The post This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Herlinda Huipe and her husband Carmelo Rojas operate Tierra HR Organic Farm on California’s Central Coast. It’s small, so they both still work part time on larger farms, primarily picking strawberries.
But the couple has recently hit a milestone: During their busiest harvest days, they’ve had to hire people to help with their celery crop.
“They are people who are really fast at cutting it,” Rojas said, “and we pay them as contractors.”
The catalyst that led Huipe and Rojas to segue from farmworkers to farm owners is the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA) in Salinas, California, which for more than two decades has offered classes, on-farm training, land, equipment, and business support to aspiring organic vegetable farmers. ALBA has received over $15 million in support from federal grants, local and national foundations, and individual donors in the last 20 years, and more than 220 businesses have launched with the organization’s support since 2001.
In an impact report published last fall, ALBA development director Chris Brown found that more than 10 new farms get started each year and four to six expand beyond ALBA’s land.
Brown also learned that among the 121 alumni farmers who responded to a survey, 77 are still operating a farm business. Meanwhile, others are working in farm-support roles, as intermediaries between farm owners and product buyers and as administrators or business support staff for other farms.
Recently, Brown said, he spoke with one alum who told him “she is helping farmers with marketing because, she said, ‘she’s not as good of a grower.’”
ALBA welcomes anyone, Brown said, but in this region known for growing heavily labor-dependent strawberries and leafy greens, the organization’s focus and greatest impact has been with immigrant farmworkers, mostly from Mexico and Central America. “They want to get away from that lifestyle and farm on their own,” he said.
Huipe and Rojas had the dream but until a friend told them about ALBA, they had no idea how they would even begin the transition. “We are really so grateful to ALBA, and all the people there.” Rojas said recently in Spanish. “They are friendly and always help us.”
One of ALBA’s farmer partners driving a tractor. (Photo credit: Shawn Linehan Photography, courtesy of ALBA)
The impact report also noted that many immigrants enter the program with lots of field experience and sometimes even years operating their own farms before coming to the U.S. But Brown said there are also U.S.-born participants, many of them children of farmworkers, who “tend to enroll in the program at a younger age.”
That’s important because while it’s great to see middle-aged farmworkers create their own businesses, attracting younger people to agricultural careers is especially important, as the average age of the American farmer hovers around 60, and the high cost of land and other capital has kept many young people out of the industry in recent years. And historically, in addition to land, people of color have had a hard time accessing federally funded supports that many long-time farm families have come to expect.
In a 2020 report, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) noted that about 23,600 of the 124,400 farmers and ranchers in the state were considered “socially disadvantaged,” meaning they were women and/or people of color. These producers often face language barriers, challenges securing long-term land access, and a lack of engagement with resources from CDFA. ALBA’s goal is to address all of these hurdles.
The ALBA program begins with introductory course work, which Huipe and Rojas completed in 2021. Then, they were invited to farm half an acre of land owned by the organization. The deal also came with equipment they could use, technical assistance from ALBA’s farm manager, and a nearly guaranteed market for their crops through Coke Farm, a local food hub and distributor that works with 70 organic producers. Now, the couple are in the process of expanding to 5 acres.
Land access can be the biggest barrier to getting started in farming—for everyone, but especially for young people, BIPOC farmers, and immigrants. In the growing national conversation about land justice, ALBA stands out.
Jennifer Hashley, director of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project in Massachusetts, said her group and ALBA were among a handful across the country that have created a framework for “how to help folks get into the business of farming and how to be successful. How to overcome all the intense barriers of access to land, capital markets, fair prices, labor issues.”
As a result, she said newer farm incubator programs have turned to ALBA as an example.
“They really did develop a comprehensive production and training program that sets the bar,” said Hashley. The fact that it combines education—the year-long course called PEPA after the Spanish acronym for Programa Educativo Para Pequeños Agricultores, or Education Program for Small Farmers—with land access and farm supports is one key element of what sets it apart from other programs.
Brown said most farmers who complete the ALBA program are prepared to be on their own.
“By that time, their mettle has been tested. They’re showing potential,” he said. “They’re starting to understand and starting to master the various responsibilities of being a farm owner.”
And he said in the Salinas Valley, he’s beginning to see ALBA alumni working with landowners in creative ways.
“Farmers are finding larger pieces of land that are available for rent and they’re subleasing them,” he said. A landowner might have 100 acres available, which is too much for one new farmer. But together a handful of ALBA alumni can divide up the land for their individual farms. “Landlords are getting more comfortable with that idea,” Brown said.
The work is gradually impacting the number of organic acres and the demographics of farm operators in California and could continue to do so in the future.
CDFA estimates that statewide about 10 percent of California farm acres were operated by people of color in 2020. But that’s according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, and data from the 2022 census should be forthcoming this year.
Farmers learn to use organic practices at ALBA and the vast majority, Brown said, continue to use them once they’re on their own. That has the added bonus of growing more food with less dependence on fossil fuel-heavy practices, like synthetic fertilizer. The total acres may be small, but using cover crops and rotating what’s grown each year can have climate benefits such as improving soil health, reducing erosion, and preventing toxic runoff.
“A lot of [farmers] said they were completely surprised that they could even do this,” Brown said, referring to running a farm. But these experienced, ambitious, hardworking people are filling a gap in U.S. agriculture as large farms continue to consolidate and long-time farm families see their children move away.
A family of ALBA farmers working in their field. (Photo courtesy of ALBA)
“No one’s being realistic about who’s going to farm,” Brown said. “It’s right in front of us, though: farmworkers—83 percent are Latino, there’s like 2 million of them. Probably 2 million, 3 million more in the back of restaurants, on packing lines, cleaning hotels, or whatever. They have that farming experience. They’re connected with it.”
ALBA has positioned itself to give this demographic the lift they need to get started.
“They have the grit and they have the desire,” he said, “and that’s very, very rare in our population today.”
The report found that farms nearly triple in acreage (on average) after leaving ALBA, and most are exclusively growing organic produce. While the independent farms typically rely on Coke Farm for distribution, 18 percent of the farmers reported growing more than 20 different crops, indicating that they are also making “sales through farmers markets or direct sales channels that demand more crop diversity,” the report reads.
Brown said he’s especially pleased that some alumni farms are also now selling produce directly to area schools. ALBA has also built a network of partner organizations that helps the new farms succeed on their own. Ernesto Soto, grower liaison-manager at Coke Farm, said the relationship goes both ways.
“We’re building an ecosystem, right?” Soto said of family-run, organic farms along California’s Central Coast. Coke gets the produce to retailers such as Whole Foods, a market that would be almost impossible for a beginning farmer to crack. “We’re their infrastructure” for things like cooling, packing, and marketing, Soto added. They also help build relationships with buyers.
Brown said the network of supports also includes groups more focused on running the business, such as Kitchen Table Advisors and California Farm Link, which may ultimately help new farms secure loans and navigate the business development piece of running a farm.
After conducting the survey of alumni, analyzing the data, and compiling the impact report, Brown said the conclusion he draws is that ALBA remains open to changing in necessary ways to best serve aspiring farmers. For example, it has joined the Blue Zone Project, a Salinas Valley Health initiative. He said it’s also introduced area nutrition directors to the feasibility of sourcing local, organic produce from small farms.
“We’re a work in progress, still,” he said, “even after all these years.”
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]]>The post Nighttime Harvests Protect Farmworkers From Extreme Heat, but Bring Other Risks appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the summer months, Flor Sanchez and the members of her harvest crew rise before dawn and arrive at a cherry orchard in Washington state’s Yakima Valley when there is only the slightest hint of daylight.
“We use headlamps,” she says, to carry ladders to the trees. Climbing up into the branches to harvest the ripe fruit in near-darkness, she says, “seems a little dangerous.” Headlamps cast shadows that can make it difficult to see the fruit. Setting up ladders in the dark also poses a danger.
Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns with United Farm Workers, says for field crops like onions and garlic, harvesting at night by headlamp or flood lights poses less risk than picking tree fruit because ladders aren’t needed, the short plants don’t create shadows, and workers know exactly what to pick even if they can’t completely see what they’re doing. The produce itself is also more durable. Winegrape harvest also often takes place at night.
When it’s time for harvest, “it’s a welcome shift for the entire crew to be able to work in the cool of the night.”
Across super-hot regions, nocturnal harvest, as Strater calls the practice, has become increasingly common. As climate change pushes summer temperatures higher on more consecutive days, and scientists are forecasting even warmer years ahead, more workers may find themselves in the field at night and in the early morning hours. And while some safety measures have been put in place, more data is needed to assess the challenges workers face.
Sanchez says she has only worked an overnight harvest shift once. “It’s complicated and dangerous,” she says, though she knows others are working them more often.
Jon DeVaney, president of the Washington State Tree Fruit Association, says overnight shifts are disruptive and generally undesirable.
“We’ve had a number of orchardists offer nighttime work—it’s usually as an offer more than a demand,” he says, because when cherries are ready and need to be harvested, cooler temperatures overnight reduce the risk that the skin will tear. High heat during the day softens the fruit and makes this type of damage more likely, he says. DeVaney says, in general, workers are less productive during overnight shifts because they’re tired and it’s harder to do the job. Scheduling surprises also interrupt home life. But overnight temperatures can be more comfortable, and they generally stay below the threshold that triggers additional precautions for outdoor workers facing heat-related stress and illness, which can be appealing to some workers and employers alike.
At Stolpman Vineyards in the Ballard Canyon area of Santa Barbara County, California, nocturnal harvest has long been the norm. Pete Stolpman, who runs the operation, says it’s been more than 20 years that the three-month harvest from mid-August to mid-November has been conducted entirely overnight.
“It’s for the quality of fruit,” he says. When the temperature can drop as much as 40 degrees from the daytime high, the fruit itself cools and he says that makes for a better-quality grape and, ultimately, wine. But beginning with his father before him, he says equal attention has been paid to employing people in a consistent, year-round way that gives them a career, not just a seasonal job.
Photo credit: Stolpman Vineyards
What’s critical to making it all work, he adds, is lights. “We’ve fabricated light poles on all of our fruit trailers and tractors that can illuminate four rows of vines each,” he says, “and then every crew member wears a headlamp.”
While night workers are entitled to all the same rest, bathrooms, and water breaks as day workers, Stolpman says the overnight work can offer a reprieve from the extreme heat of the summer. Before harvest, he says the workday typically starts at dawn and wraps up just as the temperatures reach uncomfortable highs. When it’s time for harvest, “it’s a welcome shift for the entire crew to be able to work in the cool of the night.”
New Regulations, Sparse Data
Washington, Oregon, California and Colorado currently have regulations to protect agricultural workers during extreme heat. Maryland and Nevada are working on rules of their own. (The consulting firm Venable has published an overview of state rules, which include variations from indoor-only regulations for high temperatures to outdoor rules that exclude farmworkers.) The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is in the throes of establishing a rule that would apply nationally.
But night and early morning work poses another set of challenges. In 2020, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1,350 people suffered non-fatal injuries between the hours of 8pm and 8am.
According to a 2019 fact sheet from The UC Davis Western Center on Agriculture Health and Safety, “The general, unofficial consensus among a number of professionals involved in agriculture is that night work is increasing.” Yet there has been very little data collected about how the shift in timing to avoid heat might be impacting workers.
Although the unofficial consensus is that night harvesting is increasing, there has been very little data collected about how the shift might be impacting workers.
“What concerns me most is the negative impacts on workers [from] all of the adaptations that happen to their schedule, because those changes aren’t always made with their overall well-being in mind,” says Heather Riden, program director at the UC Davis center. “What does it mean to have a person work three or four hours in the morning, then come back in the evening to work another three or four hours? And what does that do for their sleep schedule, their family life, and their ability to stay awake when they’re driving at two in the morning? That is where we don’t have data; we don’t know the bigger-picture implications.”
There is research that links a long-term shift to night work in other fields to increased risks to heart disease and diet-related illnesses, but it’s not yet clear what how it will impact seasonal farmworkers.
In 2020, California approved a set of safety standards for outdoor agricultural work taking place at night that includes adequate lighting that minimizes glare, rear lighting for self-propelled equipment, pre-shift safety meetings, and reflective safety gear for workers.
Riden adds that while employers are required to adhere to the standards, she doesn’t know “whether or not CalOSHA [California Division of Occupational Safety and Health] has been doing investigations or enforcement around that.”
“Lighting is critical for safety when you’re talking about farm work,” she says. “If you think about the kinds of human interactions and safety factors that come into play when people are out in a large field in secluded areas—all of the same concerns that exist during the day exist at night, but there’s less visibility.”
For women, night work might pose additional dangers. Researchers have found that “gender-based violence against female workers is frighteningly common on U.S. farms.” One study from 2010 found that 80 percent of Mexican and Mexican American women farmworkers in the U.S. have experienced some form of sexual harassment at work.
When asked about whether sexual harassment in the field might be a concern as more workers go into the fields under the cover of darkness, Riden said, “There have been many reports that have illuminated the horrible experiences of many women farmworkers in the daylight and I would imagine that darkness raises that risk. These are the things that we need to think about as the unintended consequences of trying to solve one problem, like heat, [while introducing] another problem. And it is why illumination standards are critical.”
The Logistics Challenges of Night Harvests
In addition to the danger, the schedule disruptions and the lower productivity, overnight work exacerbates one of the big challenges farmworkers contend with: childcare.
DeVaney says for all working parents—anywhere, in any type of employment—childcare has long been an issue. That’s even more true for farmworkers, who often earn little, live in rural areas and already have irregular schedules. Early mornings and overnight shifts magnify the situation. DeVaney says workers and employers must abide by the strict rules about who can be in the fields—children cannot tag along while their parents work.
Alberta Rojas, another worker from Sunnyside, Washington, says her children are now old enough to be left at home when she has to work before dawn. But she worries about other parents. “I’ve heard conversations about many workers who have to get their kids up so early, maybe at 2:00 in the morning,” she says, “to take them to a babysitter or someone who can care for them.”
“What does it mean to have a person work three or four hours in the morning, then come back in the evening to work another three or four hours? And what does that do for their sleep schedule, their family life?”
At the vineyard, Stolpman says any crew members who aren’t able to commit to the overnight shift will work during the day, sorting grapes instead. He says most often it’s the women who have conflicts with the overnight work, but sometimes there are men who need the day shift.
Strater says with onions and garlic, which are grown in places where extreme heat is common and expected, crews often know ahead of time when they will need to work overnight. They have enough advanced notice to (re)arrange childcare. But when harvest needs can change on a day-by-day basis and temperatures are irregular, some families find themselves in impossible situations, such as leaving sleeping kids in the car at the farm. Too often, Strater says, young children are left home alone.
“Every couple of years there’ll be a real terrible tragedy where kids were left home and there’s a fire,” she says. Children should never be left alone, she adds, and farmworker families can be especially vulnerable. “They’re often in cramped, substandard housing, rural areas with not a lot of infrastructure.”
UC Davis’s Riden added that the tendency for farmworkers to live in non-airconditioned homes can add to the problem. “Heat illness is a serious concern . . . particularly for folks who don’t have an ability to cool down when they go inside. As we might consider shifting when and how they work, we have to remember what they’re doing in the off time—and what their options are, because it dramatically changes their risk profile for the next day that they are at work. And if they haven’t had a proper rest time, at night or the day prior, their risk profile continues to increase at work the next day; the risk builds.”
This article was produced in partnership with Nexus Media News. Twilight Greenaway contributed reporting.
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]]>The post ‘Big Sugar’ Podcast Exposes How Subsidies in the Farm Bill Harm Us All appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The podcast Big Sugar tells the story of sugarcane production on American soil. Over the course of nine episodes, host Celeste Headlee speaks to Caribbean sugarcane cutters who worked in Florida and the lawyers who fought for millions of dollars in what they calculated as lost wages. But beyond sugar and labor, as Headlee says in the first episode, the podcast is “really about civil rights, inequity, racism, and backdoor deals.”
Men from Jamaica tell her how excited and proud they were to board a plane and come to the United States on work visas. And then, they discovered the dangerous, painful, and relentless work of cutting cane. “Cutting sugar cane is like you’re going to a war,” one man told her. These men were housed in shoddy barracks with inadequate food and little freedom to come and go. “It’s just like I was in prison,” another one said.
For contrast, Headlee visits West Palm Beach Island, Florida, where the Fanjul family has docked its yacht, not far from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Brothers Alfy and Pepe Fanjul left Cuba when their family lost its sugarcane empire to Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. But with the assets they managed to take out of Cuba, they invested in Florida Crystals, the company that made them billionaires, in part thanks to farm bill sugar programs.
Federal support for sugar production goes back to the colonial era. In modern history, it’s the 1981 Farm Bill that usually gets referenced as the origin of the current system, which includes loans for both sugar beet and sugarcane production, limits on imports, and a target price system that can make the price of sugar in the U.S. as much as twice the world price.
Unlike other commodity programs, like for corn and soybeans, where the farmers can receive payments directly, with sugar, it’s the processors who get the benefits. University of Nebraska economist John C. Beghin has estimated, in a report for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, that while the burden on the federal budget is low, the overall cost to the American people is between $2.4 and $4 billion. Instead of taxpayer dollars funding a subsidy that the government then doles out, American consumers underwrite this support by paying higher prices for all things sugary.
Beghin also notes the program benefits only about 4,000 sugar producers (both cane and beet) and a “few privately held sugar refining companies,” including the Fanjuls.
Sugarcane is perennial and grows primarily in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, while sugar beets are an annual crop that can be grown in a rotation with other crops. The most productive region for sugar beets is in the Red River Valley on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, but sugar beets grow in 11 states.
During farm bill reauthorization years like this one, congress often makes changes to existing programs or introduces new ones. In 2018, though, almost all the changes to sugar policy simply extended the existing programs through 2023.
In addition to labor concerns, the sugarcane industry is criticized for environmental impacts, especially for the practice of burning fields, which pollutes the air and causes health problems. Critics also claim that federal supports for sugarcane discourage other uses of the land, including conservation, and cost local residents even more in environmental cleanup.
The podcast is based on the Vanity Fair article “In the Kingdom of Big Sugar” by Marie Brenner, originally published in 2001. At that time, she estimated the Fanjul family received about $65 million a year in sugar subsidies. Banner also appears in the podcast.
Civil Eats recently spoke with Headlee, a journalist, author, and the president and CEO of Headway DEI, a nonprofit that works to bring racial justice and equity to journalism and media, about the podcast, the farm bill, and the family TIME magazine dubbed “the first family of corporate welfare.”
Why was now the time to do this podcast?
The most immediate peg is that the farm bill only comes up for reconsideration every five years, and it’s up for reconsideration this year. We wanted to make that deadline because most Americans don’t pay much attention to the farm bill, even though it involves billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer money. And we wanted to call attention to sugar subsidies.
The other thing is that so many of the issues that were involved in Marie Brenner’s article—the way [workers are] treated, income inequality, environmental issues—not only have gotten worse, but are now just exponentially more serious than they were in 2001.
She was interviewing people who were saying, “Look, this is why this case is really important.” And here we are 20 years later going, “They were right. That case was really important.” And [the workers] lost, and that’s not great. But some of the issues that were at play there were immigrant visas and how we treat those workers, the disparities between corporate power and wage workers, racism and literal wage slavery, and the rape of the environment by corporations who have found ways to manipulate the political process so they don’t have to be accountable. I mean, does any of this sound familiar?
What was important in 2001 is so much more important now. And we have come to the point at which it’s no longer a really good story for Vanity Fair, we have to sit up and pay attention. This is the future of our planet. It’s the future of society. So, it’s pretty urgent.
You have this fantastic line in Episode Five: “If the Affordable Care Act is the sexy stiletto of law, the farm bill is a size 14 Croc.” As you say, most taxpayers don’t pay much attention to it. How much did you know about sugar subsidies in the farm bill before you got involved with this project?
I have known quite a bit about the farm bill, and many of the subsidies have bothered me. I know more than I should about corn subsidies and ethanol and corn syrup. There’s a lot of things in public society that people don’t have time to pay attention to. Every once in a while, they bubble up and become important to the point where we, as journalists, have to say, “Okay, now is the time when you have to pay attention.” And when it comes to the sugar industry and the farm bill, this is one of those times.
Do you think there is potentially more appetite for this conversation around subsidies and industries involving immigrants of color as laborers than during other farm bill years?
With this podcast, we’re trying to tell the story in such a way, and in such a comprehensive way, that we can really explain how broad the impact of this industry is. It has been operating under the radar for so long, and it’s had such an incredible impact on so many parts of our lives. The point of this podcast is to bring this to everybody’s attention. It’s basically to make the fish aware of the water.
This has been going on for a very long time. These subsidies were created during World War II. And we have, ever since then, been paying these billionaires to plant sugar. The taxpayers are paying them to plant the sugar, we’re paying more [for sugar] in the grocery store [than other countries].
“I really want to make people aware of what this has cost us, again and again and again. And I hope at that point people will say ‘enough’.”
We are paying for the environmental impact of that sugar growing when they decide to do it on the cheap and just burn their fields down. We are paying and paying and paying and then we’re paying for the health care costs because they manipulated the research to make it look as though sugar was good for you.
I really want to make people aware of what this has cost us, again and again and again. And I hope at that point people will say “enough.”
Do you have specific suggestions for how the subsidy program could be reduced or amended? Are there proposals out there that might be part of farm bill discussions?
We talked to people who feel that the sugar industry should be held to account in the same way the tobacco industry and the pharmaceuticals industry were. In other words, through civil court cases in which they are sued and forced to pay for the damage they’ve done to the environment, for misleading the public on the health effects of sugar, etc.
We have talked to people who have said that they should no longer incentivize the planting of sugar because the American public will buy sugar no matter what. There’s no national security interest in enticing people to plant sugar, which I think is a strong argument.
I think that the biggest takeaway for me is that this shouldn’t be a rubber stamp. It should not be a foregone conclusion that the sugar program in the farm bill doesn’t even get discussed or debated. The U.S. sugar barons are so savvy when it comes to politics, and so powerful, they donate to both Republicans and Democrats, liberally.
The American people need to demand that if politicians are going to vote for this, if they’re going to hand over billions of dollars in our taxpayer funds to these people who own 50-foot yachts, they need to explain themselves, and there needs to be a damn good reason.
Did you have a favorite part of putting together this podcast, something that really stands out for you?
“We just need to stop treating the people that we rely on as though they’re our enemy… They deserve respect, and [proper] treatment, and fair pay.”
One of my favorite parts was speaking to the Jamaican cutters. Their stories were horrifying—I’m not gonna lie about that—and upsetting, and it was hard to listen to. But at the same time, they’re so honest and plainspoken, and they just tell you the truth. Without embellishing, without saving your feelings, without hesitation. They just tell you what happened to them. These are people who have incredible stories to tell. And they deserve better—so much better.
How do you think the immigrant farmworker visa program could be improved?
We just need to stop treating the people that we rely on as though they’re our enemy. These are people whose work we need and who do incredibly difficult work for us that our citizens don’t want to do. And they are working their hearts out and we treat them horribly. And if we would simply acknowledge the fact that we need their labor and treat them with gratitude and respect, we would all be a lot better off. They deserve respect, [proper] treatment, and fair pay.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Bringing Oats Back to American Farms appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On a cool, cloudy spring day, Landon Plagge could see hints of what was growing on a 500-acre plot of his Iowa farm.
“Our oats are starting to come up,” he said. “They’re a couple inches tall.” He had already planted a little early corn, experimentally. But he said the ground was still too cold, really, for corn or soybeans. Oats like a cool spring and don’t mind frost, but they do not do well come summer if the temperature gets too hot before harvest.
Plagge farms 4,000 acres in Latimer, Iowa, with his father and uncle, and his oats are a rarity among the nearly endless rows of corn and soybeans in the neighborhood.
Oats once were ubiquitous in Iowa, with 6.5 million acres planted in 1950. But the second half of the 20th century brought myriad changes to Midwest agriculture including the near disappearance of work animals, the separation of livestock from many crop farms, the confinement of chickens and pigs, readily available synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, and federal policy incentives for corn and soybeans that led to significant investment from seed and chemical companies.
Iowa farmer Landon Plagge grows oats and joined a pilot project with Oatly. (Photo credit: Anne Plagge)
It became easier and more profitable to grow only corn and soybeans. By 1980, Iowa had just 1 million acres of oats, and by 2000, just 180,000 acres. Today it’s less than half of that.
Plagge is one of a handful of farmers who have been taking part in an oat-growing pilot program launched in Minnesota and Iowa in 2019. Through the program he gets both technical assistance and some money to plant oats and cover crops.
“I’d like to plant more oats,” Plagge said, “but the market isn’t good enough right now.”
Plagge knows, as generations of farmers did, that oats break up pest and weed cycles and nurture the soil. Diversifying crop rotations also can lead to environmental benefits such as reducing pollution in waterways and decreasing a farm’s greenhouse gas emissions. But oats typically can’t compete with corn and soybeans when it comes to profit.
The ubiquity of oat milk at coffee shops and in grocery stores suggests demand for oats in this country may be having a moment. And shoppers increasingly care about the environmental impact of their food choices, which is propelling some people to advocate for policy changes that could make growing oats more viable.
In the process, though, they’re learning something else that Iowa farmers have long understood: Few elevators or grain mills—the critical link between farms and food companies—are buying oats these days. In recent years, however, as more people and companies have recognized the barriers to growing domestic oats, they’ve also started pushing for changes that could return more to the landscape.
Oat Milk Explosion
Demand for oat milk is rising fast. According Randy Strychar, president of the market research firm Oat Information, sales have climbed almost 45 percent in the past year.
Oatly, the Swedish company that took North America by storm in 2017, is one of more than half a dozen companies selling oat milk in the U.S. It has dazzled consumers with its cheeky marketing, gaining plenty of name recognition.
And it buys a lot of oats—from Canada. That’s where the vast majority of oats processed and eaten in the United States come from. Canada’s cooler, drier climate also contributes to its dominance as the world’s largest oat exporter. In 2022, farmers in the country grew 3.9 million acres of oats. In contrast, farmers in the U.S. grew just under 900,000 acres of oats that year.
In recent years, however, Oatly’s sustainability goals have led it to explore sourcing more of its necessary ingredient from the Midwest.
Over the last three years, about 20 farmers have participated in the pilot Plagge joined, planting oats on about 1,500 to 2,000 total acres in northern Iowa and southern Minnesota, according to Lydia English, crops viability manager at Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI), a nonprofit that nurtures farmer-led innovation. When Oatly came calling with the pilot idea, PFI was already working with a group of farmers who were experimenting with oats on their own as a way to diversify their corn and soy rotations, said English.
“If we can get some private investment,” she said, “and a company that is using those oats in a product, to also invest in the region, all the better.”
As a participant in Oatly’s pilot program, Plagge has received agronomic advice and a cost-share benefit, which reduced the expenses related to planting oats and, after harvesting them, using a diverse cover crop mix to help him build healthy soil.
“We could sell [the oats] wherever we wanted to,” he said. Oatly “would like to have the oats from those acres, but it wasn’t a requirement.” And if the harvested oats didn’t make the cut for food use, farmers enrolled in the pilot received help marketing them for other uses.
“Our interest is in trying to pivot to a regenerative supply,” said Julie Kunen, Oatly’s director of sustainability for North America. Specifically, she points to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing biodiversity and ecosystem health, and providing a crop that contributes to “farm viability and resilience to shocks, including the shock of climate change.”
For the pilot project, Oatly also partnered with the Sustainable Food Lab, another nonprofit that pushes for change in the food system, which Kunen said is part of Oatly’s goal. And Grain Millers, which processes oats in both the U.S. and Canada and has a plant in St. Ansgar, Iowa, became the destination for the pilot-grown oats. Eric DeBlieck, director of crop sciences at Grain Millers, said the pilot connected the mill to new farmers who “definitely have a keen eye and interest in some of these sustainability, or even regenerative, practices.” Some of the farmers had never grown oats, he added, and others hadn’t planted them for decades.
Oatly’s Kunen said the company is learning a great deal from the pilot and will make the written case study available to the public soon.
“After four years… we have definitely come to understand that cost share alone, or guaranteed payment alone, is not enough to overcome the barriers that exist,” she said. Other barriers the company identified include the lack of local processing, the lower profit on oats compared to other crops, and the social pressure farmers face when disrupting the status quo and deviating from their farm’s recent past.
PFI’s English said she’s hopeful the pilot will attract more companies willing to invest in U.S. oats on a broader level, though the leap from small-scale pilot project—however successful—to sweeping changes in a company’s supply chain is a big one. “Scaling those types of initiatives takes an internal sell for the company,” she said, which can be a bottleneck on the pathway to significant change.
Green oat shoots in the spring on Landon Plagge’s farm. (Photo credit: Anne Plagge)
Developing Oat Varieties for the Midwestern Climate
In addition to helping corn and soybean producers control weeds, Jochum Wiersma, extension agronomist for small grains at the University of Minnesota, said growing oats can also help them control profit-threatening diseases such as corn rootworm and soybean cyst nematode. “A whole bunch of things change for the better,” he added, when a small grain joins the rotation.
Corn that grows in soil where oats grew the previous year typically doesn’t need as much nitrogen fertilizer as a crop in a corn-only or corn-soybean system. Those reductions help cut down on the farm’s overall greenhouse gas emissions.
But Wiersma says the warm, humid weather in the Midwest can be a challenge. Farmers in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin, the main states where oats are grown, have had inconsistent success meeting the food-grade standard, called “test weight.” The air temperature before harvest plays a role in the final weight. A crop that doesn’t make the food market can still be sold for cover crop seed, animal feed, or forage, but pricing varies, often resulting in a scramble to find the right buyer at harvest time.
New oat varieties might help, but few scientists are breeding them. While the big seed companies haven’t invested in the crop the way they have in corn and soybeans, a few universities still support oat breeding. Melanie Caffe leads the program at South Dakota State University.
“If you were hearing about oat milk shortages a couple of years ago, it wasn’t the lack of oats. It was the lack of processing capacity.”
“We obviously try to develop varieties that have better productivity for farmers,” said Caffe. That means working toward higher grain yield, higher test weight, and better disease resistance. She added that other goals include breeding for better milling efficiency and nutritional quality.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognizes oats as good for heart health, which is something food companies like to state on packages. “To be able to make that claim, it needs to have a certain amount of beta glucan,” Caffe said, “so we are trying to develop oats with higher beta glucan content.”
Having more varieties specifically geared toward the food market could go a long way toward ensuring that more farmers integrate them into their rotations. But farmers also need to know what price they can expect. Oat Information’s Strychar said that can be a challenge without a lot of groundwork and price comparisons.
An Uncertain Market
Strychar has been watching the oat market for decades. He said the pricing model for oats is outdated. Unlike major commodities such as corn, soybeans, and wheat, oats don’t have a useful futures contract. That limits farmers’ ability to manage risk in the futures market.
Still, “the market is booming on the consumer side,” Strychar said, “and the supply side has not adjusted to it.” He added that food companies are buying fewer oats for cereals and snack bars, but the boom in oat milk keeps demand high.
“Oat milk’s impact has been very significant,” he said. “And we are still dealing with wide swings in acreage numbers about every two years.” Market disrupters such as a drought, pest infestation, or global market shock (such as the war in Ukraine) can influence a farmer’s planting.
With such inconsistency, how is the growing demand being met? “Sometimes barely,” Strychar said. He’s seeing new mills being built in Canada but in the U.S., there are just a handful of mills that process (almost entirely Canadian) oats, and he doesn’t see that changing. He said some companies are exploring putting their oat milk production in Canada, too.
California-based Califia Farms sells oat milk made from “North American” oats, said CEO Dave Ritterbush, who acknowledged that the majority of those come from Canada. During the 2021 drought there, Califia did buy more oats from U.S. farms, and Ritterbush said it didn’t see any dips in supply, though he says processing can be a bottleneck.
“If you were hearing about oat milk shortages a couple of years ago, it wasn’t the lack of oats,” he said. “It was the lack of processing capacity.” Califia Farms makes its products in California and New Jersey. Oatly also has a plant in New Jersey and one in Utah, with a third opening in Texas this year.
“We can grow oats here, we know growers want to do it. We just need to help make it viable for them and support them.”
Farm Policy
Kunen says Oatly and other stakeholders are pushing for “more support for regional infrastructure and lower barriers on crop insurance” in the 2023 Farm Bill in hopes that both will help U.S. farmers grow more oats.
While crop insurance is available for oats, farmers aren’t always aware of it, said Lauren Asprooth, a PhD candidate in geography at the University of California, Davis. And without stronger prices, it’s not typically worth the investment anyway.
“A much more important policy lever here would be to require [corn and soy producers to plant] a third rotation in order to receive federally subsidized crop insurance” in the first place, she said, adding that expanded incentives for conservation practices, including diversification, would also help.
The 2007 Renewable Fuel Standard, which increased demand for corn for ethanol, also incentivizes growing corn in fields that might otherwise be financially viable with a third crop like oats, she said. Congress could change that, Asprooth added, which would bring down the price of corn and help make oats pencil out.
Another strategy is state or federal tax incentives for food companies and grain processors to source domestically. Asprooth points to Michigan, where breweries and distilleries can slash their tax bill when they source local grain.” Asprooth heard from one broker who said food and beverage companies were showing a “growing interest in the geographic origin of grains from a food and flavor standpoint.”
Still, most farmers don’t make planting decisions based on the end use of a crop. They do the math and calculate what’s best for business.
Iowa farmer Plagge wants oats to work for more of his neighbors. So, he’s considering bringing processing closer to home.
“We’re thinking about building a mill for food-grade oats,” he said, “to supply the higher-end consumers that want the sustainability story, the high-quality product, and [the] domestically sourced product.”
A mill would likely cost several million dollars. This spring, Plagge scouted out possible funding partners, which may include some local agriculture and rural development programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. His goal would be to process about a million bushels of oats per year—enough to support about 15,000 acres. That shift would likely entice some of his neighbors to add oats to their rotations, and it could carve out a niche for Iowa oats in the specialty foods sector.
While Canada’s dominance in the U.S. market would remain unchecked, 15,000 more acres of oats would help those farms, the environment, and even the food companies that could spend less on shipping their products and label them domestic and, perhaps someday, more sustainable.
“We can grow oats here, we know growers want to do it,” said English, who is helping Plagge find appropriate grants. “We just need to help make it viable for them and support them.”
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]]>Dow and DuPont want to merge and then spin off three separate companies, one of them dedicated to agriculture. Monsanto has accepted an offer from Bayer. And China National Chemical Company, known as ChemChina, wants to purchase Syngenta.
Most Americans aren’t farmers. But these moves would trigger structural changes to the foundations of our food system and impact all Americans, whether or not they buy seeds, fertilizer or herbicides.
Corporate political power
Large companies can influence Congress, and some fear that the fewer companies there are in a given sector, the more likely they are to get their way.
“Perhaps the biggest problem,” says Pat Mooney, executive director of the ETC Group in Canada, a think tank that monitors agribusiness and agricultural technologies, “is that the policy makers today have no sense of food or where it comes from any longer. And all of their face-time on the food issues is with the biggest companies.”
That could mean a handful of ag company executives get real sway over policy issues.
“It will be harder for governments to say no to their requests for policy changes,” says Phil Howard, a Michigan State University professor who studies corporate consolidation. “It will be a company that’s too big to fail, like all of those Wall Street banks.”
There are some exceptions in Congress, like Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican from a farming family. Foreign takeovers and anti-competitive moves concern him first because he fears they will increase the price of seeds for farmers who already are struggling to make a profit. But also because he says consolidation of the companies responsible for making food production possible creates a vulnerability for us all.
“The availability of food is very important for social cohesion,” Grassley says, “because of the old saying… ‘You’re nine meals away from revolution.’ In other words, if you can’t feed yourself, or your kids, you might do almost anything to make sure that they don’t starve.”
Will ‘Big Ag’ take on the big issues?
Grassley chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and recently held hearings to create a public record of what the companies say they plan to do. One after another, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta and Monsanto leaders promised their proposed changes would not stymie competition or development of new products. They pledged to serve farmers even better through increased efficiencies that would allow for greater investment in research.
“With the Dow-DuPont merger, we will bring our capabilities together and we’ll be able to more effectively compete and bring more product choices to farmers,” Tim Hassinger, president and CEO of Dow AgroSciences, testified.
“Our deal will preserve investment in [research and development] and the safety, reliability and diversity in the global food supply,” said Erik Fyrwald, the CEO of Syngenta, about its potential purchase by ChemChina.
Monsanto executives insist that even as they grow through a proposed acquisition by Bayer, they will continue a commitment to finding solutions both through in-house science and by tapping new start-ups and outside talent.
“We have always had the focus on what’s next? What do we do? How can we add more value to farmers? What can we do to create even better products?” Robb Fraley, Monsanto’s chief technology officer, told Harvest Public Media in August. “And I think that’s been a part, literally, of our DNA since the very beginning.”
But Mooney says further consolidation of research into fewer companies means a narrower, profit-driven scientific focus, with less public interest. And potentially even less farmer participation than today.
“The capacity of farmers around the world to crowd-source their knowledge on plant breeding to respond to climate change is huge,” Mooney says. “Farmers work with almost 7,000 different species. Companies work with, I think optimistically, they claim 136 or 137 varieties or species.”
“These guys aren’t going to get us through climate change, for sure, with that kind of focus,” Mooney says.
And despite their promises to better serve farmers, many observers say higher prices for farmers are all but guaranteed.
“It’s really bad news for farmers and everybody who eats because these companies are just going to become more powerful and have even more economical and political influence,” Howard says, “[and] greater ability to raise prices and dampen innovation.”
Deals beget deals
Regulators in the United States, European Union and dozens of other countries get to weigh in on whether to allow these mergers and acquisitions. Even if some of the biggest countries say yes, important global players like Argentina, Brazil or India could nix one or more of the plans, Mooney says. But he cautions that should the ones currently on the table actually happen, they might lay the groundwork for something even more remarkable.
“If these mergers are allowed to go through,” Mooney says, “then it’s very, very easy to go back to regulators and say, ‘Hey guys, the real way to harness these technologies for the future is to let the farm machinery guys in, they’ve got the box everyone else has to put their products into.’”
If tractor makers such as John Deere, New Holland and others can buy up the seed and chemical companies, Mooney says ultimately farmers would choose one company to supply everything they need and to manage all of the data the farms generate.
“We’re talking about a transition…the dematerialization of the farm into Big Data and that’s where this will end up,” Mooney says, “and the Big Data will be controlled, all the information will be controlled, by the two or three big farm machinery companies.”
That may sound improbable, even dystopian, but It’s not a terribly far-fetched idea. John Deere and Monsanto penned a tentative deal for the tractor company to buy Precision Planting, an Illinois-based company that Monsanto had previously snatched up. But the U.S. Department of Justice objected to that proposal.
David King, a mergers and acquisitions expert at the Iowa State University College of Business, says there is precedent for regulators to be satisfied with as few as two powerhouse companies dominating a sector.
“The best example would be the aviation industry,” King says. “Airbus and Boeing are the two largest players and they supply to people everywhere in the world. So if there’s three large ag suppliers, they would be able to do a similar thing.”
King says in aviation, it’s a bit hollow for a customer to threaten to leave Airbus for Boeing or vice versa because relationships between supplier and client go very deep. Given that, he says, even three dominant players in ag would be a better, and viable, scenario.
“It’s better to have three because then it’s less of an act that ‘I will switch,’” King says “you have more choice.”
Still, for an industry that in its first 10,000 years or so relied upon farmers saving seeds from their best plants to sow the next year, and about a hundred years ago first exploded into a cacophony of competing seed companies, the ongoing diminishing of a competitive landscape in agriculture gives farmers and consumers plenty to chew on.
This story originally ran on Harvest Public Media.
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]]>A 17-year old senior, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail for the dissection, high-fives her lab partner when they identify the ligament and show it to their teacher. This young woman is a chapter officer in the Des Moines FFA group and recently got elected to a district-wide leadership position. She’s already earned a full scholarship to Iowa State University and aspires to be a large animal veterinarian with her own small cattle herd.
Her name is Melissa Garcia Rodriquez. Born and raised in Iowa, Garcia comes from a Mexican family.
“My mom came to the U.S. She went to California first,” Garcia said. “She met my dad there, on a strawberry field and they shared a bean taco.”
The couple eventually moved to Iowa and found jobs that were not in the fields. But in the Heartland, as in California, many immigrants find work as dairy hands, crop pickers and, especially, on meat processing lines.
For years, Latino immigrants have filled some of the least-glamorous, most physically taxing jobs in farming. The children of those immigrants may be uniquely qualified to lead the future of the Midwest’s agricultural economy, if they decide to embark on an ag career.
Mexico is the single-largest country of birth for immigrants in the Midwest. Iowa, for instance, now has four school districts in which more than 50 percent of the student body is Hispanic or Latino. Each of those communities is also home to a meat processing plant. Still, Garcia says she often feels isolated.
“Personally, I have not met any other Latina or Latino students in the FFA, except for maybe one that I met my sophomore year,” Garcia said.
Many second-generation Latino Americans grew up watching their parents toil in hard, undesirable farm jobs. That’s turned some of them off of a career in the Midwest’s most important business.
“They see it as, this is something that my parents did and they came here for me to do something better,” said Christina Gonzalez, a sophomore in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University.
Gonzalez thought she was going to study theater in college. But her older cousin Brian Castro, an Iowa State graduate, drew her into the College of Agriculture. They both grew up on Chicago’s Southside, their parents all immigrants from Mexico. Castro says the role for bilingual, bicultural Latino Americans in agriculture goes far beyond the entry-level jobs of many new immigrants.
“There’s a huge misrepresentation of the Latino population,” Castro said, “of Latino workers in the decision-making area for agriculture, even though they are the No. 1, the main population of the workers.”
Castro says people like him can be an important go-between for farm managers and recent immigrants. Many of agriculture’s biggest players are lobbying for a permanent guest worker program because farmworkers from Latin America keep the industry humming.
“The careers in Iowa agriculture, agri-business, really seem to me to be a very excellent position for students in the future who speak English fluently, speak Spanish fluently [and] understand the Hispanic culture, Latino culture,” said Dale Gruis, a consultant with the state’s education department.
But Latino enrollment in agricultural science classes at high schools and community colleges is out of sync with the Latino population growth, according to Gruis. That’s consistent with the experience of Latino immigrants in California’s farm-rich Central Valley, according to Charles Boyer, dean of the Jordan College of Agricultural Sciences and Technology at California State University, Fresno. He says the first generation raised in the United States is typically resistant to pursuing careers in agriculture. But there are exceptions.
“There’s always some of them who do and they’re sort of the leading edge,” Boyer said. “And they show the way and kind of provide the role models for the third generation to step in and do it even more.”
Melissa Garcia says she’s found her passion with livestock. She has already raised and sold sheep and soon, she’ll be raising her first steer.
“There’s a career and a job out there waiting for me,” she said. “And then hopefully one day I’ll reach my goal of having my own farm.”
It’s a lofty dream for anyone with no family land to work. But in a way, Garcia would be carrying on both a family and an American tradition. Her grandfather raised cattle in Mexico. And her parents have worked hard in the United States so that she can do whatever she wants.
This post originally appeared on Harvest Public Media.
This project was reported with assistance from the Institute for Justice & Journalism’s “Immigration in the Heartland” fellowship.
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