The event, part of a weekly live broadcast series, “A Hunger For Justice,” was initiated by Loren Cardeli, founder of A Growing Culture, a New York City-based organization that supports global farmer autonomy and agroecological advancement. And, at a time when much of the nation has been catalyzed by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black folks at the hands of the police, the conversation served as an important look at the evolution of the fight for food sovereignty, taking on a new sense of collective power and possibility.

Speakers told stories of generational land loss in America, Jamaica, Haiti, and Kenya, as well as tales of resistance, resilience, and the fight for land access. During the day-long conversation, thematic links, constants across generations, began to emerge as well the sense that current events and global shifts in consciousness could mean that long-fought-for change might at last be possible.

“Recent Black Lives Matter actions are a continuation of an ongoing fight for economic independence and land sovereignty that has been ongoing since the arrival of African slaves in America.”

“Much of the work we’ve been doing for years, now the ears of the people are open to it,” said Malik Yakini, co-founder and executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network and the Detroit People’s Food Co-op. “Both the COVID pandemic and the mass protests we’re seeing against police murder are causing people to look at Black food sovereignty in a much more favorable light.”

Recasting Colonialism

Sawdayah Kaliaha Brownlee, board president of the Brooklyn-Queens Land Trust, began the day by correcting common misconceptions on the origin and significance of Juneteenth. The most often heard explanation is that it celebrates the day in 1865—two-and-a-half years after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation—when Union forces arrived in Galveston, Texas to inform a group of slaves there that they were freed.

However, Brownlee cited research by writer Ava Tiye Kinsey who has noted that many of those slaves, through their own communication networks, were already aware of the news and engaged in forms of organization, resistance, and uprisings. Many had already made their way north to “create all-Black infantries for the purpose of going South to free our people,” Brownlee said.

Those who joined all-Black military units, she added, did so with the goal of liberating their people. Recent Black Lives Matter actions, Brownlee said, are a continuation of an ongoing fight for economic independence and land sovereignty that has been ongoing since the arrival of African slaves in America.

Grounding today’s work in history, she added, “We have done this before, and we have the systems to make that happen again.”

“For me, food sovereignty starts with the saving of seeds, the cultivating of crops, and the telling of stories.”

Brownlee, whose family is Gullah—a group of people who began fighting for self-determination through food along the lower Atlantic coast—says the effort began with the seeds that they brought with them from Africa. “For me, [food sovereignty] starts with the saving of seeds, the cultivating of crops, and the telling of stories.”

Sheryll Durrant, food justice advocate and the resident manager for Kelly Street Garden in the Bronx, spoke of her Jamaican roots. She described her approach to food as a “direct result of [escaped slave Jamaican Maroon] guerillas living in the mountains, who were able to grow food for themselves … and defeat the British.”

Gathegu Cecelia Gatunga, an Atlanta urban gardener born and raised in Kenya, spoke of how British colonization “completely erased her people’s identity,” taking away language, foods, and customs. Post-independence, her family managed to grow everything they ate and found “healing through the land.” They imagined America as a place where the streets were paved with gold. Instead they found most grocery store food “a shocking and horrible experience” that began taking a toll on their health.

“Coming back to the soil” after college, she said, “really reactivated our ancestral DNA” and “brought me back to asking questions” about her pre-colonization ancestors, such as: “What did the plants around their house look like, what did dinner look like?”

Several speakers also described ups and downs in the struggle for food sovereignty. Yakini, whom many refer to as “Baba Malik” or “Father Malik” for his wise elder status in the community, recalled how Coleman Young, Detroit’s first Black mayor, encouraged farming in the 1960s, providing urban farmers with access to tractors and seeds, and gave rise to a network of community of gardens. Like many northern cities, Detroit was populated by families that had arrived from the south during the Great Migration of the 1920s, and many brought with them their skill for gardening.

But community organizer and urban agriculture activist Alexis Mena and Durrant both also spoke of the “food apartheid” that afflicts many communities of color. “[It] affects the health and wellness of the community, our ability to integrate into larger society, and disproportionately affects work, sleep, and how we see ourselves,” said Durrant.

In the South Bronx, one of the poorest congressional districts in the U.S., she added, “these effects were compounded by the ‘decade of fire,’” that destroyed 80 percent of the area’s housing. Yet those vacant lots, in turn became opportunities to reclaim land and grow food through project like the mostly volunteer-run, 2,500-square-foot Kelly Street Garden.

“Despite generations of trauma, we do not forego our connection to food,” said Durrant. “Even though we don’t own this land, we’re reclaiming it for our community to grow food on.”

Churches as Resources

Yakini spoke of the role of the Black church in establishing self-determination for its members, citing The Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit. The Reverend Dr. Heber Brown III, pastor of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore and founder of the Black Church Food Security Network, noted that many Black southern churches were established after Black farmers donated part of their lands to the cause, and recalled the tradition of “homecoming” in which transplanted northern Blacks would return to visit their families and churches and help them work the land.

Brown, whose program aggregates fresh food grown by small-scale Black farmers and sells it to food-insecure Baltimore residents, also payed tribute to Pastor Vernon Johns, who in addition to being known as a Civil Rights crusader, shocked his “high-cotton” Baptist congregation by wearing overalls and selling watermelon after services.

How Black farmers can gain access to land was also a recurring topic. Brownlee spoke about how the gardeners who moved to New York City from southern states or the Caribbean and claimed empty lots as their own banded together across boroughs to create the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust to safeguard space they had made viable and attractive to developers.

Mena advocated going back to Indigenous traditions of collective ownership. So did biracial Black and Indigenous farmer Chris Newman. On his Sylvanaqua Farms farm in Virginia, Newman, who believes that the small diversified farm is fatally flawed, says he’s going “straight-on anarchist, back to my Indigenous roots by combining the ethics of a lot of Latinx and African farmers.” Another key part of his model are the tall grass, food-producing ecosystems maintained by Native people, which, he says, “were so vast that outsiders didn’t realize they were on a giant farm.”

Brown delivered an eloquent call to take the idea of collective ownership or guardianship and “put it in the bosom of the Black church.” No other institution, he argued, can match “the institutional power base that has been around since the late 1700s and has the ability to withstand arson and assassination of its leaders … There’s a window of opportunity here now,” he explained. The Black church has the land, space, and means from which to drive a movement, Brown added. “You’ve got the keys to the bus and the kitchen,” he said, “let’s do it.”

The Role of the Black Chef

Chefs Mavis-Jay Sanders, Sicily Sierra and Jonny Rhodes described practicing mutual support within the circle of Black farmers, chefs, and other suppliers that they’ve actively cultivated. Sierra, an actor-turned-restaurateur who now co-runs Food Plus People, described her careful cultivation of an all-Black network in the restaurants she’s headed. “My first question is, ‘Are they Black?’ It affects who gets my business because it’s so important to honor every part of the Black food system: who’s growing it, who’s cooking it, how we are telling that story.”

In answer to a question about how she overcomes the generational trauma of cooking for other people, Sierra summed up her response to any misguided notions about her role: “Let’s keep it real. I’m nobody’s mammy, I’m the boss.”

“My first question is, ‘Are they Black?’ It affects who gets my business because it’s so important to honor every part of the Black food system: who’s growing it, who’s cooking it, how we are telling that story.”

Rhodes, chef-owner of Indigo in Houston, said he hopes to combat agricultural oppression by acquiring his own land. In discussing his plans to close his acclaimed restaurant in the coming months in order to start a farm and open a store, Rhodes pointed to the need for “not just having Black farmers, but Black farmers in multitudes!”

The last discussion of the day was a sure sign of how the culture has evolved in its ability to hear and understand calls for both land and reparations—how, as Yakini noted, the “ears of the people” are finally open to these messages. Amber Tamm, a Brooklyn farmer, floral designer, and horticulturalist, spoke of her vision to pay homage to Seneca Village, a mostly African American hamlet in New York City. Although half of the village’s residents owned the land they lived on, the city took control of the village in the mid-1800s through eminent domain and then razed it in order to create Central Park.

“We’re not settling, there’s no compromise. We’re going to call it out until there is systemic change.”

Tamm is now planning to ask Central Park to donate 14 acres of the park’s Great Lawn to be transformed into a farmer training program for Black and Brown teens. The food grown there, she says, will help feed—free of charge—the Black and Brown families that will be among the two million New Yorkers projected to be food insecure post-COVID 19. Tamm admitted that she has yet to contact Central Park about her plan, but her Gofundme campaign has already amassed $97,000 in donations.

As long-time activist and urban farmer Karen Washington—another respected elder—sees it, such a bold vision might not have seemed possible just a few years ago.

In a phone call after the event, Washington expressed gratitude for the Black Lives Matter movement and the younger generation that has taken up the cause she’s devoted much of her life to. “We’ve been fighting for so long now,” she said, “but it’s the young people who are saying, ‘Not on my watch.’” The feeling now is, “We’re not settling, there’s no compromise … We’re going to call it out until there is systemic change.”

Top photo: Participants in the A Growing Culture Juneteenth event, clockwise from top left: Amber Tamm, Queen Quet, Jamila Norman, Gathegu Gatungo, Malik Yakini, Karen Washington. (Photos courtesy of A Growing Culture)

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Anthony Myint vividly recalls the moment he encountered the idea that would shift his life’s path. In 2014, the San Francisco chef and his wife and business partner, Karen Leibowitz, visited California carbon ranching pioneer John Wick at Nicasio Native Grass Ranch in Marin County.

“He had a bunch of whiteboards out and he was just wrapping up a talk with some U.N. people,” Myint recalls. Wick had been working on the Marin Carbon Project, the now well-known collaboration with U.C. Berkley scientist Wendee Silver that examined whether or not several “carbon farming” practices—such as managed grazing and adding a thin layer of compost to the land—could in fact pull greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

Wick talked about the difference between durable carbon—deposited and locked into the ground for up to centuries by plant roots and decaying and dead microorganisms—and carbon that routinely circulates from above to below ground.

Hearing of the work the couple was doing helping restaurants offset their greenhouse gas emissions, Myint recalls, Wick “told us we weren’t thinking big enough.” Atmospheric carbon wasn’t just something to avoid emitting, or to pay others to scrub from one’s environmental footprint, Myint and Leibowitz now understood: farming itself could regenerate the land.

That day, Myint and Leibowitz joined a much larger movement to bring regenerative agriculture to the mainstream and help farmers, chefs, and eaters understand the value of healthy soil. “We’re in the midst of a massive cultural change in response to global warming, and farming and healthy soil are probably the most practical and biggest solutions we have,” says Myint. “Imagine if there were a fuel additive that made burning gasoline no-emission—or actually pulled it out—and it cost almost nothing, say five cents per gallon. Everyone, corporations, governments, would be racing to scale that up. That’s the opportunity food and farming and soil offer.” It’s a solution, he adds, that’s “massive and non-invasive.”

Karen Leibowitz and Anthony Myint (Photo credit: Alanna Hale)

And restaurants are only one piece of a growing puzzle. In the wake of the U.N.’s latest report on climate change —which urged rapid shifts in the way we manage land and source food amid increasing climate-related flooding and drought events—a regenerative agriculture ecosystem built around healthy soils is emerging. Efforts range from federal, state, and local government initiatives to nonprofit and private sector ventures. But it remains to be seen which ones will work, and how fast they will take effect.

Engaging Diners

Myint and Leibowitz have spent the last five years figuring out how to help the competitive, thin-margin, high-burnout world of creative chefs, restaurants, and their fickle diners play a role in regenerative agriculture. Their first effort was the nonprofit Zero Foodprint, which helped restaurants offset their greenhouse gas emissions. Their recently shuttered restaurant, The Perennial, sought to serve food produced regeneratively and educate consumers about the role food plays in absorbing carbon.

“We assumed people would be excited about optimistic solutions, and would line up for the Tesla of food,” says Myint. But the public wasn’t ready. They learned that “we couldn’t rely on one consumer, one chef at a time to create system change.” They needed, as Wick encouraged them, to think bigger.

Now, under their nonprofit The Perennial Farming Initiative (PFI), Myint and Leibowitz have started laying the groundwork for a program, Restore California. Participating restaurants add an optional “1 percent for healthy soil” surcharge to customer tabs. PFI has already signed 30 restaurants up for the Restore California surcharge; if 1 percent of the state’s restaurants follow suit, the group estimates it could generate $10 million per year in funding for healthy soils.

The project is a collaboration between the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and PFI; when it is fully up and running, proceeds will go directly to farms and ranches working to improve soil health as a complement to the state’s Healthy Soils program. CARB, which administers the state’s cap and trade system, low-carbon fuel program, and other efforts to fight climate change—the majority of which are transportation-related—embraced PFI’s creative idea for direct funding of healthy soils. “This was a unique opportunity to put our name out there on another way of getting greenhouse gas reductions, so we’re all pretty excited about the idea,” says Dave Clergen, a spokesperson for CARB.

Restore California also offers the state a timely boost in its efforts to meet former Governor Jerry Brown’s goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2045, and coincides with current Governor Gavin Newsom’s pledge to put $28 million into healthy soil funding in this year’s budget. That healthy soils funding counts for barely a drop in the bucket of the nearly $1.4 billion in state cap and trade revenue invested in climate solutions; the program’s initial $7 million provided capacity for just a half-dozen carbon farming operations. Still, the state’s pledge is a starting point, and a program like Restore California can only help support the growth of healthy soils programs. “We know that to really achieve on aggressive timelines it helps to have additional reductions from the private sector, and to leverage what existing programs we have,” Clergen adds.

Cattle grazing on fresh grass after moving to a new paddock at Headwaters Cattle and Guest Ranch in Boulder, Utah. (Photo courtesy of Land Core)

Myint notes that during the “pre-launch” phase of the optional Restore California surcharge many restaurateurs will have questions, but is optimistic that “once it becomes more well known that increasing soil carbon can solve global warming, and that these funds are actually going directly to solve the issue, then adoption will scale up. “

PFI’s operations also got a major boost in July, when Myint was awarded the 2019 Basque Culinary World Prize, a €100,000-Euro award ($110,000) from the Basque government and the Basque Culinary Center. Leibowitz says the prize from this tight-knit, global circle of Michelin-starred chefs served as validation for the work the couple has been doing, and has encouraged other donors. It will allow them to hire staff, build up the program, and lay the groundwork for expansion to other states. PFI is also applying for a USDA Conservation Innovation Grant.

Jury member Joan Roca, the superstar chef of Spain’s El Celler de Can Roca, noted that Myint stood out for his commitment to addressing climate change and “involving different actors from the gastronomic world.” Joxe Mari Aizega, general manager of the Basque Culinary Center, says that the Center and its digital gastronomy innovation lab are looking at how it can implement PFI’s programs, as are each member of the jury’s restaurants.

Other Healthy Soil Models Taking Root

Myint and Leibowitz’s efforts to give restaurants and their patrons a way to directly fund healthy soils is just one answer to a problem that many public and private initiatives are now grappling with: how to fund the shift from extractive to regenerative agriculture? Among public programs, California’s soil health initiatives have led the way. Five states (Vermont, Illinois, Nebraska, and New Mexico) passed healthy soils legislation in 2019, and at least another 20 are working on similar initiatives for 2020.

This “State Healthy Soil Policy Map” was created by Soil 4 Climate and Nerds for Earth. Click the map for the interactive version.

Presidential candidates are talking about the potential roles farmers can play in sequestering carbon (several mentioned it in the recent Climate Town Hall). At the county level, California’s Santa Clara County will next year launch a $220,000 agricultural resilience pilot project that operates on a reverse auction basis and farmers will bid for funds for pre-approved practices. “The lowest bid for the highest public benefit—not only carbon sequestration but other ecosystem services that improve regional resilience, like improved aquifer recharge—will be awarded,” explains Michael Meehan, the county’s senior planner and agricultural plan program manager.

“The sense of emergence” in the regenerative agriculture space, “the kind of grassroots, decentralized awakening from the ground up, has been explosive,” says Phil Taylor, the founder of Colorado-based Mad Agriculture. Since 2015, the Colorado-based organization has worked to help farmers “break out of the agricultural industrial complex” by tailoring carbon farming programs to fit their land. Taylor’s organization, like PFI’s Restore California initiative, tries to “leverage existing and trusted networks for financial and technical resources to de-risk the transition to regenerative agriculture,” Taylor explains.

He offers technical expertise, helping farmers to gain access to the millions of dollars available from the National Resources Conservation Services (NRCS), the arm of the USDA designed to help farmers and ranchers on the land. Taylor connects them to a network of other farmers and ranchers who have made the transition. By working with companies like Minnesota-based Pipeline Foods, he also helps connect them to improved supply chains. “I don’t want them to sell to grain elevators, where the commodity value of your blood, sweat, and tears has to compete with China and Argentina,” Taylor says. “We work hard to de-commoditize, find premium markets, and diversify the farm so that the farmer gets paid as much as possible.”

Often during the transition from commodity market model to regenerative, farmers and ranchers face a period of financial instability because they’re putting in more labor and investing in new systems. One way for them to help bridge that transition is to access healthy soils programs like California’s, or to get involved with the growing number of organizations and private companies that put a value on ecosystem services. In the case of the Canadian nonprofit organization ALUS, those might range from establishing native grasslands to launching a rotational grazing program or restoring wetlands. Launched in 2008, ALUS now includes close to 1,000 farmer members and covers about 24,000 acres in 25 Canadian communities, says CEO Bryan Gilvesy. ALUS determines payments at the local level, which can range from US $30 to $152 per acre yearly.

Meanwhile, Seattle-based Nori is preparing to start a new carbon-removal marketplace, based on the idea that farmers need financial incentives to draw down carbon while corporations are increasingly looking for ways to offset their own carbon footprints. The blockchain-based marketplace depends on increasingly sophisticated methods of forecasting carbon drawdown using tools such as COMET-Farm, a farm and ranch carbon and greenhouse gas accounting system used by the NRCS.

In the pilot stage now, Nori is working with Maryland farmer Trey Hill, who will be the first to have his carbon drawdown measured and awarded carbon removal certificates, which he can then sell. He’ll be seeking at least $10 per ton, says Christophe Jospe, Nori’s chief development officer. At the company’s broader market launch next year the price will be determined by market demand. Independent verifiers will vet each farmer’s carbon removal claims; eventually, Nori hopes to be able to conduct “desk verification” using satellite imagery, tillage reports, and other tools.

While companies like Nori and Indigo Ag’s Terraton are focused on monetizing the tantalizing potential of carbon drawdown, Los Angeles-based Land Core is more concerned with the need to establish soil health as a critical tool for helping farmers become more resilient, especially in the face of drought and flooding.

Noting the variability of carbon drawdown on a single piece of land over time and the difficulties that still exist in accurately measuring it, Aria McLauchlan, Land Core co-founder and executive director, points to the possible pitfall of excessive “carbon exuberance” in the emerging rush toward drawdown. She says healthy soil also helps mitigate risks, and will help farmers and ranchers access “a wider range of economic incentives, such as corporate supply chain integration, preferential bank loans, and crop insurance that recognizes soil health outcomes” [if the latter were put in place in the next farm bill]. Land Core also lends its expertise to politicians working to add regenerative agriculture to their own agricultural policies.

Whereas companies like Indigo Ag hope to amass private data about the farms they work with, the newly launched OpenTEAM is the first open-source technology system to address soil health. Funded with more than $10 million in public and private funds, the group’s goal is to aggregate practice-based feedback from farms around the world, interpret field observations, and share this knowledge with farmers ranging from small holders to large-scale enterprises.

Organic cows grazing at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, in Freeport Maine. (Photo courtesy of OpenTEAM)

The goal is to create a connected platform where farmers can get help measuring carbon, improving soil health, and managing their digital records, among other things. “It’s a little like a Google account for farm data,” explains Dorn Cox, research director at the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment. “It’s a prototype of how to collaborate in a new way, on a global scale,” he adds, comparing the project to international scientific efforts like the human genome project or the building of the Large Hadron Collider.

By studying people and practices in place, at a large enough scale to draw conclusions, Cox adds, “We farmers in this part of the world might find more affinity with farmers in Northern India and Argentina than we do with Iowa.” This way of working, he explains, also signals a shift from slower-moving, peer-reviewed forms of scientific research to a more active, participatory science of continual improvement. “If we can share knowledge faster, we can capture carbon faster,” he adds.

OpenTEAM tools can be freely modified and expanded with a Creative Commons or similar license, and large databases (for weather, plants, inputs and soils, for example) will also be freely available. Individual farm, ranch, or business data belongs to the entity that generated it, so sharing of this data is on an opt-in basis. OpenTEAM’s software (which includes web-based tools such as LandPKS, FarmOS and Our.Sci) is now being trialed by thousands of farmers around the world, says Cox.

Cox points out that pivoting from a highly competitive agricultural marketplace to one that scales through collaboration, sharing, and creativity contains an element of fun. “That’s easy to discount, but it’s a key advantage as to why it works,” he adds.

The emerging public/private rush to carbon drawdown in some ways resembles a digital-age gold rush. Global players are jumping into the fray, many in hopes of pulling in big profits along the way to saving the world. But Cox sees a more utopian vision of information sharing, and an agricultural system united in regenerating ecosystems. Referring to Myint and Leibowitz’s work, he says, “I love that restaurants have a role to play in this … There’s joy in pulling all these pieces together.”

Top photo: Dorn Cox, research director at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment. (Photo courtesy of OpenTEAM)

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The latest skirmish in this battle came after the publication of a May 2017 action plan known as “The Challenge of Change” report by prominent university, government, non-governmental organizations, and business leaders. The report examines how America’s 200-plus public and land grant universities—public schools established in the 19th century in all 50 states that cumulatively receive hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal funding each year—can help meet global food and nutrition needs by 2050.

In detailing these issues, the report, however, left out these universities’ history of structural racism. Members of the Inter-Institutional Network for Food, Agriculture, and Sustainability (INFAS), who helped write the report, felt the urgent need to address it in a written response, directed specifically to the nation’s 76 public land grant universities.

“It was like this elephant in the room,” says Shorlette Ammons, an outreach coordinator with the Center for Environmental Farming Systems at North Carolina State University, who helped draft the response. “This lens of racial equity is necessary in order to do the work we want to do.”

Seeing public and land grant universities “through the lens of racial equity,” Ammons and her colleagues explain, means acknowledging the systemic racism that has powered America’s astounding agricultural productivity, and educated a workforce to make that possible. But that system also left—and still leaves—large swaths of the population out when it comes to reaping the benefits of the bounty.

A Long History of Systemic Racism

Beginning with the institution of slavery, this systemic racism continued under the Jim Crow South, the systematic denial of loans, grants, and land use to farmers of color, redlining minorities by denying them credit and entrée into certain communities, or patented and trademarked plant and animal varieties that shut out all but the biggest and wealthiest farmers from the benefits of higher yields. Over time, the group says, these practices have led to higher rates of food insecurity among people of color and households in cities and rural areas alike.

The shift this group is advocating might sound symbolic, but it has the potential to impact the way hundreds of thousands of students are educated every year.

Every state has at least one land grant university, and some states have a handful of them. They range from research powerhouses such as UC Davis, Cornell, Texas A&M, and Iowa State, to smaller schools offering reasonably priced public education, such as University of Vermont, Montana State University, and Alabama A&M. All were established to provide education to farmers, ranchers, and gardeners—and while they’ve all expanded greatly over the last century and a half, they still maintain food and farm-based research and education programs.

Most of the land grant universities date back to the 1862 Morrill Act, meaning they benefited from the millions of acres of land that the U.S. government gave away during the 19th century; in the South, many Black families were excluded from these benefits. The Act gave public land to the states, as long as the proceeds from those lands were used to establish at least one college that would teach agriculture and mechanical arts. The exclusion of Black farmers and students from these institutions was not rectified until Congress passed a law in 1890 that funded a separate set of land grant universities.

While acknowledging and targeting structural racism is the first step in tearing it down, Ammons says the enormity and complexity of the problem “is like an onion—there are so many layers.” Land grant universities “have benefitted from historical inequities over time,” she adds, “so I’m not sure that dismantling [those inequities] is the ultimate goal shared by all institutions. First, she adds, “we have to peel back layers of colonialism and capitalism.”

“The traditional approach at land grant universities,” explains Tom Kelly, executive director of the University of New Hampshire’s (UNH) pioneering Sustainability Institute and one of the co-authors of the response paper, has been to “filter out questions of politics and social values,” and see them as “lying outside the technical problem at hand.”

Where the more traditional land grant university approach focuses primarily on crop yield and agricultural productivity, Kelly and his like-minded colleagues advocate a shift toward “science that is deeply engaged … working with nonprofits, [grassroots] practitioners, businesses, and communities in a non-hierarchical way,” and recognizing the often minority, urban, or marginalized rural farmers they work with.”

One example of how structural racism is built into agricultural research programs is the way that research money and the knowledge it results in tend to stay within the agricultural academy. Even research that may extend into minority or poor rural communities tends not to be structured so that funds flow to the community leaders who are doing on-the-ground organizing and amassing valuable experience and expertise along the way, explains Joanna Friesner, the national network coordinator for INFAS.

For example, says Friesner, “There are a lot of grants to do soil science, but they don’t look too heavily at sharing resources with the community, or bringing in the knowledge of community thought-leaders.”

Programs Promoting Positive Change

A number of land grant universities have already begun to address structural racism. North Carolina State University’s Center for Environmental Farming Systems, under the direction of sustainable agriculture and community-based food systems professor Nancy Creamer, runs a Community Food Strategies project, which builds alliances between organizations to empower local food councils. One example is the CORE (Committee on Racial Equity in the Food System) project, which works with community organizations to address root causes of food system inequities.

At the University of Wyoming, associate professor of community and public health Christine Porter is the principal investigator in projects focused on food dignity and growing tribal food resilience. Meanwhile, Tom Kelly has spearheaded fundraising for a million-dollar endowment at the UNH for a professorship in sustainable food systems.

The endowment generates $42,000 per year, which would typically be used to pay a professor’s salary. But the Sustainability Institute conceived it, says Kelly, “as a part-time professorship to support engaged work in the community.” This year, two grassroots organizers will share the professorship as a way of bringing them into the university and rewarding local practitioners.

And there’s the UNH-led initiative Food Solutions New England, a six-state network convened in 2010 and centered on its commitment to racial equity. At a time when few people of color held leadership positions in the good food movement, Food Solutions established three ambassador positions open to community food leaders.

Over the next three years, says Kelly, “the composition of who was in the room changed dramatically.” In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where more than 23 percent of residents are food insecure compared to the statewide average of 14 percent, ambassador Marilyn Moore worked on a roster of projects, including launching urban gardens, educating families on how to grow and cook healthy foods, and bringing healthy foods to urban convenience stores. Moore went on to become a Connecticut state senator in 2014.

Almost all of these projects are headed by members of INFAS, each working within their university to tear down the walls of structural racism with projects that prioritize both sustainability and racial equity. The next challenge, says Casey Hoy, professor of agricultural ecosystems management at Ohio State University (OSU), is figuring out how to connect these efforts, “to transition what we’re doing, or gradually shift it toward a national network.” He adds, “the issue of structural racism is pervasive in the United States, and none of us can tackle it on our own.”

Through conversations with colleagues at OSU’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Hoy says he’s come to understand how “all of our civil rights gains in the past have been preceded by fairly careful scholarship to establish that there is a right and it is not being honored: fair housing, the right to education. For me, a conversation about the right to food would be a galvanizing objective for us [land grand universities] as a group, and for our nation. The assumption is that food is cheap, but according to the research so far, that depends on who you are and where you live.”

The range of community-based programs and initiatives underway at these universities suggests that agricultural educators and thinkers are taking heed. Jack Elliot, who heads Texas A&M University’s agricultural leadership, education, and communications department, and who chaired one of the working groups that produced the May 2017 “Challenge of Change” report, says he was impressed by participants’ “openness to moving forward.” In the last 10 to 15 years, he adds, he’s seen a new generation of scientists entering land grant and public universities who are “challenging traditional processes.”

At the group’s first meeting, where several INFAS members were present, Elliot recalls offering the committee the chance to “kick me out if you don’t like what I’m going to say.” He followed this by sharing his dislike for the premise of the working group’s title. “Whose ‘knowledge’ is it, anyway?’” he asked, calling for a more “participatory” approach. “You would have seen a huge sigh of relief, because I’m from Texas A&M,” Elliot adds, “and they’re thinking, ‘Man, this guy’s going to come in and be traditional.’”

It has been exactly a month since INFAS shared its response to “Challenge of Change” report’s commission members, and the group still hasn’t received a response. Anim Steel, executive director of Real Food Challenge, which campaigns for universities to shift their food procurement away from conventional industrial agriculture produce to local and sustainable sources, offers insight into the deep divisions that still exist between the two academic camps.

Some of the schools Steel and his team have approached, including some public land grant universities like the University of Vermont, have gladly made the switch to local food suppliers, despite its short growing season. Others, however, seem to be hamstrung by outside forces. Which universities make the switch and which don’t, says Steel, seems to “correlate with how embedded the Big Ag industry is with the universities.” He adds, “I have a bit of skepticism about programs that talk a lot about food insecurity, but don’t make the problem of massive corporate concentration in the industry an issue.” Still, he believes that the INFAS group’s “Deeper Challenge of Change,” report will make a difference.

“I’ve seen quite a lot of silence when it comes to these issues,” Steel says. “The first step will be to talk about why people aren’t talking about it. That’s very important.”

Top photo CC-licensed by Phil Roeder.

Correction: The article has been updated to correct the spelling of Anim Steel’s name.

The post Inside the Push to Bring Racial Equity to Land Grant Universities appeared first on Civil Eats.

“I was advocating for a system of agriculture that was untenable, for the 1 percent,” said Barber.

Those relics of the past, he added, “just don’t perform well for the farmer.” Because they don’t have high yields, he adds, they’re not usually very profitable to grow, nor are they affordable to the average home cook.

Today, Barber, chef at Blue Hill restaurants in New York City and upstate at Stone Barns, along with Cornell University plant breeder Michael Mazourek and upstate New York seed farmer Matthew Goldfarb, are launching Row 7 Seed Co., an attempt to overturn the conventional wisdom about seeds, food, and flavor.

The 898 squash from Row 7. (Photo credit: Johnny Autry)

The seven different organic seeds the company rolls out today include a mild and sweet flame-colored beet, a heatless pepper with the flavors of a habanero, and a small potato with nutty, buttery qualities. They can all be grown nationwide, they all put flavor first, and they may offer a new path for farmers, chefs, and home cooks.

“We’ve been seeing for more than a decade how chemical companies are buying up smaller seed companies and taking control of our seed supply,” said Rebecca Spector, West Coast director for the Center for Food Safety. “Not only are they breeding seeds for efficiency and other aspects besides flavor, they’re also not making them available to the public, and that’s even more concerning.”

Row 7 hopes to sell seeds that are easier to grow in farms and gardens, taste better and offer more nutrition, and are meant to increase seed diversity, accessibility, and affordability from the ground up. A basic rule of the company is that if it doesn’t thrive in both kitchen and field, or exhibit both deliciousness and scalability, it won’t make the cut. The company plans to release a second batch of seeds before the next growing season, if not sooner.

These seeds will all be organically bred from inception to release—unlike most organic seeds, which are produced from conventional, chemical-intensive plants and later treated organically. This is important, explained Mazourek, because in order for a plant to interact with microbes, fight disease, and fix nitrogen to boost soil health in an organic growing environment, those abilities have to be “prioritized from the beginning.” What’s more, studies suggest that crops grown organically from seeds raised conventionally can have lower yields than crops grown from organic seeds.

Row 7’s flame beet. Photo credit: Johnny Autry

Row 7 seeds will also never be patented, says Goldfarb. If a seed is replaced by a newer version or discontinued, the new variety will be entered into the USDA’s National Germplasm Resources Laboratory, where it will be accessible to all. Another seed company can produce the variety, or a farmer or home gardener will be able to request the seed to produce more, he said.

Claire Luby, the executive director of the Open Source Seed Initiative, said that efforts to expand plant-breeding research should be encouraged. “Dan Barber has done a lot of work to promote plant breeding as a piece of the food system,” she added. “It’s great to raise awareness about those issues, and if [Row 7] makes [their seeds] truly accessible, it would be a great achievement.”

It Started with the Honeynut

The effort started nearly 10 years ago, when Barber challenged Mazourek to breed an extra flavorful winter squash. The resulting honeynut squash, which Mazourek developed with the help of Goldfarb and Fruition Seeds, is “30 percent smaller and a thousand percent more flavorful” than other squash varieties, said Barber—and more nutritious to boot. It also proved to be so delicious and scalable that organic versions are now sold in Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods stores throughout the country. Mazourek noted that, “More farmers are growing it each year and it’s successful by leaps and bounds—so it must be a success for the farmers, too.”

With the honeynut squash as a strong example—abetted by what Barber called the “tectonic shifts” that have caused more consumers to demand better-tasting, more nutritious, chemical-free foods—Row 7 has attracted a number of high-profile investors, including former CEOs of both Sysco Foods and Whole Foods.

After several years of growing out vegetables and selecting seeds according to the priorities Barber and Mazourek had agreed to, Goldfarb said he realized there wasn’t a business behind their project that would support public breeding for flavor in a tangible monetary way. “We have lost seeds at an alarming rate over the last 100 years. Our cultural archive has been diminished.” His hope is to reverse that trend by using Row 7’s funding to support R&D for seed breeders—both public, land-grant universities and private breeders—around the country.

(Photo credit: Johnny Autry)

Public land grant breeders are thrilled, said Goldfarb, to be breeding for deliciousness and nutrition once again. But they also need financial help in an era when public breeding programs are increasing and competing for a shrinking pool of available grant or foundation dollars. Row 7 has developed a licensing structure so that a percentage of the sales of seeds bred in public institutions goes back to help further the research.

In many ways Row 7 is a work in progress, with many iterations ahead of it—much like the varieties it hopes to popularize and watch evolve. With a variety called the 7082 cucumber, for instance, the company hopes to bring back firmness and the subtle bitterness that has been bred out of most cucumbers in recent decades. For the 898 squash, a new take on the butternut, breeders went on a quest for more concentrated flavor, higher beta-carotene levels, and improved storability. “It’s a pathway versus an end,” explained Goldfarb.

With retail prices ranging for $3.50 to $4.95 per packet, these seeds will run higher than some of the company’s competitors. But Row 7 will also sell seed in bulk for a better rate. Goldfarb acknowledged that the venture’s financial viability is “still an ongoing question,” adding, “I don’t think the seed industry is any different from any other agricultural pursuit; it’s a challenge to make sustained profits.”

Top photo: Row 7 founders Matthew Goldfarb (left), Michael Mazourek (center), and Dan Barber (right). Photo credit: Johnny Autry.

The post Dan Barber’s Seed Company Seeks to Sow the ‘Democratization of Flavor’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

When the local vegan community got wind of the class, a handful of activists using the name of the Let Live Coalition, created a petition on Change.org, a Facebook page, and a silent vigil. Within a week of its November 10 posting, the petition had gone viral, amassing more than 10,000 signatures from around the world.

Wild Abundance Director Natalie Bogwalker began receiving as many as 50 phone calls a day, and both she and Leigh report receiving death threats. Many of the most vitriolic calls and posts came from abroad. One caller, says Bogwalker, threatened to plant a mole in the class, adding the safety of Bogwalker and her three-week-old infant daughter could not be guaranteed if the slaughter took place. Other callers, Bogwalker recalls, “said they couldn’t believe that I brought life into the world because I was such a horrible person.”

Overwhelmed by the onslaught, Leigh withdrew from part of the class, and the school found another, unnamed instructor to lead the slaughtering and butchering sections. She also wrote a blog post titled Vegan Bullying and the New World. In it she described messages from what she saw as “an international coalition of militant vegan organizations.” Leigh described “death threats, suggestions that I should be beaten, that I have only hell awaiting me, and that I deserve the worst treatment of any vile treatments imaginable.”

Leigh decided to go public, she says, because as the “humane meat” movement has grown in Asheville and elsewhere, she believes this type of behavior is growing in frequency and threat level. She has been the target of protesters “in the street and at conferences for years,” she says, but adds, “the international targeting of an individual via a harassment campaign; this feels really different.”

For its part, the Let Live Coalition asserts that its intentions were wholly peaceful and respectful from the start. The group was so serious about mounting an effective, peaceful campaign, in fact, says member Dawn Moncrief, that it turned to a Florida-based non-profit called One Protest for help. It also worked with a Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm that specializes in social causes.

Soon, though, both sides were crying foul, alleging over-the-line behavior and lies to win points in the court of public opinion. Leigh pointed to an “open threat letter” from “fundamentalists” announcing plans to continue their campaign via “various methods.” The coalition took offense at an email from a Wild Abundance associate telling them that enrollment for the humane slaughtering class had gone up, “maybe thanks to you, honestly,” and that the school would be “taking the life of an additional sheep to make sure that all our students get enough hands-on experience.” (Bogwalker asserts that the plan all along was to slaughter two animals.)

On its website, Let Live responded to the threat of the slaughter of an additional animal by saying: “This is the ultimate in bullying.”

Moncrief, who is also the founding director of the hunger relief and animal protection organization A Well-Fed World, says the school’s response it felt like “a retaliation to harm us emotionally.”

The Wild Abundance protest is just the latest clash between these two groups. As awareness grows about the reality of industrial animals farms, consumers response has ranged from seeking out pasture-based alternatives to eschewing meat and other animal products altogether. And while these decisions are highly personal, the division between vegans and “conscious” meat-eaters has become increasingly tense.

Brothers (and Sisters) in Arms

It’s estimated that about 1 to 2 percent of Americans are vegan. Those who advocate for sustainable meat are limited to the 1 to 5 percent of it that is pasture-raised. In other words, these two niche groups share their opposition to 95 percent of all meat produced in America, the factory farmed kind. Yet this shared distaste isn’t enough to keep tensions from running high. The language used by many sustainable meat advocates doesn’t help, either. As Paul Shapiro, vice president of policy for the Humane Society of the United States, puts it: Words such as “humane,” “ethical,” and “cruelty-free” have become “trigger words” for vegan activists.

Lawyer, rancher, author, and sustainable meat advocate Nicolette Hahn Niman says she’s experienced heckling and harassment at public appearances “since the beginning” of her work writing about and promoting sustainable meat 16 years ago. She describes incidences of people “rushing to the microphone” as soon as she’s finished speaking, and one woman “screaming obscenities, crying and shouting, assailing us in the most vitriolic way.”

On the Facebook page for her book Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production, Hahn Niman responded to Leigh’s description of her experience, writing, “Vegan Bullying, it’s real and—like all forms of harassment—must not be tolerated.”

Bryan Mayer, the former co-owner and head butcher at a restaurant and craft butcher shop in Philadelphia, was the target of vegan attacks several years ago. Online vitriol directed at him by anonymous protesters included a message from one individual who threatened to cut off his head and the heads of his co-workers and his family.

Mayer invited the critic to come into the shop to discuss the issue but no one stepped forward. Though he thought the incident “laughable” two years ago, Mayer, who is now director of butchery education at Fleishers Craft Butchery in Brooklyn, says he has started to take it more seriously thanks to recent national events. “Now you have people walking into pizza places and shooting,” says Mayer.

Leigh, too, compares vegan harassment to “other forms of extremism we’re seeing today,” and believes it’s “part of the larger political climate in our country now.”

Leigh, Mayer, and Niman’s experiences raise the question: Why do the two niche movements reserve such vitriol for each other? And why do some vegans seem to feel more hostile towards sustainable meat advocates than, say, industrial meat producers? How can this divide be bridged?

Princeton philosopher and bioethics professor Peter Singer—whose 1975 book Animal Liberation influenced animal rights organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)—asserts that “abolitionist” vegans are far from the norm, and that their outbursts give a “distorted sense” of the movement. This faction’s approach may represent “an excess of moral fervor,” he says, adding, “It’s not the way to win friends and influence people, and that’s what vegans ought to be doing.” Criticizing and rejecting factory food is “a positive step,” he adds, even for people who “are not one hundred percent pure.”

Singer suggests that both sides focus on what they have in common. “We’re fighting an enormous enemy with incredible resources and incredible strength building on the back of habits that Americans don’t even think twice about. “

Yet many purist “abolitionist” vegans feel that the more immediate threat comes from former vegetarians who have embraced sustainable meat. In their eyes, all meat-eating is equally immoral and “humane slaughter” is an oxymoron.

“It’s a narrative telling us that it’s okay to kill animals this way,” says Moncrief, who believes folks like Leigh and Bogwalker are “leveraging their status” as ex-vegans and -vegetarians to make new converts to humane meat eating. She adds, “People go into [the humane slaughter class] feeling good about themselves. We didn’t want to let that go unanswered.”

However, Bogwalker says that in fact, she “wouldn’t be surprised if some [who come to the humane slaughtering class] choose to be vegetarian after it, thinking, ‘That’s really heavy, I don’t want to do this any more.’” She adds, “I respect people’s ability to make choices.”

HSUS’ Shapiro dismisses the claim that former vegans touting their conversion to “humane” or “cruelty-free” meat are somehow hoodwinking practicing vegans into eating “guilt-free” meat. “There’s not much evidence for that,” he says, noting that what data is available “shows that people who start buying products like cage-free are more likely to reduce their consumption of meat. There’s just no evidence that these products are somehow preventing people from eating less meat.”

The Internet is Complicating Matters

Susan Benesch, a faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Benesch says, “It’s unfortunate that it’s the people who are most willing to threaten, or resort to violence, who get the most airtime … but it’s important to remember that there’s a big difference between threatening violence in a tweet or online and carrying it out.”

While no non-governmental actor can control these kinds of extremists, she adds, “the immense majority” of people who make such threats from the safety of Internet anonymity “wouldn’t dream of carrying them out.” Still, she acknowledges, such threats are still extremely frightening, and “we know that inciting content online does inspire other people who are much more willing to threaten violence and carry it out.”

For those who want to keep the discourse civil, she recommends that “people who are absolutely not in favor of harassment … distance themselves from other people who may support the same cause, but who don’t disavow violence.” This includes publishing and disseminating very clear guidelines for conduct. Doing this, Benesch explains, “opens up some space for civil exchange between people on both sides who are clearly opposed to threats and harrassment,” though she notes that “drawing the line between protesting and harassment is not always easy,” and is something American law has struggled with.

The Wild Abundance dust-up and others like it aside, it’s safe to say that vegans and sustainable meat advocates more often than not see themselves on a continuum of fighting for more ethical treatment of animals, an improved environment and improved diets and health for all.

“I know a lot of really smart, thoughtful vegans,” says Niman, noting that many are uncomfortable with the radical fringe. Bogwalker too, notes that many of the calls and emails she received were civil and thoughtful. One was from a 15-year-old boy who asked if he could visit her with his mother. “We talked about factory farming and he asked me about how to make change in the world,” she says. “It ended up being this really sweet, sweet thing.”

Finding Common Ground

There are a number of people working to shore up the middle ground. Gillian March, a vegan, humane meat and dairy activist in Atlanta, says she became vegan because she was “sickened by factory farming.” But she also realized that the U.S. “is a big meat-eating culture and the more we say ‘eat vegan’ the more people are going to close their ears and eyes.” So she and her daughter started an education campaign about factory farming and the alternatives. Her latest effort, in conjunction with Humaneitarian blogger (and Civil Eats contributor) Caroline Abels and other activists is Buy Better Dairy, to promote high-welfare dairies and farms.

Back in Asheville, Meredith Leigh and local soil scientist and author Laura Lengnick have been involved in exploratory talks with members of the local vegan community in an effort to ease the tension. Lengnick was the object of vegan protests over her 2015 book Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate; protestors took issue with her contention that animal agriculture can help fight climate change, calling her a “fraud,” she says, and claiming that “the only solution to climate change is veganism.”

Since then, Lengnick has become interested in how the two sides could “get better at [talking about] divisive issues.” She and Leigh have so far met twice with Asheville vegan activists Rowdy Keelor and Dustin Rhodes, with a local food community leader, Lee Warren, acting as a mediator. Neither Keelor nor Rhodes were part of the Let Live Coalition.

Moncrief says she hopes the discussion will be positive and adds, “We would still like to have constructive dialogue.” The group plans to bring on more members in 2017, and Leigh is open to including members of the Let Live Coalition, she says, as long as they are “able to flow with the intentions of the group.

Leigh reports feeling both discouraged and hopeful after the discussions so far. She says she’s “not working toward common ground, but ‘new ground,” and adds that the will to “transcend the disagreement … feels really positive.”

Lengnick is also hopeful. “If we could get militant vegans and sustainable agriculture advocates to agree to disagree, we could go a long way toward our goal of stopping CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation] production.”

The post Sustainable Meat Supporters and Vegan Activists Both Claim Bullying appeared first on Civil Eats.

Fighting on the front lines against this pollinator loss is a dedicated band of bee researchers, many of whom share a deep, abiding passion for bees. Here, we take a look at a few of those researchers who are racing against time to figure out the puzzle of bee loss, and how to turn it around.

Dr. Ernesto Guzman

As a high school student in Oaxaca, Ernesto Guzman heard a lecture on honey bees and fell in love with the insects—their social life, and how, “as a society,” he says, “they work for their community in a very organized and efficient way.” Now Guzman serves as the director of the Honey Bee Research Centre at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

He leads a team that’s looking closely at the effects of multiple stressors on bee health and mortality, including varroa mites and Nosema fungus—both of which transmit disease to colonies—and the pesticide class known as neoniconitoids. “How do these stressors affect bees’ immune response and their lifespan? We have parts of the puzzle solved, but not all of it,” says Dr. Guzman.

Much of the blame for the alarming thinning of bee ranks has been directed at neoniconitoids, the newest and most widely used class of pesticides in an agrochemical market valued at $207.5 billion in 2014. But the problem of bee declines, like bee life and bee society itself, is complex. Scientists know now that there’s a synergistic effect going on: pesticides can make bees more vulnerable to parasites and poor nutrition (from lack of forage or monocropping) can weaken their immunity.

So charged is the debate over bee loss, says Dr. Guzman, that those in favor of the use of insecticides—mainly agrochemical companies and conventional farmers—often place the blame for colony loss solely on varroa mites. This, he notes, is true in the winter but irrelevant at other times of the year. “Springtime deaths seem more related to pesticide poisoning,” he says. In 2010, Guzman published a study that found that 85 percent of the wintertime die-offs of honey bees in Ontario were associated with infestations of varroa mites. This increase was largely due to resistance the parasites had developed to miticides that beekeepers had been using to keep them in check.

While the answer to why bees are dying is complex, Guzman says the bottom line is that in published studies “pesticides are the most frequently cited factor affecting honey bee health.” And, he adds, honey bee populations are not declining all around the world, but mostly in the Northern hemisphere and “mostly in countries with developed agriculture.”

Last June, Dr. Guzman sat on a panel of experts whose advice led the province of Ontario to begin phasing out neonics. Beginning in 2017, farmers there will have to prove they have a specific need for the pesticides to be allowed to use them. “It took courage,” Dr. Guzman says of the provincial government’s decision, “because it goes against so many interests.”

Dr. Nigel Raine

Nigel Raine grew up in Britain, attended the University of Oxford, and responded to a chance request by a professor to collect some pollen during a summer research project in Tanzania. The experience eventually steered him to study the pollination of Acacia trees in Western Mexico. “Bees and their interactions with flowers have been critical to my research ever since,” he says.

Raine is one of many researchers amassing growing evidence that the level of neonic exposure bees are now subjected to can in fact negatively affect their health and their ability to to pollinate crops.

In 2014, Raine and Richard Gill of Imperial College London equipped bees with tiny radio frequency tags in order to monitor their pollen foraging ability. They found long-term exposure to two neonicotinoids, imidacloprid, and pyrethroid, prevented bees from learning essential pollen collecting skills.

Then, in 2015, Raine and several colleagues published an article in Nature, which found that exposure to “field-realistic” levels of neonicotinoids can harmfully affect bees’ foraging behavior, homing ability, and reproductive success. The term “field-realistic” is key, since agrochemical companies say that field studies don’t mimic actual crop field conditions.

After exposing bumble bee colonies to the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam, Raine and his colleagues allowed them access to virgin apple trees. Compared to the control group, pesticide-exposed bees visited the apple trees and collected pollen less often, and the apples produced by these colonies contained 36 percent fewer seeds, a marker of poor pollination services as well as fruit quality. It was the first paper to show the harmful effects of neonicotinoids on bees’ ability to pollinate, not just on the bees themselves.

When asked for a response to the study, the agrochemical company Bayer AG issued a statement noting that “when viewed in the proper context” the Nature study is “quite in line with most science on neonics—that at realistic levels of exposure, they do not pose adverse risk to pollinators.” Bayer also called the neonic exposure level of bees in the study “highly unrealistic,” the equivalent of calling black what the researchers called white.

Bayer and other agrochemical companies that manufacture neonics tout them as the safest pesticides manufactured so far. The companies also insists that neonics are necessary because they can control crop pests that have become resistant to older insecticides.

Raine’s concern, however, is that neonicotinoid use has moved from low levels since their introduction in the early 1990s “to almost prophylactic levels” today. Applied on roots, as seed-coatings, on soil or sprayed on crops, they function systemically, taken in by the plant and circulated throughout its tissue, pollen, and nectar. Pests that eat the plants receive a large enough dose to kill them; pollinators that collect their pollen and imbibe their nectar receive sub-lethal doses.

“The weight of scientific evidence suggests that we should be concerned about insecticide impacts on bees,” says Raine, “and the essential pollination services they provide to crops and wild plants.”

Dr. Marla Spivak

“I had read a book about bees while in college in Prescott, Arizona, and was fascinated,” says Marla Spivak, a professor of apiculture at the University of Minnesota and 2010 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She stayed up all night reading Bees’ Ways, and by morning she had decided on her career. “I was fascinated by the bees’ social structure—that they function without central authority,” she says.

Spivak’s research focuses on the interplay between bee nutrition, pesticides, and disease. One of the most interesting areas of Spivak’s research is on the benefits of propolis (tree resins) to the health and immune systems of honey bees. The bees collect resins on their hind legs, then deposit them in their nests to seal unwanted gaps. It can also act as an antimicrobial layer and immune defense against disease. “Rather than studying maladies, my preference is to study how bees keep themselves healthy, their natural defenses and natural ‘medicines,’ if you will,” explains Spivak.

Spivak is also interested in the development of “bee-lawns,” or pollinator habitats in urban landscapes and engaging the community in the fight to save the bees. Her Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota, has formed a group called The Bee Squad to help area beekeepers raise healthy colonies and wild pollinator landscapes. Its successful Hive to Bottle program, which encourages businesses to keep a bee hive on their property, has, says Spivak, encouraged many businesses to “change their landscaping practices and pay attention to pesticides.” Two other programs are the Bee Veterans program and Bee Arts, which support artists working with the themes of pollinators and the environment.

These activities underscore Spivak’s belief that “public concern for the plight of bees is what is driving, and will continue to drive legislative efforts to actually do something to help them.” Noting that there aren’t enough flowers in many parts of the country to support bees’ nutritional needs, she adds, “If we can get more flowers in the ground—in agricultural and urban landscapes—and if we can keep that bee food free of pesticides, we can reverse the downward spiral of bee deaths.”

Dr. Dennis vanEngelsdorp

As an undergraduate at the University of Guelph, Dennis vanEngelsdorp took a beekeeping course as an elective. He’d already opened a gardening store and thought his path was set. But he bought some bees, and was stung by one of his charges. “There’s a saying, you get stung and it’s in your blood. You know you’re a beekeeper,” says vanEngelsdorp.

Explaining the allure of the beehive, he says, “You have 40,000 sisters working in harmony, and you’re on the outside, but really connected to the environment because the bees are.”

As head of the Honey Bee Lab at the University of Maryland, vanEngelsdorp specializes in an epidemiological approach to understanding and improving bee health, which means collecting and analyzing large-scale data on bee colonies.

With the help of the Bee Informed Partnership, a large-scale collaboration between leading research institutions and beekepers, vanEngelsdorp has spent the last five years conducting a national bee management survey, examining various colony management practices and how they affect colony health.

Starting with “large data sets that are very dirty”—or with a lot of variation—and refining them, he says his lab is now close to being able “to make statements about trends” and integrate its findings into a “best management practices” approach for both large-scale apiaries and backyard beekeepers. This data set, the largest of its type in the country, is also at the stage where “people can interact with the data and ask their own questions of it,” vanEngelsdorp explains. As with the data on the health effects of smoking, vanEngelsdorp says this data does not directly link practices to outcome, but offers only correlative data.

Going beyond the honey bee, vanEngelsdorp says his research has made him “much more appreciative of the need for habitat, not just for honey bees, but for native bees as well.” He praises the movement of “making meadows not lawns,” noting that the “history of the idea of perfectly green grass is from our colonial past, when only the rich could do it,” and adds, “It’s actually horribly destructive.” More exciting is to get more forage (food for pollinators) into the environment.”

“Wild pollinators are a national treasure,” he adds. “They are these flying jewels, and we have to make sure there is room for them in our environments.”

Photo of bees in action by Susie Sun.

The post Meet the Bee Heroes Working On the Front Lines to Save Pollinators appeared first on Civil Eats.

The demand for grassfed beef is growing by at least 20 percent a year in the U.S. and the number of restaurants and burger chains serving grassfed and pasture-raised burgers is also growing rapidly. But just how they define and verify the practices behind those terms can be murky business. (We covered some of that here). While some sustainable food advocates find the growth of the entire grassfed industry to be a heartening sign of shifting mass market demand, the grassfed burger market may be growing so quickly that it’s undermining some of the original intention behind the shift.

It’s not surprising that the more expensive burger at Market Table Bistro is the only one sold in a full-service restaurant, nor is it surprising that it’s the one most likely to be locally sourced. But what might surprise you is the source of those less expensive fast-casual grassfed burgers: The meat is most likely shipped in from outside the U.S. Most of the grassfed hamburgers being touted by the likes of Elevation Burger, Hardee’s, and Carl’s Jr. are made from animals that were raised on wide swaths of open land in Australia, New Zealand, or Uruguay.

Meanwhile, most small local farms and ranches are still struggling to find a market for their grassfed, ethically raised hamburger meat at a profit.

We might not expect the 3,000 Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. across the U.S. to source their grassfed meat from small, local producers (indeed, the chains’ parent company, CKE, buys meat from Australia). But even the much smaller Elevation Burger, a Virginia-based chain that includes 60 restaurants in seven countries, buys most of its organic, grassfed beef from off-shore suppliers, says Michael Berger, founding partner and vice president of Elevation’s supply chain.

“The meet-your-farmer niche is awesome, wonderful,” says Berger. “But we need product on a larger scale. It’s difficult to aggregate their product into our supply stream because our buying volume would have the potential of taking out whole herds.”

“Sourcing is a big consideration for chains of any size,” agrees Brad Haley, chief marketing officer of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s. When market research showed that the company’s customer base, especially, as Haley puts it, “the male half of the Millenial population,” wanted so-called “cleaner” food, CKE, the parent company of the two fast food chains, began planning its “all-natural burger.”

But CKE couldn’t find a big enough supply of beef to roll out antibiotic- and hormone-free grassfed burgers at both chains. So Carl’s Jr. debuted the fast food industry’s first “all-natural” burger—sourced entirely from Australia—in December of 2014, and Hardee’s launched its line in May 2015. Both, says Haley, “were among the top burger introductions of the year,” and both are still going strong.

Meanwhile small producers and the companies that distribute their meat have a different problem on their hands: how to sell all the ground beef off of one animal in order to turn a profit.

Moving the Trim

Leland Whitehouse, head of sales for the Brooklyn-based Happy Valley Meat Company, which buys humanely raised whole animals from 20 small family farms in Pennsylvania, then breaks them down and sells them to chefs and restaurants, has seen this challenge first hand.

While prime cuts like tenderloins and sirloins, and even off cuts like tongue, heart, and liver are snapped up by nose-to-tail chefs, explains Whitehouse, it’s harder to get them excited about the trim. Anywhere from a third to half of the animal ends up as ground beef and selling that portion at market price can be a challenge. For this reason, explains White, sustainable pasture-based farmers sometimes end up “selling whole live animals to big companies like Cargill that pay low commodity market prices.”

“If you dump [hamburger] on the commodity market or sell it on the cheap, it’s impossible to make money on beef,” explains New York City whole-animal butcher Jake Dickson. He adds that this conundrum is “really the most difficult thing about running a whole animal butcher shop.” He charges $9.50 a pound for his ground beef, or around twice what commodity ground beef goes for in the grocery store.

Dickson is highly creative in coming up with added-value products designed to move that trim: beef chili, sausages, hot dogs, and Whitehouse says Happy Valley is exploring those options, too.

One of Happy Valley’s buyers, Daniel Holzman, chef-owner of the New York City-based the Meatball Shop, built his business around capitalizing on whole animal suppliers’ excess pork and beef trim. Six years ago, when he launched the Meatball Shop, “using whole animals was very much in the Zeitgeist,” says Holzman. “Our theory was it doesn’t work unless you have a way of utilizing the hind legs (for pigs) and the bottom round and portions of the legs on cows.” In addition to beef from Happy Valley, he gets sustainable pork trim from another Brooklyn-based company, Heritage Foods USA. “I’m just thrilled I can get my hands on the quality of meat I want to use,” Holzman says.

But even with three locations, the Meatball Shop is just one of a select number of businesses buying local and domestic sustainable ground meat. Happy Valley processes about eight to 12 animals a week, in theory enough to fulfill the needs of one Elevation franchise, which Berger says requires up to 10 to 15 animals a month. If Happy Valley shipped to, say, Elevation’s Ashburn, Virginia Elevation franchise, its meat would only have to travel 200 miles instead of 10,000. But it would also cost the chain considerably more. “My little local economy is competing with this massive economy of scale that comes from $8 milion worth of grassfed beef coming in on one boat,” says Whitehouse.

Cows From Down Under

Off-shore grassfed beef has become the go-to for large American chains says, Berger, because a country like Australia “has thousands of acres of uninhabited mass pastureland,” making it the best source for grassfed beef. Countries like New Zealand and to a lesser extent Australia, explains George Faison, partner at Debragga.com, the online store of the Jersey City, New Jersey high-end meat supplier, have been focused and built around grassfed meat for years; in a way, “it is their ‘commodity’ animal,” he adds. Faison, adds that economies of scale make the cost in those countries cheaper, too: “they’re going to processors not with 150 animals a week, but 150 an hour.”

These are also animals whose primary function, at least for American buyers, is to provide ground beef. The highest demand product in international certified organic beef is for 85 percent lean trim, explains Berger, and two of the largest buyers are Costo and Wegman’s. The primal cuts of these animals, he notes, tend to be harder to sell in the U.S. because Americans would find them too lean, too tough, and probably too strongly flavored for their liking.

When national chain restaurants decide to go “natural” (even McDonald’s has vowed to begin purchasing some sustainable beef this year) they need to look abroad, because volume meat producers in the U.S. are still organized around large feed lots and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and the commodity practices they are based on.

“The way sustainably produced meat is distributed now is problematic,” explains Chris Hunt, special advisor on food and agriculture for GRACE Communications Foundation. And consolidation in the meat industry is largely to blame. “What happened in the U.S. was an elimination of distribution networks for small-scale farmers over the course of several decades. Now we’re seeing them being re-established, with the kind of cooperative approach like with Happy Valley.”

The Question of Transparency

One major difference between the work of folks like Happy Valley and the large-scale international grassfed beef system is transparency. Berger of Elevation says, “Everything we buy … can be traced back to smaller growers, from 1,000 to 15,000 head, compared to the scale of 70,000 on a [U.S.] feedlot.”

Of Australian beef, Jake Dickson says, “They have a large land base and a very small population so they are massive exporters.” Calling the producers there small farms “is a fantasy,” he adds. How else, he asks, can “export beef traveling 7,000 miles” be significantly cheaper than American grassfed beef?

Indeed 1,000-15,000 cattle operations are still fairly large herds compared to the small-scale grassfed and pasture-based U.S. growers attempting to return to more sustainable ways. And at that scale, as well as the distance, true transparency is a challenge.

Will Harris, a fourth-generation cattleman who runs White Oak Pastures farm in Bluffton, Georgia and is president of the American Grassfed Association says, “It’s very difficult to read a label and tell what the protocol really was. The best way of knowing what you’re getting is to get to know the farmer or at least know something about the farm it came from. That’s hard enough to do in America and it’s even more difficult if it’s thousands of miles away.”

GRACE’s Chris Hunt and Adele Douglass, executive director of the Virginia-based Humane Farm Animal Care, which issues the Certified Humane food label, both also wonder if the large-scale organic beef producers are adequately addressing animal welfare concerns.

Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, answers Haley, have contractual requirements regarding feeding and handling of the cattle in their programs with grassfed beef suppliers, which in turn institute those same agreements with their ranchers. They are audited by the third party Australian certification program AsureQuality to verify compliance. And while the inclusion of retired dairy cows in the ground beef supply chain is a well-known practice, Haley responds that the beef in CKE’s all-natural burgers never come from dairy cows.

Shake Shack, the burger behemoth that now operates 86 restaurants worldwide, including 51 in the U.S., has, like Chipotle, been seen as a major force in changing fast food for the better. But while Shake Shack says it only buys meat in the U.S., the chain—like most U.S. meat suppliers and burger chains—is cagey about its supply network.

“All of our butchers source the same all-natural, no-hormone, and no-antibiotic whole muscle Angus beef,” says Laura Enoch, senior marketing manager for Shake Shack. When asked for more specifics, Enoch listed a number of highly reputable domestic suppliers such as Kansas-based Creekstone Farms, but she stopped there, “We believe our supplier base is a trade secret and gives us a competitive advantage.”

Whole animal butchers like Dickson argue that as systems grow it becomes harder for them to maintain humane management and slaughtering practices for both the animals and the workers.

Given the affordability and access to grassfed meat on the scale of Shake Shack, Elevation, or Hardee’s/Carl’s Jr. Hunt says some compromises might be necessary for the time being. “We can’t let the perfect get in the way of the good,” he notes. “The fact that there is huge consumer interest, not just niche, in sustainable meat in particular, is a huge first step to pushing the whole thing forward.”

Even the highly regarded third-party verification organization Animal Welfare Approved has embraced the rise of the fast-food grassfed burger as a good thing. A blog post by the organization greeted Carl’s Jr.’s announcement of its all-natural burger with joy and called the move “a game-changer” with the potential to dislodge “an entrenched and unsustainable beef production.”

But the game doesn’t always change in a linear or straightforward way. As demand continues to grow, so the need for transparency to prevent the rise of “bad actors and greenwashing,” says Hunt. Food safety is also a factor; Chipotle has acknowledged that its recent E.Coli outbreak might have come from Australian beef.

Creekstone Farms—one of Shake Shack’s suppliers—shares the U.S. market with California’s Niman Ranch, which provides antibiotic and hormone-free meat to Chipotle, and both sell to high-end restaurants across the country. They are both also now owned by large corporations: Niman was bought by Perdue in September 2015, and Creekstone is owned by private equity firm Sun Capital Partners, Inc.

Niman Ranch, notes Hunt, has done a very good job at maintaining transparency as it has grown its supply chain. When Perdue purchased the company, it promised not to change any of its production practices. “But there’s always a risk, maybe not right away, that over time,” says Hunt, things could change. “Third-party verification of production standards becomes all the more crucial,” he adds.

Meanwhile, the American grassfed industry waits to step in to supply a growing demand for its product. “The predominance of industrial, grainfed beef production in America is why Carl’s Jr. has initially sourced its grassfed beef from Australia—but it doesn’t have to stay that way,” an AWA spokesperson said on its blog. “We have been waiting for this moment and have pasture-based, grassfed American farmers ready, willing, and eager to supply this growing demand. If this takes off like we hope, it could be a job creator, a market booster, and could turn beef’s carbon footprint completely around.”

The post The Grassfed Burger Gap appeared first on Civil Eats.

“This was the standard size combine for decades; now they’re much bigger,” Hollister explains. In the era of large-scale monocropping, he points out, “nobody tries to raise 15 acres of grain anymore.”

Nobody, that is, except people like Hollister and Cleaver, who have begun farming on a small-scale, diversified level, shunning chemical fertilizers and pesticides, building up the soil, and rotating complementary crops in order produce the most delicious food possible.

When the couple, now in their 60s, bought the 197-acre former dairy farm in 2012 for $500,000, they both knew a great deal about food systems and the local organic movement, but little about the practice of farming.

Cleaver has been a key player in New York’s farm-to-table movement for 35 years, as a caterer, restaurateur, and local food activist. As owner of a $4.8 million Manhattan business that includes catering operation The Cleaver Co., and a 51-seat local and sustainable Chelsea restaurant, The Green Table, Cleaver was the first to track down locally grown tomatoes for her customers back in 1979. She’s also the crusader who launched an organization called the Farm to Chef Network in 2003, and the recipient of the first Slow Food New York City “Snailblazer” award in 2011 for her efforts to improve local food systems.

Hollister, meanwhile, had dreamed of buying a farm since he and Cleaver met as students at Bennington College in Vermont in the early 1970s. Instead, he became a mechanical technician for movies and television, and the couple settled in Brooklyn and raised a family. Returning to that agrarian dream when their children were grown called for “a tremendous amount of work and money,” says Cleaver, yet the farm has made her business a truly vertically integrated farm-to-table enterprise. “It really feels as though the circle has been completed,” she adds.

While the rewards after two seasons on the farm have been significant, the actual practice of farming, largely undertaken by Hollister while Cleaver keeps her business running in Manhattan, has been humbling. For one, it takes more concentrated, strategic thinking than they expected. Hollister compares mastering the complex task of learning chemistry, biology, ecology, meteorology, and ancient folk wisdom to “understanding the human brain,” and adds, “I’m just beginning to scratch the surface of farming.”

The farm is located just north of Albany, where lush green rolling hills are dotted with dilapidated barns and drivers automatically give right of way to tractors rumbling down the road. Hollister produced 2,000 meat chickens for Cleaver’s famed chicken pot pies, 85 heritage breed turkeys, and on his 30 tillable acres, about 80 different kinds of garden vegetables, flowers, and herbs. He’s lucky, he points out, because, with all his products destined for Cleaver’s restaurant and catering operation, “I’m only growing for flavor, not to maximize profits.”

Cleaver buys chickens, produce, and flowers from the farm, so her business benefits, especially on “higher price-point items like flowers and tomatoes,” she notes. And while she says “the profit-and-loss on chickens is not that great” they’re doing a little better than breaking even on the birds and it has helped her solve a long-term sourcing dilemma.

“We have a very high bar for product purchasing here,” Cleaver explains; even among greenmarket farmers, sourcing pastured poultry raised on non-GMO feed has not been easy. “You can raise a better chicken if you do it yourself,” she adds.

Yet while expenses are down for the restaurant and catering operation, overall, she adds the farm “is costing more than it’s making,” largely due to money the couple has pumped into infrastructure, including two greenhouses, a barn, equipment, grains, and fencing.

Now, Cleaver and Hollister understand on a deeper level the reason why so many farmers must work off the farm to subsidize it. Although Cleaver hopes to create a locally produced, wholesale chicken pot pie business, the complexities of U.S. Department of Agriculture licensing and poultry processing regulations have kept the project on the back burner for decades.

So for now, they’ll continue operating the farm at a loss, Cleaver adds, especially with so many large-ticket projects left to do, including going off-grid with solar power and dredging the farm’s pond. “Luckily my [catering and restaurant] business are debt-free and we have some savings,” Cleaver notes.

The upside makes it all worth it though. “Being able to have really amazing tomatoes, beans, carrots, and flowers picked in the morning and driven at the restaurant at night is kind of insanely delightful,” says Cleaver of the weekly produce deliveries the Green Table receives from the farm. Recalling a recent dinner for 250 she catered using only Green Table Farms poultry, she adds, “there’s a lot of pride in that.”

To help get up to speed, Hollister spent a year studying biodynamic farming at The Pfeiffer Center in Chestnut Ridge, New York. And he continues to embrace the core principles of the farming technique. Biodynamic farmers see the whole farm as a single, highly interrelated organism, and they see the role of the farmer as orchestrating the land’s cycle of nutrients, growth, life, and decay with very few outside inputs.

Hollister also devoured books and webinars on farming and attended local and regional farmer’s conferences. Esteemed veteran farmers, both well-known and obscure (including Mary-Howell Martens of Lakeview Organic Grain and Steffen Schneider of Hawthorne Valley Farm) also offered Hollister their time and advice.

While he has had success with row crops like melon, lettuce, peppers, okra, and chard, Hollister says, he’s still working on mastering grain cultivation. Hollister and Cleaver’s goal is to develop a five-acre field of oats, wheat, soybeans and perhaps barley, mainly to feed their poultry. This way, they’ll know where their feed comes from and save the cost of expensive organic feed. But the nuances still elude him.

“Really experienced farmers,” he explains, know how to read the signs in the soil and the crops: “When the soil is deficient in nutrients, they know why it happened and how to fix it. They know when to cultivate and what kind of cultivation is called for.”

The farm has been a step-by-step “a learn-as-you-go process,” Cleaver agrees. One of those steps is experimenting with a new breed of corn, Floriani Red Flint corn, an Italian heirloom variety that makes for delicious polenta. The purchase of Black Spanish and Standard Bronze turkeys from heritage breed poultry guru Frank Reese is another.

Where this experiment in farming will lead, say the couple, is an open question. At some point, Cleaver says, “We had the realization this isn’t a 10-year project, it’s a 20-year project, and we might not have 20 years.” They are already mulling over the question of who will keep the farm going once they retire. And they hope to build a second house on the property for another farmer who will eventually want it as his or her own. “Our goal is to keep the land in farming,” says Cleaver.

The couple’s quixotic adventure has turned out to be almost the ideal project for maximizing the combination of skills Hollister and Cleaver possess. It has also “reinforced in me the need for people to get on to farms and learn about how important it is to care for the earth so that the earth can care for you,” adds Cleaver. “Really getting inside and knowing farming first hand has made me a better advocate for the good food movement.”

The post Farming to Table: Adding ‘Farmer’ to a Chef’s Resume appeared first on Civil Eats.

In March, a police officer and two animal control officers showed up at Joshua Rockwood’s farm in upstate New York. They found frozen drinking water in the barn and spotted a steer sticking his nose through the snow to access running water, Rockwood reported on his blog. Despite testing and confirming that his dogs were adequately hydrated, the officer ticketed Rockwood for failure to provide adequate sustenance.

The next week brought another official visit, this time from three police officers, a dog control officer, and a vet carrying a search warrant. A few days later, the officers returned to seize two horses and a pony. Soon Rockwood learned he was facing 13 misdemeanor charges, including: keeping animals in an unheated barn with frozen water; keeping horses, cows, and pigs in a fenced-in area with a natural spring that had frozen over; and frost-bite on a pig’s ears. It is unclear who or what precipitated the police raid or the charges.

Rockwood, his lawyer, and the local Police Department did not respond to requests for interviews. But Rockwood has responded to the charges by continuing to do what he’s been doing all along: telling his farm’s story online.

So began a remarkable grassroots movement that has highlighted the divide between pasture-based rural farmers—whose practices can look rough around the edges—and their non-farming neighbors, whose notions of well-tended farm animals can clash with that gritty reality.

Since then, Rockwood has launched a crowdsourced legal defense fund that amassed over $57,000 and a Friends of West Wind Acres Farm Facebook page “liked” by close to 9,000 people. It’s a movement that has united old-guard farmers and young, conventional and sustainable. Their immediate gripe is against town officials, but those officials in turn appear to be caught between a growing sustainable farming movement—whose practitioners don’t have the capital to invest in expensive infrastructure—and locals critical of Rockwood’s practices.

When Rockwood wrote his first blog post as a new farmer in May 2011, he was thrilled to report that he had successfully leased 75 acres of pastureland and acquired 300 farm animals.

He began charting his transformation from nervous, aspiring farmer to an experienced pasture-based agrarian offering beef, chicken, and pork CSA subscriptions from his farm, West Wind Acres. Rockwood, who was only 30 at the time, bought movable pens for his Cornish broiler hens, posted pictures of his Scottish Highland cattle, agonized over whether or not to treat an injured boar with antibiotics (he did, to improve his herd and keep from having to slaughter the boar), and patiently explained to a patron who owned pet rabbits why he chose the Silver Fox breed to raise for meat.

A Different Model

Unlike farms systems that confine animals to high-density indoor living spaces, pasture-based farmers allow their animals to graze freely outdoors. In one 2012 post, Rockwood described how he and his wife Stefanie prepare for storms, writing, “We take the weather serious and do whatever we can to protect our animals while still following our model.” When tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings were issued, they kept their piglets in a portable paddock, but let the other animals decide whether to shelter in their paddocks or not. “After all,” Rockwood wrote, “Animal instincts are much better than ours.”

Unlike many large factory animal farms, which are far removed from residential areas and invisible to most consumers—small, pasture-based operations are designed to be closer to customers. They also often rely on direct marketing, so their operations are much more visible to consumers. But, as a result, they can also raise the ire of locals, who are either opposed to animal agriculture altogether, or who are uncomfortable with its complex realities when they see it up close.

“We have people screaming that they want pastured pork,” says Lorraine Lewandrowski, a dairy farmer and lawyer in Herkimer County, New York, noting that they don’t always know what that means. “If a pig is outside, it can get frostbite. These are things that touch boundaries.”

After the storm Rockwood described, an irate neighbor complained that some piglets had eaten some of her horse’s grain. They claimed that the animals had escaped because they were starving. Another neighbor expressed concern about his dogs being “underfed” and living outside. Rockwood wrote in response, “These guys get the best dog food around, liver, heart, ham, chicken, pigs feet, hocks, and occasionally we force them to eat dry dog food.” He also pointed out that they were Maremma sheepdogs, which require minimal shelter.

Over the years, Rockwood has faced other complaints by neighbors. In one January 2013 post, he told of a visit by the S.P.C.A., and noted that an anonymous person had called “to complain about the care we give our animals.”

Community Support

When the news of the charges against Rockwood hit, Shannon Hayes, who is a farmer and the author of several books, including The Radical Homemaker, wanted to see the farm for herself before blogging about it. She visited with her animal scientist father and grazing expert Troy Bishopp, and says what they saw at West Wind Acres, “wasn’t a picture-perfect farm, but was exactly like any of us would have had in March, and just what every farmer faces at the end of a hard winter, especially if they give animals some freedom to choose where they want to be.” Hayes adds, “It was just shocking to see that there would even be legal ramifications.”

At one of several procedural hearings that have been held so far this spring, Hayes says over 200 people showed up to support Rockwood and at another, she “stopped counting after 135.” In attendance, Hayes adds, were “hippie farmers, really salt-of-the-earth farmers, and ‘don’t-tread-on-me’ Harley bikers waving their flags.” Everyone, adds Hayes, “Was very respectful; you could hear a pin drop.”

Asked to comment on the controversy from an animal welfare perspective, Adele Douglass, Executive Director of Virginia-based non-profit organization, Humane Farm Animal Care (which issues the “Certified Humane” food label), declined to speak to this specific case, but notes, “Animals on pasture and raised outdoors are used to winter conditions.”

She adds, “The best thing any farmer or animal scientists can do, is to prepare educational material for consumers, the press, and law enforcement to understand the life cycle of different farm animals; when they are raised outdoors or indoors, what their needs are, how different housing and weather patterns affect them normally and whether they can adapt or not adapt.”

Washington County farm owner and blogger Jon Katz, who has defended Rockwood on his blog, says the charges are part of a larger issue of “people losing touch with the real life of farms,” and an animal rights movement whose latest target is often small farmers.

In 2011, another upstate farmer, Greg Casalaina, found himself the subject of criticism after buying four retired dairy cows to process for dog food over the winter. A neighbor who ran an animal rescue operation obtained photos of the animals, including a cow Casalaina says he butchered himself. Casalaina admits that to someone not raised on a farm, “after hard winter on dairy farms, things are not pretty,” adding that animal rights activists became “excited and upset” at what they saw in the photos.

“The next thing I know, cops are at my house,” recalls Casalaina. Despite his remaining cows being given a clean bill of health by a large animal vet, and the apologies of the policemen, Casalaina says the police received “several thousand calls” from animal rights activists and he was arrested. Casalaina says he went through “several months of hell” before he was exonerated in court.

“It really kind of derailed my life in ways I can’t describe,” adds Casalaina. “I was getting death threats, and my kids were getting actual snail mail letters saying, ‘We’re going to get you.’”

Though stories like these of farmers whose livelihoods have been damaged by the complaints by extreme animal rights activists abound, Douglass cautions against blaming an entire movement. “Most of the animal rights movement wants animals on pastures and small farms,” she says. She adds that to protect against baseless claims of abuse, small farmers would be wise “to think about having emergency plans (for contingencies such as frozen pipes and inadequate heat), and to look at and operate their farms as if they were always giving public tours.”

Rockwood’s active social media campaign has amounted to just what Douglass recommended: a virtual public tour of his farm and his practices. Rather than quietly paying the fees imposed for the alleged animal abuse and neglect and moving on, he has chosen to fight the charges online. On July 14, his next  court date, Rockwood and his supporters will find out whether or not he made the right decision.

The post A Pasture-Based Rancher is Caught in the Crosshairs appeared first on Civil Eats.

Essentially sap tapped from maple trees that hasn’t been boiled down to make syrup, maple water is growing in popularity, especially in the Eastern half of the U.S. There are now at least seven U.S. and Canadian companies producing it for widely varying price points ranging from $3 to $5 for an 8- to 16-ounce bottle. Compared to leading coconut water brands, maple water contains less sugar, has fewer calories, and travels fewer miles to U.S. markets.

While some maple water makers point to its health and hydration benefits and claim that the beverage is all-natural and filled with vitamin B, electrolytes, manganese polyphenols, and antioxidants, others tend to stress its sustainable qualities.

In fact, one brand, Vertical Water, is the product of a traditional timber company’s green makeover. As co-founder of Feronia Forests, Valentina Cugnasca had her sights set on a more socially meaningful career. It wasn’t until she pursued a degree in sustainable management, that her idea of “sustainable full forestry” really came together.

With the backing of her co-founder and father, Paolo Cugnasca, who also directs a financial risk management firm, Cugnasca set about creating a Benefit or “B” Corporation designed to preserve forests for future generations. In addition to a creating a 900-acre forest adventure park in Lanesborough, Massachusetts called Ramblewild, she began developing a maple water product in 2010.

Once convinced of maple water’s sustainability, nutritional qualities, and market appeal, Feronia Forests began connecting with as many suppliers as it could and created the infrastructure necessary to process large amounts of sap. “The more sap suppliers we can involve, the greater the social and environmental impact,” Cugnasca explains.

Launched last April, Feronia’s Vertical Water is sold in over 1,300 stores in 40 states. Cugnasca declines to divulge the quantity of maple water so far processed, saying only the company has “exceeded all distribution goals.” All of its 2014 production of maple water was sourced in western New York State from trees outside of Feronia forest in order, Cugnasca explains, “to keep as many trees as possible vertical” (hence the product’s name).

In Massachusetts, sports nutritionist Kate Weiler and her business partner Jeff Rose started selling DRINKMaple in May of last year. They stumbled across a Quebec coffee shop selling the product, and were enthralled at the idea of a beverage “straight from nature,” as Weiler describes it.

As triathletes, Weiler and Rose were familiar enough with the concept of natural hydration through products like coconut water, but Weiler says, “quite frankly had never really thought about how unsustainable that was.” The Concord, Massachusetts-based pair got to work developing their own brand of maple water. They, too, are now touting the clear, slightly sweet beverage as both a lower-sugar alternative to coconut water (whose makers have recently had to walk back several health claims), and a forest-friendly choice.

Drink Maple sold about 160,000 bottles last year mostly consisting of sap from a single New Brunswick farm and Weiler projects significantly higher sales for 2015, gathered from five farms in New Hampshire and Vermont. “The reception and demand have been absolutely phenomenal,” she says.

Michael Farrell, maple specialist and the director of the Uihlein Forest at Cornell University (a maple research and education center devoted entirely to maple syrup and sap) says maple water, “provides an economic incentive to retain the trees every year.” Farrell, who has served as a consultant to Vertical Water, adds, “This is a huge opportunity for the maple industry.”

Despite its voguish appearance in yoga studios and paleo cafés, Farrell points to the fact that Native Americans have been drinking maple sap for centuries as a tonic. It is also prized in Korea for its cleansing properties; downing huge quantities during spring maple tapping festivals is a cherished rite in some regions.

Although there are increasing numbers of large-scale maple syrup producers, especially in Canada, says Farrell, in the U.S., most syrup comes from small-scale tree owners who make it as a sideline during the spring. “It’s hard, and it’s seasonal, and it doesn’t take a full year,” he explains.

Selling maple water adds value to maple trees, Farrell notes, especially if companies pay farmers a fair price for their sap. Not only do small producers save processing cost required to boil 40 gallons of sap to get a gallon of syrup, he adds, everyone benefits from the energy saved to heat it in the notoriously lengthy process.

Farrell notes that “there is always a back and forth between loggers and maple producers about getting access to trees,” but there is no reason the two parties can’t form a partnership. Once it is about 10 inches in diameter, a maple tree can be tapped annually from 20 to 60 years. Far from harming the tree’s health, Farrell says tapping “is a minor intrusion on the tree.” He argues that the best way to save a tree is to tap it, “because it gives you an incentive to keep it and not cut it down.”

One challenge faced by maple water producers is a lack of pasteurizing and filtering facilities. Vertical Water hopes to form cooperatives of small owners and build the infrastructure that can process their sap quickly in the spring. During the rest of the year, the trees would grow, photosynthesize, and store carbon dioxide—all beneficial to the environment—and provide landowners more money over the long-term than cutting them down in the short-term.

When Weiler and Rose started talking to farmers, she recalls, “The hardest thing was finding a place that could bottle, because sap goes bad so quickly; you need the trees-to-bottle supply chain nailed down.” At the time, there were very few ways to bottle without adding preservatives. The nutritionist in Weiler didn’t want to add those ingredients to DRINKMaple.

Josh Dolan, founder of Sapsquatch Pure Maple Syrup in Enfield, New York, tends his small family maple forest, and launched his own maple syrup CSA. Although he’s interested in selling maple water, he says, “the outlay of resources is way beyond my ability at this point.” Dolan does, however, subscribe to the goal of shepherding the forests to keep them healthy and productive. “We have this idea that wild ecosystems are the healthiest scenario.” But, he adds, “There are a lot of neglected, overgrown, and overcrowded forests. The maple industry is a way that New York can improve our ecosystem.”

Cornell’s Farrell is also researching the economic benefits of tapping walnut and birch, the two other trees that render highly drinkable forms of sap. In many parts of the world, serious research on less-sweet birch sap eclipses interest in maple sap. For maple farmers already equipped to process sap, cultivating birch, Farrell says, is another way of producing more income from their land.

“There are so many parts of New York State that are undeveloped and struggling and they have this resource right under their noses,” says Cugnasca. Tempering dreams of overnight wealth for depressed Northeastern regions, Farrell notes that if maple water takes off, “it’s not going to save Upstate New York, but it’s going to create a lot more jobs and opportunities.”

The post Maple Water: Fad or Lifeline for Forests? appeared first on Civil Eats.