Calvosa Olson grew up with a Karuk mother and an Italian father on a homestead in the Hoopa Valley Reservation, near California’s northern edge. She spent a great deal of time during those formative years outside, learning about her plant and animal relatives and eating a combination of commodity foods and the foods her parents grew, gathered, hunted, and bartered for. “Family celebrations and special foods were formative to the way I now show love and connect to my identity as a flourishing matriarch,” she writes in the introduction to Chími Nu’am.

Although Calvosa Olson moved to the Bay Area, she stayed in touch with the Karuk community and continued to nurture the food traditions with which she was raised. She writes:

“When I had children of my own, I wanted to connect my sons to these family recipes and to being Karuk, as we were living away from Karuk community and traditional lands. By intentionally establishing this connection, I discovered a love for developing new and colorful recipes based on our old family recipes and traditions. Gathering wild foods, sharing, teaching, cooking, and tending have all been an opportunity to grow and heal in the nurturing way I didn’t know I needed.”

Chími Nu’am, which translates to “Let’s eat!” in the Karuk language, is in many ways a record of that process in addition to a compendium of recipes. Organized by season, the book guides its readers in gathering, processing, and cooking with Indigenous foods in hopes of helping us begin to integrate more traditional ingredients into our oversimplified modern palates.

Its recipes range from creative takes on familiar foods—blackberry-braised smoked salmon and elk chili beans—to dishes that will be entirely new to many readers, such as nettle tortillas, miner’s lettuce salad, and spruce-tip syrup. And it includes recipes for nearly a dozen foods made with acorns, including crackers, muffins, crepes, and hand pies, as well as a rustic acorn bread that calls for one cup of acorn flour and two cups of wheat flour.

Calvosa Olson has written a book that will speak to multiple audiences. But whether she’s guiding Indigenous readers to embrace more of their cultural foods or making recommendations for non-Indigenous readers interested in decolonizing their diets in an ethical way (hint: it’s about reciprocity), her voice and philosophy come through clearly on the page.

Civil Eats spoke to Calvosa Olson recently about the book, how she hopes it will reach those very different audiences, and her urgent call to all of us to begin reconnecting to the natural world through food.

How did the recipes in the book take shape, and how did you decide what to include and what to leave out to protect or preserve specific cultural foods and traditions?

I think we can all agree that Native people have lost so much, and so much has been taken, appropriated, and diluted. There are still some cultural foodways that are very similar to the foodways that we have always eaten. And because there are so few, I didn’t feel like it would be appropriate to put those in a book for everybody. Even in the work that I do for my own family, there’s a difference between what is for us in ceremony and what is for us to incorporate in our everyday lives or to maintain our connection to our stewardship.

We are all colonized, our palates are colonized. And it’s kind of impossible to raise children who don’t love Fruit Snacks and other processed foods. But I really wanted them to develop a love for foods that are bitter or fishy—those types of things that we shy away from in Western culture.

Different audiences will experience this book differently, but as a non-Indigenous reader, I felt invited in—invited to take part and understand more of the cultural experience behind these foods rather than merely follow recipes. That said, gathering and preparing these ingredients is also going to be a learning curve for some readers.

We all need to develop relationships with our foodways, and our lifeways, and what’s going on around us. Nobody can turn on the news and disagree with that. We need to at least develop some relationships with the rhythms of the world around us right now. So, I want the book to be a warm welcome in to do that.

But also, how you do that is very important. And I love that people are asking: How do I do it ethically? You have this opportunity to go forward intentionally and choose the lens that you want to view this work through, and you can center Indigenous people, and our traditional knowledge and our relationship-building and community-centered lifeways, as you go forward. Which means that you are also building relationship and building community with Indigenous people and we’re all working together.

And how do you interact with Native people who have been deliberately othered in the state, and deliberately made invisible? Growing up in the U.S., we don’t hear from Indigenous people, and that’s what causes a lot of the mystic Indian tropes. And you can see that in the [U.S.] education system, which ignores Native people, and refers to us in the past. But we are still here, and we are safeguarding so much of the world’s biodiversity.

We’re also at the forefront of environmental science; we have incredibly sophisticated people working in our environmental departments. We have climate action plans, we have stewardship plans, we have everything we could possibly need to go forward to rehabilitate the land except power and influence. Even if I only reach one person at a time, and they went about things in a different way and began to understand the value of [traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous foodways] in a new way, that would be a success.

You recommend that non-Native folks contact their local tribal representatives when they want to learn how to gather acorns and other Indigenous ingredients. What do you say to people who worry that they’d be bothering them in asking for their services?

There are non-Native people out there who run foraging classes and you have the choice to either pay them or you can call or email tribal peoples or tribal entities and say, “Listen, I’m interested in learning more about this. And I can pay non-Native foragers, but I would prefer to put my resources with you. I want to center your knowledge. Do you offer any classes to the public for gathering or know of anybody willing to show us how to gather?”

I realize it’s uncomfortable! Because, again, [people are used to] othering of us, and don’t know how to interact with us. They feel like they’re going to bother us. But that just keeps people going to foragers who are non-Native. But overcoming that awkwardness is important because the worst thing that can happen is that they can say, “Yikes, we don’t know anybody.”

You share strategies for decolonizing your diet gradually by adding, for example, a cup of squash to frybread or a cup of acorn flour to bread to replace processed white flour. Can you say more about that approach?

Because our palates are all colonized, to some degree, we have to reintroduce these foods gradually. There’s a dilution that occurs. But I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. Because we can’t all go rushing into the forest right now to completely decolonize our diets. It’s impossible. We would we need to set up new food systems that are as robust as the ones we have now before we could do that. This is a gradual change.

One cup of acorn flour instead of one cup of white flour is still one less cup of white flour. In [Indigenous] communities that really matters. We are all suffering from diet-related diseases. It’s terrible. And it’s so difficult to right that ship for many reasons. There’s so little food education, no access to healthy foods. People are still reliant on commodity food and subsistence gathering. And often when you go out to gather your traditional foods, they’re not there anymore. The fish are gone and the fires have burned the mycelium mats, so the mushrooms aren’t coming back the same.

Anything that we can do to start turning this ship around is important. And it’s about eating and nourishment, yes. But it’s also about connecting to community and connecting to our role as people for the environment—and waking up to our obligations to everything around us.

You recommend that readers start to expand their worldview and their approach to Indigenous foods slowly, but you also go on to write, “I want to impress upon everybody the urgency with which we must act to keep our ecosystems healthy.” How do you balance that desire to move slowly and build deeper connections to ecosystems against that larger sense of urgency?

“Hurry up! And go slow”—that’s what I’m telling people. Connecting to this approach requires you to go slow in the beginning, but as you develop your own connections and your own relationships it’s like a snowball; it will start to build on itself exponentially. And you will become more attuned to these issues and more connected to the activism that Indigenous people are engaged in. And then, in a year, you will have so much more knowledge and it will be an exponential leap to the next year. And it goes on from there. If you go too fast, and you’re not developing relationships or practicing reciprocity, then you’re just perpetuating the same cycles of settler colonialism and extraction that got us into this mess in the first place.

You worked with the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center teaching cooking to Indigenous elders during the pandemic. Can you speak to how that work helped shape this book?

Indigenous readers were really the first and only audience that I was considering at first. This whole book took a lot of checking in with community and gut-checking constantly about how to go forward and be inclusive, because I really, genuinely believe that we need everybody together to do this. And I don’t think that Indigenous people alone can do this. But I do want to prioritize the health of our communities first, because I want us to be healthy and ready to keep it up.

As lost as [non-Native people] might feel sometimes about how to go forward and who to ask about Indigenous foods and practices, we often feel the same way. Many Native people are disconnected from family and community, and they’re spread out or flung all over the place. For instance, I’m on Coast Miwok land, but I’m not Coast Miwok, so I’m still a guest on this land. How do I go forward here in a way that centers reciprocity? And we’re all asking these kinds of questions.

Most of our foodways were not documented in California because it was considered “women’s work.” We just have smoked salmon and acorn soup. I know we had a massive variety of foods, and it was vibrant, colorful, nuanced, and delicious. And yet, if you were to read documentation about the Karuk tribe, you would see that we only ate two things.

We are reclaiming that history and knowledge, and we have to teach it to our children. And sometimes I teach it to older people who were sent to boarding schools or whose parents were sent to boarding schools and didn’t want to have anything to do with their indigeneity when they returned. It is complicated for all of us. There are not very many people doing this work in a way that is engaging all people. And that’s mainly because there are so few of us and the first focus has to be on fortifying the people in our own communities. But I’m a white Indian, so I want to be able to leverage my whiteness to speak to a non-Native community, and to engage them about how to go about this in a good way. I’m like a liaison.

I have a whole half of me that isn’t Native, and it’s a challenge to reconcile these two sides. But I don’t have to reconcile them right now. What I can do is use what was good on [my Italian side]—the things I learned about family and community and how to show my love through food and laughter and storytelling—to uplift the Native people in my communities.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Acorn Pumpkin Muffins

Muffins are such a forgiving bake, so this is a great place to mess around with some dried fruits and toasted nuts if you like a little extra something in your morning nosh. Muffins are also very easy for little hands to make! Get the niblings involved with this one.

Makes 12 muffins

Ingredients

1½ cups all-purpose flour 1⁄2 cup acorn flour
½ cup chocolate chips (see Note)
¼ cup maple sugar
1½ teaspoons baking soda
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1½ teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon salt
1⅓ cups whole milk
1 large egg
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup cooked squash puree

Note: This is a very forgiving recipe, so you can add more or fewer chocolate chips or substitute them with dried fruit and/or nuts.

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

In a large bowl, mix together the flours, chocolate chips, maple sugar, baking soda, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and salt.

In another large bowl, mix together the milk, egg, vanilla, and squash puree.

Stir them together to form a batter. Do not overmix. Fill the cups of two 6-cup muffin tins three-quarters of the way full.

Bake for 20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.

This recipe is excerpted from Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen by Sara Calvosa Olson. Reprinted with permission from Heyday © 2023.

The post This Indigenous Cook Wants to Help Readers Decolonize Their Diets appeared first on Civil Eats.

Instead of stopping at the flavors, service, and ambiance, their columns often aimed to broaden readers’ awareness of everything from the intention behind the business and the way it treated workers, to the role it played in preserving or pushing cultural boundaries.

Although Ho—who founded Racist Sandwich, a podcast that delved into the politics, race, and identity within the broader scope of food and restaurants, before moving to the Chronicle—has had their gaze firmly fixed on the Bay Area the whole time, their influence has been felt beyond the region. For all these reasons, we figured they’d have some interesting things to say about the future, and the present, of the restaurant.

What made you want to work as a restaurant reviewer for the Chronicle, and what has made you want to expand that role to write other forms of cultural criticism in the last year?

I never planned on becoming a restaurant critic. It was just this thing that happened. From 2016 to 2019, I was really interested in meta-narratives about food. Having been involved in food media and in the restaurant world to a pretty big extent, I was really curious about how we talked about food and restaurants. And I certainly included restaurant criticism in that bucket.

I applied for the job at [the Chronicle] for the experience. I was surprised that they wanted to hire me, and I accepted the job because it seemed to be a really exciting opportunity to see how far I could go in setting certain guardrails for how I wanted to write about restaurants. I was asking: How do you do it in a consistently equitable way? And in a way that de-centers a lot of the a priori assumptions about who goes to restaurants and who’s interested in food media.

It was based on this idea that restaurants and food could serve as cultural texts worth decoding. A wide range of choices being made at all kinds of levels—from governmental to individual—manifest in food culture, and it says a lot about what we want as people, but also what we are told are the limits of aspiration.

So, all of that was included in my vision for the role. And I think it naturally expands to other things, because from the beginning, I was appropriating an analytical lens that has been more readily applied to other types of media and other kinds of material culture. I was zooming into foods, and applying other sorts of principles of analysis to something that had hitherto been maybe underexamined, in my view.

Now you are back to using that wider critical lens. How will your work continue to intersect with restaurants?

It will still intersect with restaurants on occasion. I recently wrote a piece about the first lab-grown meat being served at a restaurant in the United States, which happened to be at a spot in San Francisco, so I went and tried it. And I spent a lot less time writing about the service and the flavors and more time on the big questions about lab-grown meat, like why its funders aspire to recreate animal flesh.

I am still curious about the idea that a restaurant, or really any small or medium-sized enterprise, can be a vehicle for cultural change. Because I think that’s something that many people in food media have to take as an assumption. There’s so much coverage that centers around the restaurant as a locus for change, or as the canary in a coal mine.

We saw that a lot with COVID and how we talked, and continue to talk, about the way people adapt. I’m interested in playing with that idea and problematizing it and finding new ways to talk about alternative modes of empowerment and sovereignty when it comes to food and economic and financial stability for people who generally are the most vulnerable in our economic system. I danced around it a lot when I was a restaurant critic, and I’m hoping to be more explicit in really thinking about the restaurant as a concept—not just restaurant concepts.

I often have thought of the food system—and restaurants as the most visible aspect of the system—in the same way that I’ve thought about real estate bubbles or tech bubbles. So much of the true costs are externalized—from the workers often needing to rely on SNAP to the costs of environmental destruction caused by conventional ag falling on the taxpayers. COVID was kind of like a bursting of the bubble in some ways. But I wonder if that bubble was going to burst anyway. Do you have thoughts about that?

This newfound or reinvigorated labor movement in the U.S. was so informed by COVID. I don’t think we would have had a hot union summer without COVID. Broadly, and then also in the food industry, I think people were fed up with being put at risk for, essentially, burgers and fries. I feel like the pandemic is so inextricable from how we understand labor and food now.

People have written to me, saying that if they had a choice, they wouldn’t think about labor. So, it’s through the efforts of people who are advocating for food workers and writing about food labor that readers have been reminded about the people behind the plate.

Given the rise in the number of fast-casual restaurants, and the shortage of people interested in working in restaurants after the pandemic, I’ve wondered: Is the idea of being served as it once existed an outdated concept? Or will it always be a product of the (growing) class divide?

I think it is very much a product of class. And, at least if TikTok and Yelp are any indication, we still have a lot of vocal people who care about service. But I wonder if the backlash to tipping, for instance, and automation are going to add to this sort of deterioration of old service models that require a human who wants to be tipped?

Eating in restaurants has gotten much more expensive than it was before the pandemic. Are you seeing more people get priced out? 

In the Bay Area, we saw a lot of restaurants close early in the pandemic. Some were older restaurants that were near the end of their long-term leases and I think they were kind of lucky for getting out when they did, because things are so hard now. I’ve heard from so many restaurateurs and cooks that raw ingredients are now so expensive. And there are so many ways in which that trickles down. Prices are crazy, and I eat out maybe once a week these days. For a lot of people though, the more relevant thing is grocery stores. Restaurants are a budget item that’s optional, but buying food for your home is not. And that’s the tough thing. There was such an apex of restaurant culture in the past 10 years, and I think that’s over. I think we’re going to see a major compaction in the industry that is only going to continue.

What do you see as the best-case scenario for restaurants in the next decade?

Part of what will enable restaurants to thrive is a reduction in the overall number of them. There are just too many. And too many that were opened by people who just thought they were making easy money. It does feel like we’re headed towards more austerity, and maybe the positive thing is that more restaurants are going to have to have a clearer vision of what they’re supposed to be. I think that’s good for restaurants, because any sort of project that is done half-heartedly is pretty disappointing to experience.

Do you think restaurants can act as important third spaces as we’ve lost many other of those kinds of spaces?

There’s this really interesting tension there around whose obligation it is to provide third spaces. Restaurants have filled a gap because public infrastructure has been inadequate in the United States. Do third spaces where you have to pay admission count? Is that actually respecting the definition of the phrase? I don’t know. One of the virtues of a third space is it allows a place’s residents to rub up against each other. And I feel like restaurants can homogenize the people that are in the space, just by virtue of the culture they set and the price point. I think there should be more free third spaces. Private enterprise shouldn’t be the only option available.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The post Critic Soleil Ho: Are We Asking Too Much of Restaurants—or Not Enough? appeared first on Civil Eats.

On a warm afternoon in June, 1,500 7-week-old hens had come out to mill around—lured by feed and water stations—but many were hard to find.

“There’s an eagle that comes around here,” says Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, the farmer and visionary behind the operation. “It has flown over a few times, and it just keeps going.” Soon, he adds, the trees and other perennials will be tall enough to provide cover for the birds, but the grass will suffice in the meantime.

Salvatierra, which was a conventional corn and soy operation until Haslett-Marroquin bought it three years ago, is in the midst of a wholesale transformation. He has planted more than 8,000 hazelnut trees there, created a water catchment pond, begun managing the forest that frames it on two sides, and leveled the land where he plans to build a home for his family.

This summer, he also raised the first flocks of chickens there. As it comes into maturity, Salvatierra stands to become a central hub around which a growing network of farmers, scientists, nonprofits, and funders will rotate—all in the name of regenerative poultry farming.

Regenerative is a complex term with many interpretations. Haslett-Marroquin’s approach combines what he learned growing up in Guatemala—where chickens thrive in multi-story jungles—with a deep understanding of the Midwest’s native ecosystems. Unlike the pasture-based model of poultry production which typically uses mobile barns and is sometimes also referred to as “regenerative,” it involves raising the birds in one spot, alongside trees and other perennial crops as a way to build soil that is rich with organic matter and carbon, capture and store water, and make the land on which it takes place more resilient in the face of the climate crisis.

At the core of the effort in Minnesota is Tree-Range Farms, the company Haslett-Marroquin co-founded, and a growing network that includes more than 40 farms in the region. The Regenerative Agriculture Alliance (RAA), the nonprofit he founded and now sits on the board of, also plays a key, ongoing role in developing the infrastructure behind the network and has plans to scale it up to extend across the upper portion of the corn belt.

But the grand vision doesn’t end there. There are also farms using Haslett-Marroquin’s approach in Guatemala, Mexico, and in several Native American communities, including the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. And if its advocates have their way, the core practices and the philosophy behind it could be replicated in many parts of the world in the years to come.

And at a time when Americans eat more than 160 million servings of chicken every day and industrial poultry farming is known for polluting ground water, air, and waterways, as well as causing health issues for people who live nearby, it could be a welcome change.

How the Model Works

For years, he collaborated on research and development on his first farm, Finca Marisol, and on a nearby farm called Organic Compound in Faribault, Minnesota, to establish a production standard with very specific parameters.

Each poultry flock or “unit” includes 1,500 chickens, a barn, and 1.5 acres of land divided into two fenced in areas, or paddocks. The birds spend every day outside—where they eat a combination of dry grain, sprouted grain, bugs, and plants—in one paddock, and when the plants there have been sufficiently grazed down, they’re moved to a second one. Farms typically start with one unit, but they can also opt to start with half a unit if land is scarce.

Each flock in the Tree-Range system is made up of 1,500 birds on 1.5 acres of land. Most farmers raise more than one flock. (Photo courtesy of Wil Crombe/Organic Compound.)

“Everything that is part of the standard was tried and tested, from breeds to how long you feed them, to the right kind of welfare aspect to consider in the coop construction,” says Diane Christofore, the current executive director of the RAA, which brought in the funding for the research and development behind the standard. The organization recently launched an online course to train farmers in the practices and philosophy behind the standard; it is also making a number of scholarships available and will release a version in Spanish soon.

In addition to trees, farmers are encouraged to plant other perennials such as grasses, elderberry bushes, and comfrey. And if they grow corn and soybeans on the property, they are invited to diversify their rotations by adding oats for soil health. In eight to 12 weeks, farmers can take the birds to the small-scale processing plant that the RAA runs in Northern Iowa.

If they opt to sell them under the Tree-Range label, storage, distribution, and marketing are all taken care of, as the birds make their way to consumers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. Soon, Tree-Range plans to expand its reach to add retailers in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

The hope is to provide a relatively easy point of entry for beginning farmers looking for a way to start earning capital quickly. With their short lifecycle and relevance across many cultures, chickens allow farmers to get onboard and join the network—or the “ecosystem,” as RAA refers to it—while renting land and/or working other jobs. Once the barn has been built—or adapted from an existing structure—the required labor is concentrated in the mornings and evenings, making it a relatively easy lift for new farmers.

“We’re creating this for the people that don’t have access to the [resources to engage in large-scale agriculture], but you’re also working with people who are still engaged in conventional ag, watching this, and asking, ‘How could I transition?’” says Christofore.

Many of farms raising birds for Tree-Range are run by immigrants, such as Callejas Farm, where Jose and Erica Callejas, formerly from El Salvador, raise multiple flocks of chickens each year with their daughters. Or Carrillo Brother Farms, where Jesus and Aldo Carrillo—who immigrated from Mexico—raise one flock a year alongside a wide array of fruit and vegetables.

Feed the People Farm Cooperative is another interesting example. There, Cliff Martin has been raising two flocks a year on land that his dad owns as part of a collective with three other young farmers, including Helen Forsythe and Bec Ersek (who also works at the RAA’s business administrator).

They see the farm as part of a larger collective movement and the money they earn from the flocks goes toward maintaining the land, holding trainings and events for other young community organizers in the region. They’re also working on adding a composting processing site, neighbor approval pending. “We simply wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t for the RAA’s infrastructure and support,” Forsythe said during a recent farm visit.

Haslett-Marroquin says there are more interested farmers than the RAA has the bandwidth to support at this point, so he’s confident that the network will continue to grow.

For one, he says, the modular approach to adding flocks to farms makes it relatively simple to replicate. After years of prototyping the system at Finca Marisol, he says everything fell into place very quickly at Salvatierra Farms, where he is starting with three units and plans to add three more in the coming year.

“There was no guesswork,” he says. “This thing happened as if I had done it a million times. And we could take 1,000 acres, 10,000 acres, or 1 million acres, and we’d know exactly what to do. That’s the difference between farm-level thinking and system-level thinking. And at the end, it’s that large scale that makes it truly regenerative, not the farm itself.”

Feed conversion ratio—or the relationship between the feed that goes into the animals and the final product—is a common metric for measuring financial success and environmental impact in meat production. But the RAA’s definition of regenerative turns that equation on its end.

The chickens in that system eat more grain than chickens raised solely in a barn because they move around much more. But the farms have an overall smaller footprint, because the added chicken manure boosts the productivity of the hazelnuts and other companion crops, without synthetic fertilizer. On 1.5 acres, mature hazelnut trees will produce around 800 to 1,200 pounds of nuts.

“Once you add up the output of meat, the output of hazelnuts, the large-scale sequestration of carbon,” Haslett-Marroquin says, “you can’t even compare it to a confinement model. It’s not apples to apples.”

At the core, his approach to food production is one that places productivity within a larger context of a balanced living system. It’s about “stewarding the transformation of energy from non-edible forms to edible ones,” and it’s a process that isn’t new, but on the contrary, quite old.

“We are unleashing the original Indigenous intellect that makes us so powerful as human beings. It is the one thing that all capitalistic, extractive, destructive systems hate. That’s why they will go and massacre Indigenous communities at mass scale, because they know that that intellect is so powerful that it can overcome the extractive system. And it can, in the end, save the planet,” he says, adding, “If you restore the people to the land, you can’t exploit them.”

The Science

Beth Fisher, a soil scientists and assistant professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, is part of a team of scientists in Minnesota that started measuring the health of the soil, water, and the emissions released from farms in 2021.

Fisher says she was approached by Haslett-Marroquin, who asked her to gather evidence to add validation to what he had long observed and understood intuitively about the way regenerative practices work on the ground. She was interested in the approach, but it was the visit to Finca Marisol, the first farm where birds and trees had been raised side by side for almost a dozen years, that sealed the deal.

“The soil structure is beautiful—you pull up a scoop and how it holds together on its own, is held together by the ooey gooey stuff that organic critters put into the soil,” she says. “Water infiltrates beautifully. It has a wonderful collection of organic matter.”

Since then, she and the undergraduate students she works with have been gathering samples of soil on a handful of farms in the network, as well as conventional corn and soy farms that neighbor them.

“At Finca Marisol, the comparison farm is considered reduced-till better practice. And it’s night and day; the [water] infiltration is way slower on the reduced till practice, the carbon storage is way less, and that farmer has been doing it for decades, really trying to do better in his practice. And the effect on his soil is negligible,” she says.

“At The Organic Compound, where they’ve raising chickens using regenerative practices for six years, they’re already in better shape than the neighboring conventional farm,” adds Fisher, who is hoping to start publishing some preliminary data soon.

“We’ll be disseminating the results, both in the academic peer-reviewed literature, but also, I think it’s so important for it to find its way into the context where farmers can hear about it.”

Carrie Jennings, who is research and policy director at the nonprofit Freshwater, and an adjunct professor and researcher at the University of Minnesota, is another scientist engaged in the research. She points to the fact that the Cannon River, which runs through Minnesota and down to the Mississippi River, is one of the bodies of water that is most polluted by agriculture chemicals in the nation.

And she has seen strong initial evidence that regenerative poultry system is sending water down into the aquifers below, rather than adding to that pollution. This is rare in Minnesota and other the parts of the corn belt, where the water on millions of acres drain directly to waterways due to the ceramic pipes, or drainage tiles, that were installed below farmland over the last century. The roots of the trees and other perennial plants on the farms in the RAA network, however, often break up and clog the tiles, preventing runoff and sending the water into the aquifer below.

Jennings is closely tracking the funds Minnesota is directing toward regenerative practices. “We want to make sure they’re funding the right practices; we don’t want them throwing away tax money on things that aren’t going to improve water, soil, and climate,” she says.

Jennings also wants to provide hard evidence for farmers looking to change their practices. “Farmers notice that their lives and waters are degrading over generations, and even within a generation. They’re not exactly happy about it, either. They know that they’re spending more than they should on chemicals. So, if someone like Regi[naldo], who is innovative and experimental entrepreneurial, can show that this works then it’s more likely to be adopted.”

She also points to the fact that General Mills has been funding the research for the first two years, as evidence of the potentially influential nature of Haslett-Marroquin’s approach. “They need to make sure [crops] can continue to be grown in this rapidly changing world. It’s important to the companies and the consumers of those products,” she adds.

In addition to the research, General Mills is also funding the RAA’s farmer training and the establishment of its demonstration farm. “We have been inspired by the RAA’s thought leadership and continue to learn from the deep and holistic way they approach regenerative agriculture,” said a company representative in a statement to Civil Eats.

RAA collaborated with Oatly, General Mills, and number of other nonprofit and research entities in the region, on a $5 million climate-smart commodities grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) aimed at “support[ing] poultry producers who follow diversified, regenerative, climate-smart grain production methods incorporating small grains such as oats, no-till, and cover crops, integrated agroforestry practices.”

“It’s an opportunity now to start to produce grains within [the regenerative] system, because 70 percent of the cost to farm business is feed,” says Christofore.

Rethinking Processing and Growing the Network

A relatively small building in Northern Iowa—just over an hour south of Northfield—the facility was acquired in late 2021. That first year, the small staff processed 1,000 chickens. In 2022, it processed 50,000, and manager Arnulfo Perrera says he hopes to reach 80,000 to 90,000 birds this year.

After attending agricultural school in Honduras, Perrera came to the U.S. to work as a manager for Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer. “That was not really like my calling—raising hogs in barns in the conventional systems,” he says of the experience.

A decade later, with a long-awaited green card, Perrera was able to leave Smithfield to take a role managing the RAA processing plant in 2022. Since leaving what he calls “the dark side,” he has staffed it up 14 people, despite its isolated rural location and the challenge of competing with larger companies in the region that can offer higher pay.

But, ultimately, Perrera hopes to help create a new model, in an industry where ever-faster line speeds, crowded facilities, underage workers, and resistance to protecting workers’ health have become the norm. “I believe strongly that if the food is going to be sustainable and regenerative, it needs to be that way throughout [the food chain]. On the farm side, as well as the processing,” he says.

For Jose Morales, who has been at the plant since the RAA took ownership, the difference is palpable. The facility he worked at previously slaughtered 13,000 chickens every day of the year; 2,000 workers arrived in three shifts and worked 24 hours a day. He felt like one small cog in an enormous machine.

At the RAA facility, Morales says, he has had a say in shaping the workday and he’s helped train other employees. “We came up with a plan. Each person will be doing each job for two, maybe two and a half hours. So, you’re not doing the same thing all day.” It’s less repetitive motion, which is less difficult on everyone’s bodies, and all the workers at the plant are trained to work in all the roles. “It’s harder in the beginning, but then it’s better. When somebody’s calls in sick, or they don’t have a babysitter, we have somebody to call.”

Nonprofit meat processing plants are very rare, but Christifore, Haslett-Marroquin, and the rest of the team see the fact that they don’t have shareholders to appease as key to their approach.

The goal is to enable the proliferation and growth of the network of farms, and provide better jobs than many meat processing facilities. “If you’re doing it with integrity, there is not a lot of money to be made at that level of the supply chain,” says Christofore.

In stepping down from leading the RAA, Hasslet-Morroquin hopes the network moves toward a collective model of leadership based on a Mayan diagram that looks more like a circle than a pyramid. The idea is to create a strong system wherein everybody leads and follows at the same time, a reciprocal form of relationship-based accountability. “And if you do that, you unleash the energy of the people, and it is unbelievable. That’s why we call this an intellectual insurgency.”

Christofore echoes that idea. “We expect a certain level of participation, from those who want to commit to the ecosystem. And that’s when you start to care about things; it’s when you start to have ownership. It comes with a lot of responsibility and does require risk. But what comes with it is an opportunity to be a part of a culture and a community that’s growing.”

Hasslet-Morroquin has his sights set on reaching 250 farms on 50,000 acres in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. From there, he can see the network expanding to five or six other regions around the U.S. until it reaches 500 million chickens. That type of growth sounds enormous, but it would still only be 5 percent of the total chicken raised in the U.S. And at that point, he says, a truly regenerative system would have some real leverage.

“At that point, we’ll look at the industry—the USDA, investors, markets, everybody, and say, ‘OK, folks, why should we only do 5 percent of the total poultry system this way when we can do 100 percent?’” says the visionary farmer. “I may not get there myself, but somebody else could get us there. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. We don’t plan for the next year to two; this is about the seven generations in front of us.”

The post This Network of Regenerative Farmers Is Rethinking Chicken appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2023/05/18/this-community-garden-helps-farmworkers-feed-themselves-now-its-facing-eviction/ Thu, 18 May 2023 13:45:37 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=51887 Nava and Contreras are the community coordinator and an elder advisor with Tierras Milperas, a community garden collective group that operates seven gardens in this and other Central Coast farming communities. The garden in question is the largest; it occupies 1 acre of land on the larger grounds of the All Saints-Cristo Rey Episcopal Church […]

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On a recent weekday, Hugo Sanchez Nava and Augustin Contreras were hustling to get the word out about the Watsonville, California, community garden they were trying to protect. When they’re not working in the fields, the farmworkers have been spending time corresponding with other food and land access advocates, speaking to reporters, and soliciting signatures for a petition to save the garden.

Nava and Contreras are the community coordinator and an elder advisor with Tierras Milperas, a community garden collective group that operates seven gardens in this and other Central Coast farming communities. The garden in question is the largest; it occupies 1 acre of land on the larger grounds of the All Saints-Cristo Rey Episcopal Church and serves 51 immigrant farmworker families. In late April, its members had been served a two-week lease termination notice, and although the end date had come and gone, Tierras Milperas members haven’t stopped gardening.

“We all come from farming backgrounds, and this is our tradition.”

The gardeners were first sent a letter terminating their lease in June 2022. At the time, the church claimed that neighbors in the surrounding neighborhood had made multiple complaints about suspicious activity on its property. After a series of tense negotiations, the gardeners have managed to stay on the property for the last 10 months. Now, however, the future of the garden is in jeopardy again.

This time the threat of eviction has gained attention throughout the food sovereignty community, and the gardeners have received a growing groundswell of support. That’s largely because Tierras Milperas’s spaces—like the other rare but crucial gardens created by farmworkers—are more than your typical community gardens.

“The space is for growing organic vegetables, and when we come out of the fields where we work, it’s a place to be more tranquil,” says Contreras. “We all come from farming backgrounds, and this is our tradition.”

In addition to providing an important opportunity to farm, Tierras Milperas is also a community gathering place. In recent years, it gained fiscal sponsorship from the Community Agroecology Network and has increasingly focused on expanding its efforts, and on working as a collective through an assembly, a group of elders, and a working group.

Crops growing at Tierras Milperas in Watsonville, California. (Photo courtesy of Tierras Milperas.)

Many of its members are Indigenous, and they focus on growing and sharing knowledge about traditional cultural foods while using chemical-free farming and seed-keeping practices. The goal, says the group’s website, is to “put our health decisions and community social fabric in our hands rather than in an agrofood and health care system that sicken us with diabetes, stress, individuality, and labor exploitation.”

The garden on the Church’s property has become all the more important this spring, as one of the group’s other gardens was damaged when a broken levee led to devastating floods and mass evacuation in the nearby town of Pajaro.

“The garden serves as a lifeline to communities of farmworkers who live in a part of the state that produces an immense amount of produce, but they can’t afford [to buy] it themselves and so they have to grow it,” says Neil Thapar, the co-director of Minnow, a group working for land tenure for farmers of color and Indigenous land stewards that has been collaborating with Tierras Milperas for several years to help them secure their own land. “They’re growing food because they need to support their families. And that should be a right that’s afforded to anyone who wants to do that,” adds Thapar.

“The garden serves as a lifeline to communities of farmworkers who live in a part of the state that produces an immense amount of produce, but can’t afford to buy it themselves and so they have to grow it.”

“The church broke our contract,” Nava says. “Now, we’re asking for reasonable time to harvest everything we’ve planted. We can give them the land, but we’re asking to wait until February 2024.”

All Saints-Cristo Rey Episcopal Church did not respond to a request for comment by press time. In a statement to a local news outlet last summer, Bishop Lucinda Ashby of the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real wrote, “The gardeners have not been evicted, but the lease with Tierras Milperas is being terminated.” At the time, Ashby said “calls to police have been made frequently by surrounding neighbors due to suspicious activity on the property.”

The initial letter from the church mentioned drug paraphernalia left on the property and the death of a groundskeeper, who garden members say had been living in his car on the property at the time and suffered from alcoholism.

“They got false information and are unwilling to analyze it,” says Nava.

“It seems to us that they don’t like what we do when we come together as a community and have meetings,” added Contreras. “Many families come to the garden and women and children enjoy it and see it as a safe space.”

“Since then they haven’t wanted to [communicate] to us, just our fiscal sponsor—and even then they didn’t actually want to speak with them,” says Nava. “After we had such a big public outcry locally, the bishop agreed to have the pastor have dialogues with us and come to a different agreement.” That agreement didn’t last.

Photo by Sarai Bordeaux.

“There are a lot of negative statements being made about a community, that work racist dog whistles about the members of the Tierras Milperas community,” says Thapar. “If the church had these concerns, the assumption would be that you’d discuss this with your tenants of 13 years. Instead, their approach was to accuse and make assumptions, when there never had been any such situations.”

Thapar points to the power held by institutions such as churches, as well as the fact that a primarily Latin American and Indigenous population in an agricultural region is already at a disadvantage culturally.

“That social inequality is tied to property ownership. This situation is an example where that tension is very apparent, because while the gardeners had access to the lease, it’s clear that it can be taken away in an instant,” Thapar adds.

At this point, Tierras Milperas has gathered more than 600 signatures in an online petition that calls on church leaders to stop the eviction.

“We’ve received support from many people from here but also from around the country, and around the world. [Author, professor, and filmmaker] Raj Patel visited the garden recently. That has helped a lot in the last two weeks,” says Contreras.

Photo courtesy of Tierras Milperas.

“One of the most important things that community gardens can cultivate is community,” Patel, who is also on Civil Eats’ advisory board, explained by email. “With the church’s permission, those communities have flourished, turning soil into food, land into a schoolyard for children, and into a center for care in which seniors can be part of a community, not segregated away. At heart, Tierras Milperas’ fight is a struggle against segregation. Affluent white suburbanites don’t want ‘those people.’ But Tierras Milperas’ communities are vastly inclusive. With its eviction announcement, the church betrays its own principles, and I’m struggling to understand what they gain instead.”

The group’s struggle to stay on the land in Watsonville is just one of several similar situations. In Los Angeles, Compton Community Garden is working to raise $600,000 to buy the land it occupies while its fate lies in the hands of a developer.

In Saint Louis, Missouri, urban farmer Tosha Phonix told Civil Eats that several urban farmers in the city are being turned down in their attempts to buy previously vacant land, despite the fact that the city has “close to 12,000 blighted or vacant properties.”

“Thirty percent of our community is Indigenous people who have already been displaced from their lands. It is these forces that continue to try to erase us.”

When asked about whether he sees the fight for the Watsonville garden as part of a larger trend, Nava says, “It is a process of pricing people out, or gentrification. The people who do this act like they’re the majority, but they’re the minority. We’re in a predominantly immigrant community and there has been a lot of pricing out of our immigrant families in this region. Thirty percent of our community is Indigenous people who have already been displaced from their lands. It is these forces that continue to try to erase us.”

Regardless of how the scenario plays out, the gardeners intend to continue growing food together as a community. And for now, Tierras Milperas is raising funds for a plot of land through GoFundMe.

“We’ll continue what we’ve been doing for the last 5 years, working as collective,” says Nava. This is the part they don’t like—we’re organized.”

The post This Community Garden Helps Farmworkers Feed Themselves. Now It’s Facing Eviction. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/02/27/once-scorned-birds-are-returning-to-farms/ Mon, 27 Feb 2023 09:00:49 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=50688 A version of this interview originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our award-winning, members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue in your inbox. Executive director Jo Ann Baumgartner has been with WFA since 2001, and she’s a passionate advocate for what she and WFA call “bringing nature back to the farm.” […]

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

For more than two decades, Wild Farm Alliance (WFA) has provided just that—an alliance—between farmers and wildlife advocates. Based in California, the group is focused on finding common ground between two groups that have often been at odds in an effort to address the biodiversity crisis while helping farms benefit from adding more wildlife to their operations.

Executive director Jo Ann Baumgartner has been with WFA since 2001, and she’s a passionate advocate for what she and WFA call “bringing nature back to the farm.” Baumgartner spoke with us about the one of the group’s core efforts in recent years: building awareness about the value of birds on farms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why focus on birds?

Jo Ann Baumgartner

We have a goal of [adding] a million nest boxes and perches on 10 percent of farmland in the U.S. Our audience is mainly growers, and so we want to show them where they can see the benefits, but we also want to educate them about the need for nature to be supported. There are so many species in decline and so many ways that farmers can help, because agriculture comprises almost 60 percent of the landscape [in the U.S.] when you count all the grazing lands, and it’s a huge footprint. With farmers’ help, we can do a lot to reduce the biodiversity crisis, and they can benefit from it.

Some readers may be more familiar with how birds can eat farmers’ crops than the ways they can interact with farmlands positively. How are you working to shift the narrative?

Well, a few years ago, we published this booklet called Supporting Beneficial Birds and Managing Best Birds [that detailed ways farmers can reduce their pest-control costs by hosting more songbirds during their nesting season]. And before that, most of the growers I talked to—even growers that were finding lots of creative ways to support biodiversity—the first thing they wanted to tell me was about how birds had wrecked something on their farm. But I don’t hear that so much anymore. There are a lot more people we need to reach, but growers are starting to learn that there are so many beneficial things that birds do related to pest control, and different kinds of birds offer different kinds of pest control.

It’s just like some people think all insects are bad. But really there are beneficial insects, and there are insects that can be harmful, but most of them are good. And with birds, there a few that are bad for farms some of the time.

It seems like both need to be kept in balance, and when they get out of balance is when it’s a real problem for farms?

Yes! We’ve collected around 120 avian pest-control studies and broken it down into different crops in different temperate climates; 90 percent of the studies showed that birds were important. And, not all researchers did the exact same study. Some of them were asking, “Is habitat nearby important?” Yes, it is: The more habitat you have, the more pest control benefits you get. And some asked, “Is it important to have nesting boxes?” And yes—you get more pest control benefits with nesting boxes.

Five percent of the studies showed that while birds were helpful, they also were harmful. So, for instance, in the spring, blackbirds eat all kinds of [harmful] insects when they’re feeding. But later in the year, they may potentially harm, say, a sunflower crop because they’re flocking birds. It’s really the big flocks of birds that can be a problem and there are very few species that do that.

There’s some research that looked at monoculture strawberries and then strawberries that were growing in more diverse farmscapes, and the researchers found that a diversity [of crops] supported a diverse community of birds, and that’s when you have more pest control coming from that community and less damage or less food-safety issues.

And the food safety issues really are coming from birds that are associated with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where we’ve created a mess and they get into it. Birds go looking for spilt grain and get into the manure and then it’s not good for them to come onto your farm.

When we talk about this to growers, they inevitably tell me stories about how they’ve seen birds help. For example, we just had an event in Livingston, California, in the heart of the Central Valley ag region, where we had helped an almond grower put in a hedgerow and he told me he has seen crows clean off the mummy nuts [almonds that stay on the trees after they’re shaken, and often can carry insects and diseases that impact the following year’s crop].

Growers are paying attention, and I’ve heard lots of stories like that. Farmers, especially the ones who are already managing for diversity, are really curious about birds, and some of them are putting in lots of nest boxes. There’s a grower at Spring Mountain Vineyards in Napa who has 800 nest boxes in their vineyards. Most growers don’t do that, but a lot of vineyards are putting in nest boxes, because there are some really great studies about how they increase bluebird presence in vineyards tenfold.

A bird box at Ridge Vineyards. (Photo credit: Jerry James)

When the researcher put out experimental prey, bluebirds ate almost three times as many insects near nest boxes versus far away from the boxes. And it’s not just bluebirds that use these boxes, there are other really good insectivorous birds that use them—like tree swallows, which are aerial foragers, meaning they’re cruising around in the air and catching moths, flies, and flying insects. There’s chickadees, titmice, and ash-throated flycatchers, violet-green swallows, and a couple of different kinds of wrens and nuthatches.

I’ve read that the drought has greatly impacted migration, as many of the wetlands and bodies of water where migrating birds used to stop and refuel have been drying up in recent years. Are some birds looking to farms to fill that gap?

I’ve heard that, too, and those birds aren’t really helping with pest control on farms. Some farmers are working with conservationists to flood some of their lands when they can, but that tends to attract waterfowl and shorebirds and the raptors that eat them.

But water is important and lots of birds are stopping at farms. Maybe they’re just coming through and need some food and cover or maybe they are going to stop and nest. We created a chart and an assessment tool to help farmers (and others) find the best native plants to attract beneficial birds and identify other opportunities, like where you might put in hedgerows, change other management practices, or add flowers or pastures as habitat for birds.

You’ve talked about making the case for more birds on farms to growers. Are there other folks who you’re trying to convince, particularly at the policy level?

It’s super important for policy makers to understand that birds are in decline, and we need to do everything we can to support them. And while we’ve been talking about all of their benefits, they also have intrinsic value.

A barn owl sits on a fencepost overlooking a farm. (Photo credit: Sue Cro)

Rachel Carson talked about how if we’re not careful we might wake up to a silent spring. And years ago, when the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was implemented in 1918, there was a whole bunch of pushback from industry. But it turned out that the Supreme Court said, “Look, birds are really beneficial and we can’t ignore that fact. We have to support them.” And back in the 1880s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy.

So we have known how important birds are for pest control for all these years. And now there’s a resurgence. I see it in my own backyard, because over the years, I’ve put in lots of native habitat, and more and more birds show up and it’s just lovely to see them and know that you’re supporting them. Everybody can do this, not just farmers.

The post Once Scorned, Birds Are Returning to Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2023/02/13/could-this-mobile-solar-powered-livestock-barn-reshape-the-corn-belt/ Mon, 13 Feb 2023 09:00:51 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=50751 This article was produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners. Take a listen here. The shift took place nearly three years ago as Smith—who was working off the farm for a fertilizer company at the time—was talking with the Minnesota-based farmer Sheldon Stevermer. “Corn was $2.75, […]

The post Could This Mobile, Solar-Powered Livestock Barn Reshape the Corn Belt? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> This article was produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners. Take a listen here.

Last August, Zack Smith welcomed a group of farmers, agricultural researchers, and investors to his mid-sized farm just south of the Iowa-Minnesota border for a field day. It was warm out, shorts weather, and around 35 people sat on straw bales listening as the young, fifth-generation farmer—who has gained a devoted audience through Twitter and YouTube and welcomes curious visitors to his farm every year—spoke about a critical turning point in his thinking.

The shift took place nearly three years ago as Smith—who was working off the farm for a fertilizer company at the time—was talking with the Minnesota-based farmer Sheldon Stevermer. “Corn was $2.75, beans were $7.25. We’re small farmers who don’t have a lot of acres. [We were asking ourselves,] ‘Is it worth staying in business?’” Smith recalls. The two were exchanging ideas and Stevermer asked a third farmer, Lance Petersen, what he thought. “He bounced it off Lance and he said, ‘What about putting a pen of sheep in between the rows?’”

The hope isn’t just to build a new type of farm equipment—it’s to help farmers build soil health, cut down on water pollution, and usher in a new approach to farming in the Corn Belt.

Stevermer has an engineering background and he and Smith decided to run with Peterson’s idea. They got to work designing a farming system that involved growing alternating rows of corn and strips of pasture that were wide enough to move a mobile barn through. The plants in those rows also get exposed to more sunlight than a standard canopy of corn or soy, resulting in higher yields per plant. They called the result—a solar-powered barn that separately housed eight sheep in the front, 10 hogs in the middle, and a 125 chickens in a trailing chicken tractor—the ClusterCluck 5,000. They coined the term “stock cropping” for the larger idea to have, as Smith puts it, “plants feeding animals, and animals feeding plants.”

Since then, Smith has dedicated 5 acres on a plot of land Smith rents to trialing the stock-cropper system. And he has worked with Illinois-based Dawn Equipment to design a second, much lighter and more nimble iteration of the barn: The ClusterCluck Nano runs on solar energy and can be moved with a phone app. Now, Smith and Dawn Equipment CEO Joe Bassett are working on a third iteration and actively pursuing outside investment.

The hope, says Smith, isn’t just to build a new type of farm equipment—it’s to help farmers build soil health, cut down on water pollution, and usher in a new approach to farming in the Corn Belt.

Iowa is famously home to more hogs—25 million—than people, and a sizable number of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. As a result, massive quantities of manure get spread on the same farmland repeatedly, typically during the cold months when there are no roots in the soil to absorb it. That often leads to nutrient pollution in the waterways (and dead zones in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico).

Stock cropping, on the other hand, involves rotating crops with pasture strips so that a smaller numbers of animals leave behind just enough nutrients on the land to help corn grow there the following season—replacing the expensive, leaky fertilizer systems used by most commodity farmers. Meanwhile, the animals themselves live in less confined spaces, eating the plants and insects in the pasture strips. Smith has calculated that if there were 1.4 million ClusterCluck Nanos operating on about 1.9 million acres of forage strips within 15 of Iowa’s 99 counties full time, they could theoretically replace that state’s CAFOs.

“What is progress in ag?” Smith asked the crowd at the field day last August. “If you go down to the Farm Progress show in Boone, [Iowa,] you’re going to see one version of progress, and that’s big, wide, fast farm equipment that’s designed to do more with less people involved,” he said. But Smith, whose somewhat flat speaking affect belies his deep knowledge of agronomy and a stubborn dedication to farming, has other ideas. He points to the fact that even though corn and soy prices have gone back up over the last year, so have the prices of the inputs most commodity farmers rely on, such as synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides.

“It’s the same thing that’s happened three other times in my career. We get a pop and the machine responds, and the pop becomes not very fun anymore. But the concepts we have out here could be very useful as we move ahead into whatever is going to be next. [It’s] not going to be next year or the year after that, but the pattern always comes where [farmers] drain the tank and come back to a break-even proposition.”

Instead of this familiar boom-bust cycle, Smith hopes to see a network of farmers across Iowa, Minnesota, and beyond that can afford to stay on the land while farming at a smaller scale by cutting their input costs radically and selling higher welfare, grass-fed meat into local markets and directly to consumers. And while doing so will require more than just a grassroots effort, these farmers are hoping that their out-of-the-box ideas gain traction with investors who can help them scale up.

The ClusterCluck 5000 needs to be moved twice a day. The newer iterations are automated and can be moved with an iPhone app. (Photo by Zack Smith)

‘Escaping the Dead-end, No-win Ag Treadmill’

During the first Stock Cropper field day three summers ago, Smith started by pointing to the land next to his home farm and naming all the farming families that had sold or lost their land. The land hand been consolidated into a few larger farm operations, he told his audience, and as a result, his community had changed. Like in many rural areas, there were fewer schools, fewer neighbors to farm alongside, and it now requires a much longer drive to get to the grocery store or hardware store.

Even with an automated barn, he says, the stock-cropper system still requires farmers who are more hands-on than most other modern commodity farming, a fact that, if it were widely adopted, would result in a reversal of the population loss so many rural counties have seen.

“The whole idea of this system is that it will require a lot more farmers,” said Smith during a phone call last fall. “Because even though the barns are going to move themselves, somebody still needs to chore them, somebody still needs to do the daily husbandry. And you don’t have to try to farm half the state of Iowa to make a reasonable living.”

“The whole idea is that we want to increase the amount of biodiversity in the field within this system and build resiliency that way.”

Ricardo Salvador, the senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), had Smith as a student when he taught at Iowa State University in the ‘90s. He has attended two of Smith’s field days and sees the work as potentially transformative.

“He wants to escape the dead-end, no-win treadmill [agricultural] situation where all that you can do is choose from a very narrow range of options, which always make the farmer the person who takes the ultimate risk, earns the least, and is dependent on government [subsidies] in order to make ends meet,” says Salvador. By selling the highest-value final product—the meat itself rather than just the grain to feed the animals—Salvador adds, he’s found a way to do something that has “become out of reach for farmers that decades ago bought into the idea of specialization.”

The hope, says Smith, is to create a system that’s more resilient in the face of climate change because it relies on fewer inputs.

Eventually, he says, “we could probably cut nitrogen use by 75 percent compared to a conventional corn acre. And I think we could completely eliminate the [added] phosphorus and potassium and use the animals to cycle it back into the soil.”

He is also looking at other crops that might make good animal feed, like barley and field peas, which would diversify the operation further.  “The whole idea is that we want to increase the amount of biodiversity in the field within this system and build resiliency that way.”

Dawn Equipment’s Bassett got on board with stock cropping and started collaborating with Smith several years ago. Bassett had been making small-scale farm equipment targeted specifically at those cutting down on tillage and planting cover crops after he took stock of the nitrogen problems—and resulting regulations—in the Chesapeake Bay and the Des Moines Waterworks lawsuit.

“At that time, [it looked like] the government was going make farmers start doing something to preserve water quality and topsoil, “ he said. “I thought, ‘Surely, there’s going to be a groundswell of momentum that sort of gets farmers to change their practices.’” And while didn’t happen right away, he says that part of the business has grown in recent years.

Bassett sees much of the recent wave of ag technology as furthering, rather than solving, the most pressing problems with commodity agriculture—and he wants to do something different, even if it can mean a slower ramp-up to profitability.

“A lot of people just want you to come in and do this and then flip it in three years and sell it to Cargill. I’m not interested in that.”

“Agriculture is very high-tech now, but it’s not actually any different,” he says. “We have high-tech tractors and combines, but what they’re doing is exactly the same. Now [farmers are getting] robot tractors to plow the fields, so they’ll just plow even more.”

Bassett is personally motivated by the climate crisis and believes having animals on the landscape are key to sequestering carbon in the soil. “A stock-cropper system of intercropping, where you are rotationally grazing in between rows of cash crops, will probably be the most regenerative farming system possible. And it will produce the highest yield per unit of fertilizer of any system.”

Dawn Equipment is working on more prototypes, and the company’s ability to manufacture its first round of commercially available ClusterCluck barns will depend on the level of investment Bassett and Smith are able to attract. Together they have bootstrapped the project so far, and they are hoping to attract venture capital to keep scaling up the project. But Smith isn’t interested in the typical model.

“A lot of people just want you to come in and do this and then flip it in three years and sell it to Cargill. I’m not interested in that. We need to find the right investor that is bought into the merits of what we’re trying to build and is going to give us the rope and the leeway to get there,” he says.

And while the barns were developed for corn and soy operations, Bassett hopes to see them reach orchardists and vineyard owners interested in grazing animals as a way to build the soil between their rows in other parts of the country.

Chickens in the stock cropping system eat bugs, break up the soil, and leave behind manure that adds fertility. (Photo by Zack Smith)

A Processing Bottleneck

While Smith hasn’t had a problem finding a market for the meat he’s produced so far with the stock-cropper system, the lack of meat processing infrastructure for small scale producers is a well-known challenge.

Keaton Krueger, another Iowan who is farming with his wife on 80 acres purchased from her family, while working full time in the field of precision agriculture (most recently for WinField United), has been following Zack’s progress and says he’s very impressed with what he and Bassett have done in the last three years. The focus on soil health aligns with his approach and, on paper, the system promises the kind of steady income that would allow him to gradually transition to full-time farming.

“Right now, farming is like a second job, but it would be great someday if a system like the stock cropper could allow us to make a living farming without having to become a giant consolidated grain-farming entity. I think there are a lot of people like he and I, who are still in agriculture professionally, that probably could access a few hundred acres of land and would be happy to go home and work hard on that land to make a living.” But working at that scale isn’t possible within the current system, he adds.

And yet Krueger hasn’t committed to buying a barn because he says the meat processing infrastructure isn’t there yet. The Kruegers raise hogs for themselves and their family members, and he says, “We have to schedule a year in advance for just a few hogs a year.”

So far, Smith has been able to find a market for the hogs he’s raised, but the lack of meat processing options in rural Iowa is one potential barrier to scaling up the stock cropping system. (Photo by Zack Smith)

But he’s optimistic that more demand could help pave the way for more processing. “I think that will probably be an area that gets solved either through the stock-cropper vision or through somebody that’s supporting the vision,” says Krueger.

Krueger, Smith, and Salvador all point to Jason Mauck’s work as an inspiring example. The Muncie, Indiana-based, self-described “maverick grower” farms row crops in strips to collect optimum sunlight like Smith and raises hogs that he sells himself through Munsee Meats, the meat processing plant that has been in his family since the 1950s—with the recent addition of automated self-serve meat lockers.

“[Mauck] is trying to retain as much of the food dollar as possible, which means that he’s in charge of production, processing, and distribution,” says Salvador. “He’s got this small USDA-certified meatpacking plant. But then his sales are through what are essentially these high-tech vending machines. And he controls the whole thing.”

At the field day in September, Mauck bought a ClusterCluck Nano and brought it home to Indiana, where he has been sharing photos of it in action.

And when Smith envisions networks of producers working together to build a supply chain using stock cropping, he thinks the region around Mauck’s processing business is probably the most logical place to start.

“It’s going to take regional hubs outside urban areas, and then farms positioned around those hubs rather than, for instance, growing pork here in Winnebago County, Iowa, and shipping it to Sioux Falls to be killed, and then shipping it to Washington, D.C., after that. We’ve got to do a better job of nesting the production around where the people are.” He also sees pasture-based systems as inherently easier to locate next to cities—because, unlike CAFOs, urban dwellers “can actually come out and see and participate in it, and it’s 100 percent transparent; the farmer has nothing to hide.”

The USDA is also in the middle of rolling out a sizable grant program that is intended to support small-scale meat processing infrastructure—as part of the Biden administration’s response to consolidation in the meat industry—but it’s not clear whether those grants will work in tandem with efforts like Smith’s.

Corn in the system grows in narrow rows, received more sunlight, and produces more a result. (Photo by Zack Smith)

Swimming Against the Tide

It is far from easy to envision and follow through on building an alternative to commodity agriculture, in part because the companies behind it wield so much power in the Corn Belt.

The depopulation of rural areas—and the sheer number of miles it has put between people—hasn’t helped. But social media has done a lot to help outliers like Smith and Mauck build networks that have bolstered them in the face of the status quo. “Maybe 10 percent of farmers are open to these ideas,” says Smith “That’s the community space that we’re aiming for and trying to build a coalition around right now.”

At the end of the day, Smith is clear-eyed about the fact that what he’s doing may struggle to gain traction because it threatens the powers that be in the commodity agriculture industry.

“You’re not going to see John Deere, Corteva, or Bayer supporting something like this. I come from that world,” he told his field day audience. “I was a Pioneer seed rep and chemical dealer.” Enabling farmers to work in a closed-loop way that harnesses the power of nature isn’t good for those companies’ bottom lines, he added.

“Changing the arrangement of the use of plants and animals in this way, it is a significant threat [to the existing industry],” he added later on the phone. Not only does the stock-cropper system require much less synthetic fertilizers, but “it’s going to take us less seed. We’re getting more yield per seed, and that flies in the face of everything I’ve done up to this point. . . . It’s a potential threat to significantly reduce the things that we’re told we have to farm with in order to survive.”

“A lot of farmers just wouldn’t dare try this, because the fear of looking strange,” says Salvador, who adds, “the people who will pooh-pooh it or make it sound like it’s strange are the industry and the folks who want to be comfortable just farming corn and soybeans, and getting checks from the government when they can’t make ends meet.”

“But,” he adds, “I see a slow-brewing, quiet revolution out there.”

The post Could This Mobile, Solar-Powered Livestock Barn Reshape the Corn Belt? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/11/21/farm-fridays-for-the-future-a-young-food-and-climate-activist-to-watch/ Mon, 21 Nov 2022 08:59:49 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=49774 A version of this article originally appeared in the October issue of the Deep Dish, our monthly newsletter for members. Become a member today to receive the next issue. In Uganda, 23-year-old activist Vanessa Nakate has urged world leaders to leave the oil in the ground as a way to safeguard food and water supplies […]

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]]> A version of this article originally appeared in the October issue of the Deep Dish, our monthly newsletter for members. Become a member today to receive the next issue.

Young climate activists have done an impressive job of claiming the spotlight and making their voices heard in recent years—and for good reason: The climate crisis is already impacting their lives and shaping their futures.

In Uganda, 23-year-old activist Vanessa Nakate has urged world leaders to leave the oil in the ground as a way to safeguard food and water supplies in Africa, the continent most vulnerable to climate change. In Canada, 17-year-old Anishinaabe activist Autumn Peltier has fought for clean water for First Nation communities and has made “We can’t eat money and we can’t drink oil” her catchphrase. And Greta Thunberg—whose Fridays for Future campaign has helped embolden youth across the globe and points to farmer suicides due to rising climate strife as reason to strike—worked with Mercy for Animals on a video that reached 1.5 million people, imploring her audience to look critically at large-scale animal agriculture and eat plant-based diets.

But here in the U.S., aside from the Sunrise Movement’s focus on the Green New Deal and its brief mention of agriculture, few young activists appear to be drawing a direct line between the climate crisis and the food system.

That’s what makes Ollie Perrault one to watch. The 15-year-old activist is growing up on an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in western Massachusetts, where she and her family have spent the last two years responding to extreme weather. In June and July 2021, the farm saw 16 inches of rain—“more rain in the first two months of harvesting than we normally get in an entire season,” recalls Perrault. “And then this year, we experienced a level-three emergency drought throughout most of the summer.”

At age 11, Perrault attended a Youth Climate Summit through Mass Audubon’s Youth Climate Leadership Program that catalyzed a shift in her worldview. “I realized that if I want a shot at a livable future, and if I want a future for my family’s farm, I need to act, I need to get involved, and take a leadership role in my community,” she says.

Perrault, who has been home-schooling since second grade, has spent the last few years focusing much of her energy on climate activism—a kind of full-time version of a Thunberg school strike. Then, last year, she founded her own local organization, Youth Climate Action Now, which her parents see as a key element of her education. The entirely youth-led group fluctuates from seven to 20 members, depending on the meeting, and it is focused on organizing, building power, and providing a place for youth to commiserate about what it’s like to grow up in the face of a massive global crisis.

“I realized that if I want a shot at a livable future, and if I want a future for my family’s farm, I need to act, I need to get involved, and take a leadership role in my community.”

“We were looking for a space to be loud, and a space to let others know that we are angry and that our anger is powerful,” says Perrault. “We wanted to make a ruckus, spark social change, and feel accepted and safe while doing so. Also, we wanted to feel like we had a community of other young people who have our backs.”

And while her group is focusing on influencing state-level legislation, supporting local farms in the region, and building a composting program, its members are also clear that they want the adults around them to start thinking big and finding ways to work toward radical systems-level change.

Their thinking aligns with a recent journal paper written by 23 youth climate activists about their hopes and feelings at this pivotal moment. Young people “are often unfairly portrayed as the world’s ultimate saviors” and “seldom given platforms by their governments or corporations to share their ideas, feelings, and hopes,” the paper reads. However, it adds, “their creativity and unique perspectives, along with their limited vested interest in the status quo, mean they can be catalytic in helping societies to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis.”

Between farm work and homework, Perrault is still learning about the finer points of things like carbon sequestration, but points to agriculture’s sizable contribution to climate change, as well as the potential solutions it can bring if done right. “I really believe that agriculture can present a solution to the climate crisis,” she said. “It should be an integral part of our steps to move forward toward energy efficiency, carbon sequestration, eating locally, composting, etc.—there are so many levels of change that can come through working with sustainable agriculture.”

The post This Young Climate Activist Has Her Hands in the Soil and Her Eyes on the Future appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/10/17/pollinator-friendly-certifications-pesticides-sustainable-farms-food-product-labels/ Mon, 17 Oct 2022 08:00:36 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=48790 Those plants—and the pollinators they feed—have been there since long before Far North’s owners Mike Swanson and Cheri Reese took over Swanson’s family farm and built a distillery in 2013. But this year, they decided to start making their presence known to their customers by applying for a Bee Friendly Farm designation from Pollinator Partnership, […]

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Far North Spirits, the northernmost farm and distillery in the contiguous United States, grows the rye for its whiskey and distills it on the farm. Just 25 miles south of Minnesota’s border with Canada, the farm’s fields of golden rye and heirloom corn are interspersed with highbush cranberry shrubs, bushy crabapple and plum trees, native grasses, and a growing number of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.

Those plants—and the pollinators they feed—have been there since long before Far North’s owners Mike Swanson and Cheri Reese took over Swanson’s family farm and built a distillery in 2013. But this year, they decided to start making their presence known to their customers by applying for a Bee Friendly Farm designation from Pollinator Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to protecting and promoting pollinators and the ecosystems they rely on.

“Pollinated foods are some of our most nutrient-rich foods, some of our most colorful, and flavorful.”

For one, says Swanson, pollinators provide a lively entry point for talking with his customers about the way he and Reese run the farming part of their operation.

“Soil health, ecological diversity, sustainable ecosystems—all these things are very important to us. But I wanted a way to talk to people about what was going to be interesting to them,” he says. “When you’re talking about bees, that tends to pique people’s interest a little better. So, we’re able to talk about farming without talking about farming.”

Swanson is not alone in seeing the abundance of bees and other pollinators on his farm as a selling point, and a way to get his customers’ attention.

In fact, Americans are increasingly focused on pollinators, and they’re concerned about their well-being. In 2017, a survey found that 69 percent of respondents said they recognized pollinator populations are in decline and that number has likely grown as the news of the larger insect apocalypse—science that shows rapid decline in insect populations around the world—has been widely reported since then. In 2019, another survey found that 95 percent of respondents said they want to see designated areas where plants support pollinator health.

Pollinators are critical to food production: More than 80 percent of the world’s flowering plants—and around one third of the food crops—require a pollinator. And while it’s not clear exactly how many people are considering the plight of pollinators when buying groceries, a 2015 study found that use of the term ‘‘bee-friendly’’ had more economic value than other claims that advertised the absence of pesticides. And another study in 2018 found that consumers were willing to pay more (51 cents per dry liter) to buy blueberries and cranberries farmed in a way that supports wild pollinators.

Cal Giant Blueberries bearing the Bee Better Certified label. (Courtesy Xerces Society)

“Pollinated foods are some of our most nutrient-rich foods, some of our most colorful, and flavorful,” says Liz Robertson, who helps oversee the Xerces Society’s Bee Better Certified, another certification farmers are now seeking out. “There are wind-pollinated crops out there, but the nutrient-rich diet really depends on these animal-pollinated crops. And just over the last several decades, and increasingly in the last couple of years, there has been this real awareness and research on the decline of insects globally.”

All these factors explain why pollinator certifications have begun to appear in a growing number of grocery stores and corporate sustainability reports. The Bee Better seal is showing up on products sold by certified farms as well as on those from companies sourcing ingredients from those farms, says Robertson. Silk, Häagen-Dazs, and Cal Giant Farms are just a few of the brands that have sported the seal so far. Meanwhile, Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly logo has appeared on a signature wine from Francis Ford Coppola Winery, and may soon make its way to more packaging.

Yet while the Bee Better and Bee Friendly certifications offer up similar wordplay, and similar stated goals—both want to see more diverse and flowering forage plants on farm landscapes and less pesticide exposure for pollinators—they are markedly different in multiple ways. One is reaching a smaller number of farms with a stringent, third-party certification, while the other is aiming for much larger adoption, especially among conventional farmers, and is asking less of participating farms by design.

Taken together, however, the two certifications provide a glimpse of some of the benefits —and the limitations—of using pollinator health to gauge the overall sustainability of a farm.

Planting pollinator habitat at the Jordan Winery Estate. (Photo courtesy of Pollinator Partnership)

The Certifications

The Bee Friendly Certification began as a local initiative in northern California’s Sonoma County that helped beekeepers find farms where it was safe to store their bees. Pollinator Partnership acquired it in 2013, but Miles Dakin, the current Bee Friendly Farming coordinator, says it wasn’t a big part of the organization’s work until around 2019, the year the Almond Board of California—the group that represent 7,600 almond farms on an estimated 1.6 million acres—reached out to the organization and initiated a partnership.

The Central Valley’s almond orchards rely heavily on millions of honeybees that are trucked in from the Midwest every spring—and many beekeepers have seen record-setting bee losses in recent years. As a result, the almond industry has moved to improve its image in the eyes of consumers.

“They really wanted to educate their growers and bring the industry in on bee-friendly practices,” says Dakin, who had studied integrated pest management (IPM) in the almond industry before taking the job.

Dakin was hired in 2020 and has been working with farms in California and across the country since, helping farmers add bee-friendly forage and habitat to their land and certifying around 250,000 acres of farmland and in the last two years. “We’re definitely expanding,” he told Civil Eats. “We have avocados, coffee, a whole bunch of different systems now certified.”

The Bee Friendly Certified program requires growers to pay $45, prove that they have forage “providing good nutrition for bees” (or are planning to plant it) on 3 percent of their land, as well as nesting habitat and water. They also must use Integrated Pest Management (IPM), a wide range of practices that can involve replacing pesticides with pheromones or simply identifying the location of pests before spraying to ensure that the application is targeted.

“We were already above and beyond the certification standards, so it wasn’t hard at all for us.”

Once they are on board, Dakin says, “every three years, the growers have to provide us with compliance documents, and we review those.” He also conducts field visits on 6 percent of the farms every year.

“We’re not a prescriptive program,” he added. “We don’t tell them what to do or how to do it. We give them the criteria, and we help them meet that criteria in the way that works for them.”

Farms that receive Xerces’ Bee Better Certification, on the other hand, are independently audited and verified by Oregon Tilth, an organic certifier that has been in business since 1975.

Even before the certification launched, the Xerces Society had been working with the agricultural industry, both directly with larger brands and their supply chains as well as through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service to help farmers to install pollinator habitat and engage pollinator-friendly practices such as pesticide mitigation on their farms, says Xerces’ Robertson. “The farmers who were doing the work were like, ‘How do we communicate this to consumers?’”

She adds that the certification’s parameters are grounded in peer-reviewed scientific research done by Xerces and other institutions that looks at everything from the best native plant compositions for pollinators to the impact of pesticide drift.

To date, Bee Better has certified more than 20,000 acres of farmland in the U.S., Canada, and Peru, with more applications in progress. Almonds are also a major crop for the certification, as are blueberries. Xerces is also in the process of bringing more certifiers on board so they can begin certifying farms in more countries.

In order to earn Bee Better Certification, farms must maintain pollinator habitat on at least 5 percent of the farm, and 1 percent of that habitat needs to be permanent year-round, meaning things like trees, hedgerows, and riparian corridors that include native plants. The certification also requires a “rigorous pest management strategy” that includes non-chemical practices as a first line of defense, targeted pesticide use, and limiting or eliminating the use of what Xerces calls high risk pesticide applications.

Changes on the Farm

For some farms, achieving pollinator-friendly certification is mainly a matter of documenting what’s already taking place. For instance, Klickitat Canyon Winery in Lyle, Washington, has long invested in planting native wildflowers and grasses throughout its vineyard and owner Kiva Dobson had already received organic certification prior to adding Bee Better certification to the list. “We were already above and beyond the certification standards, so it wasn’t hard at all for us,” says Dobson. Plus, “for every bottle [of wine] we sell, a percentage of that goes towards buying native plants, so [the cost] is integrated into our business model.”

Ceanothus serves as pollinator habitat on the Klickitat Canyon Winery. (Photo courtesy of Xerces Society)

But for the larger, conventional growers who sign up, pollination certification may require undertaking a paradigm shift.

Take Woolf Farming, a more than 20,000-acre, vertically integrated farming company based in Fresno, California, that grows a wide variety of crops, including massive tracts of almonds, pistachios, and canning tomatoes all over the state. Peter Allbright, the crop manager at Woolf Farming, says a business partnership spurred them to pursue Xerces’ Bee Better certification back in 2016.

“One of our almond customers is a very progressive European food company,” says Allbright. “They wanted us to look into pollinator habitat developments and that kind of thing, and they pushed us to work with the Xerces Society, so we were actually one of the first growers of theirs to be certified.”

Woolf Farming still has 3,000 Bee Better-certified almond acres, but the company has since chosen to put more than 7,000 additional acres of almonds into Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly Farming program because, Allbright says, it’s much easier. Bee Better certification requires regular, multi-hour inspections that he describes as “more in-depth than an organic inspection” and maintains “a packet—a hefty list of rules.”

On top of the certification cost itself, Allbright says that planting pollinator-friendly habitat has also cost the company “well over a quarter million dollars in the last couple of years,” between buying the pants, irrigating them, and paying workers to weed them.

“Once [the habitat] gets established, it’s fine. It’s doable, but it’s extremely expensive to implement the Bee Better program,” added Allbright.

He says Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly program has been much more flexible about where he can plant the additional habitat (they don’t require that it be in or near the almond orchard, for instance). And when a pest infestation looked like it could cut the almond crop on one of the farm’s properties a few years back, he says he struggled to get Xerces to make an exception that would allow him to spray approved pesticides aerially. Bee Better eventually made an exception, but he found the process frustrating. “Xerces is the gold standard. But you can’t blanket that across every acre of almonds in California,” added Allbright. “It’s not compatible. Hence, we haven’t done it on all of our acres.”

Pollinator Partnership, on the other hand, requires “minor bits of documentation to demonstrate that you’re not spraying insecticides during the almond bloom, those kinds of very common-sense things that most growers are already doing,” adds Allbright. He’s also concerned that Xerces, on the other hand, is so focused on supporting wild bumblebees and other wild pollinators that they may not always be looking out for farmers like him. As a conservation group, he added “They’re actively behind the scenes working against production agriculture.”

A metallic green sweat bee. (Photo by Amber Barnes, courtesy of Pollinator Partnership)

The fact that the organization advocated for the protection of wild bumblebees in California under the state’s Endangered Species Act—and that advocacy may have had an impact on the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to allow new protections for the pollinators—is one example that concerns Allbright. He believes the change will “severely impact almond production, because that really eliminates a lot of the tools we have for crop protection.”

However, Eric Lee-Mäder, an apple and seed crop farmer and the pollinator and agricultural biodiversity co-director at Xerces, says there’s nothing behind the scenes about the group’s work. “Xerces and other stakeholders have been open and transparent in examining the decline of California’s wild bumble bees precisely so the ag sector isn’t caught off guard. Ultimately the bees in question mostly do not even occur in agricultural areas.”

Dialing in on Pesticides

Research has found that adding habitat, cover crops, and more plant diversity overall to large monocrop operations can—over time—reduce the need for insecticides and other pesticides. And that appears to be the idea that both pollinator certifications are working with, albeit to different degrees. But asking farmers to intentionally spray fewer pesticides in the process is another thing altogether—and can be seen by growers like Allbright as an assault on their very viability.

“We don’t ban specific active ingredients in pesticides, because to us, it’s more about integrative pest management, about the mindset behind using the chemicals,” says Pollinator Partnership’s Dakin, who says IPM can greatly reduce pesticide exposure to pollinators when done right.

“The goal is still to reduce or even eliminate chemicals in general, but what we’re trying not to do is make something that’s not achievable by most of agriculture.” If you eliminate specific chemicals, he adds “it actually closes the doors for a lot of farmers.” Instead, Dakin says the organization wants to have all farmers at the table, and even some pesticide producers.

In the latest example of the latter, Pollinator Partnership is partnering with Bayer Crop Science (the company that bought Monsanto in 2016, making it the world’s largest pesticide and seed company) and other local entities in a $1.7 million project with the USDA to “improve pollinator habitat and forage across California’s agricultural landscapes.”

These kinds of partnerships are far from unusual for Pollinator Partnership, which also founded and runs the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, a large collaborative body that includes 170 scientists, researchers, and government entities, alongside Bayer and CropLife America, a trade group that represents manufacturers of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals.

In another example, Pollinator Partnership has initiated research a few years back into the toxicity of the dust that’s released by pesticide-treated corn seeds that received funding from Bayer Crop Science, BASF, and Syngenta—the very companies that manufacture the seed-coating pesticides that cause the dust at the heart of the research.

“Having worked with many, many farmers over the years, it’s like people are on this pesticide treadmill and can’t get off; they can’t see their way out of it.”

Xerces Society has also engaged the pesticide industry in dialogue over the years. However, says Lee-Mäder: “We’ve never taken pesticide money as an organization. We never would, and we would never plant habitat or create pollinator conservation features where we feel there’s a potential risk to counteract the work we’re trying to do.”

But that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to work with farmers on pesticides. And Lee-Mäder and Robertson acknowledge that, like Allbright, not everyone they work with is eager to change their practices when it comes to pesticide use.

“We don’t always have the leverage to change pesticide practices. But it’s something that we stay pretty laser-focused on,” said Lee-Mäder. “And we constantly make that part of the dialogue with the grower. Bee Better does provide really clear sideboards on what you can and can’t do. But outside of Bee Better I think [Xerces] is constantly making judgment calls about what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not.”

Willa Childress, who leads state-to-state policy organizing work at Pesticide Action Network, compares working on pollinator habitat with large conventional farms to harm reduction, a strategy that acknowledges that making systemwide changes can be difficult, and many farmers need to be met where they’re at if they’re going to begin to change entrenched patterns and practices.

But exactly where they’re at doesn’t always allow for a shift. “Having worked with many, many farmers over the years, it’s like people are on this pesticide treadmill and can’t get off; they can’t see their way out of it,” Childress said. “And they encounter challenges even when trying to move slightly away, because they’re already bought into a system and have all their acreage in [conventional] agriculture.”

Childress says she’s seen a number of examples in the policy arena where the focus on getting more habitat in the ground is politically much more palatable than reducing pesticide use.

“We’ve seen this approach over and over again, which is to separate these different impacts that we know are contributing towards huge pollinator and other insect declines: pesticide use, lack of habitat, and disease,” says Childress. “Policymakers and different constituents have tried to pry apart the three pieces of this problem and the result is that we’ve passed lots of legislation trying to address increased habitat. And yet we haven’t seen a measurable difference in how pollinators are faring.”

The pesticide industry has such a powerful lobbying presence all around the country, says Childress, that bills calling for reduction in pesticide use rarely make it very far. “Our legislation isn’t matching up to our science, and the only reason can be corporate control of agriculture and corporate influence,” she adds.

When asked directly, Allbright said he hadn’t reduced his pesticide use at all—and it’s clear that he doesn’t see that as a goal either on the land certified by Xerces’ Bee Better nor the land certified by Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly program.

For Xerces’ Robertson, the hope is to reach a productive, if sometimes challenging, middle ground. “If you look at the two ends of the spectrum, you’re going to have a certification that is so incredibly rigorous that nobody adopts it. Then you’re not moving the needle at all,” she says. “On the other side, you can have a certification that is easy and anyone can adopt it without changing their practices. So again, the needle isn’t moving. Our goal is always conservation and we’re always evaluating where we’re at and adjusting and weighing in on: Can we get farms to nudge and move the needle and adopt these practices? And are we matching with the science that says, ‘This is what has to be done to help curb the biodiversity loss we’re seeing?’”

For Far North Spirits’ Mike Swanson, even the less-stringent Bee Friendly certification is an important start—a catalyst of sorts. He has about 50 acres of land set aside through USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program—which pays farmers to give their land a rest—and he says ever since he received the pollinator-focused certification he has seen his property through fresh eyes.

Before, Swanson says, he saw that land primarily as valuable because the plants growing on it kept his soil from eroding. Now, he adds, “I see that it provides not just pollinator habitat, but wildlife, birds—of all kinds of critters like to hang out in there! And I think that’s one of the big benefits of doing a certification like this; you start to look at property as an ecosystem rather than just a property.”

The post Coming Soon to a Food Label Near You: ‘Bee-Friendly’ Certifications appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/10/04/julia-skinner-fermentation-invisible-world-our-fermented-lives-book-climate-science-nutrition/ Tue, 04 Oct 2022 08:00:06 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=48524 “People around me had been talking about it for years, but it didn’t exist in book form,” recalls Skinner, who has a doctorate in Library and Information Studies and has worked as a chef, food historian, fermentation teacher, consultant, and event planner, among other things. This month, her book, Our Fermented Lives: A Story of […]

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Julia Skinner had been fermenting food for over a decade when the idea to write a book telling the history of humans’ relationship to fermentation came to her. Skinner had completed a residency with DIY food activist and fermentation guru Sandor Katz, and she wanted to braid together her love for historical research with the fascinating, fizzing art and science in which she had immersed herself—all with home cooks in mind.

“People around me had been talking about it for years, but it didn’t exist in book form,” recalls Skinner, who has a doctorate in Library and Information Studies and has worked as a chef, food historian, fermentation teacher, consultant, and event planner, among other things. This month, her book, Our Fermented Lives: A Story of How Fermented Foods Have Shaped Cultures and Communities, will be released into the world. And it doesn’t disappoint.

In it, Skinner presents a range of history, analysis, and recipes that together tell a detailed and compelling story about the way fermentation has made us who we are today. She writes:

“Our fermented foods are of course filled with their own communities, teeming with bacteria, yeast, and fungi that intersect with our senses and our own microbiomes. But they connect us to macro communities as well. As one of our most ancient preservation methods and one that has not changed over time, fermentation gives us direct access to a lineage of food shared by humans all over the world for thousands of years. Our food offers a map of the abundance and shortages they faced, as well as what stories were passed down through history versus what history has been lost or buried . . . . Ferments are a direct tether between our ancestors and ourselves.”

Civil Eats spoke with Skinner—who also writes a newsletter and runs Root Kitchens—recently about her new book, mushroom ketchup, and the way that fermentation might help prepare us for the climate crisis.

The practices and foods you describe in the book were integral in just about everyone’s lives for thousands of years. Yet for folks eating the standard American diet today, fermented foods are rare to nonexistent. How did we get here?

I think it’s important to make a distinction between food that’s fermented that we consume as an end product—like coffee, tea, wine, and beer—and probiotic foods. We were all making or eating probiotic food for hundreds and hundreds of years and now it’s less of a thing. It’s ramping back up and we have a lot more interest in fermentation. But it is separate from our diets in a way that is unique in history.

It seems like there was this kind of inverse relationship between the rise of refrigeration and food processing and the loss of fermented foods.

There’s a really good book called Food for Dissent by Mariah McGrath that helped me think about the ways that fermented food’s popularity has fallen and risen in the 20th century in the U.S. Because we had new processing technology and different ways to make many foods more shelf stable—new preservatives, different colorings and flavorings, and all the different things that changed entirely how we eat—but then we also saw pushback to that at various points—the natural food movement in the ‘70s being an example.

Seasonality is a great place to start thinking about this. For most of history, nearly all of it, people weren’t able to go to the store and buy out-of-season vegetables. In wintertime, at least in places where it gets cold and you can’t grow things, you had to plan ahead for the fact that there’s not going to be ready sources of food. And even in warmer climates you had to think about the fact that food spoils quickly. Fermentation was really helpful for extending the shelf life of foods and getting our bodies the nutrients that we needed but otherwise weren’t available. We’d dehydrate food, smoke it, and ferment it. But fermentation became important because it was so accessible. I can ferment something with just a jar or a crock in my house and some salt; I don’t need a lot of resources. Historically, we haven’t been the wasteful creatures we are today; we had to be very mindful about stretching our food stores. And that’s how we got yogurt and cheese. Somebody had their milk curdle and instead of being like, “Oh, it’s bad and throwing it away,” they were like “Well, I still need to eat it.”

I’m interested in eating like our ancestors did. They ate in season, they preserved things. They shared food with their communities, they made food with their communities.

You write about fermented foods that have nearly disappeared because technology or culture has come close to making them obsolete. Can you talk about some examples of this phenomenon?

Yes, this is why I tell people to record the food stories happening in their lives, record the recipes, record the processes, because a lot of the challenge of writing the history of food is that there are so many gaps. And there are many foods [that were eaten throughout history] that we just don’t know about today.

Salt-rising bread is a great example. Instead of a sourdough, which requires a long-standing starter, salt rising bread uses a new starter each time. We think they call it that because people were burying the warm little jar of starter in salt to help temperature control it, because it needs to be around 110 degrees. It ferments overnight, and you get this really active starter, and then you bake bread with it. It was made in Appalachia and almost went extinct but thankfully, there were a handful of people dedicated to preserving the tradition.

Acarajé is another good example. It’s a fermented black eyed pea fritter made in Brazil and I wouldn’t call it threatened per se, but its vendors were almost pushed out of business. It comes from a West African food called akara. When people were enslaved and brought to Brazil, they carried these food traditions forward. And in Bahia there have long been women vendors who wear all white and sell the acarajé on the street. A few years back, the vendors were being pushed out by a food producer that was trying to sell it commercially. But eventually [in 2012], it became registered as part of their intangible cultural heritage.

There are so many foods and drinks in this book that the average person has probably never heard of, like fermented ketchup, for example. You write that it was common to make it out of everything from mushrooms to fish.

The commercial ketchup you buy today isn’t fermented; they add in vinegar instead. What I find interesting about it is that ketchup was made as an attempt to capture a flavor that was desired, but unfamiliar to the English palate. When trade started between Europe and China, suddenly people in Europe had access to fish sauce. And soon they wanted other umami rich sauces. In addition to mushroom ketchup—which is really good!—there were dozens of different fermented kinds. Walnut ketchup was another popular one.

You write about including microbes as a key element of our ideas about biodiversity. Can you say more about that?

When we think about biodiversity, we tend to think about the visible critters. But so much of what makes the visible world possible is the invisible. I mean, plants can’t grow without the soil microbiome. Our bodies can’t function properly without our own microbiomes. Making sure that those are healthy, and that we understand the real incredible diversity of microbes that make everything else possible is important.

That diversity is closely related to our agricultural practices. How is the way that we are treating the earth impacting its microbiome? But we can think about biodiversity in our own bodies, too. There are tons and tons of probiotic supplements on the market. And that’s fine. But the problem is that a lot of them are just one proprietary strain, and they won’t help build a diverse microbiome. When we think about the history of fermentation, it’s a purely democratic process. Nobody is ever going to be able to gather up all of the lactic acid bacteria in the world and say, “These are mine!”

A broader awareness of microbes can also really help us expand our ideas about terroir, can’t they? The very popular cheese made by Cowgirl Creamery called Red Hawk can only be made at their original location up in Point Reyes, and can’t be reproduced at their Petaluma location because something—the microbes in the environment?—wasn’t quite right outside of Point Reyes.

We can make use of fermentation wherever we go. But, like you just said, it may not taste the same. Each place has its own unique kind of microbial fingerprint. And that’s something I really like to think about when I ferment food. And it’s why I like to like swap ferments with people and be like, “Okay, we all made sauerkraut a month ago, let’s all come together and see whose house makes the best sauerkraut.”

I’m not a microbiologist so my knowledge is limited. But I like that [this awareness] provides an expansive view of terroir. Because typically we think terroir and we think wine, the minerality of the soil, how adjacent the vineyard is to the ocean, and all of that. Obviously, those have an impact, but we don’t really think about terroir once the grapes come off the vine. We don’t often consider how the actual fermentation process is also influencing the flavor.

How do you think the act of fermentation can serve the goal of maintaining mental health?

Realizing what a grounding, meditative process fermentation can be was a completely unexpected revelation— and it’s not unique to me. I think a lot of people experience it in this way. Cooking is also meditative but with fermentation, you have to keep going back to it; it’s not instant gratification. And so the act of making the ferment is one of mindfulness and meditation, and then checking it and watching how it changes over time, and then eating it, which allows you to continuously tap into this mindful space.

I’ve taught classes on mindfulness and fermentation. I love it. And, honestly, during the pandemic, fermenting food mindfully was key to my mental health.

It seemed like it was a good lockdown activity in general. Did you hear from many people wanting to learn during that time?

I sold more classes in 2020 than I ever had before. Food supplies were low, people were stuck at home bored. They were trying to pick up hobbies. And fermentation worked so well because it gave us a creative space. Again, it doesn’t require a ton of resources. And the stuff I ended up teaching the most during all of that was about using fermentation to repurpose food scraps.

Can you talk a little about the way fermentation can help make us more resilient in the face of the climate crisis, and the way it helped people survive climatic shifts in the past?

I have a lot of conversations with friends about how we grapple with our eco grief, and I find it personally very comforting to know the long history of fermentation and to see the ways in which people used these skills to help ensure that they continue to live and to thrive through pretty catastrophic times.

Right, like in the mini-ice age you described people living through in the Northern Hemisphere—they survived mostly by using fermentation.

They had this very short growing season so they had to really think about stretching out food for the winter and winter was most of the year. On the other hand, there was also a time when it was so warm in Europe that they were growing wine grapes in England. We have—just within recorded history—examples of these huge fluctuations in climate. And knowing that history really helps me feel that by sharing the traditions and these histories with people, maybe I can help them be more resilient.

Fermentation is great way to support resiliency in so many ways. If my water supply seems like it may have some pathogens in it, fermented drinks were one way that people dealt with that historically [the microbes you feed during fermentation crowd out many of the pathogens]. If my food supplies are low, and I want to make sure I have minerals this winter, I can either ferment them into sauerkraut or I can take spring greens and put them in a jar covered with apple cider vinegar, which is a really good mineral extractive. Then I have something that I can put on my food that will help nourish me, even when greens aren’t available.

When we think about how we change our relationship to the earth, and to food, really turning back to the traditional methods and to thinking about ourselves as part of the environment and part of the ecosystem—and using the way we eat and the way we prepare food, as a reflection of that—is probably our best chance.

 

RECIPE: MUSHROOM KETCHUP

The predecessor to today’s sweet and savory tomato ketchup was a fermented mushroom sauce. Inspired by fish sauce, it is made by setting out salted mushrooms overnight, then cooking them (and their juices) with spices, then straining out the mushrooms. The resulting umami-filled sauce is thin, more akin to a fish sauce than a modern ketchup. However, if you want a thicker version, you can skip the straining and put your mushroom ketchup in a blender, blending it until smooth. The recipe below is based on recipes from the 1700s. If you prefer, you can swap shallot for the onion and add mace and/or nutmeg. I encourage you to play around with using different mushrooms, as each offers its own distinct flavor profile. Shiitakes and portobellos both work great here. I especially enjoy using sustainably foraged mushrooms (make sure you properly identify them, of course), which in my area include lion’s mane, oyster, and chanterelle. Doing so gives the final ketchup the flavor of a particular time and place. I also like adding seasonal herbs (rosemary is fantastic in this) to further help my sauce speak to locale and season.

MAKES ABOUT 1/2 PINT

16 ounces mushrooms, rinsed and finely diced
1/4 cup finely groud sea salt
1/4 cup good-quality apple cider vinegar
1 small yellow onion, chopped
1 tablespoon prepared horseradish ( just the grated stuff, not the creamy stuff; see note)
1/2 teaspoon whole allspice berries
1/4 teaspoon whole cloves
1 bay leaf
Pinch of ground cayenne pepper (or a splash of fermented cayenne hot sauce, my usual go-to)

NOTE: I’ll often use homemade pickled horseradish, which I make by fermenting sliced horseradish root in brine until soft, then chopping in a food processor until smooth.

1. Combine the mushrooms and salt in a nonreactive bowl. Using your hands, toss the mushrooms until they’re evenly coated with the salt and then massage the salt into them slightly. You’ll be able to feel the liquid start to come out of them.
2. Cover the bowl and let sit at room temperature. Check the mushrooms after 20 minutes or so to make sure that they are releasing liquid. If they aren’t, add a bit more salt and massage again. Allow to sit out for around 24 hours.
3. Pour the mushrooms and their liquid into a saucepan (you’ll be amazed how much liquid they produce!). Add the vinegar, onion, horseradish, allspice, cloves, bay leaf, and cayenne. Simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, then remove from the heat and let cool.
4. Line a strainer with muslin or cheesecloth and set it in a mixing bowl. Pour the mushroom ketchup into the strainer. Wrap the cloth up around the mushroom mixture and give it a good squeeze to release the rest of its juice. (When you’re done, don’t throw out those spent mushrooms! They’re infused with a lot of tasty spices and can be dried and ground into a fantastic umami-rich seasoning blend.)
5. Transfer the mushroom ketchup to a jar or bottle and store in the fridge, where it will last for several months.

Excerpted from Our Fermented Lives © by Julia Skinner. Used with permission from Storey Publishing.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/07/07/how-the-cooperative-food-movement-is-evolving/ Thu, 07 Jul 2022 08:00:08 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47515 Suparna Kudesia, executive director and co-leader of Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, or CoFED, works with a team of people who offer just that kind of support. She joined the organization in 2018 as the director of education and became the executive director in 2020. We spoke with Kudesia about what’s at stake and what’s ahead […]

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Cooperatives are taking shape and growing in all parts of the food system. And yet, their founders are swimming upstream in an environment shaped by hierarchical business models. For this reason, learning how to run a successful co-op requires time, patience, and a team that’s willing to go the distance. It also works best when you have adequate support from those with experience working cooperatively.

Suparna Kudesia, executive director and co-leader of Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive, or CoFED, works with a team of people who offer just that kind of support. She joined the organization in 2018 as the director of education and became the executive director in 2020. We spoke with Kudesia about what’s at stake and what’s ahead for the cooperative movement, as well the work CoFED is doing to build a more just food system.

CoFED started as a network for student-led food co-ops in 2011. How has it changed and what is the organization up to now?

In 2016, after Trump came to power, there was huge momentum all over the food justice movement in more traditional spaces, which is where CoFED was sitting, and people were asking, “How do we really radicalize our work and really walk our talk?” And so we started shifting our focus and thinking about: What does it mean to actually transform the food system and look at the root causes of its problems at a systemic level? [The leaders at the time] were realizing that there’s food apartheid in the U.S., that capital and resources move around the country disproportionately, that access to land is still disproportionate for Black and Indigenous people, and the whole food system is based on the legacy of enslavement and genocide as well as the theft of land and labor and stolen wealth. And so, what does it mean to transform the food system, while also realizing that the foundation is rooted in colonial genocidal racialized capitalism?

We began looking at work all across what we call the “horizontal food axis”—all the places on the supply chain, from land stewardship and farm work all the way through food production, seed distribution, and composting to food creation and distribution to restaurant work and catering—and at this point, we basically work with all of them. In 2018, we realized there are lots of cooperative spaces in the community that really needed the support we were providing but they were not able to get it through formalized educational spaces. We decided to expand our mission, but we still focus on working with youth aged 18 to 30. And we focus on cooperatives led by people who identify as queer, trans, and nonbinary, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, as well as poor and working-class folks, folks with disabilities, caregivers, and immigrants. People who have historically experienced food apartheid and currently are experiencing it, but are working in their communities to really approach cooperative work through an asset-based approach.

Can you say a little bit more about how you work with cooperatives? What are some of the challenges that those folks see getting co-ops off the ground?

CoFED is involved with the notion of starting and scaling up co-ops, so we work with co-ops at every level. And what we’ve really realized is beyond being a co-op developer, what we really have a niche in is specifically working with collectives who are interested in saying, “We want to start a co-op and we don’t know how.” The cooperative movement and cooperative ways of working have really long history among communities of color, and among queer and trans communities, who basically have a very different, non-individualistic, collective way of moving through work and life.

We see groups coming to us and saying, “We have this idea, this dream, but we don’t know how to make it happen from A to Z.” So, we get groups who are at that nascent, beginning level. And then we get groups who are also saying, “We’ve been a co-op for the last five years, now we want to refine or really sharpen our bylaws,” or what we call “OMG”—the organizational, management, and governance structures of our cooperative. Or sometimes they come to us and say, “We’ve been experiencing this repeated conflict and [we don’t know] how to exist within late-stage, racialized capitalism. We would like some training around radical accountability and moving through this with principles of transformative justice or abolitionism.” And then we work in collaboration with these co-ops. We’re not there because we know more. We’re there because we are all in collaboration and we’re all complicit in being really able to transform this food economy.

Can you share some examples of the recent groups you have supported?

One great example is Heal With the Land. It is led by two people who attended our flagship education program, Build, Unlearn, Decolonize (BUD). They’re working to acquire land in the South, to be able to build a nature sanctuary focused on land stewardship, art, and healing space for BIPOC LGBTQIA+ folks. Ka Hale Mahiku is another example. They are a small ohana, or family farm, based in East Maui. They’re connecting farming, and then also doing a lot of housing justice and land justice work in a part of Hawaii where there is so much food apartheid and food insecurity. Catatumbo Cooperative Farms is a cooperative urban farm based in Chicago. One of its founders, Jasmine Martinez, was a racial justice fellow at CoFED in 2018 and they started Catatumbo as part of that CoFED project. [In addition to farming], they’re doing educational work that brings out and amplifies ancestral wisdom around food production, and they are guided by what it really means to be a worker-owned and -led co-op.

You mentioned horizontal food access. Cooperative food distribution and retail, cooperative farms, and cooperative restaurants have all become commonplace. What else are you seeing?

There are urban gardening co-ops, there are educational co-ops that combine working with young children and educating them about food and food justice. There are compost co-ops working toward a just transition in the face of climate change. There are also medicinal marijuana co-ops that are growing around the country right now. And there are a number of other kinds of healing-based co-ops. In the past, we worked with the Black and Brown Worker Cooperative. They’re based in Philly and do reiki and energy healing work and doula work. And so it’s not directly food justice, but to us, it is connected because if we want to grow the cooperative food movement, we have to build the larger cooperative movement.

What do you think is at stake when you’re talking about the rise of the co-op movement?

What’s at stake is our collective future. I’m a parent and a caregiver to young people who are going to inherit this planet. And the extractive, unjust, transactional, non-regenerative, violent colonial economic system that is responsible for producing and distributing food—and managing our food waste—is not sustainable. What the cooperative movement is doing is offering a viable and historically proven alternative to [changing the system] and to being in relationship with each other in our labor, as well as with the land.

What are your hopes for the future of the movement?

I have a dream space, and I know I’m not the only one who is dreaming like this, but I hope for the co-op movement to be able to realize what a phoenix it is: It’s not just something that’s coming out of the ashes of capitalism, but it is its own being that is vibrant, beautiful, capable, and worthy of growth and of its own destiny and determined paths. I hope for the cooperative movement to be the main way in which we design our lives and the way we think about healthcare, education, food, land, recreation, and joy, as well as culture and organizing work. [People in] all of those spaces can learn a lot and move much more sustainably in their own capacity, but also in the world if they can embody more cooperative principles.

The post How the Cooperative Food Movement Is Evolving appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/06/30/california-dairy-water-uses-climate-change-drought-pollution/ Thu, 30 Jun 2022 08:00:05 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=47446 This story is part of the Food & Water Joint Coverage Week of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. But dairy is, in fact, king. There are an estimated 1.7 million cows living on dairy farms in California, and the industry brought in $7.5 billion in 2020, including […]

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This story is part of the Food & Water Joint Coverage Week of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

When we picture California agriculture, we tend to think of almond and citrus orchards and the massive tracts of strawberry and lettuce fields that we can see from the highways dividing the western part of the state from the east.

But dairy is, in fact, king.

There are an estimated 1.7 million cows living on dairy farms in California, and the industry brought in $7.5 billion in 2020, including $2 billion in export sales.

And because most people in the state don’t see the abundance of dairy farms—most of them function like feedlots surrounded by fields of feed crops such as alfalfa and corn growing nearby—they may not be aware of the fact that they use millions of gallons of water a day.

As the climate crisis ramps up, California is facing its third consecutive year of drought after its driest winter conditions in 100 years, and everyone in the state has grown increasingly reliant on a rapidly shrinking quantity of groundwater. Advocates say it’s a good time to take a closer look at the water use behind your milk (and butter, cheese, etc.), how the large-scale dairy industry has impacted groundwater in the state, as well as how it affects low-income Californians, communities of color, and small-scale farms.

How Much Water Does the California Dairy Industry Use?

All dairy production requires an abundance of water. The animals drink it, but it’s also used to cool the milk, keep the dairies clean, and cool off cows in the warm months. And it’s needed to irrigate the alfalfa and other feed crops.

In a recent white paper, the advocacy nonprofit Food & Water Watch estimates that it takes 142 million gallons of water a day to maintain the dairy cows in California. “That’s more than enough water to provide the daily recommended water usage for every resident of San Jose and San Diego combined,” reads the paper.

The California dairy industry uses “more than enough water to provide the daily recommended water usage for every resident of San Jose and San Diego combined.”

The industry takes pride in the fact that much of the water used inside dairies gets recycled and used to spray manure on crops as fertilizer (as a way of managing the large quantities of waste these dairies produce). The California Milk Producers Council also recently pointed to a yet-to-be-validated study that modeled the water flow on and off a typical 1,000-cow dairy and found that while it uses 112 acre-feet a year, it “exported” 98 acre-feet in the form of spraying it on crops.

This circular logic—the idea that water use doesn’t count because it’s then used on crops to produce milk—isn’t new either. In a 2019 op-ed, Geoff Vanden Heuvel, director of regulatory and economic affairs at the Dairy Producer’s Council, wrote on the group’s website, “the actual footprint of your dairy itself—the corrals, the milking barn, the feed storage pads and feed alleys—have zero consumptive water use. The only water that is lost on a dairy operation is in the milk that is sold off the farm and the water contained in body of the cow when it is shipped off the dairy for culling.”

A milk tanker drives by a dairy feedlot in California.

The industry also points to its water efficiency improvement over time. Researchers at University of California, Davis (funded by the American Dairy Science Association), found that the water used per gallon of milk dropped by 88 percent in the 50 years between 1964 and 2014.

“That’s really because the crop yields have gone up so much in the last 60 years,” said Ermias Kebreab, associate dean for global engagement in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at U.C. Davis. “Because of genetic improvement and breeding, we’ve seen a huge increase in yields.”

“The industry likes to tout its efficiency, which I don’t disagree with. The thing that the industry doesn’t normally acknowledge is that when you increase efficiency for dairy cows, you also increase [overall] water use.”

However, the quantity of milk being produced in the state has also increased in that time. “The industry likes to tout its efficiency, which I don’t disagree with. The thing that the industry doesn’t normally acknowledge is that when you increase efficiency for dairy cows, you also increase [overall] water use,” said Michael Claiborne, a senior attorney at Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, a community-based advocacy organization located in the Central Valley.

“You have to take into consideration how much more volume is being created. So, the actual tally for water use is far more enormous than it ever has been,” says Amanda Starbuck, a researcher and policy analyst for Food & Water Watch.

“And those gains we’ve seen in dairy production are due to the fact that we have newer [dairy cow] breeds that grow faster,” adds Starbuck. “We put milk cows through cycles of pregnancy and lactation much quicker than we had in the past, and cows live shorter lives because of that, and lower-quality lives. They are bred to produce as much milk as they possibly can before they are literally taken out to pasture.”

How Did Big Dairy Get So Big in California?

Dairy production in the state goes back to the 18th century, but the quantity of mega-dairies that now operate throughout the Central Valley is a relatively recent phenomenon. Warmer weather allows for dairies that don’t have to keep their animals indoors for multiple months at a time, and that fact—combined with the speed at which alfalfa can be grown in the sunny parts of the West—have facilitated a massive shift in the industry.

In states like New York, Vermont, and Wisconsin, where many small-scale producers are closing up shop at an alarming rate, dairy operations traditionally graze their cattle on pasture for much of the year. The mega-dairies that have sprung up in states like California, Oregon, Arizona, and Idaho in recent decades, on the other hand, are mainly confinement-based, or what they call “dry lot” operations.

Meanwhile, small and medium dairies in the state have also been shutting down. From 1997 to 2017, California lost 60 percent of its dairies with fewer than 500 cows.

The bulk of the mega dairies are located in the state’s Central Valley. Tulare County, the top dairy county in the state, brought in more than $1.8 billion in dairy sales in 2020; it’s commonly known that the county is home to more cows than people.

What Does It Mean for Water?

As drought conditions have radically reduced the quantity of surface water that’s available for agriculture, mega-dairies are pumping more and more groundwater to meet their needs.

Their practice of spraying their manure on nearby crops also sends nitrogen—in the form of nitrates—back into the soil, where it eventually leaches into the groundwater. This is compounded by the nitrogen pollution from other fertilizer running off crop fields and municipal sewage systems.

“It’s a widespread issue throughout the valley. Up to 40 percent of domestic wells (and even more in some areas) are impacted by nitrate levels that are above the safe drinking water standards,” says Claiborne.

“We say water flows toward money and power. And so, you can just see that in the middle of a drought who has access to that [drilling] and those deeper wells.”

The health impacts of nitrate-polluted water are well-documented. A 2019 study found that nitrate pollution in U.S. drinking water could cause over 12,000 cases of cancer each year. And that’s not the only known health impact; elevated nitrates in water have also been linked to miscarriages, fetal deformations, and a deadly blood disorder called blue baby syndrome.

As wells all over the valley run dry (including a total of 446 so far this year), Susana De Anda, co-executive director and co-founder of the Community Water Center, points to the fact that larger agriculture operations tend to have the resources needed to access groundwater, even if it means drilling deep underground.

“When you drill deeper into our aquifers, the wells are very expensive,” says De Anda. “And those deep wells are also causing major subsidence and major pressure problems around nearby public water systems. We say water flows toward money and power. And so, you can just see that in the middle of a drought who has access to that [drilling] and those deeper wells.”

That drilling isn’t completely without limits. As the state has begun implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act—which was put in place in 2014 to ensure the protection of groundwater around the state—the dairy industry is anticipating changes related to how many crops it can produce locally. In fact, the industry recently announced the formation of a Manure Recycling & Innovative Products Task Force to address what will happen when the farms are left with more manure than crop land to spray it on.

“Competing uses for crop land, and now the limits to pumping groundwater as a result of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, have heightened the attention to the fact that there is very likely a manure surplus on many California dairies,” according to the Dairy Producer’s Council’s Vanden Heuvel. The implication is that the task force plans to export its fertilizer while importing more feed crops, raising questions about the industry’s long-term viability in the state.

How Are Communities Impacted?

Many municipal water systems in the Central Valley are so polluted with nitrates that residents have become accustomed to buying drinking water. Water stores and vending machines are a common sight in the region.

“Our poorest families are having to pay some of the highest water rates for toxic water,” says De Anda. “In some situations, they’re paying 10 percent of their household income alone on drinking water, because they’re paying for a water bill and then they still have to [pay for] bottled water.”

And, when it comes to mega-dairies, some residents deal with the impacts much more directly. Take Cristobal Chavez. He and his family moved to Porterville, California—in the southern part of Tulare County—in 2008. He had been driving trucks in Los Angeles for more than two decades and when he injured himself, he and his wife bought a small farm and took on a series of foster children in addition to their biological kids. “We wanted a quieter, safer life,” he says.

“Our poorest families are having to pay some of the highest water rates for toxic water. . . .They’re paying for a water bill and then they still have to [pay for] bottled water.”

The land they bought was across the street from a large dairy that he says was home to around 10,000 cows at the time. It may have grown since then, but he’s not sure. “There are lots of corrals. The air smells so bad you can’t leave your clothes outside.”

And they use a lot of tap water—to wash the cows, to wash [away] the manure, and it accumulates in the reservoir, says Chavez.

It wasn’t until 2014 that the Community Water Center helped him get the water in his well tested; it showed elevated, unsafe rates of nitrates. Chavez was surprised, as nitrates don’t change the taste or smell of the water.

“For years, the kids ran around and drank directly from the hose. It was nice and cold; we never noticed it was contaminated.”

His family stopped drinking the tap water at that point—like members of many communities in the San Joaquin Valley—and started relying on bottled water. But they still showered in the nitrate-contaminated water.

“Most of the people where I live have to buy their own water,” he says.

Then, Chavez’s wife was diagnosed cancer and died in December 2021. He can’t know for sure, but he wonders whether the nitrates played a role.

Now, Chavez thinks about leaving the area, possibly moving to be near his son in Indianapolis, but his property value hasn’t increased like it has in other parts of California. “People see that it’s near a dairy, so I doubt I’d be able to sell it,” says Chavez.

Cristobal Chavez. Photo by Joel Caldwell.

Advocates Want Change

Food & Water Watch wants to see California put a moratorium on the expansion of existing mega-dairies as well as permitting for new ones. “We’re not telling them to have farmers shut their doors tomorrow, but we should not be allowing mega dairies to get even bigger, and we should not be permitting brand new mega dairies in the worst water crisis that we have seen in generations,” says Starbuck. “And that could come from the California legislature, or there are national bills that have been introduced into this Congress that would do something similar, but from a national perspective, for all factory farms.”

Starbuck doesn’t believe the fault lies with individual farmers—who have had to grow their operations within the current system. “It’s not even to outcompete your neighbors, but just to be able to stop the operation from losing money. Most dairies lose money, let’s just be honest.” For that reason, change has to come at the industry level, she adds.

Food & Water Watch is one of a number of groups advocating for a return to supply management—or quotas on the amount of milk farmers can produce—within the industry, which Starbuck says would potentially bring the cost of production in line with what farmers earn.

The Leadership Council is also monitoring and opposing growth of existing dairy operations. “We’re not advocating for eliminating the industry altogether in the Central Valley, but it can’t look the way it does,” says the Leadership Counsel’s Claiborne. “We see a need for herd size reductions and far more sustainable milk production. It just can’t come at the expense of access to drinking water. And right now, that’s what’s happening.”

Currently, the Council has its eyes on two dairies in Merced County, where the group has been monitoring nitrate levels in neighborhoods near dairies and found elevated rates: north of Fresno—one where owners are trying to add 1,700 cows—and another where they’re looking to add 2,100.

Due to provisions in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the expansions trigger the need for CEQA reviews, and the Leadership Council provided comments on environmental documents. A coalition of Central Valley residents is also asking the State Water Resources Control Board to do a better job of overseeing the regional water board’s regulation of areas in the Central Valley and find ways to ensure that groundwater and drinking water resources are better protected.

What is the Dairy Industry Stance?

California Dairy, Inc.—the largest dairy cooperative in the Central Valley—didn’t respond to our request for comment. And while the National Dairy Council shared its overall sustainability goals with us, it didn’t want to comment about water use in California.

“[The industry has] acknowledged that essentially all dairies in . . . the Central Valley region are polluting groundwater actively today. They’re asking for up to 35 years to try to stop polluting. But we think it needs to happen much, much faster than that.”

However, one public document—produced by a dairy industry group as part of a monitoring program required by the Regional Water Quality Board—does tell a compelling story about Big Dairy’s role in nitrate pollution in the Central Valley. It reports on wells monitored throughout the Central Valley over a seven-year period and found “a challenge of a scale that requires thoughtful, expansive solutions backed by strategic planning, sustained effort, and long-term commitment.” The report goes on to say that “even if all farming was permanently stopped, it would take many decades for groundwater nitrate-N concentrations in the production aquifer to decline below the Maximum Contamination Limit of 10 mg/L.”

“They’ve acknowledged that essentially all dairies in California or at least in the Central Valley region are polluting groundwater actively today in a way that makes the water undrinkable,” says Claiborne. “They’re asking for up to 35 years to try to stop polluting. But we think it needs to happen much, much faster than that.”

Community Water Center’s De Anda agrees. “Do I think we’re moving in the right direction? Absolutely. We’ve come a long way,” she says. “The regional water board is saying, ‘It’s not that we’re not going to regulate nitrate pollution, it’s how we’re going to do that.’ So, there has been that shift. But it’s been a very slow shift. And, in reality, residents have been exposed to this toxic water for a long time.”

Meanwhile, the Milk Producers Council is also focused on advocating for more water storage infrastructure and ways to capture the increased rain during rare flood years.

Switching to Almond Milk?

Almond orchards cover around 1.3 million acres and account for a huge percentage of the agricultural water used in California. According to Food & Water Watch’s 2021 analysis of industry data, the industry was planning to send an estimated 1.5 trillion gallons of water to irrigate the crops that year. And while dairy operations do consume more water than almond farms do, Starbuck doesn’t think the solution to the current water shortage should rest entirely on the consumer.

“People might be on the fence about whether to drink dairy milk or almond milk. But I think some of that is just infighting between the two industries, which are competing [for resources]. It also points to the fallacy that it is within the consumer’s ability to fix this problem,” she says.

As Starbuck and other advocates we spoke to see it, changing policy and holding industry to account is far more important than any consumer choice. “I’m not saying that individual actions aren’t important,” she adds, “but we are never going to protect our resources for future generations if we don’t address these huge industries that have basically been given a green light, a free pass to use as much water as they like, however they like.”

The post California Dairy Uses Lots of Water. Here’s Why It Matters. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/05/18/what-the-rise-of-craft-sake-says-about-farming-climate-and-culture/ https://civileats.com/2022/05/18/what-the-rise-of-craft-sake-says-about-farming-climate-and-culture/#comments Wed, 18 May 2022 08:00:39 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=46870 A New York- and Toronto-based writer and editor (and an occasional Civil Eats contributor), Matsumoto has been writing about sake for around 10 years. In 2019, she and the book’s coauthor, Michael Tremblay, an expert, teacher, and official Sake Samurai, traveled through the Japanese countryside visiting small-scale breweries and rice farms, eating, drinking, and learning […]

The post What the Rise of Craft Sake Says about Farming, Climate, and Culture appeared first on Civil Eats.

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In the introduction to her new book, Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth, Nancy Matsumoto writes, “Sake embodies some of the things I love most about Japan: the contrast between old, traditional ways and endlessly imaginative reinvention, and an intense dedication to craft. Sake’s identity is inseparable from the country’s history, culture, and language.”

A New York- and Toronto-based writer and editor (and an occasional Civil Eats contributor), Matsumoto has been writing about sake for around 10 years. In 2019, she and the book’s coauthor, Michael Tremblay, an expert, teacher, and official Sake Samurai, traveled through the Japanese countryside visiting small-scale breweries and rice farms, eating, drinking, and learning about a critical moment in the history of sake production. For Matsumoto, the experience was about more than creating a snapshot of an industry—it was also about the importance of seeing sake as an agricultural product.

As Matsumoto and Trembley write, sake’s 2,600-year-old history is so intertwined with the history of Japan (and Shintoism) that it appears in the country’s foundational myths. Brewing used to occur in religious temples, and every brewery in the country still includes a small Shinto shrine. Sake has always been inextricably linked to rice farming, but the industrialization of the production process beginning in the 1950s led many Japanese consumers to stop seeing it that way. Now, that’s beginning to change.

Meanwhile, cultures outside Japan are slowly embracing sake as an alternative to beer and wine. The U.S. is now the leading export market for the beverage, making it an important opportunity to draw a connection between farm and glass.

We spoke with Matsumoto recently about heirloom rice varieties, the impacts of climate change on the sake industry, and why she believes the drink may be on the verge of a bit of an international renaissance.

One of the brewers you visit says, “post-war industrialized sake relied on petroleum-based energy and brewing materials, production machinery, chemical lactic acid, commercial use, and often rice transported from afar, resulting in a low-cost standardized brew.” He considered this entire system unsustainable and he talked about the return to traditional Edo Era techniques, which involve doing nearly everything by hand. Can you say a little about that transition and why you wanted to write about it?

We deliberately put that word “craft” in the title because we were talking about artisanal, pretty small-scale breweries. Many of them were once big breweries when sake was a much bigger domestic Japanese industry. And then, with the decline in consumption and the horrible effects of World War II, which is such a big part of the sake story, so many breweries basically went bankrupt and closed, and a common way to revive or keep a family brewery going was to scale down production and make it much more artisanal, because everything was going back to much older techniques that were done by hand as opposed to the industrialized one.

There are still huge sake makers, and it’s not really to cast aspersions on the product that they make because they have incredible technical know-how and can make beautiful sakes on a large scale. It’s sort of like large California wine makers—they know what they’re doing, and they do it well. But so many of them are going back [to old ways], and it’s a way to go back to quality.

Some really do care about the carbon footprint and the fossil fuels, but you don’t hear them talk about organics the way you hear it in the West. It’s more like, “We realized that if we go back to the wooden vats, it tastes better and it’s more natural,” or “We realized that if we want a better quality of rice and we use fewer pesticides, then we can have a habitat for native birds.” The driving force is sometimes a little bit different, but it’s the same outcome, which I really like, because they’re emphasizing quality over quantity. And they are thinking about the environment and the local economy in a way that’s going to give farmers a better market for their rice.

Japan has the same problem that every other place in the world has. Farmers are aging out, and their children don’t want to continue. So when you have, say, an heirloom rice being revived [for sake production], people have to pay a premium to get farmers to grow this because it’s hard, and they have to re-learn it. But [those brewers] are supporting the local economy and local farmers.

Can you explain why sake consumption has declined in Japan?

It goes back to the economic boom of the ’70s and ’80s when, all of a sudden, Japanese people had a lot more consumer dollars to spend, and they started getting access to foreign spirits like whiskey and French wine. These things were way sexier than sake. At that point, sake had become a not-great product, because of all the rice shortages after World War II [when it was diluted with water, distilled alcohol, glucose syrup, and other additives]. So it had this image of like, what grandpa drinks when he gets drunk at night. And it still suffers from that kind of image problem.

Another reason is young people all over the world are drinking less. There are so many things competing for their attention like video games and other screens, so they’re not really socializing as much. And COVID was horrible for [Japan’s restaurant and bar] industry.

Can you say more about those heirloom rice varieties? You talk about how some are very regional.

People all over Japan are reviving their prefectural heirloom grains. Omachi is a great example, because it grows in a very particular warm climate, in this very sheltered valley between the mountains and the Seto Inland Sea, which is very calm. Many other prefectures grow their own sake rice, but some varieties like omachi are so good that it overrides any desire to be local. It is the most expensive sake rice in the country.

Yamada Nishiki is of course the most famous [sake rice]. There’s this organic maker in Shiga, which is not that far [from where it’s traditionally grown]—they have crossed their own local breed of rice with Yamada Nishiki, so they can say, this is our own domain, our own little local sake, but it has traits like the Yamada Nishiki.

For decades [most of the farmers sold their rice] to one cooperative, Japan Agricultural Cooperative. And it is good in the sense that it’s cooperative. But now, you’re seeing more individual relationships between brewers and farmers. That also is good for the farmers, because they have a guaranteed buyer and usually a guaranteed price. And in the case of several stories of heirlooms, the brewer offers to pay a huge premium just to get these guys to grow it, because they’re reluctant at first. Then, in some cases, they’ll see that it makes an amazing sake and develop a sense of pride in it.

There’s a real difference between table rice and sake rice; sake rice usually has a much bigger, starchy heart because that’s where all the smooth aromatics come from. But you’re seeing more and more sake brewers—and it’s a really a testament to their skill—taking a very humble table rice and making amazing sake.

One of my favorite quotes was from a brewer in Nara at Yucho Shuzo. His goal is to support the local farmers that are growing this very typical table rice, but he wants to make sake so good that he elevates the price of it to be like what people would pay for Yamada Nishiki. He’s building that local economy through his brewing technical innovation and his skill. It was really thrilling to see that combination of technical expertise and people wanting to put [their skill] to work helping to revive the local farming economy.

And you are seeing some cases where the [farmers’] kids are like, “Oh, yeah, I want to do this.” It’s happening in the U.S. too. I’ve written about this farmer in Arkansas, Chris Isbell. He kind of became a celebrity in Japan because he could grow Yamada Nishiki. And omachi is so hard to grow but apparently he’s growing that, too. In some ways, he’s ahead of demand, but he’s anticipating it, because all these new breweries are opening across the U.S.

You educate your readers about how the number on a sake bottle corresponds to the rice polishing ratio, or the percent of each rice grain that has been milled away. How are brewers disrupting the typical assumptions about what makes “good” sake and working on more savory sakes with more of the grain intact?

For a long time, Daiginjo and Ginjo [premium sake styles that use a high percentages of polished rice] were the kings, and everyone was in this arms race to polish rice more and more, which was so wasteful. If you’re bragging about the fact you have a “0 percent” sake, that means like, basically over 99 percent of the rice has been milled away. What’s left might be used for animal feed or some other very low-cost purpose. These newer brewers, like the ones at Terada Honke and other people on the front end of change, are saying, “We’re only polishing 10 percent of it off, and it’s going to be really savory.”

This is sort of like the way Westerners discovered natural wine and the value of keeping the skins on the grapes and not wasting as much. The wine has a funkiness that some people couldn’t stand at first. And yet now, our tastes are shifting. To a degree, it is happening with sake, because these kinds of kimoto and yamahai brews that are old fashioned, they take a lot longer, they have natural lactic acid instead of commercial. They’re polishing it less. At Terada Honke, they’re just using brown rice, so you’ll get a cider-like, lactic, very different taste.

We talk about how we have to kind of recalibrate our notions of deliciousness. Zatsumi means “off-flavor” or “odd taste,” and in one example, brewery owner/master brewer Yoshihiko Yamamoto of Yucho Brewery in Nara, Japan—who I mentioned earlier is trying to elevate the price of his local table rice—wants us to recalibrate our brains so that we perceive certain aromas and tastes we might have described as having zatsumi instead as having fukuzatsumi, a play on the word fukuzatsu, meaning “complex” or “complicated.”

You mentioned that many of the farmers in Japan are struggling, and the next generation in many cases doesn’t see a future in farming. How is the Japanese government helping them stay afloat—considering how central rice is to Japan’s culture?

There actually is a lot of government support for research into rice varieties, creating hybrids, experimenting with growing practices, and creating new yeast varieties [for sake], because it is in their vested interest to keep this industry going. Traditionally, there have been very close ties between government and the sake industry.

When I wrote about the African farmers growing rice in the Hudson Valley, I talked to Erik Andrus, who is one of two or three people in the U.S. Northeast growing rice. He spoke enviously about Japan and how farmers there have this incredible network of knowledgeable people and government support for research. And you have all of this specialized equipment. Andrus made a connection with a farm in Hokkaido, because it’s the exact same latitude as Vermont, and he was overjoyed, because whenever he has a problem, he communicates with this rice farmer in Hokkaido, and he has learned a lot.

In Japan, [growing rice and brewing sake] is just much more of a community effort. And we really saw that when we visited the researcher who created a number of modern yeast varieties. He was working for a prefectural research institute, and he was on call for every brewer in his prefecture with questions like, “This is what’s happening to my mash—what should I do now?” So, there’s this sort of close relationship and coaching going on.

How is the climate crisis impacting the growing and brewing processes?

It’s very scary. With every farmer and every brewery that we visited, I would ask that question, and they all voiced concern about it. One of the co-op agents said, “We think about it all the time.” There’s a lot of focus on developing more heat-resistant varieties. And just like in wine production, you’re going to see more breweries farther north [where it’s cooler].

However, one brewer, who really has embraced the idea of farming as part of his practice and started a separate company to grow his own rice, talked about how in the far north, the extremes in weather are so violent that storm patterns that are more typical of Southeast Asia are becoming more and more routine. They get these really harsh rains that can wipe out crops.

There are also more of those off-the-charts heat waves, so there’s also often a need for more refrigeration because [when it’s very hot] you need to put ice in the sake mash, and invest more in refrigeration, and that’s a big drain on energy. I’ve seen a few stories about craft breweries putting in solar panels and trying to access alternative energy sources, but I think people are really going to have to think more about that, too.

Is there anything else you want to say about the future of the craft sake industry?

As someone who really has come to love these brewers and the farmers and thinks of sake as a really valuable, traditional craft to preserve, I love the idea of growing it through an international market and helping to preserve an amazing cultural tradition, but also keeping farmers working and creating a really viable agricultural product for Japan. I mean, [craft sake] is very, very niche right now. But the bigger it gets abroad, I think, the better it is for Japanese makers.

We’re seeing really interesting [cross-cultural] collaboration. For example, there’s very large brewery called Hakkaisan, and it has started a business partnership with Brooklyn Kura, which is a well-respected New York City brewery. And then there’s this other brewery called Asahi Shuzo. They make a really well-known sake brand called Dassai, and they’re opening a huge brewery right near the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York. They’re going to start a sake program at the CIA, and they’ll have CIA students come and work at the brewery so that they learn how to brew sake.

My hope is that internationally, people in Spain or France or California will soon be sitting down to dinner and say, “Should we have beer, wine, or sake tonight?”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post What the Rise of Craft Sake Says about Farming, Climate, and Culture appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/05/18/what-the-rise-of-craft-sake-says-about-farming-climate-and-culture/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2022/05/06/jorts-the-cat-jean-the-cat-labor-organizing-farmworkers-rights-labor-organizing/ Fri, 06 May 2022 08:00:25 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=46743 But Jorts and Jean aren’t merely mugging for the camera like the internet cats of yore—they’re putting their sudden stardom to use. In recent months, the cats have been sharing maps of the rapidly growing network of Starbucks unions, educating readers about unfair labor practices and the original meaning of May Day, publishing zines, and […]

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The story of Jorts and Jean started last December when two co-workers disagreed about the cats who lived at their worksite; one of them chronicled the conflict on Reddit in a humorous way that went viral and spawned hundreds of memes. Fast forward five months, and Jorts—who is large, orange, and prone to “trash can mishaps”—and Jean—a smaller, supposedly smarter, tortoiseshell cat—have become internet famous.

But Jorts and Jean aren’t merely mugging for the camera like the internet cats of yore—they’re putting their sudden stardom to use. In recent months, the cats have been sharing maps of the rapidly growing network of Starbucks unions, educating readers about unfair labor practices and the original meaning of May Day, publishing zines, and donating the proceeds to worker funds.

I do love this map https://t.co/3qH9f4qXTR pic.twitter.com/bnV95vXPwd

— Jorts (and Jean) (@JortsTheCat) May 3, 2022

And yes, they also do some posing when they get the sense that one of their nearly 200,000 followers might just benefit from an extra show of solidarity.

Civil Eats spoke with Jorts recently via Twitter DM about his hope for farmworkers in California, the under-estimated power of a soft paw, and the way all cats can benefit from just workplaces.

You signal boost a number of food and farm organizers. Why are these workers—and their rights—important to you?

Everyone eats food. Every day! How many days per year do you see a doctor? How many days per year do you need a lawyer? Now compare that to how many days you eat food. If we can’t protect the people who literally feed us, we need to take a cold hard look at what our society values.

28 cents a what now https://t.co/0xqx3D2RNy

— Jorts (and Jean) (@JortsTheCat) April 24, 2022

You’ve been focusing your attention on Gavin Newsom recently. How do you hope he responds?

I hope he signs the bill that farm workers have asked him to sign. Last year he vetoed their bill AFTER it passed the California legislature and then made up a fake day as “California Farm Worker Appreciation Day.” That’s frankly bullshit. What an empty measure and what a sign of how he sees farmworkers. He needs to listen to what farm workers say they need. They don’t need laws to appreciate them. They need laws that give them rights.

Don’t forget @GavinNewsom hasn’t supported #AB2183, a bill to give California farm workers choices to vote in union elections without being intimidated by bosses like him pic.twitter.com/RQSpX1uXIn

— Jorts (and Jean) (@JortsTheCat) April 20, 2022

In your recently sent a letter to Starbucks employees, you wrote, “sometimes the softest paw can be a claw.” Can you say more about what you meant by that?

It’s actually a reference to an old song from the IWW. It’s 100 years old! It could be interpreted in a lot of ways. It could be interpreted as a warning not to underestimate someone’s ferocity. Maybe that’s a cat, maybe that’s the working class. That’s the way the song probably meant it. I also like it because sometimes, the kindest and most righteous thing you can do is to be fierce.

Solidarity is an act of radical love. When workers build their union at Starbucks, that is an act of radical love and tenderness to future workers who they don’t even know. Reporting a bad boss to the department of labor is an act of love to workers who will be hired years from now. Soft paws need claws.

Do you see the current wave of unionizing cresting anytime soon? Or do you think it still has a way to go?

If the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was fully funded, the working class would be unstoppable.

Do you have thoughts about Twitter’s new owner and how the platform might change for accounts like yours in the coming months or years?

Jean says that Elon Musk should leave space alone. Space doesn’t need his bullshit. I think the same applies to Twitter, and who knows what he even intends to do?

What is the state of cat solidarity in 2022, and are there any rights you’d like to see expanded for people of the feline persuasion?

As cats are uniquely difficult to exploit, I think we can safely focus on policies that help everyone. For example, if people weren’t dealing with poverty and a housing crisis, fewer cats would be surrendered to shelters. Policies that provide housing and reduce poverty would help cats, too.

The post Jorts the Cat Wants You to Care About Farmworkers’ Rights appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/04/06/what-will-the-rise-of-giant-indoor-farms-mean-for-appalachian-kentucky/ https://civileats.com/2022/04/06/what-will-the-rise-of-giant-indoor-farms-mean-for-appalachian-kentucky/#comments Wed, 06 Apr 2022 08:00:06 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=46310 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, a members-only monthly newsletter from Civil Eats. To read the full issue, with exclusive reporting, interviews, photographs, and more, become a member today. Hatfield, who is 27 and has two young daughters, says before her eldest started school, the late hours weren’t so bad. Her […]

The post What Will the Rise of Giant Indoor Farms Mean for Appalachian Kentucky? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, a members-only monthly newsletter from Civil Eats. To read the full issue, with exclusive reporting, interviews, photographs, and more, become a member today.

Nancy Hatfield was working the night shift as an assistant manager at a 24-hour Shell gas station in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, when she learned that the new indoor farm—just 20 minutes away in Morehead—was hiring.

Hatfield, who is 27 and has two young daughters, says before her eldest started school, the late hours weren’t so bad. Her husband would take care of the kids at night, and she would spend the day with them before heading back to her job at 5 p.m.

“It was great,” she told me. “Then Madeline started school, and I was like, ‘If I’m at work all night and she’s at school all day, I’m never going to see her.’ And that didn’t sit well with me, so I went on the hunt for a different job.”

Now, Hatfield spends evenings with her family and days helping take meticulous care of hundreds of thousands of tomato plants in a glass-roofed greenhouse the size of 50 football fields. She started working for AppHarvest—a company she says many in the community had their eyes on—shortly after it went into production in March 2021, right before the first harvest of hydroponic tomatoes.

Appharvest’s Morehead, Kentucky, facility.

Hatfield is one of around 500 AppHarvest employees from Morehead and other nearby towns in this region of Appalachian Kentucky, a small army of plant tenders called “crop care specialists” who show up every day in brightly colored T-shirts. The jobs—which start at $13 an hour and provide health insurance and productivity bonuses—have been popular in a region where the average household income is 40 percent less than the national average, and living-wage jobs have been scarce in recent years.

For Hatfield, it was a step up. “There hadn’t been anything similar in the Morehead area,” she told me. “A lot of people either work in fast food, education, or in the medical industry. So, this gives people an option in the agriculture field, without having a degree.”

Hatfield is also missing a hand, so her job options have been limited. And yet, when we spoke, she described with enthusiasm the way she one-handedly removes suckers from the tomato plants—which can grow as tall as 40 feet under a combination of natural light, LEDs, and high-pressure sodium lights—to ensure that the plants’ energy goes into creating trusses, or clusters of tomatoes. Hatfield hopes it leads to more opportunities with the company. But for now, she says, she likes caring for the plants much better than overseeing a convenience store.

The other AppHarvest workers I met at the Morehead facility—a sleek, 3 million-square-foot building made up of several conjoined Dutch-style greenhouses surrounded by picturesque rolling hills—echoed Hatfield’s experiences. And it’s not hard to see why the whole operation has inspired a combination of awe and optimism for both residents and visitors.

Inside the temperate greenhouse, long rows of plants—720,000 in total growing in small cakes of substrate—flank a center walkway, and the light, when it filters through the glass roof, is refracted, diffusing and softening the shadows. A 44 million-gallon retention pond lies alongside the far end of the building, collecting rainwater and cycling it through to the plants and back out again in a closed loop.

And while it’s one of a handful of high-tech indoor farming operations that have garnered glowing media attention and massive venture capital investments in recent years, the majority of the others have built locations in urban areas first and then begun to add more rural, less coastal locations. Take Aerofarms’ indoor warehouse operation in Danville, Virginia (population 42,000), or Bright Farms’ greenhouse in Wilmington, Ohio (population 12,000), for example.

An Appharvest employee helping tend tomatoes.

AppHarvest, on the other hand, has been rooted to rural Kentucky from the start. CEO and founder Jonathan Webb grew up in the state and returned a few years ago after working in renewable energy development in New York and Washington, D.C., including a stint with the Department of Defense. He says he turned to the burgeoning world of indoor agriculture as a solution to climate change and an alternative to conventional farming, or what he calls “dirty agriculture.”

He points to three reasons he has chosen Appalachian region: As one of the wettest states in the U.S., it has abundant rainwater that the company hopes can make it resilient in the face of climate change; it’s located a day’s drive from nearly 70 percent of the U.S. population; and it’s a place where people are hungry for jobs.

When the tobacco and apparel industries left the region and coal shifted course to mountaintop removal, which requires much less human labor than traditional mining, a whole generation was left in the lurch. Some people picked up and left rural Kentucky, and many who stayed found work for remote call centers, meat processing facilities, and prisons.

Webb, who can talk at length about the region’s tenacity, describes Appalachian Kentucky as “a prime candidate to reshape labor practices in agriculture.”

And the company, which went public in February 2021 and has had a rocky start on the market, has big plans to expand. In 2018, it received its seed funding from the Rise of the Rest seed fund, the effort founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case and Hillbilly Elegy author-turned prospective-U.S. Senator J.D. Vance with the stated intention to bring more technology companies to rural areas. It has raised more than $500 million since then, thanks in part to Martha Stewart, who has been an early champion and board member.

Three new greenhouses are currently under construction, and the company plans to have a total of 12 by 2025, including two more on the land in Morehead. And while tomatoes are the sole product now, there are more on the way, including salad greens and strawberries.

AppHarvest is also part of a larger effort to attract more agtech businesses to the state—and that might be another thing that drew Webb to Kentucky: The state provides tax credits, bonds, and other financial support for incoming companies, and its leaders have taken a particular shine to the idea of agtech as a larger economic solution. (AppHarvest claims it hasn’t received any tax incentives to date.)

“There’s no way to get to a 2050 or 2075 world that does not include what we’re doing here. Hard stop.”

Governor Andrew Beshear has been so inspired by the promise he sees in AppHarvest, and the industry at large, that he has developed plans to make Kentucky “America’s agritech capital,” including a collaboration with the Dutch government and 16 other organizations, as well as an official advisory council.

“When Toyota Motor Company set up in Scott County in the mid-1980s, few could imagine the number of jobs and the economic activity, both directly and indirectly, that would flow from that one plant,” said Beshear when he toured AppHarvest’s Morehead facility in early 2021. “We see the same path for AppHarvest and others: investments that will grow over time into powerhouse economic engines for our state.”

Kentucky also boasts the “lowest electricity rates in the Eastern U.S.” as a selling point for those looking to build new agtech operations in the state. Of course, it’s also worth noting that almost 70 percent of the Kentucky’s electricity was generated by burning coal in 2020.

AppHarvest’s current iteration—which involves many human hands on each plant—isn’t permanent. And that’s key to the promise the company has made to investors; the cost of labor has to come down pretty radically in order to make a produce farm a smart investment—and that’s where automation enters the picture. Last April, the company acquired Root AI, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to create farming robots.

Is it possible to simultaneously boost the economy, provide good jobs, and move toward automation? And what do massive investments in indoor agriculture mean for independent farmers in the state’s burgeoning local food economy? Furthermore, what can AppHarvest illuminate about how the current wave of indoor farming operations stands to impact rural places?

These are the questions I set out to answer when I visited the farm in December.

A Grand Vision

When I spoke with Webb a few years ago, shortly before AppHarvest broke ground in Morehead, I was struck by his intense, verbose visioning.

Then in early December 2021, we sat around a fire pit in front of the large RV he lives in with his wife on the AppHarvest campus. It was early in the morning and the frost that had settled overnight was melting and turning to steam in the bright, late-autumn sunshine. The effect gave Webb—in a wool plaid button-down with his hair cropped at his shoulders—an almost oracle-like quality.

Jonathan Webb inside his company’s mobile greenhouse, designed to teach the community about CEA and healthy eating.

Webb effusively shared his philosophy—and the fact that he sees his company’s produce as displacing not the local farms in the area but the “dirty agriculture” grown on large, conventional operations in California and Mexico, and points to the fact that many farmworkers face demanding, inhospitable working conditions and have limited rights.

“In 2021, why do we have people bending over in the fields breaking their backs and using harsh chemicals? I mean, we should all be just ashamed. It’s deplorable,” he said. “If you work in agriculture, you should be glorified. So, building a model around that shouldn’t be that out there. Ultimately, if we want to make any progress on the environmental stuff, [treating workers well] has to be a core piece of it. [We provide] living wages, healthcare, everybody has stock in the company. You’re making an investment in a person who is ultimately going to help you in the long run.”

This ethos was evident in the testimony of the AppHarvest workers I was given access to. Take David White, a father of five in his 50s who works as a crop care specialist. “I’ve had just about every job,” he said. “I’ve been a forest firefighter, a heavy equipment operator, an EMS [emergency medical service] worker.” Just before he was hired at AppHarvest, White worked at a meat processing facility in Owingsville, Kentucky, where he made sausage for Hillshire Farms and other big brands. This job is a clear improvement, he said.

“I’ve always liked messing around with plants,” he said, adding that he learned a lot from his grandparents, who were gardeners. White was an early AppHarvest hire who had gone through two harvests by the time we spoke, and told me he had recommended the job to several other people who now work alongside him. “It’s a good place to be for people who want to work,” he said.

David White.

Elaine Manning, a woman who looked to be in her 50s and had spent her early years in the army before moving home to care for her ailing father, was more effusive about the job.

“Honestly, I would have been a janitor to get my foot in the door,” Manning said. She added that she supports “the mission Jonathan has for this company, and how he wants to be sustainable and take care of the world, and not have our dependence lie with Canada and Mexico.” After a year working as a crop care specialist, Manning moved into a supervisory role.

“I was raised on a farm, and I still live at the home place built by my grandfather. Dad was a tobacco farmer. This is entirely different than what I was raised with, but I think my dad would be proud,” she added.

More Control, Fewer People

Webb and the team at AppHarvest see controlled environment agriculture (CEA), or hydroponic indoor food production, as the only way to feed a world where climate change is ushering in one weather extreme after the next. In addition to providing a way to move away from relying on drought-prone California for water-intensive crops, the industry also sees this approach as a way to protect crops from things like heat waves and floods.

“Honestly, I would have been a janitor to get my foot in the door.”

“Our country is packaging up water in an area that doesn’t have it and shipping it to the East Coast, where we have tons of water. Structurally, it’s broken; it’ll collapse upon itself,” said Webb, who added, “There’s no way to get to a 2050 or 2075 world that does not include what we’re doing here. Hard stop.”

Of course, the question of energy use—and the resulting carbon footprint—is a big one when it comes to indoor agriculture, and it certainly complicates Webb’s insistence on CEA as a climate solution. While Dutch greenhouses do utilize sunlight very efficiently, reducing the footprint of greenhouses compared to some other forms of indoor farming, energy use has long raised big questions for critics of the industry.

In 2020, AppHarvest released a sustainability report estimating that its use of LEDs had helped it cut electricity consumption by 20 percent, but it’s not clear how its increased use of robotics will impact the overall picture. And although the company says it’s working on a long-term plan to buy renewable electricity, it’s still reliant on that low-cost coal-fired power.

The company told Civil Eats that each pound of tomatoes it produces results in 3.8 pounds of CO2 emissions, a number that appears to be much higher than most field-grown tomatoes. It also says it plans to see the number go down as productivity rises.

How to put that number in context? One estimate that 1.4 pounds of emissions are produced for every pound of tomatoes grown, but that likely includes both field grown and greenhouse grown tomatoes. Meanwhile, a recent study of both types of tomato production in Washington state found that, “the GHG footprint in [high-tech greenhouses] was 18 times that of the OF [open field] system.”

Josh Lessing, the founder of Root AI and AppHarvest’s chief technology officer, also points to climate as a central motivator for the work. “As we start looking at uncertainty, due to climate change and access to food, we can instead have a food utility that lives outside of major cities and has year-round production,” he said.

But it’s also about creating a much more predictable, controlled industry, said Lessing, who has worked in various roles related to indoor agtech and said he had partnered with several of the Dutch companies that pioneered the greenhouses.

The goal, he said, is guaranteed production year-round, and a system that allows “visibility into when that food is going to be available. We have that ability for a manufacturing plant, we know when we get cars, shampoo, razor blades. We should hold food to the same standard, because frankly, it’s more important,” said Lessing.

CTO Josh Lessing (left), and Geof Rochester, a member of the Appharvest Board of Directors.

“We know full well that’s what transformed heavy industry and manufacturing—the ability to go online and order a good and have it show up at your house the next day,” added Lessing. “And we’re dedicated to standing that up for farming.”

AI robotics is one piece of that puzzle; a portion of the tomatoes in the Morehead greenhouse is already tended to by robotic harvesters. Soon, he said, the robots will use computer vision and deliver data-driven insights for the nearly 80 miles of crop rows.

Will that shift involve replacing people? Not the ones already on staff, said Lessing, since the technology will rely on humans to oversee and work with it. But as the company scales up significantly, the number of employees won’t scale at the same rate. It currently plans to hire another 500 people (the same number it relies on to run the Morehouse facility) to staff its next three farms.

“An important thing that we’re learning as an industry is that collaborative workflows—where people work with robots—create amazing efficiencies and productivity,” said Lessing. “Part of doing that, we’re starting to train up people on all of this technology, because besides the fact that it’s very needed and wanted, it also fulfills our commitment to the community, which is to deliver a lot of on-the-job training, and upskilling the workforce.”

Webb, for his part, stressed that people who work as technicians on robots will also likely command higher salaries than those working with the plants. “And because we’re starting an industry that doesn’t exist, it’s not like we’re displacing jobs,” he said.

But not everyone agrees with that both/and framing. And not everyone agrees a whole new industry is what’s needed to bring prosperity to Appalachian Kentucky.

Creating Local Farmers or Competing with Them?

A whole subset of very vocal organic farmers have responded to the rise of hydroponic farming—objecting to the fact that the practice doesn’t focus on building soil—and the larger trend toward industrial-scale operations. And while AppHarvest isn’t certified organic at this point, the certification doesn’t appear to be off the table for the company either. Webb clearly wants to be seen as complementing the work of small-scale, local farmers.

“If we can grow it outdoors, if we can do it year-round, by all means that is what we should be doing. We should be getting soil health back, we should be getting microbes back into the soil. But this is taking pressure off the open field,” he said.

Martin Richards, the executive director of Kentucky’s Community Farm Alliance (CFA), has watched AppHarvest’s entry into the local marketplace closely and has met with Webb several times.

He was initially supportive of the company and believed Webb when he said he didn’t want to compete with local farmers. But then the company signed a distribution deal with Mastronardi, the “largest producer and distributor of greenhouse-grown produce in North America.”

Now, the produce it grows ends up wherever Mastronardi wants to sell it, including an array of grocery stores in Eastern Kentucky, where the tomatoes (and soon greens and strawberries) may be the recipient of the Kentucky Proud label or available to low-income shoppers looking to double the value of their dollars by buying local through the Kentucky Double Dollars program. Martin said both opportunities are the product of years of work by CFA to develop a market for locally produced food after tobacco left the region.

“[In the 1990s], we started thinking, if not tobacco, what’s next?” he recalled. Then, in 1998, the attorneys general of 46 states sued the four largest cigarette manufacturers in the U.S. to cover Medicare costs related to smoking in the Master Settlement Agreement. Kentucky is on track to receive an estimated $2.5 billion over 25 years.

“At that time, CFA and a whole lot of other ag organizations rallied together and passed House Bill 611, which devoted half those funds into diversifying agriculture,” said Martin. “And suddenly, farmers and communities had the resources to start building a different kind of agriculture in Kentucky.”

It took time, but it worked. Appalachia has long been home to diversified agriculture, and permaculture and forest farming—of mushrooms, ramps, medicinal herbs, and ginseng—have both grown in popularity. In addition to growing vegetables in high tunnels, Martin said CFA members are investing in small-scale livestock operations, growing more fruit and berries, and tapping their trees for maple syrup.

Appharvest’s greenhouses from above.

In recent years, demand for local food has grown to the point where today it is greater than the production, adds Martin. Farmers in the region have been slow to adapt to the idea that they can produce food for local markets, but they’re catching on, he adds. And the pandemic sped the process along, as consumers in the state enabled the growth of all kinds of new markets and infrastructure.

“And then comes along a startup entity with hundreds of millions of dollars to put up a large-scale greenhouse,” Martin added.

AppHarvest is far from alone in benefitting from the larger push for local produce. In fact, nearly every indoor farming operation markets its products as local, despite the term originating with an ethos that was more focused on small-scale field production—and the farmers’ markets, CSAs, and farm stands where the food they grow is typically sold. But the waters have been muddied over the course of the last decade, as “local” has been used to imply everything from more nutritious to more sustainable to more American.

Ultimately, Martin said he’s concerned that AppHarvest’s local sales—and its wider approach—could impact the future of Kentucky farmers. “This is the country we live in; it’s based on capitalism. AppHarvest and the other [indoor farming] operations in Kentucky are perfectly free to do all this. If they can raise hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and satisfy them by a return on investment, that’s all fine and good. But it comes down to a question of scale. And who is this building wealth for?”

He’s worried by early signs that the company plans to compete for federal or state-level funding that he believes should go to diversified Kentucky farmers.

The Future of a Battered Region

AppHarvest is also thinking about the future of Kentucky farmers—but in a very different way. In 2018, before it built its first greenhouse, the company announced its presence in the region by launching an AgTech feeder program based on container farms built in shipping containers that has since expanded to serve 12 high schools around the region. Last year, it partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build one of the farms.

The company’s hope is that educating kids in container farming will prepare them for promising careers in agtech.

“Schools need people, hospitals need people, businesses need people. It starts and ends with people. And if we continue to shed population like we have, we will continue to be in a spiral.”

“It’s an emerging industry. And it’s the supply chain that we could own upstream and downstream from that, that could result in more opportunities for Eastern Kentuckians,” said Colby Hall, executive director of at Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR), a nonprofit that works to fill the economic gaps left by the decline in human labor in the coal industry.

This is key, says Hall, because after coal industry workers lost their livelihoods, many of them moved away. So while Kentucky’s urban and peri-urban counties are growing in population, the state’s Appalachian counties are shrinking—some by double digits in the 2020 census. “Schools need people, hospitals need people, businesses need people. It starts and ends with people. And if we continue to shed population like we have, we will continue to be in a spiral,” he added.

Appalachia is indeed a unique region. It has long seen a lower-than-average investment in education, and people there face ongoing challenges with substance use and mental health as well as a range of other stark public health issues. But reductive ideas about the people of Appalachia and the age-old narrative that all it needs is a large company to swoop in and save the day are deeply intertwined.

In his 2017 book, Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia, Steven Stoll, professor of history at Fordham University, writes about how the area was “locked into an enduring association with poverty and backwardness” in part as a strategy by the coal and lumber industries to plunder the land—much in the way the white settlers had first taken it from five tribal nations in the region: the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek.

“Aspersions of stupidity, backwardness, primitivism, and volatility coincided with the seizure of the environment. Inventing a race of people and depriving them of land not only required the force of law, it required a story,” writes Stoll in the book.

And while the isolation of people there—largely because of the mountainous geography—was a much-described characteristic, he writes, “industry had no problem finding what it wanted and removing it. Corporations lay track to thousands of hollows and pulled billions of dollars in lumber and coal from the region. . . . Still, those searching for the cause of poverty in Appalachia—throughout the 20th Century and even today—blame isolation.”

In today’s context, Stoll said in a recent phone interview, the question is whether companies like AppHarvest and Mastronardi (which announced in December that it is investing in expanding CEA operations in Central America) are approaching Appalachia like they do the developing world.

“People there compose this huge unemployed labor army,” said Stoll. “And they’re an opportunity for someone who wants to come in and pay them very little to make an enormous amount of money off of their labor, by attaching them to ever more powerful machines. The key to this is that it has to be deskilled. And I say that not because the people there are not capable of great things, but because it is one of the most undereducated places in the United States.”

“The region and its people have always been in this exploitative relationship, except when they completely controlled their own land and their own destiny and hunted and farmed,” Stoll said. “I’m not proposing a quick return to that. But there would be ways of addressing the poverty of the region in such a way that it gave land back to people and let them make choices about it. And I happen to know a lot of people there want that.”

Adam Hudson knows the possibilities of independent farming in Appalachia well. He’s the director of Refresh Appalachia, a program that provides on-the-job agricultural training for people who need a second chance or a secure vocation. The trainees in his program raise food in high tunnels and on small, diverse operations—and learn everything from how to start seeds to washing, packaging, and warehousing, and some go on to start their own operations.

Since the landscape doesn’t lend itself to wide swaths of flat land, commodity crops are less common. For that reason and others, Hudson said, “Appalachian farmers are overlooked by most of the country. And yet if you come here, there’s a lot going on—from the hillsides to the stream banks, there’s someone trying to grow something or produce something that they can turn around and sell to somebody.”

He’d like to see more resources for independent farmers, as the region emerges from an era dominated by coal.

“We’re trying to work out how to break a generational cycle of poverty. We don’t want to produce a crop at a low cost and then not pay the person who’s producing it anything, and then ship it out of the region,” he said. “It’s just the same thing as coal. It’s extraction. Except sometimes at even lower margins.”

“The problem,” said Hudson, “is that too many people will come into the region with solutions. But they’re not coming in and asking, ‘How can I help?’ Instead, it’s, ‘Here’s how I’m going to help.’” He’s intrigued by the idea of automation and agtech, but he wonders if it will ever be made accessible to independent farmers in the region. “Are we thinking about the small enterprise that’s at $50,000, and with a little bit of automation and capital could be at $100,000 a year?”

FCA’s Martin wonders whether AppHarvest may eventually pivot to provide the Dutch technology that would allow others to build greenhouse operations in Kentucky. So far there’s no sign that the company plans to work with independent farmers, but prefers a factory-like model with employees. And both Webb and Lessing mentioned wanting to scale the work globally.

To Martin, the core question is: What is farming? “For me, and other folks who have similar values, it’s about stewardship of land, air, water, and biodiversity,” he said.

And yet, that question may be nested inside so many others that pertain to the rise of indoor agriculture: Should we focus on producing food by any means necessary, as efficiently as possible—like cars, shampoo, or razor blades? Or is it just one more effort in an endless drive to extract capital for investors? And perhaps most importantly—should the future of farming be unrecognizable to the people who know its past?

The post What Will the Rise of Giant Indoor Farms Mean for Appalachian Kentucky? appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2022/04/06/what-will-the-rise-of-giant-indoor-farms-mean-for-appalachian-kentucky/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2022/03/08/perfect-day-whey-protein-alternative-dairy-nut-milk-consumers-ice-cream/ https://civileats.com/2022/03/08/perfect-day-whey-protein-alternative-dairy-nut-milk-consumers-ice-cream/#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:00:42 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=45898 “They would open their fridge and it was stacked with all of these plant-based options that were fine, right?” Nikki Briggs, Perfect Day’s vice president of corporate communications, told the local publication Berkeleyside last year. “But it just wasn’t the same thing as stretchy cheese on pizza, or silky yogurt, or creamy ice cream.” The […]

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When Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi stopped eating dairy around a decade ago, they found themselves at a loss to try to replace the creamy consistency associated with the milk and cheese they had grown up eating. In the ensuing years, the pair founded a startup called Muufri—which has since been renamed Perfect Day—dedicated to creating “dairy without the cows.”

“They would open their fridge and it was stacked with all of these plant-based options that were fine, right?” Nikki Briggs, Perfect Day’s vice president of corporate communications, told the local publication Berkeleyside last year. “But it just wasn’t the same thing as stretchy cheese on pizza, or silky yogurt, or creamy ice cream.”

The answer, Pandya and Ghandi decided, was to replicate the protein found in whey using precision fermentation to make products that are strikingly similar to “the real thing.”

And, by many accounts, that plan seems to be going well for the company. Perfect Day provides its whey protein to existing food company “partners”—such as Graeter’s ice cream and General Mills, which uses it in its animal-free Bold Cultr cream cheese. The company also has its own consumer packaged goods (CPG) arm, called The Urgent Company, which has so far unveiled both an ice cream brand (Brave Robot) and a cream cheese brand (Modern Kitchen). Over the course of the last two years, Perfect Day has accumulated $750 million in funding. In November, it revealed a potential partnership with Starbucks and then, in December, The Urgent Company acquired the ice cream brand Coolhaus.

Although Perfect Day—which received its first $2 million investment in 2014—has been a kind of pioneer in the space, it’s now one of a handful of companies making lab-produced milk. Competitors like Imaginedairy and RealDeal Milk all appear to be using a similar fermentation process. According to a 2020 report from the trade group the Good Food Institute, three quarters of precision fermentation companies are working on dairy. That may be because meat produced through cellular agriculture may ultimately be too costly to make it worth doing at scale. Or it may be that lots of consumers dream of a way around the pitfalls of dairy, but can’t break the habit.

Either way, “there is a real revolution going on here,” Jim Mellon, a biotech investor and the author of Moo’s Law: An investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution, said about the trend when speaking to New Scientist last August.

And yet while these “animal-free” dairy brands are promising lower-carbon, kinder products through technology, they may also be benefiting from the fact that most consumers know little to nothing about the science it relies on. And a number of the scientists and food system advocates Civil Eats spoke to worry that a loophole at the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration (FDA) has allowed the company to declare its own products safe, despite being an ultra-processed food made with a novel set of proteins that have never before been on the market. There are also big questions about whether Perfect Day and its peers are simply providing a very expensive distraction from other more—to use their own word—urgent systemic solutions.

Or, as Anna Lappé, sustainable food advocate and author of Diet for a Hot Planet (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), put it in a recent interview about the phenomenon: “I don’t think the conversation about alternative meat and dairy should take the place of the important conversation about how dominant the meat and dairy industry is, how it needs to be regulated better. We’re not going to take on that corporate power by choosing a different [product] in the marketplace.”

Perfect Day’s Promises

Although Perfect Day was founded by dedicated vegans, and promises consumers a “kinder world” on its website, the company’s marketing doesn’t share facts or spend time talking in detail about factory animal farming. Instead, it’s positioning itself in a more neutral way that might appeal to omnivores as well as vegans.

“We hear from vegans all the time who love our products, but our target consumer is really any food lover who wants to reduce their environmental footprint,” said Tim Geistlinger, Perfect Day’s chief scientific officer.

Indeed the company says its supply chain results in as much as 97 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional milk. According to Briggs, if just 5 percent of the dairy industry replaced the whey in their products with Perfect Day’s, it would save 12.3 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions or the “equivalent to the carbon emitted from every single car registered in the city of Los Angeles.”

Perfect Day also provides its own detailed life cycle analysis (LCA) of the powdered whey protein on its website, where it claims to use less “blue water” and use 60 percent less nonrenewable energy than traditional milk production. When the company released the 2021 LCA— which was created for Perfect Day by WSP, a global engineering and infrastructure company and reviewed by a panel of experts—Leonardo DiCaprio applauded the company’s “forward-looking vision.”

However, Alastair Iles, associate professor of Sustainability Transitions at the University of California, Berkeley, is skeptical of the company’s claims, in part because they’re so dramatic.

“Biotech fermentation manufacturing can use up a lot of water and lead to significant wastewater pollution,” says Iles. “The centrifuge and drying parts will also use a lot of energy. This is why I would be a bit wary of a life cycle assessment that makes the big claims that the company does.” Case in point, while the LCA claims the emissions are reduced by anywhere from 85 to 97 percent, the company has chosen to use the largest number in its materials. And while the analysis is “based on projected production at a co-manufacturing site in the U.S.,” Geistlinger told Civil Eats that the company produces “our protein at a number of large food manufacturing sites globally.”

“We work with our co-manufacturers to ensure consistency regardless of where our protein is being produced, so our LCA is an accurate reflection of our protein production process,” he added. “That being said, we do plan to conduct additional analyses to even more deeply understand how aspects like geography may impact how we are creating a kinder, greener tomorrow and how we maximize that impact.”

Transparency and GRAS

On a weekday in December, the Perfect Day offices, located in an industrial neighborhood in West Berkeley, are nearly empty. After giving a reporter a short tour of the laboratory and test kitchen, Geistlinger offers up a tasting of the surprisingly creamy Modern Kitchen cream cheese on crackers.

“We want to be very transparent,” he said. “We want people to understand what we do and how it’s very much building on what the food industry has been doing for over 40 years, but we’re taking the next step.”

Geistlinger also stressed the fact that Perfect Day is using the same percentage of protein that you’d find in traditional dairy. “We want it to be the same as what the animal is offering. Most vegan products are very low on protein—they’re mostly starches and gums—but we’re matching [dairy] on protein, because we don’t want customers to feel like they’re cheated on that,” he said. 

That protein ferments in giant vats similar to the way beer does, but the process differs greatly from what most consumers think of when they hear the word “fermentation.” That’s because it involves genetically modifying a type of fungi similar to yeast (with genetic code from an online database) in a solution with sugar so that it excretes something called Beta-lactoglobulin. Then it’s spun in a centrifuge and dehydrated before combined with water and fats like coconut oil to create a “milk.”

Iles describes Beta-lactoglobulin as “a key part [but not the only part—perhaps 65 percent] of cow whey. It’s the milk skin that forms on top of a drink when heated.” But Iles and others we spoke to have some questions about the fact that the ingredient is allowed to be sold in food due to the FDA’s Generally Recognized as Safe or GRAS regulations, and it harkens back to debate about another ingredient in a meat alternative—the heme Impossible Foods makes using genetically engineered yeast.

“GRAS is now a way for food companies to quickly secure regulatory approvals of new food ingredients, as companies have more scope to make their own determinations and to provide the information they want to provide to the FDA. Plenty of food additives have been given GRAS status without real scrutiny; some may be quite safe for people to eat, but others might not be,” says Iles.

Perfect Day sent FDA a GRAS notice—essentially explaining why they believe their new form of whey protein is safe. Then in March of 2020, they were informed that the agency “had no questions,” meaning it wouldn’t contest the use of the ingredients.

“We’re giving a microorganism the instructions on how to make a protein it wouldn’t normally make,” said Geistlinger.

But not everyone sees it that way. “Their basic argument is that because fungus-made whey is chemically identical to animal-made whey, it should therefore be approved. This also seems to be the FDA’s reasoning, but it’s based on the company’s argument,” says Iles.

“They’re assuming that because the amino acid is the same, nothing else has changed,” said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports. “Could this product that they’re producing have a different impact on gut microflora, for example, compared to a whey protein from a cow? The answer is, we don’t know. At the DNA level, it’s different.”

For this reason, Hansen says, “It would seem appropriate that these products be treated like new food additives.” And yet, at the same time, he believes the fact that Perfect Day is submitting GRAS notices at all is worth noting. Because the GRAS process is voluntary, “there could be companies out there putting these kinds of products into their foods without letting anybody know.”

That’s why Hansen and others in the public health and food safety fields have concerns about the GRAS that extend far beyond Perfect Day. The Center for Food Safety and the Environmental Defense Fund sued the FDA over the GRAS rule in 2017, and a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit last October. Lawmakers have also introduced bills in Congress that would require the agency to study and reassess the chemicals used in foods.

The company acknowledges that allergies are a concern for those who might mistake the product for dairy-free. It has worked with the Food Allergy Research & Resource Program at the University of Nebraska and includes an allergen warning on the front of packaging, in addition to the mandated back of package warning.

“We do not plan to do human testing because our whey protein is bioidentical to traditional whey protein which has been a staple of diets for centuries,” Geistlinger said. “Additionally, precision fermentation has been used safely for over five decades to create the majority of food enzymes, like rennet used for cheese manufacturing globally, and other common food staples.”

Michele Simon, a public health attorney and the former executive director of the Plant Based Foods Association, compares the way companies like Perfect Day use terms like “precision fermentation” to earlier attempts seed and pesticide companies made to obfuscate the fact that they were using new, unknown technology to breed GMO seeds.

“In the Monsanto era, the biotech industry did a great job in getting the federal government to not require companies that use genetic engineering to label their products accordingly,” says Simon, “That’s been the history of the FDA for decades.” Last June, she penned a LinkedIn article examining Perfect Day’s “rush to market” with the Brave Robot ice cream and pointed to their use of the term “vegan friendly” despite the fact that it is made with whey. In it, she called out the brand’s narrative: “This messaging, attempting to justify a new form of biotechnology by comparing it to age-old food-making techniques should sound familiar,” Simon writes. “It’s from the Monsanto playbook.”

Replacing Factory Farming?

The market for plant-based alternatives is growing as more than 52 percent of Americans say they are eating more of these foods. But it’s not exactly clear whether new high-tech alternatives will actually lead to a reduction in overall consumption of factory farmed meat and dairy. In fact, overall U.S. meat consumption appears to have gone up slightly between 2020 and 2021. Overall dairy consumption has also increased more or less consistently since 2002.

“These companies will tell you they’re on a mission to displace dairy, but they can’t explain how putting out GMO protein products is displacing anything in the food system,” said Simon, who is an outspoken vegan. “Is Starbucks going to stop serving dairy now? The only way to save the nation from the damages of dairy production is to get a company to stop serving the harmful dairy.”

And not everyone wants to see all dairy displaced. For instance, Iles says that while the current model of industrial animal agriculture isn’t sustainable, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t move in that direction.

“Dairy has become very intensive, dependent on energy-consuming technologies, building much more massive cow herds than before, and using feed sourced from soybeans. At the same time, animals are central to sustainable agriculture. Not only can they contribute important inputs to a farm, they support a functioning farm ecosystem and help support a diversified farming system. So reducing—not eliminating—dairy milk would be a good idea.” He also points to the plight of farmers in places like Wisconsin, which lost 10 percent of its dairy farms in 2019 alone. “We need more support for those farmers to survive and to practice sustainable agriculture,” adds Iles.

“It’s important to not fall into a binary—that we have to choose between horrific factory farming or problematic GMOs,” says Dana Perls, the food and technology program manager at Friends of the Earth. “There are very sustainably grown, organic, plant-based proteins. There are also very well managed, pasture-based production systems that have been providing a very critical alternative to factory meat and dairy,” she added.

And while Perfect Day doesn’t make big health claims, it isn’t clear that most consumers see meat alternatives as the heavily processed products they are.

“In recent years, ultra-processed foods have emerged as a major concern for public health experts,” said Iles. “Even if the [dairy products] are not in the same category as, say, packaged meals, it still amounts to a model of food production that is in the same line as the industrial foods we’ve been eating for decades,” he said.

Looking to a Perfect Future

While Perfect Day has made itself at home in the dairy aisle, it’s also hoping to work with food manufacturers to include its whey in products typically found in a wide range of other parts of the store.

“We’ve already seen what our protein can do in replacing the equivalent of three eggs in cake mix and giving performance nutrition to athletes in protein powder, and our food team has created prototypes of everything from salad dressings to whiskey sour mixes to confectionary treats and beyond,” said Geistlinger. “We’re just getting started with whey.”

Many alt-protein brands have been acquired by large meat and dairy corporations in recent years —and Anna Lappé says that trend raises big questions about the potential for systems change.

“These products become a profit-generating portion of a portfolio for a company that can use that profit and invest it back into its highly environmentally destructive industrial meat and dairy production and expand those throughout the world as they continue to do,” says Lappé.

But that’s not Perfect Day’s plan.

“Our business model exists to help make other brands, big and small, kinder and greener,” Senior Corporate Communications Manager Anne Gerow told Civil Eats. “We aim to make our supply chain more resilient through partnerships with companies who want to use our protein or technology as part of their sustainability commitments, and [we] are not looking to be acquired by them.”

Nonetheless, Iles says he’s curious about whether the company plans to patent its manufacturing process. “A lot of the new technologies are more about creating valuable IP than anything else, if you look deeper,” he added.

And in the end, most of the critics we spoke to saw Perfect Day as representative of a much larger pattern: A reliance on new products and technology as silver bullets at a time when much larger change is needed.

For starters, that means relying less on dairy and meat as the basis of the American diet—regardless of how it’s made. “If Americans just ate—even if it was still terrible, factory-farmed meat and dairy—the amount of protein that was aligned with what our bodies can use and what science says is best for our health, there would be a dramatic reduction in the demand for meat in this country,” said Lappé.

It also means holding the companies that make our food to account rather than crossing our fingers that the next company will make better choices in a minimally regulated industry.

“We don’t need to hold out hope around being able to scale up a new technology,” said Lappé. “What we really need is the political will to take the kind of regulatory action needed and put pressure on corporations to clean up their supply chains.”

Tilde Herrera contributed reporting.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/03/08/perfect-day-whey-protein-alternative-dairy-nut-milk-consumers-ice-cream/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2022/03/07/soil-proof-quantify-regenerative-agriculture-soil-carbon-health/ https://civileats.com/2022/03/07/soil-proof-quantify-regenerative-agriculture-soil-carbon-health/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2022 09:00:21 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=45882 He asks us each to take a mealy worm, attach it to our ball of clay with a pin, and place it somewhere in the orchard, adorned with a bright pink ribbon so that we can find it later. After we’ve tromped through a lush green carpet of grasses and other cover crops, he explains […]

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It’s an unseasonably warm February day near Turlock, California, and farmer-researcher Jonathan Lundgren is handing out tiny white balls of clay. A group of us have gathered at the edge of the almond orchard at Burroughs Family Farms, a 400-acre organic, regenerative farm in the San Joaquin Valley, for a field day. Lundgren, who is visiting from South Dakota, has invited us to replicate an experiment that he and the scientists he works with use often.

He asks us each to take a mealy worm, attach it to our ball of clay with a pin, and place it somewhere in the orchard, adorned with a bright pink ribbon so that we can find it later. After we’ve tromped through a lush green carpet of grasses and other cover crops, he explains the goal. The worms are bait; in half an hour, participants will count them to determine just how many birds, insects, and mammals are in the regenerative orchard, waiting to descend. The scientists have done counts like this on a range of conventional, regenerative, and transitional farms around the country as a way to measure biodiversity or, as Lundgren puts it more simply: life.

A clay ball with mealy worm attached. (Photo by Twilight Greenaway)

And life, quite frankly, is rare here. In this part of California, conventional almond orchards cover thousands upon thousands of acres in mind-numbing succession and—aside from the trees’ abundant blooming and fruiting, their root systems shaped by irrigation—growers and farmworkers toil to keep all other living things to a minimum.

But Lundgren, an entomologist who left a role at U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Research Service as a whistleblower in 2015 to found the Ecdysis Foundation, is embracing an approach that breaks the sterile, monocropping mold—on farms like Burroughs, where sheep graze between the trees and beneficial insects abound.

The foundation has taken an unusual approach to scientific research—carrying it out on its own working farm and others. For years, Lundgren and the team at Ecdysis have been studying and documenting the impact of regenerative practices—everything from reduced tilling to compost applications, cover crops, and prescribed grazing. Now, they’re embarking on a national, 10-year study they’re calling the 1,000 Farms Initiative.

For years, Lundgren and the team at Ecdysis have been studying and documenting the impact of regenerative practices—everything from reduced tilling to compost applications, cover crops, and prescribed grazing.

“For years, success stories about regenerative food systems and their potential for carbon sequestration, water retention, promotion of life, and profitability have been dismissed because critics insisted on data to ‘validate’ the impact of regenerative agriculture at a mass scale. This is that study,” Lundgren said in a January press release announcing the research.

Indeed, while the hype around regenerative is nearing a fever pitch—and the need for solutions to the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss is more pressing than ever—the science, particularly on its carbon storing potential, has been slow to unfold, despite some very big claims.

If the field day at Burroughs Family Farm is any indication, a growing number of farmers and scientists are ready for more hard science on the subject. More than 200 people including organic and conventional farmers, members of the California Almond Board trade group, and experts form Chico State, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Merced, among others, gathered to learn from the latest research in the space.

Lundgren spoke about the study Ecdysis scientists have done over the last two years comparing regenerative and conventional almond systems (including the Burroughs orchards) in California. Published last August, it found that the regenerative orchards had 32 percent more total soil carbon, much more diverse plant and invertebrate communities, and more nutrient-dense almonds. But perhaps most important to the farmers in attendance that day—who are weathering what scientists have determined to be the worst drought in 1,200 years and will likely receive no water allocations from the Central Valley Project’s network of reservoir canals this year—the soil in the regenerative orchards allows more water to infiltrate faster, and hold it there longer once it’s there.

“In 2020, we were scrounging, trying to find farmers to take part in the [almond] study,” Lundgren told a the larger-than-expected crowd. “And look at where we are now.” His hope with the 1,000 Farms Initiative is to bring this kind of evidence to bear all across the nation. In the first month, he says 750 farms registered to take part.

Civil Eats spoke with Lundgren recently about the work he sees ahead for the new study, the promises and challenges it holds, and the need to balance scientific rigor with the urgency inherent in this moment.

How does the 1,000 Farms Initiative fit into the larger body of work that you and others at your foundation have been doing for the last six years?

“We’re trying to find out whether regenerative works no matter what you grow or where you grow it. We’re working with established regenerative farmers and folks that are transitioning.”

When I was at the USDA, I started to meet farmers doing things that science said couldn’t be done. And it wasn’t called regenerative agriculture very often back then. They were focusing on soil health, no-till, cover crops, planned grazing, that kind of stuff. In visiting with these folks, it became clear to me that there was something real going on; it wasn’t just anecdotes. And science needs to be done differently if we were going to capture that. So, I quit, and we started the Ecdysis Foundation here on an operating regenerative farm in the middle of South Dakota.

The idea is that scientists have to be farmers to connect with our issue because that’s how to change the metrics of success. That evolution has driven our scientific and research programs ever since. We don’t do research on experiment farms [like most academic ag scientists]; we work with some of the top producers in the world all over North America. And we are simply trying to capture what the leaders and innovators are accomplishing on their own farms to show that [regenerative agriculture] is replicable and there are predictable outcomes that we can see.

Ecdysis Foundation staff measures plant diversity and biomass in a California almond orchard. Photo courtesy of the foundation.

We’re looking at full systems that cross disciplines, that cross geographic borders and soil types . . . to conduct the largest experiment that has ever been attempted. We’re ready to deploy scientific teams out to 1,000 farms across the U.S. to gather systems-level data.

What do your existing relationships with farmers look like, and how will they expand as part of this effort?

We’re trying to find out whether regenerative works no matter what you grow or where you grow it. We’re working with established regenerative farmers and folks that are transitioning.

In order to know what’s attainable, we have to find those champion farmers who have been doing this for a while. It gives us an idea of expectations. And then the other component is how quickly we can get there. Early adopters are often the first to admit that it took them a long time. They say, “If I was to have a do-over, I’d be able to get here much quicker.” And because they were on the bleeding edge, they didn’t necessarily practice optimal transition strategies. Those are things we’re learning right now.

In the established systems, we run out to the farms with our team of scientists and try to capture what’s special about them—and put it into data. In the case of those transitioning farms, we’re going to spend multiple years revisiting them to see how things change. We’ll be visiting in years one, two, three, five, and 10, and so we envision there being sort of this hump to our scientific efforts, where over the next three or four years, it will be an intensive sampling scheme that ends up starting to have a longer tail toward the end.

We’re not interested in saying, “This is the way that you need to be farming.” What we’re trying to say is, “The farmers are the leaders, and the scientists were excellent at science, but we’re not farmers. We need to pair our expertise and provide that service for farming.”

That’s a lot of data collection in a short period of time. How many scientists are involved?

“Life is the currency that drives carbon sequestration. That’s the way the planet works. If we’re not measuring life, then we’re missing out.”

We’re trying to do this with minimal resources. We’ll try to standardize and automate things and collaborate as often as we can. For this initiative, we estimate we’ll need probably 45 to 50 staff members. Right now, we have nine doctoral-level scientists, and depending on when you visit, our staffing swells or ebbs depending on seasonality. We’re trying to locate more people around the U.S. So far, we have a scientist stationed in the Central Valley and another up in the Pacific Northwest.

We’re seeing an explosion of interest in private carbon markets, which allow the carbon stored in farms’ soil to count as offsets for big companies. How much is the emphasis on soil carbon for those purposes influencing this study?

We must be thinking about systems. If carbon is the gateway drug to get people changing their practices, to adopt regenerative systems, [it has value]. But if we make this a dialogue only about carbon, then there are going to be cheaters that come in and exploit the system in ways that don’t change the entire system the way that it needs to.

We’ll be measuring deep carbon down to around 60 centimeters (variable depending on the system) as well as surface carbon levels. And we should be able to calibrate what kinds of carbon levels farmers are putting back into the soil, using our management practices. But, to us, life is the best bioindicator of success in regenerative systems.

Say more about that.

We measure plant life as well as the numbers of invertebrates, insects, birds, mammals, and humans. Life is the currency that drives carbon sequestration. That’s the way the planet works. If we’re not measuring life, then we’re missing out.

Ecdysis scientists collect data, including insect abundance and water infiltration rates, in a regenerative California almond orchard. Photo courtesy of the foundation.

We were working with folks like General Mills on their supply chain in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and we saw the life resurge on these [transitioning] farms very fast. In year one, 25 percent of the caterpillars we were putting out there were eaten by predatory insects within one hour. By year two, 50 percent were gone. By year three, 75 percent have been eaten. This is a good surrogate for insect pest dynamics. These farms just came alive over a very short window of time. And at that point, they became regenerative systems where the farmers don’t need [pesticide and synthetic fertilizer] inputs. Life is doing what your inputs used to do.

Let’s talk about the difference between organic and regenerative. Some folks want to see them practiced in concert, but regenerative farmers oppose tillage while organic farmers oppose all use of herbicides. What are your thoughts about the tensions that have arisen between people practicing the two approaches?

Regenerative is not all that different than the philosophy that drove organic, or the concepts behind organics back when it was starting. But it’s connected to what I said about carbon markets. If you establish [a label] that’s not outcome-based or systems-focused, there will be cheaters that can come in—and that’s what’s happened with organics. We have to be really careful as regenerative comes online.

There’s a good chance that by the time we save the planet using our food system, we’ll call it something other than regenerative. I’m not going to get hung up on the name. But the principles have to be there for this to work.

Once every couple of weeks, I get contacted by another group that is putting together a certification program for regenerative agriculture. It’s getting to be this fever pitch. But none of them are actually putting data behind it or actually testing to find out whether it works. That requires science; unless you’ve got that, it’s hand-waving. I’m not saying our matrix is perfect, but we’re the only ones who have an actual matrix of regenerative practices (that can be shown to contribute to regenerative outcomes) that is in the peer-reviewed literature.

There is a great deal of urgency in play as more companies and lawmakers begin to grasp the full reality of the climate crisis. How do you balance that urgency against the need for this kind of longitudinal data gathering?

That’s why we are starting now. We have to make major substantive changes to our food system within the next 10 years, otherwise, we’re SOL. We’ll need data in hand to make those changes. Science takes a while, and that’s a main driver behind the strategy that we’ve taken both in terms of scale, as well as the questions we’re asking and how we’re asking them.

Meanwhile, there are other entities within the science realm that are trying to sequester funds for endowments and buildings and programs in regenerative agriculture. And it’s like, “Folks, this isn’t the time for that. We’ve got to have data in hand here, momentarily.” That’s what Ecdysis is trying to do.

Is there other substantive research into regenerative agriculture happening outside the U.S.?

“Driving up and down I-29 six years ago, it was bleak; the soil was constantly tilled. Now, you drive up and down I-29, and you see cows grazing cover crops.”

There’s more and more talk outside of the U.S. But in terms of scientific research experiments? I don’t know of anything else out there. Ecdysis has been approached by other groups interested in scaling the research to a global space. We’ve had farms from Australia, Europe, and Africa register to take part in the study and we’re thinking about how to scale the study up once we have a year or two under our belts on this continent.

Can you tell us about Blue Dasher Farm—the farm where the Ecdysis Foundation is headquartered in South Dakota? What do you all produce, and how do you strike a balance between production and research?

We have a 53-acre farm. Part of that is native unbroken prairie and wetlands. Our major outputs are honey, lamb, eggs, poultry, and pork. And we have a young orchard and a jams and jelly garden. We sell primarily to our local community. But the most important output is homeostasis—life. That’s one of our important outputs, and if a farm is not producing that, then it isn’t going to be around for very long. It’s hard to put a monetary figure on that, unless you’ve got a business plan that accounts for that balance of life. The other thing is the next crop of young scientists.

Sheep graze on Blue Dasher Farm.

The farm was conventional before you moved there, and it is surrounded by large, conventional farms. How do your neighbors respond to what you’re doing there?

A real chasm has grown between scientists and the people they’re trying to serve. When we embedded a research facility, an “eco farm,” into the middle of what is essentially ground zero of where change needs to happen, the whole point was to plant a flag that people could rally around. The farming community here, it’s changing. We can’t take full credit for that, but I can say that our field days are extremely well-attended. The neighbors who never tried any of this before are talking about grazing pieces of their crop ground this year, and they decided not to spray [pesticides], because they wanted to be good neighbors and didn’t want to spray out our bees. (They didn’t know that they were costing me $20,000 a year in new bees.)

We’ve got a little community that comes for a Soil Builder Coffee Club, where we can be a support network for them. The outputs of that have been a new roller/crimper [a tool that allows farmers to terminate cover crops without herbicide] that we’re building in the community and a new interseeder that people can use. Driving up and down I-29 six years ago, it was bleak; the soil was constantly tilled. Now, you drive up and down I-29, and you see cows grazing cover crops. So, there are changes happening, and it’s bigger than us, but we’re happy to be a part of it.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

People tell me, “We love the idea of regenerative agriculture, but we’re stuck in this current way and what is it gonna cost us to change?” I think, whether we’re farmers or consumers or philanthropists, we all have to change the question and ask ourselves: What is it going to cost us not to change? That is what’s driving our efforts right now. As a scientist, it would have been easy to stay at USDA and count lady beetle spots for the rest of my life and take home a paycheck. But we need action.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2022/03/07/soil-proof-quantify-regenerative-agriculture-soil-carbon-health/feed/ 3 https://civileats.com/2021/10/20/op-ed-the-flood-of-climate-disasters-has-the-food-system-reeling-its-time-to-act/ https://civileats.com/2021/10/20/op-ed-the-flood-of-climate-disasters-has-the-food-system-reeling-its-time-to-act/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2021 08:00:40 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=43917 This article was produced in partnership with Edible Communities; a version of this article appears in the Winter 2021-22 issues of local Edible magazines. If someone had described the catastrophic flooding of the Missouri River that submerged a million acres of corn and soybeans in 2019 (followed a year later by winds in the same region that were so destructive they flattened corn silos), crops in Texas […]

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]]> This article was produced in partnership with Edible Communities; a version of this article appears in the Winter 2021-22 issues of local Edible magazines.

If we had been told, a decade ago, that so many climate-fueled disasters would hit the food system so soon, would we have believed it?

If someone had described the catastrophic flooding of the Missouri River that submerged a million acres of corn and soybeans in 2019 (followed a year later by winds in the same region that were so destructive they flattened corn silos), crops in Texas freezing in April, winemakers having to throw away entire vintages because they tasted of wildfire smoke, shellfish in British Columbia being literally cooked alive in the ocean, and ranchers throughout the West being forced to sell off tens of thousands of cattle so they wouldn’t starve due to drought—would we have listened? Would we have done more to prepare?

I can’t help but think back to a lecture I sat in on in 2008 on the future of food and climate change by a pair of Ivy League economists. I had seen An Inconvenient Truth and was serious about local food. And I had a hunch that reducing my “food miles” wouldn’t cut it.

The economists talked about the potential boon to crop yields, due to “increased photosynthesis” and “CO2 fertilization,” but added that warming temperature and rising evaporation would balance one another out, at least in our lifetimes. Some places would get too wet, and some would be too dry, they warned. And, as if to reassure us, they said that other parts of the world—developing nations with little infrastructure and large numbers of subsistence farmers—would face the worst of the problem. And those of us in North America? We’d be fine until at least the end of the century.

“But most of us had no idea how urgently we needed to prepare for what we’re now seeing play out in the food system—and in the world at large.”

Then someone turned the lights back on, the economists thanked the audience, and everyone went home. I wrote about the lecture, quoted the experts on the science, and was careful to take a similarly calm tone, as if I were writing from a great distance about something that may or may not occur.

Of course, some climate scientists were already issuing dire warnings at that point, and many had made concerns about our ability to feed ourselves central to their pleas for action.

But most of us had no idea how urgently we needed to prepare for what we’re now seeing play out in the food system—and in the world at large. Indeed, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Food production has been rocked to the core and many small and medium-scale farmers are contemplating throwing in the towel.

This fact was driven home for me this summer, as I trudged through ankle-deep mud on my family’s small farm in Captain Cook, Hawaii—on what was once the “dry side of the island” but has seen unprecedented, nearly non-stop rainfall for the past year. My mother, a farmer, was dismayed at the constant rain’s impact on her orchards, and by the host of new invasive species—from fire ants and wild boars to slugs that carry a brain-eating parasite—that are thriving there due to warming temperatures. The soil has been consistently saturated with water, and the coffee and fruit trees are suffering from multiple fungal diseases at once. The vegetables in the gardens are often stunted and mildewy as the sun has stubbornly refused to shine.

Flames rise behind Ledson Winery on October 14, 2017 in Kenwood, near Santa Rosa, California. Multiple wildfires tore through Northern California’s wine country, affecting counties such as Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino.

And I thought about those self-assured economists when I returned home to drought-stricken Northern California, where I saved water from my kitchen and shower and lugged it to the tiny garden I struggle to keep alive through the dry season. Most of the small-scale farms in the area didn’t have the luxury of reclaimed water; instead, they found themselves watching their wells run dry, abandoning dozens of acres at a time, making radical changes to their business models, and discontinuing their CSAs. Meanwhile, the ongoing, often terrifying onslaught of wildfires made the mere thought of rain seem like a mirage on the other end of a very long desert.

The fact that these “new normals” have already had a dramatic impact on the food system probably shouldn’t be a surprise. Global temperatures have already risen 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and the impacts are evident. The sixth assessment report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in August warned of significant drops in crop yields for corn, wheat, rice, and other cereal grains if global temperatures hit the 2 degree C level. If that happens, the report said, there will be “more times of year when temperatures exceed what crops can stand” and “risks across energy, food, and water sectors could overlap spatially and temporally, creating new and exacerbating current hazards, exposures, and vulnerabilities that could affect increasing numbers of people and regions.”

“While the food system is being hit hard by the climate crisis, it also plays a sizable role in causing the problem, accounting for one third of the world’s emissions.”

Among the clear list of hazards are the “food shocks” caused by extreme weather events—and they show no sign of slowing down. For these reasons, food prices are expected to increase at a steadier clip than most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for instance, global food prices rose by nearly 33 percent between September 2020 and September 2021.

And like the economists suggested, warmer temperatures will also likely allow more farming to take place closer to the earth’s poles, endangering virgin forests and tundra—land that has long been off limits to development—leading to more emissions, and ultimately more warming. This prediction is just one of many Gordian knots at the center of the conversation about food and climate. Because while the food system is being hit hard by the climate crisis, it also plays a sizable role in causing the problem, accounting for one third of the world’s emissions. And in addition to carbon dioxide from transportation, nitrous oxide caused by over-use of fertilizer and methane emissions from animal agriculture are both important parts of the puzzle.

It’s not just farmers who are scrambling to respond. Many of the world’s largest, most powerful food companies are starting to examine their supply chains in a new light, hoping to position themselves as part of the solution. After years spent avoiding the term “climate change” all together, for instance, the American Federation of Farm Bureaus began valorizing many of the largest farms in the U.S. as key players in solving the problem as recently as 2019.

Multinational food companies like General Mills, Smithfield, Unilever, and Danone are all publicizing the changes they’re making in their supply chains to address emissions and rethink their farming practices. Some of these changes could have a real impact and others might just be marketing ploys, but it’s clear that they’ve realized “sustainability” is a term they must use literally, as in, do their business models have a future?

When it comes to making sure the rest of us have a future, however, I’m betting on the work of small-scale farmers and ranchers—and more of them working at a human scale—as one of our most important solutions to the climate crisis.

“Can we change the food system in time to help cool the planet? That’s an open question. Do we have any real choice but to try? Absolutely not.”

If done right, farming and ranching can help bring the natural world back into balance. And it has the potential to reverse our current scenario: millions of acres of land covered in monocrops growing in soil that is overly tilled, void of most life, and actively washing into the ocean nearly every time it rains.

Soil holds three times more carbon globally than the atmosphere does. And it can hold more if it’s managed in a way that brings more of it back to life. But to do that we need producers who are immensely curious and dedicated—who see the challenge at hand and want to rise to meet it.

They need to work in concert, and they need to represent a much wider swath of the population—here in North America that means intentionally making space for exponentially more young people, more Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) producers, and more LGBTQ producers. It also means passing systemic policies that help them explore, invest, in  and modernize the farming practices that have long been successful at cooling the planet.

In plain terms that means we need more perennial crops, trees on farms (i.e., agroforestry and silvopasture), managed grazing, cover crops, dry farming, and other methods of deep-soil planting, crop diversity, prescriptive burns, seed sovereignty, local food and farm infrastructure, and multitrophic aquaculture.

We need to help more farmers control weeds without over-tilling the soil. We need more compost on the surface of the soil and more mycelia and living ecosystems below. We also need more plants at the center of our plates. We need to spend more time listening to Indigenous communities and remembering that our needs are inextricable from the needs of the natural world, and the ecosystems that have kept it in balance for millennia.

Most of this probably won’t require new cap and trade markets, new consumer labels, or new technology. But it will require more hands—and very likely a different, more collective approach to land ownership, at a moment when building housing is considered a much more valuable use of land than producing food.

None of this will mean much if we don’t also stop burning fossil fuels—and subsidizing that burning on a global scale. But there’s more and more agreement among scientists and climate advocates that we also need to turn more of our agricultural soil into a carbon sink, and that doing so is a matter of how and when—not if.

The good news is that a lot of smart people are already working on the how. And that’s where your dinner—and breakfast, lunch, snacks—enter the picture.

There’s a healthy debate in both agriculture and climate circles about the value of individual action versus the need for systemic change. And food, thankfully, lies at the intersection of both. What we do—and eat—every day is who we are. When we support people who produce food with the climate and soil health in mind—whether that’s buying from them directly, using a farmers’ market SNAP dollar-matching program, or dining in restaurants that cook with their foods—it often has the curious effect of making us into the kinds of people who want to vote for, and fight for, systemic change.

I was thinking about this recently while lugging a bucket of dishwater out to my garden and feeling a little like I was wasting my time, as my neighbors were still turning on their hoses. It hurts my back, it’s absurdly time consuming. But every time I do it, I am made again and again into the person who notices water and who keeps noticing water—who notices plants, notices soil. And being that person is what makes me ache for climate policy that prioritizes survival for all.

Can we change the food system in time to help cool the planet? That’s an open question. Do we have any real choice but to try? As I see it, absolutely not.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2021/10/20/op-ed-the-flood-of-climate-disasters-has-the-food-system-reeling-its-time-to-act/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2021/10/12/journalist-turned-cattle-farmer-beth-hoffman-on-the-impossible-math-of-starting-a-farm/ https://civileats.com/2021/10/12/journalist-turned-cattle-farmer-beth-hoffman-on-the-impossible-math-of-starting-a-farm/#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2021 08:00:09 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=43788 Hoffman had spent more than two decades as a reporter and journalism professor—often covering food and agriculture—and Hogeland was a butcher and Whole Foods buyer who had long wanted to return to his family’s fifth generation, 540-acre farm. The couple had spent a series of summers returning to the beloved patch of rolling hills an […]

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By the time Beth Hoffman and her husband, John Hogeland, moved from San Francisco to Iowa to farm, they’d been planning for years. But that didn’t make it any less of a leap.

Hoffman had spent more than two decades as a reporter and journalism professor—often covering food and agriculture—and Hogeland was a butcher and Whole Foods buyer who had long wanted to return to his family’s fifth generation, 540-acre farm. The couple had spent a series of summers returning to the beloved patch of rolling hills an hour southeast of Des Moines. And over the years, they had worked to convince his parents to lease them the land so they could convert the commodity corn and soy operation into one that produced grass-finished beef using rotational grazing.

Then, in May 2019, once Hogeland’s sons had graduated from high school in the Bay Area, they “packed up the car with the necessities for another summer in Iowa—old jeans and light long sleeves, rubber boots, raincoats—and stuffed the old dog and her bed into the back. [They] rented out [their] house for three months to some high-paid tech interns and peeled off onto I-80.”

Hoffman and Hogeland have been in Iowa ever since. In her new book, Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America, Hoffman describes the first two years of their journey in an effort to shed light on the larger economics of American agriculture and the myriad challenges facing beginning farmers.

The book provides readers with a detailed, up-close look at the choices the couple face as they launch their farming business as well as the lessons they’ve learned so far. But what really sets Hoffman’s book apart from others in the genre is her willingness to show her readers the numbers.

By the end of the book, for instance, Hoffman tells readers that she and Hogeland have put in, “more than $70,000, not including the cost of our housing.” She details out their early costs and earnings—a $13,000 lease, three $10,000 cattle payments for a net profit of only $25,000. And she writes, “After a fair amount of anxiety, we sold our first round of heifers and steers without much struggle—14 wholesale to small distributors and six directly to consumers, mostly friends and family.”

In sharing her experiences, Hoffman acknowledges the history of land theft for farmers of color and grapples with her own privilege. She describes her family buying her house in San Francisco and tells her readers that it doubled in price in six years. “We have family land to lease, money in the bank, and little debt to our names,” she writes, making it clear that she and Hogeland aren’t facing the same consequences many others do if their operation fails to bring in a profit.

She also makes a point to dispel several myths around farming, such as those that elevate and romanticize agrarianism, writing:

Living on a working farm is not about making your life simpler. It isn’t only about putting your hands in the dirt (although you certainly can) and magically feeling more grounded, or getting up each morning to enjoy the sunrise as you milk a cow. It also shouldn’t be all about self-sacrifice or endurance, independence or ruggedness. Unless you are raising food solely for your family, farming is a business. It is not a hobby, even if you don’t make much money at it; it’s hard work, often both enjoyable and very stressful. And every farm is embedded within an industry full of extremely complex problems—problems that can begin to be untangled only if we understand the history of how we got here.

Civil Eats spoke with Hoffman recently about the book, her goats, and the ways she’s preparing for climate change.

In some ways, Iowa and San Francisco can seem like polar opposites. What was it like to make this transition?

When I met John, he told me that he had just been in Iowa and that he was planning to move back there. At the time I probably couldn’t have pointed out where Iowa was on a map; I knew nothing about it. But as we spent time together and ended up getting married we came out here a lot and I formed my own relationship to the land.

When we told people we were moving, they’d say, “Iowa?!” without ever having stepped foot in the state. One of the reasons why I wrote the book is there’s so much misunderstanding, particularly in coastal cities, about the way agriculture works in places like this. People think all the farms are corporate-owned and that it’s just the subsidies that make farmers there grow corn. They think all farmers are brainwashed by agribusiness into using chemicals, that they’ve been sold this bill of goods that completely kills the environment. I remember coming out here for the first time and being surprised to see birds in the trees and frogs with four legs. I was expecting some environmental waste land.

Ninety-eight percent of farms in this country are family owned. So a “family farm” can be almost anything; they can be really, really large. They can be really small. They might use chemicals, they might not. And most farms aren’t of the size where they receive any kind of large subsidy payment. It’s a little thing to keep you going, but it’s more that all of the support systems at the [local] USDA [U.S Department of Agriculture] offices, at land grant universities, they’re all geared toward supporting this commodity system.

So, you can easily get expert advice. You can easily have somebody help you map out your land and tell you the correct rotation of corn and soybeans. But if you walk into these USDA offices and ask about any other kind of farming, they don’t know anything about it. It’s not just the subsidies that are the issue. And rather than brainwashing everyone, agribusiness took advantage of an opportunity. Farmers were spending exorbitant amounts of time and energy killing weeds, for example, and they made products that help keep the amount of time spent in the fields very short—mostly because [most farmers] don’t make money at it and so they have to have other jobs.

These sorts of misunderstandings don’t allow us to find actual solutions to the problems. And if we don’t understand what the reality is, then we can’t actually make real change in the food system.

What do your days on the farm look like?

First thing in the morning these days, we move the goats. We have 12 of them right now, but we’re about to pick up a buck and have many more of them very soon. And if they don’t have enough to eat, they’re escape artists. They’re an amazing part of the regenerative system because they eat invasive weeds. They’re like a herd of locusts. So we move them to a new location using mobile, electric fencing; we just kind of cordon off areas of forest for them.

Then we move the cattle. We have two different herds that we’re running. We make sure everybody’s alive and well and then we move them with electric fencing as well. We reconfigure the shape and location of their paddocks daily or every other day, so they don’t eat the grass down too low. We need to make sure everybody has water, has shade. We have a solar mobile water unit that we move around.

Then we have a lot of sit-down work, like working on the website and contacting people who are interested in beef, trying to find time to read and learn more about [farming], for example, what is the best forage to feed cattle. There’s a lot of waste leftover from the days before landfills, when everybody just chucked their farm equipment all over the place. We’re still doing a lot of carting off scrap metal.

Is it just the two of you doing that physical work? Or do you have other help?

My father-in-law is turning 90 this year and he still takes on projects, but it’s mostly the two of us. My nephew owns a couple of the goats so he participates, and he’s spent some of his summers working with us. We have somebody else who is hopefully going to work with us next spring running his pastured chickens behind our cattle. We’re very excited about that. The ecological service of the chickens eating fly larvae out of cow poop is worth a million dollars to us because the fly situation gets so out of hand, and we don’t want to use chemicals. He will be sharing our lands without paying for it. We’re trying to help the next generation get going because, it’s so prohibitively expensive to invest in renting land, chicken trailers, you know, the chicken, the feed. I don’t know how anybody in their 20s or 30s could afford it at all.

Do you want to talk a little bit about your impetus to write about the economics of breaking into farming?

We were pretty ignorant about the business aspect. Once we had gotten the lease, we sat down with my mother, who’s a CPA, to try to figure out the actual numbers. We started listing all our costs, we tallied it all up and then looked at how much we would make selling cattle and hay. That first year, we came out with a $25,000 loss which was $6,000 more than we had planned to put into the whole thing. That was pretty shocking and I started thinking about this as a reporter [and asking]: “Is this really what people make? Is this what our neighbors are making?” Even after we pay off the cattle, the bottom line was that we would make something like $20,000 – $30,000 a year; that was if everything went well and in farming things usually don’t go very well. There’s always something that breaks or dies.

I started really looking into it and this is when I became interested in writing the book. I discovered that  the median farm income in 2019 was less than $300 a year . . . . we were one of the really profitable farms, if we look at those numbers. In the media it’s always framed like “this year is a problem” or “this year we’re heading into trade issues with China.” But we never really talk about it as this pervasive issue that takes place year-in and year-out.

Corn and soybeans are not really designed to be profitable at this point.

Exactly. I really wanted to know a lot more about that and I thought that by making our story the center of the book, we could dig into it for others who wanted a better understanding of how it works.

I also realized that we were coming into this with a lot of privilege, meaning that we had family wealth that had been built up over generations. Not exorbitant wealth, but reasonable wealth. And we had this access to the land.

If we’re going to get anybody else into farming—and in particular any farmers of color, because 98 percent of farmland is owned by white families—it just seems like an impossibility with the cost of entry being so high. The capital costs to get in but also the fact you can’t really make [any money] the first year.

You described your process of trying to find people to farm on the land with you and looking for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) farmers to offer it to rent-free. What did you learn?

We put out a call for farmer of colors who didn’t have land access and pretty quickly [learned that it wasn’t a realistic expectation]. The next generation coordinator at the Practical Farmers of Iowa, Celize Christy, explained that even if you’re offering up land, the whole rest of the system still exists that basically led people of color to lose their land. There’s the lack of programs that are available to help these farmers, there’s very well-documented discrimination on the part of the USDA and the banks. It’s really a matter of thinking about how we can change the system, not just make land available. And that would include all sorts of things like making financing and debt relief available specifically for farmers of color.

There’s also very little housing in rural America. I mean, in the town that’s seven miles away from us, there is no place to rent. And so that would mean that if people are going to come out to farm they’d be commuting a long distance to get here and that doesn’t really work. So, if people want to make land attractive to the next generation of farmers there has to be housing. You can’t find people to farm without offering them a house.

At times there can be a divide between smaller sustainability-oriented farmers and commodity farmers. How did you hope to bridge that gap in this book?

Over the years when I’ve interviewed a lot of people—people often with very different mindsets from my own. It’s one of the great gifts of being a journalist; you can interview somebody with a very different mindset and just listen and not have to respond and not have to convince anybody of your point of view. And I think that’s extremely helpful in learning to empathize with somebody with different beliefs. Because at the end of the day, what all of us want is a better life for our kids; we want opportunity and we want to be comfortable and happy. We’re not as different as we all think. And there are so many shades of gray in between where people believe a little of this and a little of that. I don’t think we’re as divided as we all believe.

In the book, your father-in-law describes an extreme heatwave in Iowa that took place in 1934. There were 25 days with temperatures over 100 degrees and the region where you live hit a high of 115 degrees. How are you thinking about and preparing for climate change on the farm?

I remember seeing pictures of Hurricane Ida and seeing video of cattle just wandering out on the highway. It’s horrifying to think about losing not just your investment, but your animals that you care for every day. The emotional toll of that as a farmer cannot be overstated; it’s just an incredible amount of stress. Even though you can never really be ready for disasters, it’s worth trying to put the support in place and to be thinking about our mental and physical health. In terms of the landscape, we are constantly thinking about planting more trees to provide shade for animals. Half of what we do is about nurturing a landscape that would be more resilient. And we’ve built mobile water systems that we can move around using our ponds.

We are probably going to start selling off the black Angus cattle because they can’t handle the heat like the Red Devons do. And when it got quite hot here, the goats were literally sunbathing—they just loved it [and that’s why we’re looking to get more].

Is there anything else you want readers to take away from this book?

In addition to doing away with the romanticism about farming, farmers really need to be thinking about taking some of their power back.

For example, the lawsuits brought by the [The Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America, or R-CALF USA] and all the advocacy around limiting meat industry consolidation, and making companies be more transparent about their pricing. It’s a small first step, but I think that’s along the lines of what can be done if we start working together in our own best interests. Right now farmers get 14 cents for every dollar spent at the grocery store; that used to be closer to 30 or 40 cents in the 1970s. And there’s a lot to be said about marketing our products together, and taking more of that food dollar for in-house marketing, advertising, packaging, transportation, and not having it serve CEOs [at big meat companies and retail stores], making millions of dollars a year.

Farmers making more and having this be a viable career option doesn’t mean that customers need to pay more at the grocery store. This isn’t a matter of inflation. It’s a matter of power and farmers gaining some of it back.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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