from that barn, which is to euthanize all the birds in that barn,” said Pitesky.

Along with poultry facilities, waterfowl also spend time on the cattle farms that are concentrated in the Central Valley, which is home to the vast majority of California’s 1.7 million dairy cows. This is an emerging concern for the dairy industry as H5N1 was detected in U.S. dairy cows in late March after spreading undetected for months. It’s the first time an avian flu virus has been detected in cattle. Recently, USDA scientists linked the original spread to cattle to a wild bird. Recently, USDA scientists likely linked the original spread to cattle to a wild bird by a genetic analysis.

Scientific literature first documented waterfowl birds’ use of poultry and cattle facilities with telemetry in 2022. Led by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Western Ecological Research Center, a team of scientists, including Casazza and Pitesky, affixed a solar-powered radio signal to over 600 waterfowl that travel along the Pacific Flyway, which runs from Alaska to Patagonia.

This telemetry offered a highly precise, day-to-day account of each bird’s movements—and found that 11 birds ventured close to or directly on agricultural facilities in California and Washington. The wild birds made use of the effluent ponds, also called lagoons, which hold slurry manure. They also spent time on feedlots where cattle are fattened with grain, likely foraging for spilled grain.

“We were surprised by it,” Casazza said. “We saw species that we did not expect, like [northern] pintail and cinnamon teal, utilize some of these ag facilities.” He was only expecting this of certain species of waterfowl, like mallards, often spotted in city parks.

H5N1 has been detected in cinnamon teal, northern pintail, and mallards in the U.S., among many other species of wild birds, according to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s data, which tracks detections of the virus, typically in dead wild birds sampled by local agencies and partners.

Casazza views this study as likely indicative of a much larger trend of birds using agricultural facilities. “They are pretty indicative of their cohort,” he said. “If one of the radios mark birds doing something, that probably means that hundreds, if not thousands of other birds, are doing that exact same thing.”

Since then, he has continued tracking waterfowl using telemetry and has observed that wild birds make use of “all kinds of alternative water features on the landscape,” including water sewage treatment plants, golf course ponds, and city ponds. Some agricultural operations can also be beneficial habitats. For instance, waterfowl utilize California’s flooded rice fields as habitat, a beneficial relationship to farmers who rely on birds to eat the rice stubble, which they used to burn.

While it remains unclear exactly what is drawing wild birds to water features on cattle and poultry farms, Casazza suggested that habitat loss may lead some wild birds to seek out alternative habitats, especially during times of drought, when their natural habitats are more constrained, a question he’d like to study. This may also lead the virus to spill over to other species, when wild birds wind up in agricultural facilities, as Casazza and other researchers proposed as a potential pathway.

It’s also a complex issue, he noted. For instance, it’s unclear whether in some cases the wild birds may be attracted to water or other resources on the agricultural facility, which may depend on the species, noted Casazza. It also may depend on whether the bird is migrating, looking for a stopover spot with water, versus moving within their wintering region—when it’s the later, he says, “when they have what they need, we tend to not see a ton of movement.” When this question was posed to Buler, he noted that it may depend on geographies too. California, for instance, is more water-restricted than the Delmarva.

As a solution, Casazza sees promise in creating more wildlife habitat for waterfowl, located away from agricultural facilities. “This would give them an opportunity to settle on habitat that is designed for them rather than these alternative habitats,” Casazza said, adding that this could also involve flooding the rice fields. He also hopes to see an increase in surveillance of waterfowl potentially as a “national data stream” that could track where wild birds are moving to help predict where the virus could be moving next.

Pitesky also emphasized the importance of more widespread waterfowl tracking, pointing to application he developed that tracks the abundance of waterfowl using remote sensing, designed as a warning system for farmers to know to implement higher biosecurity measures. For instance, he notes that farms could utilize geofencing to automatically close the curtains in the barn—used to ventilate the barn—in response to a flock of waterfowl moving toward that facility.

Another option may be that agricultural facilities relocate, so they are not clustered on waterfowl habitats. Of course, neither option is easy, especially in a place like California’s Central Valley, where nearly everyone—including farmers and waterfowl—are seeking the remaining sources of water. But there’s also rarely an easy fix to widespread infectious diseases, emerging and mutating at the complex interfaces of animals and humans, and the fragments of wildlife habitats.

Read More:
A Deadly Bird Flu Resurfaces
Industrial Meat 101: Could Large Livestock Operations Cause the Next Pandemic?

New Bill Supporting Wildlife Habitat on Private Lands. A bipartisan group of senators recently introduced the Habitat Connectivity on Working Lands Act, aimed at “improving wildlife habitat connectivity and wildlife migration corridors” on private land. The bill would enable private landowners to use the USDA’s voluntary conservation programs to address the problem of wildlife fragmentation, including through technical assistance, cost-share, and payouts offered under existing programs. This would include, for instance, restoring wildlife habitat and adopting virtual fencing technology to allow wildlife to move more safely through landscapes.

Read More:
Changing How We Farm Might Protect Wild Mammals–And Fight Climate Change
What Is Agriculture’s Role in Protecting Endangered Wildlife?

Protecting Farmworkers From Avian Flu. The CDC recently updated its interim guidance for protecting higher-risk workers—such as poultry workers, slaughterhouse workers, and veterinarians—from the avian flu virus. The agency recommends personal protective equipment, including non-disposable, fluid-resistant overalls, a particulate respirator with a minimum of N95 filters, rubber boots with sealed seams, and properly fitted goggles. The guidance comes after a dairy worker in Texas was infected with avian flu, the second case of H5N1 detected in a human in the U.S. However, the CDC doesn’t have the ability to enforce these recommendations and has already received pushback from farmers who are unwilling to offer this equipment to workers.

Read more:
Farmworkers Are in the Coronavirus Crosshairs
Animal Agriculture Is Dangerous Work. The People Who Do It Have Few Protections.

The post Bird Flu May Be Driven By This Overlooked Factor appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/04/17/the-shrimp-on-your-table-has-a-dark-history/ https://civileats.com/2024/04/17/the-shrimp-on-your-table-has-a-dark-history/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2024 09:00:17 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55969 “These peeling sheds aren’t supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be used by anybody,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “There are 20,000 pounds of shrimp per day going through these peeling sheds that are landing on U.S. grocery store shelves.” The high temperatures in the shed could easily lead to pathogen growth, he warned. […]

The post The Shrimp on Your Table Has a Dark History appeared first on Civil Eats.

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A few months ago, along the coast of Andhra Pradesh in eastern India, Josh Farinella drove 40 minutes out of his way to visit workers who peel shrimp for Choice Canning, where he worked as a shrimp factory manager. He didn’t travel to the rural area for any of his job responsibilities; he was there to document injustice. He observed a crew of local women quickly peeling shrimp along rusty tables in 90-degree heat, wearing street clothes and flip-flops. They worked for long hours in a shed in a dirt field, far from the main work site, easily escaping the notice of auditors.

“These peeling sheds aren’t supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be used by anybody,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “There are 20,000 pounds of shrimp per day going through these peeling sheds that are landing on U.S. grocery store shelves.” The high temperatures in the shed could easily lead to pathogen growth, he warned.

Farinella started his work for Choice Canning in 2015 at a production facility in his hometown of Pittston, Pennsylvania. In 2023, when the company offered him a high-paying managerial position at a new facility in Andhra Pradesh, he accepted. But four months into the job, he decided to come forward as a whistleblower, exposing what he says are the deplorable and unsanitary conditions in one of India’s largest shrimp manufacturers.

According to the company’s website, Choice Canning sells shrimp in more than 48,000 retail and food-service locations in the U.S. This includes major retailers like Walmart, Aldi, ShopRite, Hannaford, and HelloFresh, which advertise to consumers their commitments to sustainable seafood sourcing on their websites.

As Farinella was driving back to the town of Amalapuram, he recalled receiving a text from his wife with a photo of officers with machine guns outside their apartment. It was unusual timing. “It was one of those heart-beating-out-of-your-chest moments, like, does somebody know?” he said, worried that the company had caught on to his gathering dirt on its bad practices.

Soon after, Farinella quit his job, filed a complaint with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and flew back to the U.S. He took with him thousands of pages of documents, photographs, and videos, which have since been published by The Ocean Outlaw Project, alongside a vivid, reported account of his experiences at Choice Canning over the course of a few months of employment. According to the Project, this includes text messages that reveal that when Farinella informed the company’s vice president that shrimp had tested positive for antibiotics, which are banned in shrimp by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, he was told to “ship it” to the U.S. anyway.

Choice Canning is far from an isolated bad actor in India’s $8.4 billion shrimp industry. Farinella’s whistleblower account coincides with a three-year investigation, “Hidden Harvest,” published in March by the Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), exposing the human rights abuses rampant across India’s shrimp sector. The report documents how India’s shrimp is farmed and processed by a highly exploited workforce, rife with horrific abuses, including child labor, sexual harassment, debt bondage, and forced labor—to then be sold to many of the largest U.S. grocery retailers, often with a sustainability promise.

Building on the CAL’s report, the Associated Press (AP) traveled to Andhra Pradesh, the center of India’s farmed shrimp industry, visiting growing ponds, hatcheries, warehouses, and even the hidden peeling sheds. They observed women “barehanded or wearing filthy, torn gloves,” peeling shrimp crushed in ice for 10 hours per day. A local dermatologist told the AP that he treats “four to five shrimp peelers every day” for infections and frostbite on their fingers—at times, severe enough to require amputation.

“I am like a ghost worker,” a worker for Satya Sea Food, one of the many employees working without a contract or pay slips, told CAL. The workers are often recruited in groups and charged a steep fee, which they pay over time through paycheck deductions, forcing them into debt bondage. Surveillance cameras and security guards are often used to monitor the facilities and the shared housing, preventing workers from leaving the premises.

These findings reflect the shortcomings of corporate social responsibility in bringing meaningful reform to supply chains. As Civil Eats has reported, the Walton Family Foundation’s philanthropic commitments to regenerative agriculture and sustainable fisheries is undermined by Walmart’s business model, aimed at “squeezing suppliers and foisting the costs of production onto the small-town landscapes”—in this case, according to the Ocean Outlaw Project, rural India and the women risking their health to bring cheap shrimp to Walmart’s shelves.

This is obscured to even a discerning reader of food labels. Choice Canning, one of Walmart’s suppliers, misrepresented its practices to receive a Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) certification, as the Ocean Outlaw Project reported. Likewise, many of the retailers named in CAL’s report, including Kroger, Aldi, and Whole Foods, work with the Conservation Alliance for Seafood Solutions (CASS), which recently released new guidance to inform their approaches to sustainable seafood commitments.

When asked about this apparent contradiction, a CASS representative replied: “Many companies are making progress in prioritizing ‘the human factor’ but the industry has a ways to go before social responsibility goals are fulfilled. All companies, even the current best performers, have more work to do.” The representative noted that CASS is not a regulatory agency, but rather focused on educating its members on best practices.

“It’s become increasingly clear that environmental and social responsibility are two sides of the same coin,” said Ryan Bigelow, CASS project director, in a separate statement emailed to Civil Eats. “If a company is treating people poorly, they most likely don’t care about the environment—and the reverse is also true.”

In the case of the Indian shrimp industry investigation, Bigelow said, low pay and inhumane working conditions coincided with environmental contamination from shrimp farm runoff. “This interconnectedness underscores the importance of companies embracing a holistic approach to sustainability, addressing both the well-being of workers and the health of the planet.”

The reports’ findings could have major implications for the domestic U.S. shrimp market, which imports around 90 percent of its shrimp. India is by far the largest supplier of U.S. shrimp, accounting for 40 percent of shrimp imports. The AP investigation concluded that the conditions they documented violated laws in India and the U.S. In March, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Natural Resources inquired into the issue, asking for further evidence from Farinella of violations of U.S. laws.

For years, U.S. wild shrimp harvesters have been calling to curb imported shrimp, which undermines their shrinking industry. Last year, shrimpers in Louisiana staged a protest at the state’s capital building, protesting their “starvation” wages. “We’d have to catch millions of pounds to survive with these shrimp prices,” a 51-year-old Louisiana shrimper told Civil Eats last spring. The shrimpers pointed to how they are struggling because they are competing with shrimp produced through highly exploited labor, as recent reports confirm.

“It’s absolutely our government’s responsibility to make sure what they’re permitting to come into this country is not being handled by slave labor,” said Kindra Arnesen, a Louisiana shrimp harvester and advocate for the domestic shrimp industry.

Under international trade law, the U.S. can only ban imports from locations that have violated U.S. human rights and environmental standards. “If India’s labor standards do not meet the U.S. labor standards, then yes, [the] U.S. could ban imports,” said Petros Mavroidis, a lawyer at Columbia Law School and former member of the World Trade Organization’s legal division. This has historically been a challenging bar for the U.S. shrimp industry, given the lack of transparency and limited testing of imported seafood supply chains.

“I hope it helps the U.S. industry,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “So much of this product is coming in from overseas at much lower prices. Part of that has to be with all the corners you’re cutting, with food safety and your basic human rights laws.”

Read More:
Cheap Imports Leave US Shrimpers Struggling With ‘Starvation Wages’
The US Is a Dumping Ground for Illegal Seafood. Some Lawmakers Want to Clean Up the Market
Diving—and Dying—for Red Gold: The Human Cost of Honduran Lobster

Avian Flu Spreads to Cattle. A highly pathogenic strain of the avian flu, known as H5N1, has spread to 16 cattle herds across six states. It’s the first time that the virus—which has been circulating in wild birds and poultry the U.S. since late 2021—has spread to cattle, according to the Center for Disease Control. This recent outbreak also marks the second time the virus has spread to a human in the U.S.: A Texas dairy worker contracted the virus after coming in contact with infected cattle. Fortunately, his only reported symptom was eye inflammation. Experts fear that the flu could have been transmitted through “poultry litter,” a type of cattle feed that contains poultry excrement, spilled feed, feathers, and other waste scraped off the floors of poultry barns.

Read more:
The Field Report: A Deadly Bird Flu Resurfaces
How Will Bird Flu Affect Backyard Poultry?

The Bankrollers of Methane. Major U.S. banks have been accused of undermining their “net zero” climate commitments by financing the livestock industry, the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions in the world. Between 2016 and 2023, U.S. banks provided the livestock industry with $134 billion in loans or underwriting services, according to a new report by Friends of the Earth and Profundo. The Big Three lenders, as designated in the report, are Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup.

Read more:
Methane from Agriculture is a Big Problem. We explain why.
How Climate Policy Gets Obstructed by the Meat Industry
From Livestock to Lion’s Mane, the Latest From the Transfarmation Project

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/04/17/the-shrimp-on-your-table-has-a-dark-history/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/04/16/we-are-in-the-golden-age-of-dorm-room-cooking/ https://civileats.com/2024/04/16/we-are-in-the-golden-age-of-dorm-room-cooking/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2024 09:00:55 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55951 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. In a mostly dark dorm room, a narrow beam of light illuminates the makeshift table: a white towel spread over a bed. A pair of hands prepares filet mignon, using […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

In a mostly dark dorm room, a narrow beam of light illuminates the makeshift table: a white towel spread over a bed. A pair of hands prepares filet mignon, using just a cutting board, basic utensils, a crockpot, and a blowtorch. The hands sear a slab of tenderloin steak with a flash of blue flame. A Nicki Minaj–Ludacris mashup is punctuated by the sounds of fast-paced cooking: the grinding of sea salt, a flick of a cap of oil, the sizzling of the steak in a crockpot with melted butter, a heap of garlic, and a twig of rosemary.

The final scene: A knife glides into the perfectly tender and crispy filet mignon, prepared without ever leaving the dorm room bed.

This 15-second video, by TikTok user Lazy Pot Noodle, has amassed more than 2 million views and even garnered the attention of renowned chef Gordon Ramsay.

In a response video, Ramsay takes on the voice of a sports coach, cheering and predicting the young chef’s next move: “Yes! Stop it! Basting. Beautifully done. Butter,” he shouts, squinting at the steak bathed in butter. “Oh my god, this kid knows what they’re doing!”

When it’s ready, Ramsay announces that it’s time to take the steak out, and the student follows right on cue. “Baste it with the resting juices,” he instructs. Like clockwork, the hand does exactly that. “Kids, what happened to the $3 ramen?” asks Ramsay. “We’ve been upgraded to a five-star steak!”

As Ramsay observed, we’re now living in the golden age of dorm-room cooking. Thanks to social media platforms facilitating the exchange of cooking hacks, students have figured out how to adapt recipes to the dormitory, without kitchen appliances. They’ve become masters of crock pots, easy-bake ovens, cheap cutting boards, and portable electric burners, while maneuvering in a tiny space. While campus cooking is hardly a new trend, this generation of college students has a fresh stage and audience—even celebrity chefs may tune in—to swap notes, recipes, and typical internet babble.

@lazypotnoodle Filet in my dorm 🥩 łink in bió! #collegedorm #dormhacks #tiktokmademebuyit #foodtok #college #foodtiktok #steak ♬ Area Codes x Did It On Em by L BEATS – DJ L BEATS

Some of these dishes stretch the boundaries of what was thought possible for on-campus cooking, like the filet mignon. Yet much of the genre is also focused on practical, affordable meals that can be easily replicated outside of the dorm room, broadening the possibilities for all budget- and space-constrained chefs. These low-budget, accessible, and creative dorm-room meals are opening up new possibilities for all cooks with limited kitchen access, from low-budget travelers staying in hostels to anyone struggling with housing insecurity to housemates tired of waiting for their turn to use the oven. All it takes is an easy-bake oven, and a dash of confidence, to prepare a delicious, kitchen-free meal.

Students have become masters of crock pots, easy-bake ovens, cheap cutting boards, and portable electric burners, while maneuvering in a tiny space.

Students have become masters of crock pots, easy-bake ovens, cheap cutting boards, and portable electric burners, while maneuvering in a tiny space.

“That easy-bake oven is putting in WORK,” said one TikToker, in response to Lazy Pot Noodle’s Thanksgiving dinner. “He’s so tired,” quipped the dorm-room chef about the little pink oven that had just cooked up turkey, stuffing, baked mac and cheese, and mashed sweet potatoes topped with golden-brown marshmallows. “You did better than folk with a WHOLE kitchen,” replied another of the young chef’s fans.

Lazy Pot Noodle’s videos reveal that just about anything can be prepared in a small, kitchenless room, with equipment no bigger than a microwave, from shabu shabu to jambalaya to mini pizzas. The chef also has some more classic college essentials, like spruced-up boxed mac and cheese and ramen.

There’s a growing world of social media users preparing just about anything under the sun from the comfort of their dormitories. For Lazy Pot Noodle, this has turned into a job, earning income from sharing links to the cooking equipment, ranging from $30 to $80. But other social media chefs are simply sharing to swap knowledge on how to cook in the confines of a dorm room.

In another series, then-college student Priyamvada Atmakuri prepares budget-friendly recipes, often from the desk of her dorm room, including apple crumble in the microwave, peanut and coconut tofu curry on an electric burner, zesty and creamy lemon pancakes, and quinoa salad with kale and spicy chickpeas.

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Priyamvada Atmakuri (@priyamvadatmakuri)

“This is way more elaborate than anything I’ve made in my dorm room so far, but oh my god, it’s so worth it,” she wrote in 2022, describing her curry noodle soup video. “It’s so filling and comforting, and it’s just what one needs on a cold afternoon.” Since her college cooking days, Atmakuri has become a professional pastry chef for a restaurant in India, while operating an at-home bakery by herself and still sharing recipes on Instagram.

Another TikToker, amycooksfood, has become known for her rice cooker series, based on meals prepared in her college dorm room. “To be totally honest, my dining hall wasn’t very good. My college luckily allowed rice cookers,” she explains in a video. “So, I tried making thịt kho tàu with a rice cooker, and from then on, I learned that you can use a rice cooker for anything.” She uses a small, no-frills rice cooker, she explains, to keep her recipes accessible for low-income college students who can’t afford fancy equipment.

@amycooksfood i lived in the dorms all 4 years and was on the meal plan BUT nothing beats homecooked meals! Like most dining halls mine was not very good, and being able to cook in some capacity every so often meant i had good food to look forward to 🥰 hey, just cause i was broke doesnt mean i didnt deserve to treat myself to a homecooker meal 😚 i had the same silly tiny rice cooker all 4 years of college too! Most of the students i knew had similarly small rice cookers, and the small size means it takes up less space..my dorm was tiny 😭#amycooksfood #cookininricecooker #japanesecurry #millefeuillenabe #thitkhotau #canhbi #misosoup #eggdropsoup #lowincomestudent #collegecooking #dormlife #dormcooking #adapting ♬ Cool Kids (our sped up version) – Echosmith

Amy’s series includes Japanese curry, tteokbokki, miso soup, soft-boiled eggs, and even banana bread from a dependable rice cooker. In her video for budae jjigae, a spicy stew from Korea, she explains the origins of the dish in a caption: “This dish was created from leftover processed foods from U.S. military bases in Korea during a time of extreme food scarcity,” she wrote. “It’s a symbol of adaptation and resourcefulness necessary for survival.”

This generation of dorm-room chefs are showing that you don’t need a glossy, high-end kitchen to make good food. In fact, you might not even need to leave your bed.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/04/16/we-are-in-the-golden-age-of-dorm-room-cooking/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/03/20/florida-banned-farmworker-heat-protections-a-groundbreaking-partnership-offers-a-solution/ Wed, 20 Mar 2024 09:00:45 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55688 April 15, 2024 update: Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill late last week that would ban heat protections for workers. The headline of this article has been updated to reflect the bill’s implementation. “It’s morally repulsive, and it will kill farmworkers,” said Erik Nicholson, a farmworker advocate and the former vice president of United […]

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]]> April 15, 2024 update: Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill late last week that would ban heat protections for workers. The headline of this article has been updated to reflect the bill’s implementation.

Earlier this month, Florida’s Senate passed a bill banning local jurisdictions from passing measures protecting workers from heat exposure, the latest of a series of draconian laws targeting immigrants and workers in Florida. This bill, which awaits the approval of governor Ron DeSantis, prohibits governments from requiring that employers provide water, shade, and breaks to workers—relatively small measures that can mean the difference between life and death for workers laboring under Florida’s hot sun. This law precedes what is expected to be another record-breaking summer of extreme heat.

“It’s morally repulsive, and it will kill farmworkers,” said Erik Nicholson, a farmworker advocate and the former vice president of United Farm Workers. “I have accompanied the families of too many farmworkers who have needlessly died due to heat stress.”

But Nicholson also highlighted the promise of another avenue to bring strong heat standards to Florida farms: The Fair Food Program (FFP), a groundbreaking partnership between retailers, farmers, and farmworkers that has implemented the strongest, legally binding heat protocols in the nation on Florida’s farms, while bypassing the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.

Originating in Florida’s tomato industry, the program now operates across eleven states and four countries. With the support of a new U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) award, it is anticipated to expand this year to protect farmworkers in 25 states.

“We as workers can’t afford to wait for the Florida legislature to find its conscience,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a former farmworker and organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, in a statement. “That’s why we are focused on our partnership with many of the state’s largest growers and on expanding the Fair Food Program.”

“We as workers can’t afford to wait for the Florida legislature to find its conscience. That’s why we are focused on our partnership with many of the state’s largest growers and on expanding the Fair Food Program.”

The FFP was established in 2011 by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a worker-based human rights organization with a long history of community-based farmworker organizing in Florida. The program is a unique partnership between farmers, farmworkers, and 14 major food retailers—including Subway, Whole Foods, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Taco Bell—that guarantees a set of legally binding farmworker protections for heat and other workplace conditions, which were drafted by workers. An independent, trilingual council operates a 24/7 worker complaint line and audits the participating farms.

“[Farmworkers in the FFP] don’t feel pressure to keep working under conditions that are placing their lives and their health at risk. And that’s fundamentally different from what happens outside of the program,” said Chavez.

Between April and November, Florida’s hottest months, the program’s heat protocol mandates shade on fields, water with electrolytes, and a rest break every two hours. The addition of electrolytes, explained Chavez, was based on “scientific research about the need to incorporate those so that workers can be protected long term in regards to kidney failure.”

Farmworkers sit underneath shade structures in Georgia. (Photo courtesy of the Fair Food Program)

The shade is provided by a portable structure attached to a pick-up truck that accompanies workers as they move through the field, he said. Whenever workers need to take a break, the shade structure is nearby. Crew leaders also monitor for signs of heat illness, trained to especially look out for new farmworkers still acclimating to the temperature.

And if a worker does develop symptoms of heat illness, they have the right to stop working and take a break or receive medical attention if necessary. The federal government and state of Florida do not mandate any of these worker protections, which means that participating farms have heat protocols that surpass any regulatory requirements.

Currently, only a handful of states—Washington, California, Oregon, and Colorado—have passed heat protections that extend to outdoor workers. In October 2021, the Biden Administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) initiated a rulemaking process to develop a federal standard to regulate heat exposure. Yet, after over two years, the regulation has yet to be finalized as global temperatures tick upwards.

“It’s been a pretty substantial amount of time for OSHA not to have actually created a regulation for heat stress,” said Laurie Beyranevand, the director of the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School. “In the absence of federal regulation, people are concerned about the health of farmworkers.”

If the standard isn’t finalized by 2025, she adds, another Trump Administration would be in a position to keep the heat standard pending without ever finalizing it, deferring a promise that farmworkers and advocates have long fought to establish for decades.

Last week, Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, launched a project in which federal health leaders commit to better protect farmworkers from heat and smoke. In the past, the agency has recommended that OSHA finalize standards.

The FFP, however, offers a more immediate avenue of protection for retailers who are willing to come to the table and collaborate with farmworkers and farmers. Beyond concern for the health of farmworkers, major retailers are incentivized to join the program because it guarantees a level of transparency in their supply chain, eliminating the social liability of contracting with farms rife with labor abuse. And farmers sign onto the agreement because it gives them preferential purchasing from the major purchasers, while also ensuring that their workplace practices are ethical and often helping retain employees.

A Fair Food Program auditor speaks to a farmworker in a tomato field. (Photo courtesy of the Fair Food Program)

“[The Fair Food Program] is not designed to magically erase the problems and risks of harm. It is designed to respond appropriately, and by doing so in a really effective way, reduce the amount and the types of abuse that take place,” said Chavez. “In the case of a heat illness, it’s the most powerful tool that there is in the country.”

FFP has been quickly expanding beyond Florida’s tomato fields to operate across many crops: flowers, sweet potatoes, onions, corn, peaches, melons, and squash. The program recently added international farms that grow flowers in southern Chile, South Africa, and Mexico, with support from the Department of Labor. The USDA also recently launched a pilot to support farms in addressing labor abuses, recognizing the worker-driven social responsibility model as a pathway for achieving the highest human rights standards. This development has incentivized more farms to join the FFP, Chavez said. Based on the applications submitted so far, it could lead to the program launching in as many as 15 new states.

This model pioneered by FFP, known as Worker-Driven Social Responsibility, has been adopted by other industries long plagued by abuse. It inspired Bangladesh’s garment industry to form a similar partnership between brands and trade unions, protecting over 2 million factory workers with a legally binding accord. A similar program, known as Milk with Dignity, has been adopted by Vermont’s dairy industry. The United Kingdom’s fishing industry has been in conversation with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers as they build their own version of this model.

“We see this as the blueprint for workers in other realities,” said Chavez. Even after Florida’s move to ban heat protections, he remains hopeful about the promise of this model to support workers when the government fails. “We are in a great moment in history where there is a cure for many of the abuses that have plagued not just our work but many industries.”

Read More:
The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Immokalee, Florida
The Heat Wave Crushing the West is a Preview of Farmworkers’ Hot Future
As the Climate Emergency Grows, Farmworkers Lack Protection from Deadly Heat

Barriers to Accessing Federal Loans Persist. There is a long history of the USDA selectively approving loans to U.S. farms at their discretion, resulting in the well-documented denial of loans to Black farmers, a pattern that has pushed farmers off their land. This pattern of “broad discretion” continues into today and can “allow for agency bias and discrimination,” according to a new analysis by Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School with partners Farm Aid and the Rural Advancement Foundation International. The researchers also found the USDA tends to “err more frequently when processing loan applications for farm operations that differ from the ‘traditional’ commodity farms,” imposing a barrier to farmers engaged in innovative and climate-friendly practices. On top of this, it’s also harder for smaller-scale farmers, unable to afford high legal fees, to appeal a loan denial.

Read more:
Farm Credit Can Make or Break Farms. Should It Be More Equitable?
This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More than 2 Decades

New Organic Standards. New regulations within the USDA’s  National Organic Program will become enforceable on March 20, reflecting the most sweeping update to the program since 1990. The update is largely aimed at stopping organic fraud, by increasing transparency and oversight of imports and of the organic rules in operation on farms. While most organic advocates support the reforms as necessary to maintain the integrity of the organic seal, some say small farms may struggle with the record-keeping requirements. “Organic recordkeeping is already extensive,” Kate Mendenhall, who directs the Organic Farmers Association, told Food Dive last month. “We will likely lose small and mid-size organic farmers from the program if we do not address this issue.”

Read More:
USDA Moves Forward With Sweeping Plan to Prevent Fraud in Organic
The Field Report: The Future of Organic Food Is Taking Shape at the USDA—and Beyond What is the Future of Organic?

The post Florida Banned Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/03/11/fungi-are-helping-farmers-unlock-the-secrets-of-soil-carbon/ Mon, 11 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55603 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. This article was also produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners. Take a listen here. “This is called shadow microscopy,” says […]

The post Fungi Are Helping Farmers Unlock the Secrets of Soil Carbon appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox. This article was also produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners. Take a listen here.

Timothy Robb peers into a microscope to reveal the underground realm of the living and dying within a fistful of soil. On the glass slide, he sees clumps of golden-brown minerals and organic matter particles, like pebbled splotches of ink. Nearly everything else in the landscape is a microbe, a motley crew of roving shapes, preparing to eat or be eaten. Hairy orbs of protozoa glide around in search of snacks in the flecks of bacteria scattered all around. A nematode, a microscopic worm, thrashes through the scene in a hurry. A tubular strand of fungi stands still, perhaps absorbing the dust of dead plants.

“This is called shadow microscopy,” says Robb, the co-owner of Compostella Farm in southern Mississippi, bringing the microorganisms into focus. It’s a way of viewing living specimens under an oblique light, so they appear backlit and magnified, like a shadow box theater. Just prior to this, he diluted the sample in water and shook it, like a “hurricane or earthquake, any biblical catastrophe motion for that soil.” This broke apart the soil’s structure so he could see everything holding it together, like the dark brown curl of fungi.

Soil microorganisms busy decomposing, magnified by shadow microscopy.
(Photo credit: Timothy Robb)

“This is what a really good, healthy fungi strand looks like,” he says. Its uniform, segmented structure, thickness, and color are often good signs, though he adds that it’s not a hard and fast rule, just clues that this might be an architect of healthy soil.

As a vegetable farmer, Robb is mostly in the business of life. But his interest in building healthy soil led him down into this shadowy world of decay, where microbes shuffle carbon and nutrients in an endless cycle that sustains all life on Earth. This world appears chaotic at first glance, but Robb insists that it is elegant. An orderly marketplace, really. He’s been working to understand and strengthen this underground economy to replenish his soil.

Researchers have increasingly recognized how essential fungi are to sequestering carbon in the soil and some have come to appreciate the outsized role they play in supporting crop health, mitigating climate change, and even sheltering crops from disease. As fungi’s vast benefits come to light, more farmers are tapping into this vital network, learning how to work with beneficial fungi to encourage its growth in the soil, swapping tilling for microscopes.

This growing interest in fungal networks on farms quietly challenges the underpinnings of U.S. agriculture. The prevailing model involves taking care of the crop’s nutritional needs with chemicals, bumping up the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in an effort to maximize the yield of the crop. Farm ecosystems are controlled with herbicides that kill weeds and fungicides that kill the fungi in the soil. Common practices, like tilling the soil, disturb the fungal networks and then deepen the dependence on chemical inputs.

“It’s a criticism of how agriculture is currently conducted, and it’s a methodology of introducing the microorganisms that are absent from the soil.”

“We’re reliant on these cheap inputs that are no longer cheap,” says soil ecologist Adam Cobb, whose research focuses on mycorrhizal fungi. He notes that farmers are then subject to the whims of a global market, which tends to skyrocket in price during geopolitical conflicts.

These chemical-based practices degrade the soil over time, stripping it of its ability to cycle carbon and nutrients without its supportive network of decomposers. But working to both protect and encourage fungi on farms is a way to reverse course. Robb sees his work of coaxing beneficial fungi back into the soil, which he largely learned from an online program called the Soil Food Web School, as both a challenge to mainstream agriculture and as a way forward to restore agricultural soils.

“It’s a criticism of how agriculture is currently conducted,” says Robb. “And it’s a methodology of introducing the microorganisms that are absent from the soil—the chain of organisms that release different minerals from rocks, clay, or silt particles in the soil.”

The Nutrient-for-Carbon Exchange

Fungi are effectively merchants of carbon. In the soil, they give plants the water and nutrients they need, while the plants provide fungi with carbohydrates (i.e., carbon) from photosynthesis. Fungi can act like a second set of roots, extending the plant’s ability to draw in water and nutrients.

Mycorrhizal fungi, which encompass thousands of species, can form large, underground networks, connected by branching filaments called hyphae, threading through the soil in every direction. One type of this fungi, known as arbuscular mycorrhizal, attaches directly to the cell membranes of a plant’s root, facilitating a smooth delivery. Other microbes in the soil, like protozoa and nematodes, participate in this cycling, too, digesting fungi and bacteria to release their nutrients in a more available form to plants.

“The microbes engineered habitats around the plant roots that would be high in organic matter and make it more efficient for them to be able to obtain water and nutrients that they could then–in this carbon economy–essentially sell it to the plant,” says Kris Nichols, a leading researcher on soil microbiology. “It’s really an economic relationship.”

This relationship becomes especially interesting when business is booming—when the plants are delivering a lot of carbon into the soil that is used to build larger and larger fungal networks while distributing carbon across the soil profile. The carbon accumulates in the soil in many forms, from fungal cell walls to soil aggregates, or pellets of very alive soil that Nichols describes as “little microbial towns,” like economic hubs.

Fungi threading through the soil of Compostella Farm in Mississippi. (Photo credit: Grey Moran)

When these microbial communities develop, mycorrhizal fungi use their hard-earned carbon to build a protective coating around them, sheltering them from disturbances while more stably storing carbon. To the naked eye, these pellets look like crumbs in the soil.

The accumulation of carbon in the soil effectively slows the carbon cycle, causing carbon to linger in the ground for a longer period of time rather than quickly releasing into the atmosphere, where it takes the form of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas driving climate change. That’s the goal of what’s been popularly described as “climate-friendly farming,” or regenerative agriculture: keeping as much carbon in the soil for as long as possible, in part by keeping these underground networks undisturbed.

And increasingly, fungi have gained scientific recognition for their essential role in slowing this life-ending and -giving cycle. A recent study found that the world’s mycorrhizal fungi store the equivalent of a third of fossil-fuel emissions.

How Farmers Can Tap Into Fungal Networks

Peering through the microscope, Robb’s task is relatively simple: He counts and measures each microbe—fungi, nematodes, protozoa, and bacteria—to understand the microbial relationships in the soil and gauge its health. He also looks for the indicators of beneficial fungi and a diversity of microbes: different colors, lengths, and shapes.

“You’re introducing millions of fungi and bacteria species to the soil. And that’s as far as the management really needs to go.”

There’s no shortage of bacteria on the slide. It’s common for agricultural soils to be dominated by bacteria, which Robb is hoping to shift on his farm, building a more balanced ratio of fungi to bacteria in his soil. It’s not that bacteria should be scorned; they too are important decomposers that collaborate with fungi. But it’s hard to beat fungi at its game, rightfully a kingdom of its own. Fungi, more complex organisms, are more efficient at storing carbon across vast networks in the soil and more effective at delivering nutrients for certain plants.

The ratio of fungi to bacteria depends on the plants, explains Robb. He mostly grows salad greens across 3 acres of farmland. For his bok choy, mustards, and kale, he’s aiming for a 1-to-3 ratio of fungi to bacteria, but his lettuce requires a bit more fungi, closer to 1-to-1. He steeps the compost like a tea, extracting the microorganisms in water, and then runs it through his irrigation system.

“You’re introducing millions of fungi and bacteria species to the soil. And that’s as far as the management really needs to go, because once the plant gets established, then it’s controlling [the relationship with the microbes],” says Robb. He’s essentially just giving a plant options, a pool of microbes at its service.

In addition to applying compost tea, Robb supports fungal life by creating mulch from wood chips, which the fungi help decompose.

Robb shows me a pile of wood chips softening in the sun. It’s just 3 months old, but already threaded with fine white hairs of saprophytic fungi, resembling a cobweb. “When you can see it visually like this, what you’re actually seeing are like thousands of strands wrapped around each other,” says Robb, given that hypha are just several microns in size.

Before planting, he’ll also coat his seeds in a mycorrhizal treatment, a powder of spores. This inoculates this critical, network-building fungi in the soil. So as soon as the plant germinates, the fungi will be available to swap nutrients for carbon. Periodically, he’ll feed the fungi, adding liquid kelp, fish hydrolysate, and humic and fulvic acids to encourage its growth.

Every month or so, Robb peers at a soil sample under the microscope, assessing his progress. It has been about a year since he bought his first microscope and began surveying the local microbes. Most of his soil still isn’t where he’d like it to be, still dominated by bacteria, but it’s steadily improving. He essentially started from scratch on sandy soil that couldn’t hold onto much water or nutrients.

Rows of salad greens growing on Compostella Farm in Mississippi. (Photo credit: Grey Moran)

The most visible marker of improvement, at least to the naked eye, might be the crops themselves. A couple years ago, he observed “a precipitous decline in the quality” of his vegetables. They were yellowing and stunted. His lettuce was drooping. Disease was a regular occurrence. This prompted him to look into how to build soil that could hold onto more nutrients, which led him to fungi.

So far, his focus on improving decomposition has improved the health of his crops—now, rows of mostly bright green, leafing, upright crops emerge from dark brown, lush soil.

A Symbiotic Relationship That Predates Humans

The critical relationship between fungi and plants dates back 470 million years, when aquatic plants first transitioned to land. It was a barren landscape, without trees or soil, just endless sand, silt, and clay.

“We had a very mineral land base, but we didn’t have soil,” said microbiologist Kris Nichols. As plants began washing up on shore, it’s thought that mycorrhizal fungi helped them siphon nutrients and water, providing what they needed to move to land, in a symbiotic relationship for the ages.

“We know that this relationship existed,” said Nichols. “We have the genetic markers and we have the fossilized plant roots to be able to see, structurally, that it has been this same type of relationship for hundreds of millions of years.”

It has taken a while for the role of fungi in supporting plants and soil health to gain mainstream scientific recognition, however. Elaine Ingham, a pioneer in the field of soil microbiology, recalls facing pushback in the early 1980s when she proposed researching the role of soil microorganisms for her dissertation at Colorado State University. She met with her professors to propose her field of inquiry, only to be sternly dismissed.

“They’d look me in the eye and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Bacteria and fungi in the soil—they’re just there. They don’t do anything,’” she recalls. “All of them agreed that I was endangering my ability to get a job at the other end of my research project.”

But Ingham was undeterred. “I wanted to understand what bacteria and fungi in the soil were there for,” she says. “In all the literature I looked at, you couldn’t find anything about what these organisms in the soil actually do.” With the blessing of her advisor, she was allowed to pursue a dissertation project, along with her husband Russell Ingham, studying how soil fungi, bacteria, and nematodes interact with plants.

“We like to think of these wood chips as encouraging the fungi from the native forest around to come into our fields and partner with our orchards and with our crops.”

It was the start of her life’s work to help peel back the layers of the mysterious world of microbes within the soil. To date, the vast majority of the millions of fungi species on Earth remain unknown by scientists, but it’s now abundantly clear that many fungi play a critical role in soil health. Ingram, who grew up on a farm, now works with farmers to reintroduce soil fungi through the Soil Food Web School.

Robb came to learn how to work with fungi on his farm when he stumbled upon the school by chance in a footnote of a book. He attended the program without a background in science, but it didn’t take him long to feel comfortable behind a microscope. It was an “aha moment” when he realized his soil was depleted of fungi and other microbes—with this, he had the clarity of a diagnosis.

The Vast, Untapped Potential of Fungi

While the Soil Food Web School is one approach, there are practically infinite ways to work with beneficial fungi and microorganisms on farms. Many practices associated with regenerative agriculture and long-standing Indigenous methods encourage fungi. Even if not measured with a microscope, there are signs of fungi at work—like dark, spongious soil.

The roots of a cowpea plant, with fungi stained in blue, under a microscope.(Photo credit: Adam Cobb)

“We never leave our soil bare. It is always covered with straw, leaf mold, or wood chips,” says Leah Penniman, the co-founder of Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. “We like to think of these wood chips as encouraging the fungi from the native forest around to come into our fields and partner with our orchards and with our crops.”

In 2006, when she started Soul Fire Farm, the soil was very degraded and the organic matter—which includes soil carbon—was only at 3 percent. But they’ve since increased it to 10 percent to 12 percent in some areas. “That has been through a partnership with fungi,” Penniman says. Slowly but surely, fungi have emerged from the forest, building carbon in the soil.

Robb also thinks of the forest on the outskirts of his fields. The trees have a relationship with mycorrhizal fungi and microbes that take care of all their needs, without any human intervention. “Those are nitrogen-rich plants, and nobody’s applying fertilizer,” he says.

He currently adds organic nitrogen to his farm, but hopes to add less and less, allowing the fungi and microbes to increasingly take over in tending to his crops.

The post Fungi Are Helping Farmers Unlock the Secrets of Soil Carbon appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/03/06/new-research-shows-how-the-meat-industry-infiltrated-universities-to-obstruct-climate-policy/ https://civileats.com/2024/03/06/new-research-shows-how-the-meat-industry-infiltrated-universities-to-obstruct-climate-policy/#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2024 16:55:12 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55550 In this week’s The Field Report, we look at how Big Meat seeks to influence climate understanding, climate-friendly farming practices in question, and more.

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New research sheds light on the scope of the livestock industry’s influence over prominent agricultural research centers at two public universities. In a paper recently published in the journal Climatic Change, researchers detail how the meat industry funds credentialed academics to “obstruct unfavorable policies,” especially those targeting the industry’s largely unregulated methane emissions.

One example of the tactic occurred in early 2019, after Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) co-introduced the Green New Deal, a climate stimulus plan that laid the groundwork for the Inflation Reduction Act. Her team sent reporters a fact sheet, accidentally released prematurely, that made a passing mention of “farting cows.”

It’s a reference to cow’s greenhouse gas emissions, largely produced through belching, though passing gas contributes, too. This quickly stirred a Twitter maelstrom, the dust from which has yet to settle. Republicans depicted this as a siege on meat, claiming that Ocasio-Cortez is on a mission to take away their burgers.

Dr. Frank Mitloehner, a professor in the animal science department of U.C. Davis, urged the congresswoman to reconsider. In polite but firm academic language, he posted on Twitter that meat and dairy are just 4 percent of emissions in the U.S., and framed the discussion of emissions from cows as a distraction from the fight against fossil fuels. (Mitloehner wrote an op-ed for Civil Eats in 2020, in which he repeated some of the same talking points.) It’s a figure that a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins have argued is incomplete, and used in order to “downplay the environmental impacts of animal agriculture.”

After this, he met directly with the think tank that advised on the Green New Deal to “set the record straight,” according to an interview. He explained that cow farts aren’t the issue compared to their burps, which produce methane, but fossil fuels are the real concern.

While Mitloehner is right to single out cow burps, he misses the broader issue: Livestock and fossil fuels are both significant drivers of climate change. In fact, livestock is the world’s largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide.

Far from a neutral defender of bovines, Mitloehner runs the CLEAR Center at U.C. Davis, a prominent academic center for studying climate and agriculture, nearly entirely funded by the meat industry. Since 2002, Mitloehner has received at least $5,498,000 in industry funding, according to the Climatic Change paper, and also in his 2021 CV, including from the National Pork Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. And over the decades, his research and talks have minimized livestock’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions, which has then been frequently utilized by industry to argue for lax climate regulations.

Mitloehner, however, stands by his research and extension efforts. “My career is dedicated to reducing emissions from cattle and other livestock, and to say I downplay the climate impact of the sector flies in the face of that,” he wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “It’s not my research that is questioned, and it’s disappointing to see this ad hominem attack which is meant to distract from efforts to improve the climate impact of livestock.”

Due to limited public funding for academic research, industry-funded studies on food and agriculture are common. And while researchers often strive to avoid bias and funding does not always impact research quality, evidence suggests industry-funded studies are more likely to produce results that reflect well on the funder.

In the paper, Viveca Morris and Dr. Jennifer Jacquet reveal a broader pattern of how the livestock industry, which has long had close affiliations with land-grant universities, has infiltrated universities to block climate scrutiny. The researchers trace the origins, funding, and political function of the “corporate capture of academic institutions”—especially focusing on the CLEAR Center, founded in 2018, and AgNext at Colorado State University, founded in 2020. As the authors argue, these leading academic centers wield their academic credibility to “maintain the livestock industry’s social license to operate.”

“Having a university–without transparency, without even telling the public that an industry donor is involved–acting as a PR arm of an industry group is impossible to justify with the university’s mission.”

“They’re conducting industry-funded public relations and communications campaigns on climate change issues that benefit their agribusiness donors,” said Morris, the executive director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School. This effort extends far beyond industry-funded research to more actively shape policy, effectively acting like a lobbyist through frequent testimonies and meetings with policymakers, among other strategies.

Even if this is legal, “having a university—without transparency, without even telling the public that an industry donor is involved—acting as a PR arm of an industry group is impossible to justify with the university’s mission,” added Morris.

The new research details just how well Mitloehner has followed his stated mission—offering a third-party voice to the meat industry—throughout his career. To name a few, he testified in 2017 against regulating air quality of dairy confined feeding operations in Oregon. “The air quality in Oregon is great, so what do you want to improve and at what cost?” he asked lawmakers. In 2019, he testified before the U.S. Senate about how animal agriculture’s role in climate change “pales in comparison to other sectors.” In 2022, he testified before Ireland’s parliament, explaining that reducing cattle herds would actually lead to a spike in greenhouse gas emissions.

“I’ve looked at the history of how industries have bought science,” said Jacquet, an environmental social scientist at the University of Miami and author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World. While hardly a new phenomenon, she described it as “egregious how much these cases stand out and how much they are PR and lobbying focused as opposed to about the research.”

Jacquet and Morris also brought to light the work of Mitloehner’s former student, Dr. Kimberly Stackhouse-Lawson, who now directs Colorado State University’s AgNext. She previously worked as the chief sustainability officer of the U.S. subsidiary of JBS, the largest meat company in the world, which is among the industries that have funded AgNext. The center is advised by a “industry innovation group,” which includes JBS’s current head of corporate affairs and chief sustainability officer. Like the CLEAR Center, AgNext was born from a host of meat-industry partners.

As the paper noted, Stackhouse-Lawson has described her “day to day [at CSU] is not so different than what it was at JBS.” In 2021, she gave at least 90 presentations on livestock sustainability—two per week—to “industry groups, state agencies, and governmental organizations” on this topic. “The balance of effort just seems much heavier on PR and outreach and presentations than it is on scholarly publication,” Jacquet noted.

Stackhouse-Lawson, for her part, maintains that the center’s research is independent. “AgNext faculty independently research topics across the entire livestock value chain, and research outcomes are peer-reviewed by experts from across the country before publication in scholarly journals,” she said in an email to Civil Eats. “It is common for industry and government to fund programs, equipment and even research; however, university research is independent and funding sources have no influence on AgNext research outcomes.”

The end result of this many-pronged industry effort has likely been successful in obstructing climate policy addressing the meat industry, the paper asserts. Since 2006, the U.N. has continually revised down its greenhouse gas emissions for agriculture, dropping from 18 to 14.5 to 11.2 percent—a phenomenon The Guardian has linked to pressure from industry lobbyists.

Nicholas Chartres, a senior research fellow at the University of Sydney, was impressed by the paper’s deep look at pathways of industry influence. He called it a “really important characterization of the different ways the industry is able to shape not only the scientific knowledge of a topic, but also the regulatory and policy process, and public opinion.”

Still, he is hopeful that there are ways to reverse the tide of agricultural industry influence. “We need a transparency database,” said Chartres. He points to the federal public database for pharmaceutical payments to doctors as a model, which could be extended to other industries.

“It’s a critical thing not only for people like me who do this type of research to have access to that information,” he added, “but for the public and policymakers just in general.”

Read More:
Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’
Questions Remain about Big Food’s Influence on the New Dietary Guidelines
At an Annual Sustainability Gathering, Big Ag Describes Its Efforts to Control the Narrative

EQIP’s Questionably Climate-Smart Practices. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), the most popular farm bill program, recently added 15 new “climate-smart” practices. The new roster includes sprinkler irrigation, irrigation pipelines, and fuel breaks.  The program funds farmers to implement these methods, in hopes of incentivizing “quantifiable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” The only issue is that “many of the newly labeled practices likely do not have climate benefits,” claims a new report from the Environmental Working Group (EWG). They have yet to be studied for climate benefits by the USDA, EWG states, noting that eight of the new methods are for livestock and irrigation management and “likely don’t reduce emissions.” At an agriculture event last week, USDA Undersecretary Robert Bonnie said he strongly disagreed with the criticisms and that it would be important for the agency to continue gathering data on the efficacy of all of the practices as it continues to direct more resources toward them.

Read more:
Why Aren’t USDA Conservation Programs Paying Farmers More to Improve Their Soil?
The Field Report: Conservation Dollars Funding CAFOs Instead of Soil Health

Panhandle Wildfires. Blazing wildfires have swept across 1.3 million acres in the Texas Panhandle over the course of a week, gutting the state’s agricultural economy. The wildfire represents the largest in the state’s history. “The fires have left little food or water for livestock,” wrote The Texas Tribune. “Some farmers lost everything. Property fences are gone.” The fire is expected to be especially catastrophic to the state’s $15.5 billion cattle industry: Thousands of cattle have been injured or killed in the tragedy. The wildfires were intensified by abnormally hot, dry weather, a pattern linked to climate change.

Read more:
How Centuries of Extractive Agriculture Helped Set the Stage for the Maui Fires
Northwest Farms Hit Hard by Wildfires

The post New Research Shows How the Meat Industry Infiltrated Universities to Obstruct Climate Policy appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/03/06/new-research-shows-how-the-meat-industry-infiltrated-universities-to-obstruct-climate-policy/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/02/07/a-florida-immigration-law-is-turning-farm-towns-into-ghost-towns/ Wed, 07 Feb 2024 09:00:06 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55212 “It was a quick decision. Once I learned about the law, I talked it over with my wife and we said, ‘OK, let’s get out of here,’” said Moncho, who is using a nickname. He has lived in the U.S. for nearly 20 years, moving between states as a farmworker and construction worker, without getting […]

The post A Florida Immigration Law Is Turning Farm Towns Into ‘Ghost Towns’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Moncho had just started building a life in Florida when SB 1718, a broad law targeting both undocumented immigrants and the people in their lives, passed through the state legislature last May. In the weeks that followed, his home stopped feeling like home. He began seeing more cops and state troopers in his town, a predominantly immigrant community. He feared it would only get worse and figured it was safest to leave before the law went into effect in July.

“It was a quick decision. Once I learned about the law, I talked it over with my wife and we said, ‘OK, let’s get out of here,’” said Moncho, who is using a nickname. He has lived in the U.S. for nearly 20 years, moving between states as a farmworker and construction worker, without getting the chance to fully make any of them his home.

“Once the law passed, there were empty houses. You went down the street, and it was ‘For rent. For Rent. For Rent’ everywhere.”

In June 2023, just weeks after the bill’s passage, Moncho and his wife packed up what they could fit into their car and drove—through the wildfire smoke that was blanketing the East Coast at the time—to Vermont to seek work in the dairy industry and build a new life for themselves, again.

They are just two of the many undocumented immigrants who have left Florida in the aftermath of the bill’s passage. In the last nine months, as workers have fled, “help wanted” signs have reportedly popped up across the state. Crops have been left to rot in fields. Entire communities emptied out and turned into “ghost towns.”

“Once the law passed, there were empty houses,” said Moncho. “You went down the street, and it was, ‘For Rent. For Rent. For Rent,’ everywhere.”

The law targets supporters of undocumented immigrants by making it a felony, under the charge of human smuggling, to knowingly transport undocumented people across state lines. Beyond that, it requires medical providers to inquire about a patient’s immigration status (although patients need not respond).

And the most potentially sweeping provision aims to crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers by mandating the use of E-Verify, a web-based federal system that allows employers to confirm or deny workers’ legal status. This applies to workplaces with 25 or more employees and extends the use of E-Verify to many Florida farms that were previously exempt.

Proposed by Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis as an answer to “Biden’s border crisis,” the law reflects a larger Republican strategy for the upcoming election: “The GOP’s goal is to turn the 2024 election into a referendum on the Biden administration’s handling of immigration, framed by the notion of a crisis that has spilled beyond the southern border and into cities across the country,” wrote immigration reporter Gaby Del Valle in a recent op-ed.

It’s a strategy currently on display in Congress as House Republicans appear poised to sabotage an immigration deal—even though it would crack down on the southern border—that is backed by President Biden.

But some farmers and advocates speculate that Florida’s law may be largely intended as a political spectacle that will stir chaos but ultimately lack enforcement—and began as an effort to boost DeSantis’s short-lived bid for president—while still allowing Florida industries to rely on undocumented laborers in the end.

“It’s not clear whether it’s a way for DeSantis to boost his image as somebody ‘tough on immigration’ versus a law that will have real penalties and consequences,” Deirdre Nero, a Florida-based immigrant rights advocate and lawyer, told Civil Eats. “We’ll see when they start imposing penalties if the proof is in the pudding.”

Regardless, Florida farmers, farmworkers, and lawmakers will continue to deal with the consequences of the law in the coming months and the potential for another exodus if E-Verify is enforced. As Florida looks to fill worker shortages, the law poses big questions about the future of farm labor in the U.S. as similar policies could expand elsewhere.

As the presidential election season kicks into gear, Donald Trump and other GOP candidates are promising sweeping crackdowns on undocumented workers and expanded federal mandates of the use of E-Verify. But Florida, often a bellwether of the GOP’s future, shows that even a political tool can have real consequences.

Chilling Effect

SB 1718 has already disrupted the lives and livelihood of undocumented immigrants and their communities. “It’s a political stunt gone too far,” read a letter sent in October by a group of Democratic members of Congress, led by U.S. Representative Darren Soto from Florida. The letter calls upon Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the law, which they say is “causing immense harm to families and could jeopardize Florida’s economy.”

Agriculture is one of Florida’s major industries, and along with construction and tourism, it plays a significant role in employing the state’s estimated 772,000 undocumented immigrants. Nearly half of Florida’s farmworkers are undocumented, according to the Florida Policy Institute.

“I can’t say for sure, but my understanding is that there will definitely be advocacy from the business community to try to poke holes in the E-Verify law, or even get it repealed.”

After many farmworkers began to flee, some Republican lawmakers briefly realized they may have bit the hand that, quite literally, feeds them. Last June, Representative Rick Roth, a vegetable farmer and Republican who voted for the law, pleaded with constituents to convince workers to stay. “This is more of a political bill than it is policy,” he told an audience of South Florida pastors at the time, implying that it wouldn’t be enforced with any real consequences.

So far, there have been a few arrests under the law’s human smuggling provision, which is being challenged as unconstitutional in a lawsuit. But the E-Verify mandate isn’t set to begin enforcing penalties until July.

Now, nine months after the law’s passage, some farmers are struggling to find workers to harvest crops, while farmworkers live and work with heightened uncertainty that ultimately impacts their health and safety.

Jeannie Economos coordinates a pesticide safety and environmental health program for the Farmworker Association of Florida, a group that represents more than 10,000 workers. She told Civil Eats that she typically fields complaints from them about “wages, pesticides, harassment, and other conditions in the workplace.”

But since SB 1718 passed, those complaints have slowed to a trickle, despite last summer’s record-breaking heat. A similar silence fell over the community under the Trump administration, she said, when farm workers feared speaking out.

The E-Verify Mandate

Still largely voluntary on a federal level, the E-Verify system emerged from the Immigration Act of 1990, a major overhaul of the U.S. immigration system. This established a commission that recommended a national registry for checking immigration status and employment eligibility. After a series of pilots, the program became available in 2003 to employers in all states as a voluntary database. Since then, a growing number of states have mandated its use, but industry pushback often narrows the scope of these mandates.

Previous attempts to strictly enforce E-Verify have unraveled in Florida. In 2020, when DeSantis pushed for a law mandating use of the database in the hiring process, it was strongly opposed by the Florida Chamber of Commerce and the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association, for instance, until it was amended to exclude farmworkers.

“Once you register that you don’t have a social security number with the government, you become immediately deportable.”

The version of the bill that passed also created loopholes for private employers, prompting some to call it “E-Verify Light” and “Fake E-Verify.” Prior to that, two other efforts to require use of the database failed to pass. The reason is clear: The current E-Verify mandate could hurt Florida’s economy to a tune of $12 billion in just one year.

“[Florida’s E-Verify mandate] has always been defeated, and it’s not defeated by the immigrants that would be impacted,” said Paul Chavez, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, representing a legal challenge to the law. “It has been defeated by the business community, including from lobbyists for farmers, tourism, and construction.”

“I can’t say for sure, but my understanding is that there will definitely be advocacy from the business community to try to poke holes in the E-Verify law, or even get it repealed,” added Chavez, who expects to see efforts to do so in the current legislative session.

Greg Schell, a lawyer who represents migrant farmworkers in Florida, thinks there is good reason to believe the E-Verify mandate will lack enforcement. “There are no regulations to guide employers,” he said. “It certainly would be plausible for an employer to claim that the returning worker is ‘grandfathered in’ and does not need to be the subject of an E-Verify inquiry.”

In other states, E-Verify mandates have often spared the agriculture industry and other industries dependent on undocumented workers, either by the law’s design or its lax enforcement. For instance, North Carolina passed a law mandating E-Verify in 2011, but carved out an exemption for “temporary seasonal workers for fewer than 90 days,” which would allow farms to continue employing, with less risk, undocumented people for seasonal work.

In 2013, this exemption was expanded to employees of less than nine months. Since then, North Carolina lawmakers have introduced several bills to carve out an even larger exemption for all farmworkers.

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who served as South Carolina’s governor between 2011 and 2017, has called for a national E-Verify mandate in her campaign. She often cites the law that she helped pass in 2011 as an example. “What we did in South Carolina with E-Verify was you had to verify that that person was in this country legally or else you could not hire them,” Haley said, in an interview with Breitbart. “That’s what we put in place in South Carolina and, more importantly, we enforced it.”

However, like in other states, South Carolina’s law doesn’t require E-Verify for every employee, exempting a number of essential jobs, including farmworkers and domestic laborers. “The S.C. Farm Bureau convinced lawmakers that the E-Verify requirement could scare off migrant workers needed to harvest crops,” The State reported in 2017. A representative from South Carolina’s Department of Labor confirmed that this exemption remains in effect today.

In fact, no state has been able to enforce E-Verify across every industry, without it backfiring. Take Georgia. In 2011, when the state attempted to enforce E-Verify for nearly all employers, it triggered a mass exodus of farmworkers and an estimated $140 million loss in agricultural revenue.

“Agriculture risks losing some of its most highly skilled workers.”

The expansion of E-Verify mandates is often framed, including by former Governor Haley, as a way to protect the jobs of U.S. citizens. Yet when this policy has prompted an exodus of undocumented farmworkers, U.S. citizens haven’t exactly jumped at the opportunity to work on farms. In fact, when E-Verify mandates are strictly enforced in agriculture, they have been found to lead to worker shortages, loss in farm revenue, and shrinking farm production.

“E-Verify is a way of sharing immigration status with the government that has no positive value for either the undocumented worker or the employer,” said Mary Jo Dudley, the director of the Cornell Farmworker Program. The consequences are most dire, of course, for the farmworkers who would face criminal penalties and a heightened threat of deportation.

“[For] farmworkers, E-Verify is a pathway to share information with the government that you’re deportable,” said Dudley. “Because once you register that you don’t have a social security number with the government, you become immediately deportable.”

Questions About the Future of Farm Labor

Despite the rippling economic consequences, the promised expansion of E-Verify mandates has become increasingly central to the GOP platform. Currently, Republican lawmakers in Iowa and West Virginia are pushing for state mandates, while DeSantis, Haley, and Chris Christie campaigned for a federal mandate. E-Verify is also part of the conservative playbook, Project 2025, which plans to “permanently authorize and make mandatory E-Verify” on a federal level if a Republican wins the 2024 presidential election. 

As Congress tensely debated the latest border security bill, which was released by the Senate in early February, Republicans have repeatedly insisted on even more stringent proposals. In a recent letter, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, pointed to the Secure the Border Act (H.R. 2), a Republican-sponsored bill that passed in the House last year—which would federally mandate E-Verify, among other sweeping measures—as reflecting his core legislative demands.

But in recent years, even major bipartisan efforts to reform immigration for farmworkers, namely the multiple versions of the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, have also included E-Verify mandates. First introduced in 2019, the legislation creates a path to citizenship for undocumented farmworkers, while streamlining the hiring of foreign agricultural workers with a temporary H-2A visa. Re-introduced and abandoned last year, the bill is a political compromise that has deeply divided farmworkers and their advocates, and one of the major sticking points is E-Verify.

“There are basic things that we cannot negotiate away, and E-Verify is one of them,” said Edgar Franks, the political director at Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farmworker union in Washington state representing Indigenous farmworkers. “[The Farm Workforce Modernization Act] is sold as immigration reform . . . but it would implement the E-Verify system for the first time across a whole industry in the United States.”

Even in Washington, where E-Verify is voluntary, Franks has observed farmers threaten to use it when engaging with the union. “We’ve seen E-Verify weaponized, especially when immigrant workers are trying to organize themselves into unions, or to get some kind of justice in their workplace,” said Franks. As he sees it, “the main intention [behind E-Verify] is always having this hanging over people’s heads—or raids or deportations—to make sure that the workforce is controllable.”

This perspective was echoed in a letter to the House Agriculture Committee’s newly formed Labor Workforce Working Group last September by a group of farmworker advocates, including the Farmworker Association of Florida and the Agricultural Justice Project, which raised concerns about the Farm Workforce Modernization Act and its E-Verify mandate.

As of September, Florida’s farms recruited over 86,000 H-2A farmworkers in 2023, already surpassing the amount recruited in 2022.

“Do not implement mandatory E-Verify for farms, since it serves as a control and scare tactic in an immigration and trade policy system that strategically created a large population of undocumented immigrant workers to ensure an exploitable labor pool,” reads the letter. “Agriculture risks losing some of its most highly skilled workers.”

Mandatory E-Verify could also create a more exploited workforce by helping funnel more farmworkers into the H-2A guestworker program. The federal program, which recruits farmworkers from other countries, has ballooned by more than 7 times between 2005 and 2022. It represents one of the only pathways to legally enter the U.S. with a high acceptance rate. Yet the program is rife with exploitation and abuse, often perpetuated by its structure: Farmworkers live in employer-supplied congregate housing, often in unfamiliar rural areas, and are not allowed to switch employers.

“The vulnerability of H-2A workers makes them an attractive workforce for growers,” reads the letter from the group of farmworker advocates. “They are tied to the grower or contractor who recruits them and can be legally fired for not meeting exhausting production quotas, or for raising issues about workplace conditions.”

In fact, the American Farm Bureau, the largest lobbyist group representing growers, has stated that they would support E-Verify mandates under one condition: a “workable guest worker program” so that farmers could more readily hire H-2A workers and curb the anticipated labor shortage. So, by making a pathway to citizenship conditional upon both an E-Verify mandate and streamlining the H-2A program, The Farm Workforce Modernization Act strikes a compromise that appeals to farmers. As Edgar Franks put it, “It’s basically a gift to the agricultural industry.”

As the state with the most H-2A workers, Florida has played a major role in driving the rapid expansion of this program, and it’s likely that it could rely on this program even more to address labor shortages. As of September, Florida’s farms recruited over 86,000 H-2A farmworkers in 2023, already surpassing the amount recruited in 2022. For comparison, California, the second biggest H-2A state, recruited nearly 46,000 workers during that time.

In recent years, Florida’s labor-intensive citrus industry has moved to nearly exclusively hiring H-2A workers, representing 95 percent of the workforce in 2022, according to the Florida Citrus Manual. If E-Verify is enforced, it’s possible other agricultural industries in Florida may follow suit.

Meanwhile, undocumented farmworkers in other parts of the country have felt the chilling effect of Florida’s law. In New York, a farmworker who asked to remain anonymous and a leader with Alianza Agricola, a group of undocumented dairy workers organizing for their rights, observed an influx of farmworkers coming from Florida to New York late last spring. He welcomed a couple families from Florida to their meetings, helping them feel at home. But witnessing this also made him worry about what could happen if a E-Verify mandate ever came to New York.

“Those of us who are farmworkers in the dairy industry are concerned about this too,” he said. “It puts the status of many workers in the food chain at risk and [people] who have been working here for 10, 15, or even 20 years—like me.”

The post A Florida Immigration Law Is Turning Farm Towns Into ‘Ghost Towns’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/01/24/wic-shortfall-could-leave-2-million-women-and-children-hungry/ https://civileats.com/2024/01/24/wic-shortfall-could-leave-2-million-women-and-children-hungry/#comments Wed, 24 Jan 2024 09:00:41 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55080 Yet Congress recently broke with this precedent in a move—or rather a delay in action—that could jeopardize those nutritional benefits for the most vulnerable families, following a year of record-high food prices and deepening hunger across the U.S. “Our country has always had a promise when it comes to WIC that it will be there […]

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Since 1997, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has received consistent federal funding from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Even during periods of gridlock, members of Congress have always been able to put aside their differences when it comes to funding nutritional benefits for low-income women and children. As a result, millions of women and children struggling with food insecurity have received healthy food, referrals to other social programs, and breastfeeding support at pivotal times in their lives.

Yet Congress recently broke with this precedent in a move—or rather a delay in action—that could jeopardize those nutritional benefits for the most vulnerable families, following a year of record-high food prices and deepening hunger across the U.S.

“Our country has always had a promise when it comes to WIC that it will be there to serve all eligible participants,” Georgia Machell, the interim president of the National WIC Association, told Civil Eats. “If you’re eligible for the program, you should be able to access it. If that promise is broken, it really puts families at risk.”

“We wouldn’t start to see waitlists until a few months down the road, but I think something that’s important to keep in mind is that it’s going to be different for every state.”

Last week, Congress passed a resolution—for the third time—that would keep the government open and fund WIC at its pre-existing level, or $1 billion less than what’s needed to fully fund the program. At least 2 million women and children  are at risk of being turned away by September if WIC is not funded to its full capacity, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. If that happens, women and children will likely be put on waiting lists for the first time in over 25 years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In 2022, a staggering 39 percent of all infants within the U.S. relied on WIC support. In total, the program served nearly 6.3 million pregnant and postpartum women and children under 5 in 2022, providing a consistent source of nutrition to many vulnerable families. Research has found that WIC improves birth outcomes, lowers infant mortality, reduces Medicaid expenses, improves cognitive development, and increases childhood immunization.

This shortfall comes at what would have otherwise been a celebratory time in WIC’s history. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the first WIC clinic in Pineville, Kentucky, in 1974. Yesterday, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear gathered with national and local WIC staff and advocates and other program pioneers at Pineville’s original clinic to honor its legacy and fight for its future.

“Right now, we have a major responsibility to ensure that this program continues,” said Beshear, who is a Democrat, in a speech given at the gathering. “All that I ask is that Congress and our state legislature start not with what party they’re in, or what color they wear on their ties, but with the basic empathy that we are taught to have for one another. We’re taught the golden rule, that we love our neighbor as ourself.”

Since its launch, the WIC program has grown dramatically. It operates in every state and is administered through local health departments, across 10,000 clinics, nearly 2,000 local agencies, and 33 tribal organizations.

If there is a shortfall, it isn’t expected to hit all at once because WIC is so widely administered and depends on individual state policies. “We wouldn’t start to see waitlists until a few months down the road, but I think something that’s important to keep in mind is that it’s going to be different for every state,” said Machell.

According to WIC’s regulations, participants who are most medically at risk are prioritized in a budget shortfall. The waiting lists would first include postpartum women who are not breastfeeding, followed by children between ages 1 and 5, without high-risk medical issues, according to the USDA. However, the agency anticipates that waiting lists could extend even to the most vulnerable groups, including infants.

“Given the size of the funding shortfall, it is likely that waiting lists would stretch across all participant categories, affecting both new applicants and mothers, babies, and young children enrolled in the program who are up for renewal of benefits,” a USDA spokesperson said in an e-mail to Civil Eats.

As a last resort, “if other measures aren’t enough to close the shortfall, some states could be forced to suspend benefits for current participants,” added the spokesperson.

Beyond these drastic measures, budget cuts will probably affect the nearly 7 million participants and lower the quality of service across WIC’s offices. “States are also likely going to pull back in other ways. They’ll limit outreach. They won’t pursue cross enrollment efforts with other programs like SNAP and Medicaid. They’ll reduce their clinic hours,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She notes that this shortfall would also likely deter eligible people from applying to WIC.

Bergh also said that the estimate of “around 2 million” that could be turned away for WIC benefits, if not fully funded, is an underestimate. It will likely be higher now in light of the recent resolution, which gives Congress until March to fund WIC in an appropriations bill and leaves states with less time to plan for a shortfall.

For months, the Biden administration has urged Congress to fund WIC, while seeking the support of community advocates. In December, the USDA warned that “a federal funding shortfall of this magnitude presents states with difficult, untenable decisions about how to manage the program.” And last week, the USDA and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent a letter to faith and community leaders to ask for their help in advocating for WIC’s necessity.

“We firmly believe that no child should go hungry in America and we ask that you amplify the importance of WIC among your faith-based community partners and congregations,” reads the letter.

“It would be a huge hit to our budget. We really appreciate that supplemental income on a monthly basis.”

The increased need for funding is partially the result of more eligible people signing up for the program, according to the USDA. This is in some ways a good thing, noted Bergh, as it indicates that WIC has become more accessible. The program used to require in-person appointments to enroll and receive benefits, but that stopped during the early COVID-19 pandemic when it began offering remote services.

The expansion in people signing up for WIC is also likely an indicator of just how desperately people need its services as food insecurity deepens. “We’re seeing the impacts of higher food costs. Families’ budgets have been stretched,” said Bergh. “In many cases, families who were receiving additional aid from other programs during the pandemic have now seen those pandemic measures expire.”

The ongoing uncertainty surrounding WIC’s future has left many of its participants worried and unable to fully plan for their families’ futures.

“On average, we’re talking about $80 to $100 a month as far as what that does for our food budget,” said Emily Church, a current WIC participant living in Ohio who also serves on the National WIC Association’s participant advisory council. She is raising a toddler and teenage son, while working and attending school. “It would be a huge hit to our budget. We really appreciate that supplemental income on a monthly basis.”

“I am fearful of how this is all going to shake out,” said Church, before pausing to check on her 3-year-old daughter. It’s her health and well-being, in her formative years of growth as a toddler, that concerns Church the most.

“I feel frustration and anger over the fact that this is even a question,” said Church, getting back on the call, as her daughter could still be heard in the background.

Meanwhile, lawmakers struck a deal to bring back the child tax credit, a pandemic-era support that provided relief for low-income families and ended in 2021. If the tax breaks are resurrected, it could go part of the way toward helping some families feed their children.

Read more:
Changes to WIC Benefits Would Cut Food Access for Millions of Parents
Do Regulations Designed to Promote Nutrition Make WIC Food Lists Too Restrictive?

Farmworker Women’s Rights: The next farm bill may shape the rights of women farmworkers. The sweeping, trillion-dollar legislative package, reauthorized every five years, has been extended for another year as Congress continues to debate the next version of the legislation. Historically, farmworker and labor rights have been excluded from the bill, but there has been a recent concerted effort among advocates to change that.

In mid-January, a group of women with Alianza Nacional de Campesinas traveled to Washington, D.C., to push for the inclusion of their rights within the large bill. They met with members of Congress to discuss their proposals. Those include: stronger heat protections, more resources dedicated to farmworker housing, guaranteed funding of SNAP benefits regardless of immigration or visa status, more research into pesticides, the development of a fully staffed farmworker office within USDA, and resources to assist farmworkers with transitioning to farm ownership.

“Our journey to Washington, D.C., underscores the urgency of necessary resources and acknowledgement of farmworker needs, particularly women and girls, in the upcoming farm bill,” said Alianza’s Executive Director Mily Trevino-Sauceda in a statement.

Read more:
The End of Roe vs. Wade Makes Reproductive Health Even Tougher for Farmworkers
Threatened by Climate Change, Food Chain Workers Demand Labor Protections
This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades

Fertilizer Consolidation: The multinational giant Koch Industries recently acquired Iowa Fertilizer Co. for $3.8 billion, sparking outcry from advocates concerned about the increasing trend of consolidation within U.S. agriculture. Fertilizer prices have spiked in recent years due to inflation and rising gas prices, and the industry’s consolidation—furthered by this recent acquisition, advocates say—clamps down on competition that could drive down prices.

A recent letter, signed by 18 agriculture and environmental advocacy groups, called for a federal investigation into the acquisition. The letter notes that the fertilizer plant was first proposed in 2012 with the intent of lowering fertilizer costs and challenging the “Koch Industries dominance in the fertilizer markets,” while relying on substantial federal, state, and local funding to build the plant. “The unrestricted federal funds left the door open for Koch Industries to purchase the company just six years after the plant opened,” states the letter, delivered to the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission.

Read more:
Health Concerns Grow as Oklahoma Farmers Fertilize Cropland with Treated Sewage
Excess Fertilizer Causes a New Challenge: Low Crop Yields During Drought
Why Seed Consolidation Matters

The post WIC Shortfall Could Leave 2 Million Women And Children Hungry appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/01/24/wic-shortfall-could-leave-2-million-women-and-children-hungry/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/01/22/can-prescriptions-for-produce-focused-meal-kits-fight-diabetes/ Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:00:28 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=55043 Bailey was introduced to these new kitchen staples through a prescription meal kit delivery program, known as Healthy Food Rx. A collaboration between local community organizations, the Public Health Institute (PHI), and a large philanthropic fund, the 12-month program delivered meal kits twice monthly for adults with diabetes in Stockton, California. Although the city is […]

The post Can Prescriptions for Produce-Focused Meal Kits Fight Diabetes? appeared first on Civil Eats.

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Recently, at age 72, Shane Bailey changed her grocery store routine. Her first stop is now the produce section to pick up kale, her new favorite food. She prepares it with collard greens, mixes it into stir-fries, and boils it in vegetable broth. Another new love is white sweet potatoes mashed with a dab of butter. She also has a new go-to sandwich: avocado, low-fat mayonnaise, white onions, and alfalfa sprouts between toasted rye bread. “Oh my God, it’s to die for,” she said. She then raves about donut peaches. “Google it!” she insisted. “It looks like a donut, but it’s a peach.”

Bailey was introduced to these new kitchen staples through a prescription meal kit delivery program, known as Healthy Food Rx. A collaboration between local community organizations, the Public Health Institute (PHI), and a large philanthropic fund, the 12-month program delivered meal kits twice monthly for adults with diabetes in Stockton, California. Although the city is located at the top San Joaquin Valley, a major agricultural region, fresh produce is sparse and people in many Stockton neighborhoods struggle with food insecurity.

“It has taught me how to cook things, like dandelion greens and kale, that I never knew existed. It has been very educational.”

Over half of the town’s 320,000 residents are diabetic or prediabetic, according to PHI. The Healthy Food Rx program aims to help change that, recognizing the large body of research linking food insecurity and diabetes. So far, the approach—delivering meal kits with enough food for two meals and pantry staples, paired with nutrition fact sheets and cooking lessons—appears promising in managing diabetes.

Along with addressing the sharp rates of diabetes in Stockton, a larger goal of the program is to build the case for a program like this to be treated as medicine. It’s part of a nationwide food as medicine movement to prescribe nutritious foods, recognizing the medical capacity of food to help manage or prevent chronic diseases.

So far, the majority of programs under this banner prescribe fruits and vegetables or medically tailored meals that have been pre-prepared and designed to support a particular condition. While home-delivered meal kits have yet to gain widespread traction as a medical intervention, advocates hope that it could offer a more educational approach—while eliminating transportation issues—to supporting people with chronic diseases, which is nearly half of the U.S. population.

Engineering Dietary Shifts

After just six months, Bailey attributes to Healthy Food Rx a dramatic shift in her diet despite a lifetime of ingrained habits. She especially loved the optional cooking and nutrition classes that were offered alongside the meal kits. “It has opened up a whole new area in my shopping list under fresh vegetables,” Bailey said. “It has taught me how to cook things, like dandelion greens and kale, that I never knew existed. It has been very educational.”

The shift has also helped her better manage her Type 2 diabetes. She’s observed a reduction in her A1C levels, a measurement of blood sugar levels used to diagnose diabetes, which fell from 7.2 to 6. It’s a significant drop: An A1C over 7 is considered uncontrolled diabetes, increasing the risk of other health complications. Now, her blood sugar levels are in a manageable range. She’s also lowered her dosage of the diabetes medicine Trulicity.

“In general, as we get more and more research, we’re learning that diet plays a role in everything.”

Of course, Bailey’s outcomes may be also attributed to her mindset, one particularly receptive to change. She calls herself a “lifelong learner,” and because she’s retired on a fixed income, she seeks out every free educational opportunity she can find.

This is a broader problem with evaluating lifestyle change programs: They tend to draw people motivated to change. That said, other participants in the program also saw their A1C levels fall into a healthier range.

In fact, an internal study of 450 program participants found a clinically significant decrease in A1C levels—an average 0.8 percent decline—within 12 months for participants with uncontrolled diabetes. The study participants also reported that the dietary shifts helped them exercise and take health education classes more often.

While the study’s limitations make it comparable to an internal evaluation—there’s no control group or peer review—it points to initial promise of meal kits that utilize fresh fruits and vegetables in managing diabetes. (Bailey, who is still in the program, wasn’t in this study.)

Most of the participants stuck with the program, too: Eighty-five percent stayed for the first six months, and 64 percent stayed for all 12 months. That’s a higher retention rate than other prescription produce programs typically see. Maggie Wilkin, the study’s lead author and the director of research and evaluation at PHI, said the way the kits help participants prepare meals provides a  low barrier for participation—the education classes are optional and the kits are delivered by DoorDash, which partners with over 300 anti-hunger organizations.

And it certainly helps that the food is enjoyable. “The feedback we get on these recipes is phenomenal,” said Alex Marapao, a nutrition educator at Stockton’s food bank who is responsible for packaging the meal kits. She curated them with the town’s predominantly Latino population in mind, developing recipes that were nutrient-dense and culturally appropriate, while exposing people to new, easy-to-prep dishes like pressed kale salads. They’ll also throw in staple foods such as eggs, brown rice, or Greek yogurt, depending on what’s available.

As California has lost much of its grain to higher value crops, small flour mills and grain cleaning businesses have disappeared, too. It’s a symptom of what Gonzales-Siemens sees as a larger problem facing many farmers, awash in a marketplace dominated by highly concentrated operations as regional farm infrastructure atrophies. This specialized, often professionally operated equipment—and all farm equipment, for that matter—can be prohibitively challenging for many farmers to buy and maintain.

“This does not feel like I am living on planet Earth, where humans live,” said Gonzales-Siemens, laughing at the absurdity of the drive north to find a mill.

He eventually bought a mill from a grain farmer who went out of business, but finding the other equipment necessary for both farming and processing grain was an ongoing struggle.

So, Gonzales-Siemens got to talking with other farmers in the region. He learned nearby grain farmers, Clayton Garland and Melissa Sorongon in Santa Barbara, were in a similar position. In 2019, the trio decided to work together to lift this equipment burden, pooling funds to buy their first combine. Prior to that, they had all either harvested by hand, an intensely laborious process, or hired someone with a combine. Next, they purchased a no-drill seeder together, and it allowed them to plant rows of grain directly into orchards and pastures without tilling, a practice known to benefit the soil.

As word spread, other small-scale farmers joined them, and they became a more formalized collective with a name: California Plowshares.

“It’s a programmatic way for us to be a little more collaborative and supportive of each other’s work,” said Gonzales-Siemens. “It’s not a novel idea. Farmers have been sharing equipment forever. But it seems like farmers are becoming less and less neighbors of each other. Most of my neighbors—the people actually adjacent to me—are corporate entities,” where the farm owner is often absent, and the workers don’t have a say in the equipment.

In this sense, California Plowshares is a return to the kind of rural sharing economies that once arose naturally between farmers in tight-knit communities but have become much less common in recent years. The collective currently consists of around 50 farmers located along California’s southern Central Coast who share equipment that they co-purchase and individually own, often with a rental fee.

The original idea was to form a collective for just grain farmers, given that “grain farming is so rare that we need all the infrastructural and equipment help we can,” said Gonzales-Siemens. But then it became clear that the collective could benefit a wide range of small-scale farmers.

The collective doesn’t charge a membership fee, but they each contribute in other ways. There’s the “sweat equity type of guy,” who jumps in wherever needed. Another farmer with storage for equipment. Others chip in financially when they’re having a good season. There’s a skilled welder who fixes loose parts. As for Gonzales-Siemens, he often helps transport equipment between farms. They tend to lean on each other’s strengths.

In the near future, he hopes to contribute further by building out a local grain processing operation, filling a gap in regional infrastructure. He is now the proud owner of three flour mills, two of which he shares, and the co-owner of a grain cleaner—the building blocks of the processing operation in the works. Long gone are his days of driving up the coast to find a flour mill, and he hopes to spare other farmers from that fate as well.

Collective Response to Farming’s Steep Costs

Next to land, equipment is a farmer’s biggest investment. While farm equipment collectives are still relatively rare in the U.S., they tend to share a similar origin story: Farmers begin informally swapping farm equipment to ease costs, building a sense of trust. Then they realize that sharing tools makes sense and they build a more formal system. This is the story of Tool Legit (yes, named after the MC Hammer song), a farm equipment library in North Carolina.

“It started off with a couple of buddies. I owned the tiller. Someone owned a bush hog. Someone owned a flail mower. We would just swap them back and forth as needed,” said George O’Neal, a vegetable farmer who started Tool Legit. “We thought it was so stupid to have all this steel sitting in the field that we were using just twice a year.”

In 2011, they formed an LLC with a rotating president and treasurer, supported by a $27,500 grant from the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI). This helped them buy their first cache of shared equipment: a tiller, a harrow, a manure spreader, a trailer to move equipment between farms, and a log splitter for heating greenhouses with wood. Every year, they pool funds to add to their growing collection of tools.

A decade later, the collective is still thriving. “We’re all very community and civically minded, but I feel like that’s very true for 90 percent of small farmers,” said O’Neal. “We don’t see each other as competition in any meaningful way. We see Walmart or shitty food or HelloFresh as competition—not each other.”

O’Neal estimates that he saves about $1,000 every year in equipment upgrade costs. The collective charges an annual membership fee, but aims to keep it low, below $400 per year, so it’s accessible.

It helps that, like California Plowshares, Tool Legit has low overhead costs; they store the equipment on their farms and use Google Calendar to reserve it. Other equipment-sharing models involve renting space, a system that works for some farming communities but can add to the costs.

The list of equipment shared between the farmer members of the Intervale Farmer Equipment Company in Burlington, Vermont.

One example is the Intervale Farmer Equipment Company, a farmer-owned cooperative in Burlington, Vermont. Hilary Martin, one of the farmers in the cooperative, said the space they rent is their largest expense annually. They spread out the cost through a fee structure based on either the number of acres on which the equipment is used or the number of hours it is in use. It’s an evolving system, said Martin.

“Every year we have to take a look at [whether] we’re charging enough,” she added. “We’ve been well in the black some years, and other years we’re in the red.”

So far, they’ve been able to accommodate seven farms of varying size. They have the advantage of being close neighbors, and all rent land from the Intervale Center, a nonprofit that supports farm viability. The center originally owned the equipment cooperative, then sold the business to the farmers. “We’re kind of pre-organized to work together,” said Martin.

Still, she wasn’t sure they’d be able to make it work. “I was worried about a tragedy of the commons scenario . . . people would be in a rush, misuse the equipment, and leave problems for everybody else.” Instead, she has been pleasantly surprised by her neighbor’s capacity to look out for each other.

Environmental and Social Benefits of Equipment Sharing

For instance, prior to the formation of California Plowshares, none of the group’s members owned a spreader for mulching, which helps retain moisture in the soil. Once ubiquitous, spreaders have become harder to come by in California’s Central Valley, where many of the corporate farms hire private companies to deliver and spread mulch. The companies are often booked months in advance. “To get [your mulch or compost] spread in a timely manner was really quite impossible,” said Gonzales-Siemens.

Everything changed when the collective bought a small-scale spreader from the 1980s, relying on a grant they obtained. Now, the farmers’ soil will be better protected during dry times of the year. Similarly, buying a no-till drill allowed Gonzales-Siemens to expand the use of cover crops in his orchards and further protect the soil.

“[The drill] made a huge difference. It has allowed us to do much more creative things in orchard systems,” said Gonzales-Siemens. It’s also helped him experiment with intercropping, another practice that builds soil health and biodiversity on the farm. And, at $6,000, he wouldn’t have been able to afford one on his own.

Over at Tool Legit, the farmers share similar goals of farming ecologically and productively at a human scale, which lends to knowledge-sharing, too. “It functions kind of like an informal discussion network,” said O’Neal. “Every time you go pick something up, there’s usually a 15- or 20-minute chat, like, ‘What are y’all up to today? Oh, that’s cool. I’ve never seen that. What is that? What are you growing?’”

Nathanael Gonzales-Siemens demonstrates how to use California Plowshare’s no-till drill to grow cover crops in an orchard. (Photo courtesy of Nathanael Gonzales-Siemens)

They’ll also often advise one another on the best, most efficient ways to use the equipment. For instance, O’Neal said farmers will send the entire group a text, such as, “Hey, I offset the potato digger and it can do two rows at once. Has anyone tried this?”

Connecticut farmer Mary Claire Whelan, who helps run a new tool-sharing network with the New CT Farmer Alliance, has also observed the mental health benefits that come from having a supportive network of farmers and access to the right tools and equipment.

“It’s so emotionally draining to use the wrong tool over and over again,” said Whelan, who works as a farm crew member on a vegetable and flower farm. “Building efficiencies and healthy movement patterns into your farming business is such an important way to protect yourself and not burn out.”

She recalls working on a previous farm where she was required to break heads of garlic into individual cloves for planting. “It’s hard on your thumbs. I would get all these calluses,” she said. Then she learned of a tool that can quickly split garlic heads. It could have finished the task in a few hours, saving days of hard, repetitive labor.

Whelan hopes to one day own her own farm in Connecticut, the state that she notes has some of the most expensive farmland in the country. She sees building social and resource networks as essential to making it as a first-generation farmer.

“I don’t think [owning a farm business] would be possible if I didn’t have a robust community to rely on and folks who I could borrow equipment from, or purchase it in common with,” she said. “It helps me feel like the future I desire and see for myself is a possibility.”

Slow Shift to Collective Tool-Sharing

These cooperatives have allowed farmers to share equipment and infrastructure, including compost facilities, and have been integral in helping a growing number of farmers there adopt agroecological practices. “Since the 1980s, some Coopérative d’Utilisation de Matériel Agricole (CUMAs) have taken initiatives that pertain to agroecology: purchases of specialized harvesting equipment necessary for more diversified farming systems,” observed French scholars Veronique Lucas and Pierre Gasselin in a 2022 article.

There have been some recent efforts to support more robust farm equipment-sharing in the U.S. Earlier this year, California Assemblymember Steve Bennett introduced a bill aimed at funding regional equipment-sharing hubs for equipment needed for soil health and conservation practices, as well as storage and processing. It also would have provided training for farmers on how to design their own equipment cooperatives. The bill passed in both the Senate and House last spring, but it was vetoed by the governor due to budget concerns.

“It just makes sense to have it be a piece of equipment that gets rotated around and shared,” Assemblymember Bennett told Civil Eats. And while he’s not ready to commit to introducing the bill again next year, he’s considering it.

Faith Gilbert, the author of a popular guide on tool-sharing, attributes the slow uptake in the U.S. to the effort it takes to organize. “Few of us have time to go organize a whole new program in order to save $3,000 to $5,000 annually,” she said. And while sharing farm equipment can chip away at the high costs of farming, she notes that “it’s not going to fundamentally shift the business model” of most farms.

Still, she acknowledges, most small-scale farms work with small margins, and any boost to the bottom line can make a difference.

The post The Farmers Leaning On Each Other’s Tools appeared first on Civil Eats.

On the first day of the gathering, delegates from 152 countries signed a global declaration for food systems transformation. And for the first time in its history, the conference devoted an entire day to food, agriculture, and water.

In opening remarks that day, Susan Gardner, director of the U.N.’s ecosystems division, highlighted the dangerous cycle of unsustainable agriculture. “Let’s be clear: we know our current food systems are broken,” she said. “Agriculture alone is responsible for 60 percent of biodiversity loss. It generates about a third of greenhouse gas emissions globally.”

However, food and agriculture won’t likely get much airtime in the much-debated Global Stocktake, the key document resulting from the conference’s negotiations. The stocktake represents an important juncture in international climate negotiations, and has been described by the U.N. as “taking an inventory” of global climate progress. And despite much discussion of food systems, the draft agreement only makes a passing reference to food.

Much of the attention over the last two days has gone to the removal of language about a fossil fuel phaseout in the draft, but questions also remain about why food systems were largely left out of the agreement. And it’s clear that the negotiations didn’t occur in a vacuum. Three hundred and forty agribusiness lobbyists—a record number—attended the conference, and most where from the meat and dairy industry, according to an analysis by The Guardian and DeSmog.

While most lobbyists came as observers, over 100 gained access to the negotiations designated as “country delegates.” Delegates representing the industry-funded Global Meat Alliance attended with the explicit goal of positioning meat as beneficial to the environment.

Representatives from Bayer and CropLife America, the pesticide trade group, were also present as sponsors of the Sustainable Agriculture of the Americans pavilion.

As negotiations drew to a close, some advocates did push to include more language about food systems in the Global Stocktake. On December 8, over 120 civil society organizations, and even some corporations, sent a letter expressing “significant concern over the omission of agriculture and food system” from the draft. “The current draft is a far cry from what is needed,” reads the letter, which points out that the parties repeatedly addressed the food system throughout the process leading up to the agreement’s draft.

The U.N. also released a roadmap this weekend that lays out how to transform the food sector to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The document sets new benchmarks, including cutting methane emissions by 25 percent by 2030.

It also lays out pathways for livestock, fisheries and aquaculture, and crops and advises that “initiatives target regenerative farm practices, sustainable land management, freshwater management, advanced irrigation technologies, remote sensing utilization, inclusive governance, and coherent policies to protect land rights and improve water-pricing policies towards sustainable resource use.”

But those messages do not carry the authority of the Gobal Stocktake, which is a more formal pathway for achieving the binding targets of the Paris Agreement.

Bibong Widyarti, Council Member Inofo of Indonesia speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (CC-licensed photo by Christophe Viseux, COP28)

“Never before have we seen food systems on the climate agenda like at this COP. It is an unprecedented achievement,” said Gonzalo Muñoz, the U.N. Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP28, in a speech on the food system day. “However, there is still a huge gap in translating these intentions into action.”

Aiming to narrow this gap, on December 10th, Muñoz led the development of a manifesto calling for the urgent need to transform food systems, especially by supporting and directly financing the knowledge of small producers and Indigenous people. The manifesto also calls for an agreed upon set of global targets. It has since been signed by over 200 non-state actors— rom farmers and fishers to businesses, cities, civil society, consumers and all those engaged in food systems—who are hoping that governments will support those who have long tended to the earth.

In total, COP28 has resulted in pledges of more than $7.8 billion in funding for climate action in the food sector, according to the conference’s organizers. Yet it’s unclear how much of this funding will reach small-scale producers or Indigenous people.

“We are not sure if we will be able to directly access this climate finance that has been announced,” said Estrella Penunia, the secretary general of the Asian Farmers’ Association (AFA), in an interview with Civil Eats. “We [have] a lot of solutions to adapt to climate change with mitigation potentials, and we need support.”

For instance, Penunia pointed to how in her home country of the Philippines, farmers grow rice with ducks who fertilize the soil, an integrated system promoted by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Yet the ingenuity and knowledge of small farmers—including AFA’s 13 million-plus farmers, fishers, and Indigenous peoples—is often overlooked.

While growing more than a third of the world’s food, small producers receive just 0.3 percent of international climate financing, according to AFA’s analysis released prior to COP28.

Penunia also expressed skepticism about the World Bank’s announcement last week that it funds carbon markets in 15 countries to preserve forests. She cautioned about the potential for carbon markets to be an “excuse to not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” by cutting fossil fuels. Beyond that, she wants Indigenous people and small farmers to have as much agency as possible within the carbon markets on their land.

“We want to innovate. We don’t want to be passive recipients of technology, including how to count carbon,” Penunia told Civil Eats. “We want to have direct control and ownership over the technologies we are implementing.”

Monica Ndoen, an Indigenous leader from Rote, Indonesia, also expressed the need for directly funding Indigenous peoples to steward biodiversity. “If you really want to support Indigenous peoples and responsible sourcing initiatives on the ground, it has to be direct climate finance, not going through institutions or NGOs,” she told Civil Eats.

She points to the fact that only 7 percent of the $1.7 billion pledged at COP26 in 2021 to Indigenous peoples and local communities actually made it to the intended recipients.

Meanwhile, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who attended COP28 last week, isn’t too troubled that agriculture will be left out of the UN’s final agreement, as he seems to believe that U.S. farmers are already doing enough. “We flipped the script for American agriculture” he said on a recent call with reporters, referring to the agency’s Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities and other voluntary programs that have yet to show clear results when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Read more:
Will a Food and Ag Focus at COP28 Distract From the Fossil Fuel Economy?
Op-ed: Big Ag Touts Its Climate Strengths, While Awash in Fossil Fuels

The 2023 Farm Bill extended: The U.S. faces food security and agriculture funding challenges as the next farm bill, the massive, trillion-dollar legislative package that shapes the entire food system—from nutritional benefits to crop insurance—remains in limbo. The 2018 Farm Bill expired in September, and was extended for another year. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) points to where the next farm bill could be cut: the Federal Crop Insurance Program. In 2022, the USDA subsidized 62 percent of farmers’ insurance premiums, totaling $12 billion. The report suggests reducing the subsidies for high-income farmers, while lowering payments to the private insurance companies which offer the federal program, to save millions.

“This report highlights the simple fact that by establishing modest payment limits, we can save money while helping small farmers and ranchers who are short-changed or left out of the crop insurance program altogether,” Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon), said in a statement to Civil Eats.

Meanwhile federal funding for the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) nutrition is only allocated through until January 19. WIC’s administrators fear that they may have to turn away mothers and children. Nearly 13 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2022, according to the USDA.

Read more:
The Farm Bill Really Matters. We Explain Why.
Former Snap Recipients Call for Expanded Benefits in the Next Farm Bill
How Crop Insurance Prevents Some Farmers from Adapting to Climate Change

Food Loss and Waste: Earlier this month, the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a joint draft of a national strategy aimed at reducing food loss and waste, while increasing organics recycling. The draft was announced at COP28 as part of the Biden administration’s target of halving food waste by 2030, a goal that reflects the Paris Agreement’s commitments. Yet there is still a long way to go; recent EPA research shows methane emissions are increasing from landfilled food waste. The U.N.’s food systems roadmap also lays out strong recommendations for cutting methane emissions quickly.

Read more:
Supermarket Food Waste is a Big Problem. Are Strategic Price Cuts the Solution?
These Manure Digesters Incorporate Food Scraps. Does That Make Them better?

The post Global Leaders Bypass Real Agriculture Reform Again at COP28 Climate Summit appeared first on Civil Eats.

This time around, animal welfare groups have even stepped up their efforts to shape the bill. The nonprofit Farm Sanctuary, the first shelter for farm animals, is among the groups that has spent the past couple years calling for substantial reforms to the farm bill as part of a growing recognition that animal and human rights are connected.

“Animal-centered organizations have both an ethical responsibility to include and elevate impacts for people and the planet. And we have a tactical responsibility too,” said Aaron Rimmler-Cohen, Farm Sanctuary’s advocacy director.

Aaron Rimmler-Cohen, Farm Sanctuary

Civil Eats spoke with Rimmler-Cohen about the divisions in Congress that threaten this legislation and the changes that he hopes to make it into the upcoming bill.

Farm Sanctuary has recently expanded to advocate for broader changes across the food system, beyond ending animal agriculture. Could you describe how this shift came about?

There has always been a recognition that while the beings that we center are farm animals, the interrelated issues caused by factory farming hurt all of us—animals, people, and the planet. And what we’ve tried to do over the past two and a half years is reach out to 2,500 national and local organizations working in various aspects of food, all across the supply chain: farmers, workers, environmental justice advocates, health advocates, doctors, and other animal-centered organizations. We’ve tried to understand where we have common ground. We believe it’s the next step in what the vegan and animal-centered movement has to do.

In the 1980s, when [founder] Gene [Baur] first got going with Farm Sanctuary, a lot of what he was doing was mainstreaming critiques of factory farming that had already existed within the environmental justice and social justice communities for decades. And he was mainstreaming those concerns and critiques around factory farming through compassion and empathy for animal beings. We can do the same thing in the 21st century, except instead of mainstreaming some of these critiques, we can also mainstream some of the solutions and actions being taken by environmental justice and social justice organizations.

While the central impact that concerns us as a movement is animals, we recognize that the way in which we collectively affect change is through food. And so we have to do a better job as an animal-centered movement of prioritizing food, elevating food, and integrating [those conversations] with a concern for animals and factory farming.

How does the current gridlock in Congress impact the farm bill? 

We need a robust and vigorous debate over what a farm bill should do and how it can best support families, farmers, communities, animals, people, and the planet. And we’re not getting that. We’re getting the can kicked down the road.

This is very reminiscent of the Merrick Garland 2016 Supreme Court nomination—when the Republicans kicked the can down the road and eventually waited until the next presidential election to pick a Supreme Court nominee. If we have the same thing happen with the farm bill, then Donald Trump [if re-elected] could sign two consecutive farm bills [in 2018 and 2025]. We need a robust public debate, but we also need to make sure we get a farm bill across the finish line.

How do you see the farm bill shaping the U.S. food system? Why is this bill so important?

On the one hand, you have critical nutrition support for over 40 million American families and American consumers. The proposed Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) Expansion Act, which would build on the programming that we have to grow [the purchasing power for] fruits and vegetables under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is amazing. But we have to better use those programs to nourish more people to advance health equity, and to support farmers who are growing crops that nourish our communities in the process. So, that’s 75 percent of the farm bill right there—that nutrition spending.

Then you have the other 25 percent, which is predominantly commodities, crop insurance, and farm conservation programs, and what that funding does is it skews the entire food system, through cheap, publicly subsidized credit, to grow predominantly feed crops for animals or ethanol fuel. Then you’ve got 70 percent of the crop insurance subsidies going to the largest farms in the top 7 percent, and most of them are growing corn and soy.

Has the farm bill always supported what you see as a “skewed” food system? How did it get to this point?

Many of us think about factory farming or industrial agriculture as something that has been around forever, or at least for a really long time. But when you go to Iowa or North Carolina, the food and farm systems that folks are living with now are very different from what’s in their living memory or certainly their grandparents’ living memory.

The original intent of the farm bill was to support farmers during [the Great Depression], one of the worst economic crises the world has ever seen. Then, under the Nixon administration, in the first White House Conference on Food, the U.S. had this amazing vision for food and farm systems that said, “Everybody should be nourished and we should support every farmer who’s contributing to the system and every worker who is contributing to the system.” You had this fairly broad, holistic vision.

But over the last 50 years, what we’ve seen is more and more lobbyists and special interests have taken a hold of the food and farm process. It’s easy to do with the farm bill because it only gets passed twice per decade. So, if you’re Tyson, Cargill, or one of the other big corporate conglomerates, you can spend money influencing the farm bill and then reap those returns for the next five years. That’s slowly what they’ve been doing—chipping away at a vision of the farm bill that says universal nutritional security and sustainable farm[ing] opportunities should be the goal of the legislation.

We have to pass SNAP and WIC, the nutritional support that’s critical for millions of American families. Big Ag interests use that as a lever to say, “We’re not going to cut SNAP too much, just as long as you let these big millionaire landowners and billionaire consolidators get what they want.” As part of the negotiations process—in order to protect U.S. families’ nutritional security—we end up giving things up on the food supply end. That political bargain used to be referred to as a union between farmers and families, but because of the insidious nature of corporate interests in this country, the Big Ag interests succeed and they use families as a cudgel to get what they need.

Can you describe how the EATS Act became a potential part of this farm bill?

California passed by voter referendum a bill, Proposition 12, that would ban [in-state sale of meat and poultry resulting from] gestation crates. Then the National Pork Producers Council [and American Farm Bureau Federation] sued the state of California over Prop 12, and the Supreme Court decision came down earlier this year.

In a surprising and inspiring turn of events, the Supreme Court sided with the animal-centered organizations led by the Humane Society of the United States, including Farm Sanctuary, as interveners in the case. And as a result of that victory in the Supreme Court, the Republicans brought back this amendment called the “King amendment” [and called it the “Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression Act” or the EATS Act]. It would both overturn the progress on Prop 12, preventing future states from being able to regulate factory farms in that way, as well as [potentially] overturn pesticide protection laws that are on the books.

You don’t have to care about animals to fight back against factory farming and to say, “I don’t want cancer-causing chemicals in my food.” And that’s the level of regulatory reform we’re talking about with the EATS Act. It’s something that small farmers across the country are rallying to oppose. We recognize that their standing up against the EATS Act in Washington, D.C., is a far more powerful perspective than our own—it means a lot to hear directly from the small producers in the local communities that have been impacted by factory farming and agricultural consolidation.

If the U.S. were to continue down the current trajectory and pass farm bills like those of the recent past, what will that food system of the future look like?

If we continue down the current path, there will be fewer farmers, greater consolidation, an accelerating climate crisis, and a worsening public health crisis—not to mention more animals living in even more consolidated, industrialized conditions. Globally, food systems make up one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, but get 3 percent of public climate funding within the United States. According to the USDA, 85 percent of U.S. healthcare spending, which is about one-sixth of the U.S. economy, is related to diet-related diseases. So, food matters.

Do you have anything else to add?

I think animal-centered organizations have both an ethical responsibility to include and elevate impacts for people and the planet. And we have a tactical responsibility, too. You referenced our shift from “ending animal agriculture” to working for food systems that work for all of us, but in some ways it’s a theory of change. Ultimately, over the long term, we’re going to end animal agriculture by building food systems that work for everybody—animals, people, and the planet. I really think that kind of inclusive, unifying message is one that the animal-centered movement could better use to build bridges to meet folks where they are and to ultimately advance the progress that we care about for animals and the rest of us.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Animal Welfare Advocates Want a Say in the Next Farm Bill appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2023/10/19/new-orleans-urban-farmers-prepare-for-overlapping-climate-disasters/ https://civileats.com/2023/10/19/new-orleans-urban-farmers-prepare-for-overlapping-climate-disasters/#comments Thu, 19 Oct 2023 08:00:19 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=53884 “We’re able to be adaptive and react to the crisis and individual needs,” said Margee Green, a fruit tree farmer and the nonprofit’s executive director. “Everybody pulls together whatever resources.” Historically, the crises they’ve responded to have almost always been hurricanes. But this year, Louisiana experienced overlapping climate disasters: the largest wildfire in the state’s […]

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Whenever a disaster strikes in Louisiana, Sprout NOLA springs to life to offer technical assistance to farmers, helping them navigate a wide range of challenges. The nimble group of New Orleans urban farmers and food justice advocates travels directly to farms across Louisiana to offer funds, lend tools, rehome animals, organize volunteers, distribute food, and help farmers with post-disaster paperwork.

“We’re able to be adaptive and react to the crisis and individual needs,” said Margee Green, a fruit tree farmer and the nonprofit’s executive director. “Everybody pulls together whatever resources.”

“It has been a really rude awakening of our understanding of our capacity, and we are stepping up.”

Historically, the crises they’ve responded to have almost always been hurricanes. But this year, Louisiana experienced overlapping climate disasters: the largest wildfire in the state’s history, record-breaking temperatures, and a developing crisis of saltwater intrusion moving from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi River due to historically low water levels. While most of New Orleans will likely be spared, the salt water intrusion issue is not going away.

“It has been a really rude awakening of our understanding of our capacity, and we are stepping up,” said Green.

She has seen nearly half of her orchard wither in this year’s heat, but she’s most concerned about other farmers—who operate on thin margins and depend on growing crops to make a living. It has been so hot that seeds have failed to germinate, and farmers have had to dig wells for the first time.

Sprout NOLA fills in a critical gap, mainly working with the farmers who tend to be left out of government-level disaster support services. They range from small-scale farmers in New Orleans to LGBTQ and BIPOC farmers throughout the state and most lack crop insurance.

Civil Eats spoke with Sprout NOLA’s Mina Seck and Green about establishing new protocols, helping farmers navigate the new normal, and how the organization is preparing the region’s farms for an increasingly volatile climate future.

Margee Green is a fruit tree farmer and executive director at Sprout NOLA. (Photo Photo by Lizzy Unger.)

How has this season been different for you with the wildfires and heat? How has it affected farmers that you work with? 

Mina Seck: This summer, the heat broke records and was just absolutely abnormal. But I’m really feeling the effects of the lack of rain. Usually summers are really hot, but we get a lot of rain. We’d get those afternoon rains and the clouds would roll out—clouds really matter. Your soils were not being directly pounded by the sun. The drought really, really was rough.

In the community garden where we grow our food, we plant cover crops every July and August anyway. It’s a standard thing we do [because] it’s too hot to grow food in the summer. The heat has affected being able to start production in September though, and that’s what’s scary. We do food systems work. We want to be able to grow food for people. The soils were just so dry, even with the cover cropping. It was hard to keep them slightly moist, even covering them with banana leaves.

Being able to get seeds to germinate with the heat and lack of water has been an issue that I’ve seen farmers come up against. The soil in New Orleans, and in other parts of Louisiana, doesn’t retain much water.

We’re figuring out how to move through heat and drought as a [new form of] disaster this year and in coming years. We reached out to some funders to see if it would be possible to offer farmers help mitigating this part of the climate disaster, whether through digging wells or [buying] shade cloth. We were able to offer micogrants.

And we’re in the planning stages of hosting a climate gathering in January. I’m really excited about that. It’s going to be a space where we offer technical assistance to farmers, growers, and community members about what to do in the heat.

How could saltwater intrusion potentially impact farmers in Louisiana?

Seck: We’re still waiting to see what happens. We’re working in partnership with Louisiana State University’s AgCenter and other organizations to keep up to date. When salinity reaches a high level, it can affect farmers and urban growers as plants may not survive, but it’s still a developing situation. Mulching, reverse osmosis, and injecting water with sulfur or sulfuric acid are some ways farmers can try to deal with it. We can offer folks tips and tricks on how to handle high levels of salinity as it pertains to growing. We’re planning a saltwater townhall meeting with LSU ag experts.