The post At Climate Dinners Hosted by Chefs Sam Kass and Andrew Zimmern, The Meal Is The Message appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Adorned with rose-hued eyeglasses and tan plaid sweater, eclectic chef and restaurateur Andrew Zimmern addressed a rapt crowd of around 100 attendees at Minneapolis’ Scandinavian-inspired Tullibee Restaurant on a late January evening, which called for no more layers than Zimmern was wearing.
He explained that some our most beloved foods like coffee, chocolate, and wine “will become more and more expensive so that only a handful of people can actually give their kids a chocolate bar,” before recalling a scene from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which the titular character shares a chocolate bar with six family members. “That day, sadly, I believe is coming.”
Sam Kass—who served as an assistant chef in the Obama White House, Barack Obama’s senior policy advisor for nutrition, and executive director of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign—followed Zimmern on the microphone. “The [Inter-American Development Bank] predicts that if we hit 2 degrees [in planetary warming above pre-industrial levels] by 2050, which is where we’re headed, that 50 percent of the regions currently growing coffee will no longer be suitable for coffee production,” he said.
“The purpose of the dinner is really to use food to tell the story about what’s actually at stake.”
Kass turned guests’ attention to the flutes of sparkling white Italian wine on their tables as he continued. “In France, one of the great Champagne producers, which started making Champagne in 1729, this year for the first time had to do a blend because they could not produce a high-enough quantity and quality of grapes to produce their time-honored Champagne.”
The dinner was part of both the Great Northern, a Twin Cities winter festival, and a series of similar dinners Kass and Zimmern have held around the country. Expertly marketed as The Last Supper, the $285 per-person meal was billed as “a last-in-a-lifetime dining event exploring the intersection of food, place, agriculture, and climate” through “a regionally inspired menu with wine pairings and dishes crafted from what experts believe to be near-extinct ingredients.”
Chefs Marque Collins, Andrew Zimmern, and Sam Kass at The Last Supper. (Photo credit: Jayme Halbritter)
While the description certainly gets diners’ attention, “the purpose of the dinner is really to use food to tell the story about what’s actually at stake [as the planet warms],” Kass told Civil Eats. The event’s theory of change, he said, “starts with people’s lack of awareness about what’s really at stake and connects that to things they care about . . . like not having coffee to drink or wine, chocolate, or oysters—the things that give us so much joy and pleasure.”
Kass hopes the dinner helps guests understand that their way of life is threatened by the climate crisis and inspires them to take steps to respond. Ideally, they would leave “willing to do more to try to shift these issues and make changes in their own lives—they’re willing to donate, they’re willing to vote. There’s a million different things that can come out of it,” he said.
While Zimmern and Kass were the headliners, Tullibee’s chef Marque Collins collaborated with Kass to translate his list of threatened ingredients into a four-course dinner that included an amuse bouche of Old Bay spiced shrimp and salmon skin chips, an oyster and mussel course that gave way to Norwegian salmon, lamb with wild rice, and a coffee and chocolate sticky toffee pudding.
“As much as we might shake our fist at some big companies . . . they really need to be our allies, right?”
Where possible, ingredients were locally sourced. For example, the salmon’s romesco sauce was made with “fresh chilies from a local farm . . . called Sin Fronteras run by a Hispanic gentleman who grows traditional Mexican produce here in Minnesota—which is, in and of itself, a sign of changing climates,” Collins told Civil Eats. The wild rice that accompanied the lamb “is as Minnesota as it gets,” he added.
Kass has been hosting these meals-as-educational events since 2015 when he served a meal designed to draw attention to food waste to 40 heads of state at COP 21, the gathering that yielded the Paris Climate Agreement. Since then, he has hosted a handful of Last Suppers, including one in New York last year.
While the Great Northern event series sent out a survey conducted in partnership with a senior economic impact analyst with the University of Minnesota Extension, Kass himself doesn’t track outcomes. “I don’t have any way to track what people in that room would do. That would be nice, but I don’t have any capacity,” Kass said. He does, however, have anecdotes to share.
“I saw Christine Lagarde”—president of the European Central Bank—“a few times at different events following [the COP21 meal], and every time she would come up to me and say, ‘So good to see you. That lunch, I can’t get it out of my head,’” Kass recalls.
At the dinner, in a solutions-oriented talk earlier that day, and in an interview with Civil Eats, Kass and Zimmern said spurring culture change and cultivating economic support and prosperity for food-focused climate solutions is the driving force behind their efforts. But save for references to companies under the umbrella of Kass’ Acre Venture Partners investment fund, the night was more focused on headline-grabbing examples of foods that have been impacted recently, such as peaches in Georgia and wild oysters in Florida’s Apalachicola Bay.
Voting, talking to family members and co-workers who refute climate change, eating less meat, and a broader conscious-consumerism about the food we put on our plates were the main suggestions offered. To the extent that solutions were discussed, business and the market economy were the main levers.
“General Mills is putting [money], I think it’s up to about $500 million a year, into researching drought-resistant grain,” Zimmern said during the talk, mentioning the company’s profitable grain-reliant cereals division. “As much as we might shake our fist at some big companies . . . they really need to be our allies, right?”
Dr. Margaret Klein Salamon—a clinical psychologist, executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund that supports climate activists, and author of Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself With Climate Truth, who was not at the dinner—takes a different view.
“Luxury food is at risk and that’s one kind of loss, but rice production, wheat production, and the basic stables getting hurt by climate is a much greater risk to basic global stability.”
“What I steer people towards is the disruptive climate movement, where they throw soup on paintings or interrupt politicians’ speeches, sporting events, or whatever,” she says. “Things are not normal. We should not be limited to using normal political channels.”
The Last Supper’s less-than-disruptive messages seemed to resonate with the dinner’s guests, however, particularly during the Q&A session near the end. “Other than eating less red meat in our everyday lives, what can we do to help the situation?” one teen dining with her family inquired. Kass responded, “I would say, companies that are proclaiming to care about these issues and their supply chains, how their ingredients are being produced and with what practices—supporting anybody who’s making a claim is a good start.”
One of the co-founders of the Great Northern brought up induction cooking. “For a lot of the high-profile chefs we have in the room tonight, I would love to see you all make induction cooking cool,” he said. Praising induction as a cooking method, “some of us in the room are working with companies right now to make induction cooking cool,” Zimmern replied. “Gas creates a lot of problems, especially in low-income housing where the HVAC system can’t get all of the toxins and chemicals out of the house.” Plus, induction can be powered by renewable energy sources like solar.
Andrew Zimmern at The Last Supper. (Photo credit: Jayme Halbritter)
Overall, Zimmern and Kass are certainly correct that coffee, wine, and chocolate are under threat from global warming. While costs will very likely increase, research suggests that we’ll see a shift in the regions capable of production and a change in flavor rather than a complete end in production—at least in the near term. But that loss might also be the least of our worries.
“Luxury food is at risk and that’s one kind of loss, but rice production, wheat production, and the basic staples getting hurt by climate is a much greater risk to basic global stability,” Klein Salamon said. The chefs did mention diminishing staple crops and other repercussions of the crisis, like climate migration, briefly in passing.
The central difference between Klein Salamon’s approach to mitigating climate change and to that of Zimmerns and Kass is a clear pathway from emotion to action. Klein Salamon’s book outlines a five-step process that moves from facing the truth, confronting painful emotions, reimagining our lives, getting into an “emergency mode,” and ultimately joining the movement to disrupt the normalcy that’s gotten us here—all underpinned by an awareness of the cognitive devices like intellectualization that contribute to climate denial.
Klein Salamon said that she hoped The Last Supper would address climate change “from a systemic perspective.”
While the chefs did touch on systemic elements, it was in the form of retooling what the current system cares about, deems worthy of investment, and who its beneficiaries are.
“Companies working to solve these big problems have to work economically if we’re going to have impact,” Kass said. “How amazing would it be for the companies that are pushing better marine practices, regenerative agriculture, or whatever the case may be . . . [if] they were the ones getting IPOs and worth $200 billion? That’s what we should be pushing for.”
The post At Climate Dinners Hosted by Chefs Sam Kass and Andrew Zimmern, The Meal Is The Message appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Coming Soon to a Food Label Near You: ‘Bee-Friendly’ Certifications appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Far North Spirits, the northernmost farm and distillery in the contiguous United States, grows the rye for its whiskey and distills it on the farm. Just 25 miles south of Minnesota’s border with Canada, the farm’s fields of golden rye and heirloom corn are interspersed with highbush cranberry shrubs, bushy crabapple and plum trees, native grasses, and a growing number of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.
Those plants—and the pollinators they feed—have been there since long before Far North’s owners Mike Swanson and Cheri Reese took over Swanson’s family farm and built a distillery in 2013. But this year, they decided to start making their presence known to their customers by applying for a Bee Friendly Farm designation from Pollinator Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to protecting and promoting pollinators and the ecosystems they rely on.
“Pollinated foods are some of our most nutrient-rich foods, some of our most colorful, and flavorful.”
For one, says Swanson, pollinators provide a lively entry point for talking with his customers about the way he and Reese run the farming part of their operation.
“Soil health, ecological diversity, sustainable ecosystems—all these things are very important to us. But I wanted a way to talk to people about what was going to be interesting to them,” he says. “When you’re talking about bees, that tends to pique people’s interest a little better. So, we’re able to talk about farming without talking about farming.”
Swanson is not alone in seeing the abundance of bees and other pollinators on his farm as a selling point, and a way to get his customers’ attention.
In fact, Americans are increasingly focused on pollinators, and they’re concerned about their well-being. In 2017, a survey found that 69 percent of respondents said they recognized pollinator populations are in decline and that number has likely grown as the news of the larger insect apocalypse—science that shows rapid decline in insect populations around the world—has been widely reported since then. In 2019, another survey found that 95 percent of respondents said they want to see designated areas where plants support pollinator health.
Pollinators are critical to food production: More than 80 percent of the world’s flowering plants—and around one third of the food crops—require a pollinator. And while it’s not clear exactly how many people are considering the plight of pollinators when buying groceries, a 2015 study found that use of the term ‘‘bee-friendly’’ had more economic value than other claims that advertised the absence of pesticides. And another study in 2018 found that consumers were willing to pay more (51 cents per dry liter) to buy blueberries and cranberries farmed in a way that supports wild pollinators.
Cal Giant Blueberries bearing the Bee Better Certified label. (Courtesy Xerces Society)
“Pollinated foods are some of our most nutrient-rich foods, some of our most colorful, and flavorful,” says Liz Robertson, who helps oversee the Xerces Society’s Bee Better Certified, another certification farmers are now seeking out. “There are wind-pollinated crops out there, but the nutrient-rich diet really depends on these animal-pollinated crops. And just over the last several decades, and increasingly in the last couple of years, there has been this real awareness and research on the decline of insects globally.”
All these factors explain why pollinator certifications have begun to appear in a growing number of grocery stores and corporate sustainability reports. The Bee Better seal is showing up on products sold by certified farms as well as on those from companies sourcing ingredients from those farms, says Robertson. Silk, Häagen-Dazs, and Cal Giant Farms are just a few of the brands that have sported the seal so far. Meanwhile, Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly logo has appeared on a signature wine from Francis Ford Coppola Winery, and may soon make its way to more packaging.
Yet while the Bee Better and Bee Friendly certifications offer up similar wordplay, and similar stated goals—both want to see more diverse and flowering forage plants on farm landscapes and less pesticide exposure for pollinators—they are markedly different in multiple ways. One is reaching a smaller number of farms with a stringent, third-party certification, while the other is aiming for much larger adoption, especially among conventional farmers, and is asking less of participating farms by design.
Taken together, however, the two certifications provide a glimpse of some of the benefits —and the limitations—of using pollinator health to gauge the overall sustainability of a farm.
Planting pollinator habitat at the Jordan Winery Estate. (Photo courtesy of Pollinator Partnership)
The Certifications
The Bee Friendly Certification began as a local initiative in northern California’s Sonoma County that helped beekeepers find farms where it was safe to store their bees. Pollinator Partnership acquired it in 2013, but Miles Dakin, the current Bee Friendly Farming coordinator, says it wasn’t a big part of the organization’s work until around 2019, the year the Almond Board of California—the group that represent 7,600 almond farms on an estimated 1.6 million acres—reached out to the organization and initiated a partnership.
The Central Valley’s almond orchards rely heavily on millions of honeybees that are trucked in from the Midwest every spring—and many beekeepers have seen record-setting bee losses in recent years. As a result, the almond industry has moved to improve its image in the eyes of consumers.
“They really wanted to educate their growers and bring the industry in on bee-friendly practices,” says Dakin, who had studied integrated pest management (IPM) in the almond industry before taking the job.
Dakin was hired in 2020 and has been working with farms in California and across the country since, helping farmers add bee-friendly forage and habitat to their land and certifying around 250,000 acres of farmland and in the last two years. “We’re definitely expanding,” he told Civil Eats. “We have avocados, coffee, a whole bunch of different systems now certified.”
The Bee Friendly Certified program requires growers to pay $45, prove that they have forage “providing good nutrition for bees” (or are planning to plant it) on 3 percent of their land, as well as nesting habitat and water. They also must use Integrated Pest Management (IPM), a wide range of practices that can involve replacing pesticides with pheromones or simply identifying the location of pests before spraying to ensure that the application is targeted.
“We were already above and beyond the certification standards, so it wasn’t hard at all for us.”
Once they are on board, Dakin says, “every three years, the growers have to provide us with compliance documents, and we review those.” He also conducts field visits on 6 percent of the farms every year.
“We’re not a prescriptive program,” he added. “We don’t tell them what to do or how to do it. We give them the criteria, and we help them meet that criteria in the way that works for them.”
Farms that receive Xerces’ Bee Better Certification, on the other hand, are independently audited and verified by Oregon Tilth, an organic certifier that has been in business since 1975.
Even before the certification launched, the Xerces Society had been working with the agricultural industry, both directly with larger brands and their supply chains as well as through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service to help farmers to install pollinator habitat and engage pollinator-friendly practices such as pesticide mitigation on their farms, says Xerces’ Robertson. “The farmers who were doing the work were like, ‘How do we communicate this to consumers?’”
She adds that the certification’s parameters are grounded in peer-reviewed scientific research done by Xerces and other institutions that looks at everything from the best native plant compositions for pollinators to the impact of pesticide drift.
To date, Bee Better has certified more than 20,000 acres of farmland in the U.S., Canada, and Peru, with more applications in progress. Almonds are also a major crop for the certification, as are blueberries. Xerces is also in the process of bringing more certifiers on board so they can begin certifying farms in more countries.
In order to earn Bee Better Certification, farms must maintain pollinator habitat on at least 5 percent of the farm, and 1 percent of that habitat needs to be permanent year-round, meaning things like trees, hedgerows, and riparian corridors that include native plants. The certification also requires a “rigorous pest management strategy” that includes non-chemical practices as a first line of defense, targeted pesticide use, and limiting or eliminating the use of what Xerces calls high risk pesticide applications.
Changes on the Farm
For some farms, achieving pollinator-friendly certification is mainly a matter of documenting what’s already taking place. For instance, Klickitat Canyon Winery in Lyle, Washington, has long invested in planting native wildflowers and grasses throughout its vineyard and owner Kiva Dobson had already received organic certification prior to adding Bee Better certification to the list. “We were already above and beyond the certification standards, so it wasn’t hard at all for us,” says Dobson. Plus, “for every bottle [of wine] we sell, a percentage of that goes towards buying native plants, so [the cost] is integrated into our business model.”
Ceanothus serves as pollinator habitat on the Klickitat Canyon Winery. (Photo courtesy of Xerces Society)
But for the larger, conventional growers who sign up, pollination certification may require undertaking a paradigm shift.
Take Woolf Farming, a more than 20,000-acre, vertically integrated farming company based in Fresno, California, that grows a wide variety of crops, including massive tracts of almonds, pistachios, and canning tomatoes all over the state. Peter Allbright, the crop manager at Woolf Farming, says a business partnership spurred them to pursue Xerces’ Bee Better certification back in 2016.
“One of our almond customers is a very progressive European food company,” says Allbright. “They wanted us to look into pollinator habitat developments and that kind of thing, and they pushed us to work with the Xerces Society, so we were actually one of the first growers of theirs to be certified.”
Woolf Farming still has 3,000 Bee Better-certified almond acres, but the company has since chosen to put more than 7,000 additional acres of almonds into Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly Farming program because, Allbright says, it’s much easier. Bee Better certification requires regular, multi-hour inspections that he describes as “more in-depth than an organic inspection” and maintains “a packet—a hefty list of rules.”
On top of the certification cost itself, Allbright says that planting pollinator-friendly habitat has also cost the company “well over a quarter million dollars in the last couple of years,” between buying the pants, irrigating them, and paying workers to weed them.
“Once [the habitat] gets established, it’s fine. It’s doable, but it’s extremely expensive to implement the Bee Better program,” added Allbright.
He says Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly program has been much more flexible about where he can plant the additional habitat (they don’t require that it be in or near the almond orchard, for instance). And when a pest infestation looked like it could cut the almond crop on one of the farm’s properties a few years back, he says he struggled to get Xerces to make an exception that would allow him to spray approved pesticides aerially. Bee Better eventually made an exception, but he found the process frustrating. “Xerces is the gold standard. But you can’t blanket that across every acre of almonds in California,” added Allbright. “It’s not compatible. Hence, we haven’t done it on all of our acres.”
Pollinator Partnership, on the other hand, requires “minor bits of documentation to demonstrate that you’re not spraying insecticides during the almond bloom, those kinds of very common-sense things that most growers are already doing,” adds Allbright. He’s also concerned that Xerces, on the other hand, is so focused on supporting wild bumblebees and other wild pollinators that they may not always be looking out for farmers like him. As a conservation group, he added “They’re actively behind the scenes working against production agriculture.”
A metallic green sweat bee. (Photo by Amber Barnes, courtesy of Pollinator Partnership)
The fact that the organization advocated for the protection of wild bumblebees in California under the state’s Endangered Species Act—and that advocacy may have had an impact on the recent decision by the California Supreme Court to allow new protections for the pollinators—is one example that concerns Allbright. He believes the change will “severely impact almond production, because that really eliminates a lot of the tools we have for crop protection.”
However, Eric Lee-Mäder, an apple and seed crop farmer and the pollinator and agricultural biodiversity co-director at Xerces, says there’s nothing behind the scenes about the group’s work. “Xerces and other stakeholders have been open and transparent in examining the decline of California’s wild bumble bees precisely so the ag sector isn’t caught off guard. Ultimately the bees in question mostly do not even occur in agricultural areas.”
Dialing in on Pesticides
Research has found that adding habitat, cover crops, and more plant diversity overall to large monocrop operations can—over time—reduce the need for insecticides and other pesticides. And that appears to be the idea that both pollinator certifications are working with, albeit to different degrees. But asking farmers to intentionally spray fewer pesticides in the process is another thing altogether—and can be seen by growers like Allbright as an assault on their very viability.
“We don’t ban specific active ingredients in pesticides, because to us, it’s more about integrative pest management, about the mindset behind using the chemicals,” says Pollinator Partnership’s Dakin, who says IPM can greatly reduce pesticide exposure to pollinators when done right.
“The goal is still to reduce or even eliminate chemicals in general, but what we’re trying not to do is make something that’s not achievable by most of agriculture.” If you eliminate specific chemicals, he adds “it actually closes the doors for a lot of farmers.” Instead, Dakin says the organization wants to have all farmers at the table, and even some pesticide producers.
In the latest example of the latter, Pollinator Partnership is partnering with Bayer Crop Science (the company that bought Monsanto in 2016, making it the world’s largest pesticide and seed company) and other local entities in a $1.7 million project with the USDA to “improve pollinator habitat and forage across California’s agricultural landscapes.”
These kinds of partnerships are far from unusual for Pollinator Partnership, which also founded and runs the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, a large collaborative body that includes 170 scientists, researchers, and government entities, alongside Bayer and CropLife America, a trade group that represents manufacturers of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals.
In another example, Pollinator Partnership has initiated research a few years back into the toxicity of the dust that’s released by pesticide-treated corn seeds that received funding from Bayer Crop Science, BASF, and Syngenta—the very companies that manufacture the seed-coating pesticides that cause the dust at the heart of the research.
“Having worked with many, many farmers over the years, it’s like people are on this pesticide treadmill and can’t get off; they can’t see their way out of it.”
Xerces Society has also engaged the pesticide industry in dialogue over the years. However, says Lee-Mäder: “We’ve never taken pesticide money as an organization. We never would, and we would never plant habitat or create pollinator conservation features where we feel there’s a potential risk to counteract the work we’re trying to do.”
But that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to work with farmers on pesticides. And Lee-Mäder and Robertson acknowledge that, like Allbright, not everyone they work with is eager to change their practices when it comes to pesticide use.
“We don’t always have the leverage to change pesticide practices. But it’s something that we stay pretty laser-focused on,” said Lee-Mäder. “And we constantly make that part of the dialogue with the grower. Bee Better does provide really clear sideboards on what you can and can’t do. But outside of Bee Better I think [Xerces] is constantly making judgment calls about what we’re comfortable with and what we’re not.”
Willa Childress, who leads state-to-state policy organizing work at Pesticide Action Network, compares working on pollinator habitat with large conventional farms to harm reduction, a strategy that acknowledges that making systemwide changes can be difficult, and many farmers need to be met where they’re at if they’re going to begin to change entrenched patterns and practices.
But exactly where they’re at doesn’t always allow for a shift. “Having worked with many, many farmers over the years, it’s like people are on this pesticide treadmill and can’t get off; they can’t see their way out of it,” Childress said. “And they encounter challenges even when trying to move slightly away, because they’re already bought into a system and have all their acreage in [conventional] agriculture.”
Childress says she’s seen a number of examples in the policy arena where the focus on getting more habitat in the ground is politically much more palatable than reducing pesticide use.
“We’ve seen this approach over and over again, which is to separate these different impacts that we know are contributing towards huge pollinator and other insect declines: pesticide use, lack of habitat, and disease,” says Childress. “Policymakers and different constituents have tried to pry apart the three pieces of this problem and the result is that we’ve passed lots of legislation trying to address increased habitat. And yet we haven’t seen a measurable difference in how pollinators are faring.”
The pesticide industry has such a powerful lobbying presence all around the country, says Childress, that bills calling for reduction in pesticide use rarely make it very far. “Our legislation isn’t matching up to our science, and the only reason can be corporate control of agriculture and corporate influence,” she adds.
When asked directly, Allbright said he hadn’t reduced his pesticide use at all—and it’s clear that he doesn’t see that as a goal either on the land certified by Xerces’ Bee Better nor the land certified by Pollinator Partnership’s Bee Friendly program.
For Xerces’ Robertson, the hope is to reach a productive, if sometimes challenging, middle ground. “If you look at the two ends of the spectrum, you’re going to have a certification that is so incredibly rigorous that nobody adopts it. Then you’re not moving the needle at all,” she says. “On the other side, you can have a certification that is easy and anyone can adopt it without changing their practices. So again, the needle isn’t moving. Our goal is always conservation and we’re always evaluating where we’re at and adjusting and weighing in on: Can we get farms to nudge and move the needle and adopt these practices? And are we matching with the science that says, ‘This is what has to be done to help curb the biodiversity loss we’re seeing?’”
For Far North Spirits’ Mike Swanson, even the less-stringent Bee Friendly certification is an important start—a catalyst of sorts. He has about 50 acres of land set aside through USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program—which pays farmers to give their land a rest—and he says ever since he received the pollinator-focused certification he has seen his property through fresh eyes.
Before, Swanson says, he saw that land primarily as valuable because the plants growing on it kept his soil from eroding. Now, he adds, “I see that it provides not just pollinator habitat, but wildlife, birds—of all kinds of critters like to hang out in there! And I think that’s one of the big benefits of doing a certification like this; you start to look at property as an ecosystem rather than just a property.”
The post Coming Soon to a Food Label Near You: ‘Bee-Friendly’ Certifications appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Renegade Biologist Alexandra Morton Is Fighting for the Future of Wild Salmon appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the early 1980s, marine biologist Alexandra Morton followed the orcas she was studying to British Columbia’s remote Echo Bay. She fell in love with the community where she raised her two children—until salmon farms moved into the region in 1989. The change took a toll on the local ecosystem: Wild salmon started dying off—from sea lice, she would later learn—and the orcas left.
What comes next is a tale of chasing viruses and documenting destruction that only a scientist could tell. Morton’s book, Not On My Watch: How a Renegade Biologist Took on Governments and Industry to Save Wild Salmon, is already a national bestseller in Canada. It chronicles how Morton founded the Salmon Coast Field Station in 2006 and published dozens of research papers on wild salmon and sea lice, only to find that they didn’t move the dial with the Canadian Government or the Norwegian fish farming industry.
This is the story of how she instead chose to work with Indigenous governments, which hold treaty rights and maintain reverence for the natural world. Ultimately, it is an account of how Morton transitioned from research to activism, occupied Swanson Island fish farm alongside Indigenous women in 2017, and sued the government four times (including a current lawsuit).
As Morton describes them, sea lice are a naturally occurring parasite that adult salmon can weather, but young fish cannot. The lice breed rapidly on crowded fish farms, and have become resistant to the delousing drugs traditionally deployed to control them. When they slip into the surrounding waters they attach to young fish, weakening them and ultimately killing them.
The impacts can be staggering, says Morton. She writes that she has heard her Indigenous partners repeatedly say: “They killed us and now they are killing our food like they did to the people of the plains when they killed the buffalo.”
Civil Eats spoke with Morton by phone from her home in Alert Bay, British Columbia.
You’ve spent decades working to restore wild salmon. Why is this cause important enough to be your life’s work?
Wild salmon are so important. They’re like a power cord; they collect the energy of the sun hitting the open Pacific Ocean by eating the little fish and the plankton. Then they carry it up the hillsides as they migrate and, when they die, those nutrients are poured down over the mountains. When you remove a power supply like that from an ecosystem like this, you kill it. In the face of climate change and destruction of biodiversity and habitat, this was my fight. It was my responsibility because I was the biologist on the scene in British Columbia. I had the capacity to [record] the data that would show the impacts of salmon farming. The industry said it would be good for us, it would benefit the community, that they’d be sustainable, and they hurt us. The whales I was studying left. The salmon were clearly in shock.
In the book you describe how your naivete fell away as you interacted with non-Indigenous governments. Can you talk about that?
It was a huge shock for me. I totally trusted government. When I first began to run into problems, I thought they just didn’t know, but I was met with such obfuscation. Eventually, I realized they were facilitating the salmon farming industry at all costs, and they didn’t actually want to know what the problem was.
For the first 10 years, I thought the solution was writing letters. Fisheries and Oceans Canada kept saying there was no evidence of what I was saying. So, okay, I did the science. I poured myself into 10 really intensive years of sea lice research. I measured every variable and sometimes published several papers a year.
When that didn’t work, I switched to protests. But they don’t work either because it’s like rain on a rock. Now I realize that simply putting your body physically in the way while behaving in a highly honorable manner—like we did during the fish farm occupation—is one of the most powerful things any individual can do. It was the only thing that has worked. It’s not a great measure of our democracy when occupying a fish farm is what you need to do to make change.
One of the things that has leapt out at me is that non-Indigenous governments actually have no mechanism in place to protect the living world, particularly anything that we don’t pay for. But the Indigenous governments grew up depending on these systems, so they have mechanisms to protect them. Of course, these governments have been profoundly damaged, but there’s enough left and they’re reconstituting. It really is the only hope.
Truth is a recurring theme within the book. What role does truth play in all of this?
What I mean by the truth is the reality of what is happening to these [wild] fish. [We have documented their demise but the farmed salmon industry claims that the wild salmon aren’t dying.] And you can’t say that both sides are right because that’s actually not true. The natural world is based on truth. If you are going to try to restore the natural world, every move you make has to be based in truth. On the other hand, politicians have to get reelected. They’ve always got their finger to the breeze and want to know who believes something more. I don’t think the politicians are necessarily looking for the truth. They’re looking for . . . what’s popular? What will get them reelected? The truth is not a factor.
You came from the field of science, which is often at odds with activism. You grappled with that and eventually went with activism. How have you walked that line?
If my government [made decisions] based on science then research is all I would have to do, and that would be a much more comfortable existence for me. But our government is not based on science. If you know that an ecosystem is being destroyed, you have to do everything you can to make sure people know. When a bunch of us stand on a farm or 5,000 of us end up at the Parliament buildings or a hundred of us paddle down a river, then we’re on the cover of newspapers and we can deliver some piece of the real information. That’s why I do activism—to make sure there’s a platform to get the message out.
Today, there’s this young cadre of scientists who grew up knowing that what their government was saying was not true. And yet, they’re tenured professors. They have prestigious chairs awarded to them. They would work for some of the biggest wild fish organizations in Canada. They’ve moved into positions of authority with a sense of what’s right and wrong. So, the whole activist-scientist [divide] has [disappeared].
Where are we at with wild salmon now?
It’s a really delicate moment, and First Nations are bearing the brunt of it. The industry is pushing back hard and aggressively, accusing them of killing jobs. The wild salmon [populations] are so low right now. The Fraser River sockeye salmon run (the annual event when the salmon return to the river where they were born) just had two consecutive years that are by far the lowest in the history of this fish. Instead of 10 million fish, there were only 200,000 fish.
But there’s this very powerful science that is in the process of being developed that reads the immune system of fish. You can tell if the fish is suffering from low oxygen or high temperature or a bacteria or virus. If you were to test the fish as they’re migrating, you would see at what point their immune systems start fighting something. Because that gives you a location, you can go into that area and ponder what caused that and then try to fix it. Then the next year you can read the immune systems of the fish again and know whether you made it better or not.
What are the implications to human food systems?
Wild salmon are part of food security. Salmon also are part of fighting climate change. Trees are very effective at drawing down carbon and releasing oxygen, and research shows that the more salmon that come back to a river, the bigger the growth ring on a tree. Salmon not only feed people, but they feed a whole economy here because, love it or hate it, wilderness tourism is huge, and that involves whales and bears and eagles—all of which need salmon. By restoring salmon, you get food security, and you’re fighting climate change. It’s a true act of reconciliation.
What can consumers do? What do you want readers to take away from this book?
When you’ve got your hand hovering over which salmon package you’re going to buy, you are making a life-and-death decision for this coast. Don’t pick that farmed salmon. First, I don’t believe it’s good for you. Next, when you do buy farmed salmon, you’re killing orcas, you’re killing wild salmon, and you’re destroying First Nation cultures. People think that buying farmed salmon protects wild salmon, and that’s wrong. When you buy wild salmon, you are actually funding an economy that demands it. It’s absolutely critical. Stop buying farmed salmon and tell the store and the sushi restaurant why.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post Renegade Biologist Alexandra Morton Is Fighting for the Future of Wild Salmon appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post How a Food Business Incubator Is Building Black Economic Strength in Minnesota appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In mid-January, Gene Gelgelu made a down payment on a building along Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, accomplishing two goals: combating gentrification in the increasingly popular Hamline-Midway neighborhood and laying the first steps of what will become the Little Africa Market and Food Business Incubator. Gelgelu had been dreaming of starting the incubator for some time, but financing was a challenge—until just recently.
Gelgelu’s African Economic Development Solutions (AEDS)—a nonprofit dedicated to building wealth in African immigrant communities—is one of the 20 organizations from around the country that received a total of $3 million in grant money from the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) in December. Earmarked from the 2014 Farm Bill and executed in partnership with the Reinvestment Fund, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program is designed to support projects that improve access to fresh and healthy food through retail.
Gene Gelgelu. (Photo courtesy of the Bush Foundation)
Gelgelu and AEDS applied to the program late last summer and found out they would be getting the $200,000 award this fall. Purchasing the nearly 8,200-square-foot building was the first step in developing what will become a Pan-African immigrant cooperative market.
Although the food incubator is still in its earliest stages, the vision for the space is a home for everything from food retail to a commercial kitchen and bakery below a new office headquarters, community meeting spaces, and a museum for African immigrant art.
The effort is fitting, as the Twin Cities’ African immigrant population has grown from roughly 35,000 in 2000 to over 90,000 in 2018. Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali community, many of whom are concentrated in the two cities. Minneapolis boasts a Little Mogadishu in its Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, which Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American, called home.
However, Minnesota and the Twin Cities in particular are often seen as deeply inequitable places, where people of color experience gaping disparities across income, employment, education, and poverty levels compared to their white counterparts. Food access, of course, falls along the same lines, with 43 percent of African Americans experiencing food insecurity compared to 10 percent of white people, according to a 2019 survey.
Gelgelu hopes that the Little Africa Market and the building AEDS has now acquired for it will help address these challenges. “Finding this place played a critical role in helping us to even think of the possibilities of a co-op and a museum and an office,” Gelgelu says.
Community engagement will be key in defining what the pan-African food incubator will eventually look like, but the hope is to bring together a diverse selection of food production and other projects in one place. “How can we provide a space where [people] can learn from each other and share their culture?” Gelgelu says. “I think that’s really what inspired us.”
Bridging the Racial Wealth Gap
Gelgelu—an Ethiopian immigrant, 2017 Bush Fellow, and former operations analyst for the State of Minnesota—started AEDS at an almost unimaginably trying time, after the 2008 housing bubble collapse. “It was difficult for a nonprofit to start—for any business to start, but especially a nonprofit—but that’s when we started. And our mission was and still is wealth-building.”
AEDS focuses largely on business development and homeownership as the central ways to move people in African immigrant communities out of poverty.
Ribbon-cutting at Sabrina’s Cafe and Deli in St. Paul. (Photo courtesy of AEDS)
In 2015, the organization partnered with Bruce Corrie, an economics professor at St. Paul’s Concordia University, on a report titled “The Economic Potential of African Immigrants in Minnesota.” Corrie’s work found that 67 percent of African immigrant business owners identified securing a loan as a major obstacle to forming a business. He also found that African immigrant communities bring in nearly $2 billion in annual income and valued the African products markets at $281 million across the state.
“The wealth gap . . . exists because if you don’t have loans or financing, it’s difficult to sustain a business. They’re capital starved,” Gelgelu says of Minnesota’s African immigrant community. “This is why we needed to start our own lending program to fill that gap.”
That’s exactly what AEDS does—and then some. The organization offers a 12-week training program to help community members start or expand businesses as well as access to pro bono attorneys, microlending, homebuyer education, and financial education. In 2020 alone, AEDS served more than 1,000 people, including 100 participants in the homebuyer program, the majority of whom Gelgelu expects have bought a home as a result.
The Funding That Made It Possible
“[HFFI] came here when we needed the funding at a critical time,” Gelgelu says.
HFFI started in Pennsylvania in 2004 as a partnership between the state’s department of community and economic development and the Food Trust, a national food access nonprofit headquartered in Philadelphia, to provide investment in underserved areas. That program grew into a national campaign that finally took shape during former President Obama’s first term and made its first grants in 2018.
“The grants we offer are really about implementation and capital that’s needed” for one-time expenses, says Molly Hartman, HFFI’s program director. “A lot of the grants are being used for equipment, buildout and, in some cases, initial operating expenses,” she says, noting that HFFI also offers technical assistance for programs that are still in the planning phase.
While the Little African Market’s African immigrant focus stands out from the crowd, several other HFFI grantees are focusing on economic development. The California Indian Traditional Food Incubator in Santa Rosa is providing technical assistance to young people who are starting food businesses. The Fresh Start Farms Food Hub in Manchester, New Hampshire, is an economic-support organization that will be updating its mobile market and open a retail site for corner stores. The Jeffcoat’s Family Market in Marks, Mississippi, is opening a full-service grocery store in the rural Mississippi Delta that is expected to bring jobs and economic development with it.
The idea for AEDS to do food-related work has been in development for some time, Gelgelu says, but the feasibility and the urgency didn’t truly emerge until after the pandemic hit and civil unrest followed the murder of George Floyd, Gelgelu says.
As a result of the damage and destruction that coalesced in St. Paul during the rioting and looting that coincided with the peaceful protests, many immigrant food businesses couldn’t afford the costs associated with rebuilding in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
Entrepreneurs stand in front of their building that burned down during the protests after George Floyd’s murder. (Photo courtesy of AEDS)
“The gentrification of the building next to us,” he says of businesses like Bolé Ethiopian Cuisine, “inspired us to [buy] a building in order to mitigate the displacement and gentrification.”
Preparing for the Long Haul
Though the HFFI grant covered the building’s down payment, it’s not clear how AEDS will be funded in the future.
As Hartman sees it: “[Some of] these models will need subsidies for a long time, or forever in some situations.” David Hughes, an agribusiness development professor at the University of Tennessee, agrees. Food incubators similar to AEDS’s can be found nationwide, including Salt Lake City’s Spice Kitchen incubator, which serves refugee communities; Brooklyn’s Hot Bread Kitchen, which serves a range of individuals impacted by inequality; and Chicago’s Forty Acres Fresh (another HFFI grantee) on the city’s largely Black and immigrant west side—but many struggle to find financial stability over time.
Hughes describes grants like HFFI’s as “great at helping people get off the ground and help continue operations,” he says. “It’s good start-up money, but, ultimately, you’re on your own. It doesn’t mean that you can’t find permanency in local government money or local or regional foundations if you are perceived as doing enough that’s beneficial to the community. But you might be at the mercy of the market [in terms of] what revenue is coming through the door.”
“To sustain ourselves, to survive as humans, wealth-building is our mission in developing a sustainable immigrant community.”
Gelgelu, however, is undeterred. “That’s part of the adventure,” he says of the project that is also being funded through a line of credit. He’s used to thinking constantly about ways reduce costs, whether that’s through shared equipment or a floating cashier that all vendors in the building will utilize through a shared barcode system.
In the meantime, though, getting the building renovated to meet code is immediate next step, as is bringing on a full-time project manager to usher the vision into reality.
Ultimately, for Gelgelu, the market will be an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to addressing the wealth gap. “To sustain ourselves, to survive as humans, wealth-building is our mission in developing a sustainable [immigrant] community.”
The post How a Food Business Incubator Is Building Black Economic Strength in Minnesota appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post The Coffee Shop Giving Homeless Youth a Chance at Success appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Valarie Mckenzie struggled to control her anger early in her life and was kicked out of her home at 18. She roamed everywhere from Grand Rapids, Michigan to Atlanta, Georgia, but spent most of her time living in downtown Minneapolis, where she slept on public benches and in bus shelters. The city’s unrelenting bright lights, which she constantly tried to escape, reminded her of exactly what she lacked: a safe and warm place to sleep at night.
Late last summer, when she was 24, things began to change for Mckenzie. An outreach worker introduced her to Carley Kammerer, the executive director of Wildflyer Coffee, who offered Mckenzie a job that enabled her to secure stable housing. She had worked odd jobs before, but nothing consistent.
“It’s the job, not even really the income, that made the difference,” Mckenzie says. “It was mostly the stability,” she says, that helped her transition out of homelessness.
It’s exactly this structure and stability, paired with an environment that’s empathetic to the unique struggles faced by the roughly 13,000 young people experiencing homelessness in Minnesota every year, that Kammerer has sought to provide. She started the business in 2017, after years of working as a social worker.
As of 2019, there are more than 35,000 homeless youth in the U.S., with an additional 550,000 young people between 18 and 24 experiencing homelessness for longer than a week. Most often this is a result of family conflict coupled with poverty, mental health, substance abuse, and other contributing factors. The pandemic has hit homeless youth especially hard, as already limited access to hygiene and shelter resources has become further strained by social distancing measures and school closures.
“I had been working with youth experiencing homelessness for about eight years in different capacities,” Kammerer says. “I saw the same youth cycling through drop-in centers and outreach programs, and there wasn’t seemingly a lot of traction to get them out of that cycle.”
Valarie Mckenzie brews an espresso at Wildflyer Coffee. (Photo courtesy of Wildflyer Coffee)
Since Kammerer’s parents owned a coffee shop when she was growing up in Wisconsin and she had roughly 10 years of barista experience herself, she decided to start a coffee business to help address the problems she was seeing in the youth with whom she worked. Her goal was to run a business that would meet homeless youth where they are, offering flexibility and understanding while fostering the soft skills and customer service-focused development that would help them meet the demands of the job market.
Developing a Business Model—and a Vision
Wildflyer isn’t the first coffee shop to focus on homeless youth. Kammerer looked at other examples, like Purple Door in Denver (where she briefly interned), Street Bean in Seattle, and The Monkey & The Elephant in Philadelphia, and saw an opportunity to do things a little differently in terms of the length of the program and the soft-skills training focus.
She spoke with other social workers and case managers to understand what was working and what wasn’t when homeless youth tried to get and maintain jobs, and she used their insights to develop Wildflyer’s six-month program. By offering extensive training and real-time coaching when issues on the job arise, the program is designed to help bridge the gap between life on the street and entry-level positions.
“I was seeing a lot of youth get jobs and then lose them,” Kammerer says, largely due to challenges that stem from homelessness, ranging from transportation issues to accessing and storing important documents like birth certificates, which are required to establish employment.
With homelessness also comes a lack of access to resources for maintaining personal hygiene, so sometimes youth will miss work because they’re embarrassed to come in after not having showered for a few days, Kammerer says. Sometimes the mental health challenges become too much and getting to work, much less on time, can seem impossible.
When Kammerer first established Wildflyer, the organization employed four to six young people to sell simple pour-over and iced Dogwood Coffee drinks at local farmers’ markets each season, where training was more ad hoc. It has since secured a brick and mortar location and is in the process of expanding both its coffee service and its training program.
“Youth don’t always know how to do well at time management, customer service, and dealing with managers professionally,” Kammerer says. When she founded the café, she asked: “What if we knew what we were getting into and planned ways to handle skill development rather than fire them?” Now, that’s exactly what she’s working to create.
Rather than adding a roasting component like the one at Purple Door, Kammerer decided to keep the focus on customer-facing barista jobs so they can practice what they’re learning in training.
When challenges arise, Kammerer and her team talk through them with the youth employees, focusing on causes and potential future solutions. With her social work background and contacts, she’s also able to connect youth to services and resources to help stabilize their situations.
For Mckenzie, that flexibility and understanding have made all the difference. “Carley and the shift leads and the shop manager are all very understanding of mental health and the struggles I go through,” she says. “They’re a big support.”
Building Out the Program
Wildflyer’s new brick-and-mortar coffee shop opened in December on Minnehaha Avenue—a stone’s throw from the civil unrest that coalesced around Minneapolis’s third precinct in the days that followed George Floyd’s death at the hands of ex-Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin.
The location was previously home to Peace Coffee, a local roaster dedicated to fair trade practices that exited the retail business after the pandemic led owner and CEO Lee Wallace to focus only on wholesale. Now, Wildflyer has taken over the space and will continue to sell and brew Peace Coffee along with Dogwood Coffee.
(Photo courtesy of Wildflyer Coffee)
“In 2020, we were able to sell 17 percent more coffee than we did in 2019 despite losing our food service business,” Wallace says. “There have been so many sad stories about things closing and a real sense of loss, so it was really cool to be able to tell people a good story about Wildflyer taking over.”
Wallace worked with Kammerer and the building’s owners to transfer over the lease, landing on a graduated rent increase plan so that Wildflyer has some time to get established. As a result, Wildflyer was able to save on purchases and a lower initial rent, and divert funds toward youth employment and training. “I feel eternally grateful to Peace Coffee because they sold us all the equipment and really worked out a deal with [rent],” Kammerer says. Peace Coffee’s former director of retail has also consulted with the Wildflyer staff weekly on how to run a coffee shop.
Now, with a spacious, sunlight-filled physical location, Kammerer will be able to increase Wildflyer’s available employment hours from 200 per year to a minimum of 3,000 per year. She expects to employ roughly two six-month cohorts of 10 to 12 young people who identify as everything from couch surfers to unstably housed each year with the new shop, although pandemic-related restrictions have slowed the process a bit. Dine-in service was banned in Minneapolis until January 11, but with indoor capacity now operating at 50 percent, Wildflyer celebrated its grand opening just this week.
Moving forward, Kammerer also plans to focus on what she calls Phase Two of Wildflyer’s work: partnering with local businesses to hire its graduates. So far, Dogwood has hired a Wildflyer graduate, and local Butter Bakery Café has come on board as the first Phase Two partner dedicated to hiring graduates with an understanding of their situation.
Evaluating Effectiveness
The big question, though, is whether or not initiatives like these really work to help young people effectively transition out of homelessness over the long term.
According to Dr. Ann Masten, a University of Minnesota professor who studies youth homelessness and resilience, more studies are needed, but the existing research is promising.
A 2017 systematic literature review found a variety of outcomes across youth employment programs, but that the effects of skills training programs like Wildflyer are among the most significant. “The mission of Wildflyer Coffee aligns well with what we know about promoting resilience”—the capacity to successfully adapt to challenges—“in youth who have experienced adversity,” Masten says. “The program combines opportunity with support, role modeling, and mentoring, building skills, hope, and self-confidence along with work competence.”
For Mckenzie at least, the program has worked wonders. She’s staying on for an extra six months and is optimistic about finding employment through the project’s second phase.
The new coffee shop “feels like a second home to me,” she says, “and I love the fact that we have our own little group of people that come in every day, who know us by name. It’s amazing.”
The post The Coffee Shop Giving Homeless Youth a Chance at Success appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Hmong Farmers Are Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement in Minnesota appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>A number of Minnesota organizations stepped up to address the new level of hunger in the Twin Cities. But the Hmong American Farmers Association (HAFA) stands out for the steady stream of fresh food they’ve donated by nearly doubling its community supported agriculture (CSA) program this year, helping growers to sell online and deliver their produce, and their conviction to continue to help through the end of the year at least.
“The murder of George Floyd has really lifted up the challenges of BIPOCs and the systemic racism that exists,” says Janssen Hang, HAFA’s executive director. The group of immigrant farmers from Southeast Asia grounds their work in social justice and equity, and it’s not hard to see why they have been quick to want to help communities battered by racism and violence heal.
From buying produce and organizing donation boxes to providing food as their existing partners’ new relief locations, HAFA has been doing what it can to both advance social justice and support its farmers along the way—not only in the short term but as a model for others.
“We’ve had a lot of challenges,” says Princess Haley, co-founder of Appetite for Change, a nonprofit working to bring healthy food to the majority Black North Minneapolis neighborhood. The organization, which has delivered 5,000 meals a week since April, has been using produce provided by HAFA as well as a number of individual Hmong farmers.
Beyond produce contributions, Haley has also looked to HAFA as a model for Appetite for Change’s work, deciding to operate similarly to HAFA by focusing on a marginalized community but not at the exclusion of others. Like HAFA, “we don’t want to leave anyone out,” she says. She adds that she was inspired by the Hmong women farmers Haley met when she first moved to the Twin Cities from Chicago 16 years ago.
“Those women didn’t speak much English, but I remember the first day squatting in the garden,” Haley recalls. A Hmong farmer came over to Haley, gave her a knife, and showed her how to weed effectively while taking her sandals off to show her how growing should be done—in connection with the earth. “They just welcomed me in,” she says.
A History of Reinvention
A minority group that resided largely in the mountains of Laos and Thailand, the Hmong people were secretly recruited by the CIA to assist the U.S. in the Vietnam War. This alliance eventually led many to resettle in the U.S. as political refugees after the U.S withdrew from the war in 1975. Today, the Twin Cities area has the highest concentration of Hmong people of any metropolitan area in the country.
When the Hmong began immigrating in the ‘80s, “because of language barriers and a lack of skills in a post-industrial society, many reverted back to farming because that was part of the skills they knew. They have been farming for generations,” explains Hang.
Photo credit: Mike Hazard / HAFA
However, Minnesota’s newest farmers lacked the access to the resources and systems—from land to capital—to fully flourish in their new home. White landowners often took advantage of the Hmong people’s lack of understanding of modern farm and economic systems. “Many landowners who leased land wanted to charge them an astronomical amount,” Hang explains. “Some were charging Hmong farmers $350-$400 an acre while charging their Caucasian counterparts no more than $150.”
Despite these barriers, the Hmong people continued to find ways to farm, introducing Minnesotans to products like bitter melon and Thai chili peppers while revitalizing the Twin Cities farmers’ markets in the process. Many Hmong farmers naturally use organic practices but find hurdles on the way to certification. Rather than bar them, many markets like the Mill City farmers’ market opt to do their own growing checks in place of formal certificates. Then, in 2011, when Hang’s sister Pakou became a Bush Fellow, things began to change.
Pakou used the opportunity to conduct feasibility studies and research on the challenges and opportunities facing Hmong farmers after more than 20 years in the Twin Cities. “She found that there’s still a great disparity in what Hmong farmers were making compared to their white counterparts, primarily due to a lack of access to land, markets, credit, capital, and training,” Hang says.
That same year the Hangs and a group of Hmong families started HAFA as an act of self-determination and a means for organizing to change the lingering inequities in the local food economy.
“Our theory of change [is] about building community wealth through our whole food model,” Hang says. “[The] model states that all aspects of the food and farming industry must be freely accessible simultaneously with regards to land access, markets, training, research, and financial assistance to truly . . . change these aspects of food and farming.”
In 2013, HAFA acquired a 155-acre farm in Vermillion, Minnesota, just outside the metro area. In addition to providing its farmers with land, the farm is also used to teach them about farming best practices, from soil health and cover cropping to water quality and food safety. When HAFA started in 2011, its member farmers were earning $5,000 in sales per acre. By 2017, and thanks to the HAFA farm, that number jumped to an average of $11,000 per acre—a 120 percent increase. Today, HAFA’s farmers sell produce through the organization’s CSA or in Twin Cities farmers’ markets where Hmong American farmers make up over half of the farmers.
Responding to the Current Moment
For much of 2020, the HAFA farm has played a slightly different role than it has in the past, working to enable Hmong farmers to more easily and effectively respond to the social justice needs of the moment in the best way that they can: through food.
When restaurants closed this spring and the outlook for summer farmers’ market turnout was uncertain at best, HAFA not only added internal infrastructure to keep its farmers safe and provide PPE, but it also helped them pivot to online CSA sales.
“Most Hmong farmers are older and have language and computer-literacy barriers,” Hang says. HAFA worked with a designer to create a user-friendly online sales platform that farmers could get up and running for their individual businesses in just a few hours.
“HAFA gave trainings . . . [and] was really pushing farmers to do online markets,” says Lillian Hang (no relation), a HAFA board member whose parents, Phoua Thao and Wang Ger Hang, have been HAFA farmers since the beginning.
This helped farmers continue selling during a challenging time while also meeting the food needs of the community. “We got a lot of customers who were immunocompromised. They really wanted access to fresh, local produce but couldn’t risk going to the grocery store,” Lillian says. She and her family have taken to doing deliveries to literally and figuratively meet customers where they are during the pandemic.
This year, HAFA has doubled its usual number of CSA shares for a total of 800. Janssen expects to reach 1,000 before the year is out.
HAFA Capacity Building Director Nancy Xiong delivering Summer CSA to a HAFA drop site. (Photo courtesy of HAFA)
In the days that followed the killing of George Floyd, much of the looting centered on Lake Street in Minneapolis and University Avenue in St. Paul, an area of the city where many immigrant and minority groups, from the Black community to the Latinx and Asian communities, live and own businesses.
“The Hmong community is very close-knit,” Janssen says, adding that almost everyone in the Hmong community has a friend, relative, family member, or at least someone they know with a business on University Avenue.
“[Floyd’s death] really hit us personally. [University Avenue] is our backyard . . . we eat, drink, and shop there,” Lillian says. “Like a lot of POCs, we get it. The whole police brutality thing is nothing new in the Hmong community.” In 2006, Minneapolis police killed 19-year-old Fong Lee, a Hmong American.
Like many Asian Americans, the Hmong residents of the Twin Cities also endured racist vitriol in the early days of the pandemic, and many were eager to support the social justice reforms that the BLM movement called for. HAFA took several steps to ensure that its farmers had the ability to support the communities of color disproportionately impacted by the food deserts created by the boarding up and burning of businesses.
Since May, HAFA has organized donation boxes that its farmers can contribute to in addition to using grants and other funding to buy produce from its farmers to supply restaurants and community organizations that have been donating food and meals to communities in need. The organization also participated in the Healing Community Food Drive in June, and from there connected with a variety of food security-focused organizations like University Avenue-based Nexis Community Partners that they’re still working with today.
“We donate quite a bit to the food shelf,” Lillian says of her family. “On Sundays, there’s always groups that come to collect donations,” such as Second Harvest, a St. Paul-based hunger relief organization. “My parents said they don’t have the money to donate, but they have produce and veggies to share. It’s like, ‘What can we do?’”
Months later, these food relief efforts are far from over. Janssen expects HAFA’s to continue making donations through at least the end of the year. He wants to ensure that there’s a steady flow of produce for HAFA’s partners and a secure income stream for its farmers, so HAFA has begun building a storage facility at the farm so farmers can cure their fall root crops in order to extend their shelf life.
“The need for food is still a reality. Even though the murder of George Floyd was a couple of months ago, communities are still impacted as a result,” he says.
Top photo credit: Mike Hazard / HAFA.
The post Hmong Farmers Are Supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement in Minnesota appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post What AI Down on the Farm Could Mean for Rural America appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Carroll is spearheading an effort to build an agricultural Tomorrowland on 40 acres of black dirt just outside of Horace, North Dakota. The director of operations at Emerging Prairie, a non-profit dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship in North Dakota, he’s overseeing Grand Farm, an initiative launched at the end of April that is in the running—competing with indoor operations like Iron Ox—to create the world’s first fully autonomous farm by 2025.
Farm may be a misnomer, however, because while Grand Farm will include some fields growing crops like corn, soy, and wheat, even those will most likely be for field testing more than actual production. Described as a “a laboratory for entrepreneurs and ag tech companies,” the effort will include a business accelerator, robotics lab, makerspace, and code school called Emerging Digital Academy.
Autonomous farming—marked by equipment fueled by artificial intelligence, using machine learning to gather and compute data to determine and optimize when, where, and how much to plant, fertilize, and the like—has been evolving for years. It has already yielded advancements in precision agriculture and smart equipment such as driverless tractors. Now, projects like Grand Farm promise to take it further.
An annotated rendering of Grand Farm, including autonomous drone monitoring, a learning center, and autonomous tractors. (Click image for a larger version)
Grand Farm hopes to advance autonomous ag tech as an approach to addressing several issues facing North American farmers and rural communities today: a skills gap, a lack of venture capital across rural America, and a farm labor shortage pervasive across the U.S. and Canada.
Grand Farm’s primary goal is to provide technology that will take human labor out of the equation, but it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition for Carroll. “I look at it this way: if we get to a fully autonomous farm, that would be great. But to me, the challenges are addressing those pain points… those are more important measurements to see if we’re successful or not,” he says.
The project will develop and test ag-focused innovations, ultimately marrying them with investment opportunities to shepherd them into the wider market. For now, production will center on row crops, but Carroll says the initiative has already gotten interest from mushroom growers and vertical farmers. Grand Farm, which received an investment of 1.5 million from Microsoft earlier this month, also has a bigger goal: to ensure that when the future of agriculture arrives, North Dakota—and the Corn Belt more generally—will have a place at the table.
[newsmatch_box]Like other, similar efforts, Grand Farm also raises important questions about the role of ag tech, and artificial intelligence in particular, at a time when farming has become dominated by large producers and even larger agribusiness interests. Artificial intelligence-based (AI) ag tech also brings with it sociocultural issues that have profound implications for farmers in rural America and the communities they sustain.
Fertile Ground for Innovation
For an experiment that pairs one of America’s oldest industries with one of its newest, North Dakota is fertile ground. Ninety percent of North Dakota’s land is devoted to agriculture; the state is a top producer of row crops including sunflowers, lentils, and soybeans, and 40 percent of North Dakota’s farms weigh in at 1,000 acres or more in size.
Grand Farm isn’t the state’s first foray into farm-tech innovation. The now-international, multi-billion-dollar farm equipment company Bobcat was founded in North Dakota in 1947. More recently, Fargo-based Myriad Mobile launched the app Bushel that digitally handles everything from scale tickets to cash bids for modern grain farmers.
Although Grand Farm’s founders face an uphill battle when it comes to finding investors (more than three-quarters of venture capital went to companies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston in 2015) the founders hope that an infusion of capital and high-tech jobs could revitalize an area that has been struggling to keep young people from moving away.
AI farming promises a myriad of benefits, such as using precision ag to reduce farming’s carbon footprint through a highly efficient use of resources—everything from fertilizer and pesticides to water and seeds. Autonomous tractors and other machines that use sensors, algorithms, and image-recognition software all have the potential to make farming more efficient by killing weeds, harvesting crops, and spotting crop diseases before they spread.
“I think one of the big benefits from a global perspective is that we’re going to be able to use these technologies to produce more food with less inputs on smaller amounts of land,” says Evan Frasier, director of the Arrell Food Institute and research chair in Global Food Security at Canada’s University of Guelph.
“There is a great interest and desire in technology and where it may go,” says Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union.
A recent effort by Google supports Watne’s claim. The company helped convene a group of stakeholders in late 2018 to explore how technology such as AI and machine learning could accelerate the creation of a more sustainable, scalable, and equitable food system. “We see big opportunities for big data to help small and mid-scale farmers,” reads a report summarizing the group’s findings.
[pico_box]But Watne wonders whether or not the efficiencies and decreased labor costs that AI agtech aims to bring are enough to justify the price of the equipment. “The questions of how fast, what we can afford, and does it actually bring efficiencies, are always the challenge,” he says. The farmer hopes that Grand Farm’s research element will help weigh the costs and benefits for producers so they won’t have to take on all the economic risks themselves.
However, there are serious issues facing AI farming that warrant Watne’s cautious stance, from data ownership to national security threats, all existing in a fast-moving tech sphere that far outpaces the ability of lawmakers and regulations to keep up.
Betting the Farm on Big Data
Chances are, the cost concerns that Watne raises are going to be a downstream issue in the data-centered revolution that agriculture is undergoing through initiatives like Grand Farm—a revolution that could make ownership as we know it a thing of the past.
“In the digital agricultural revolution, what we’re talking about is data,” Frasier says. “And in this regard, there’s actually nothing different about farming than any other sector of the economy that’s moving into a data-driven system.”
Consider the last time you upgraded your smartphone. Maybe you walked into a store, forked over some cash, and walked out with a phone you own. But when you powered up the new device and accepted the long list of conditions wrapped up in the phone’s end-user license agreement (EULA), you were consenting to license the software that the phone requires to operate. Through that consent, the company retains the rights to, and control over, the essential components of the phone. What you actually own is merely a chunk of parts that’s largely useless without the software designed to run it.
Many companies in the ag tech sphere are making similar moves to ensure that ownership of the software that powers smart farm equipment stays in the hands of the company, rather than the farmer, through similar EULAs.
And, as we’ve seen in the evolution of Facebook, the information the company harvests from its 2.1 billion users can easily be deployed for nefarious purposes.
“If I’m a farmer and I’ve got AI systems, what’s happening to my data—who does it belong to and what’s it being used for?” asks David Rose, an associate professor in Agricultural Innovation and Extension at the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at University of Reading in southern England. “Is it being used to maximize benefits on the farm for me or is it being used by a company that wants to sell me more stuff?”
As smart farm equipment churns across a farm, scooping up data on everything from rainfall and water stress to microclimate information and chlorophyll levels along the way, that data can then be used by the company to market products to farmers in the form of AI-fueled recommendations like applying more fertilizer, which said company just happens to manufacture, Rose explains. “If you aggregate data across certain types of farms, you can build up a detailed picture of how that farm works, what products they need, and know that farmer better than they know themselves.”
Precision Agriculture technology with GPS allows farmers to plant corn at night. (Photo by the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture)
Data ownership gets particularly murky when data sets are created by a company, corrected by farmers in the field, and perhaps partly owned by the government—should states get involved in the Big Data game. “There’s a huge quagmire,” Frasier explains, one in which farmers aren’t free or able to use the data they generate across different equipment manufacturers and their respective clouds. This results in more ownership and control for companies, and the evaporation of notions of ownership as farmers have known it.
Little has changed in terms of software ownership since the days of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, designed to protect movies and music from pirating in the Napster era. “In little bits and pieces, that protection was extended to software that runs devices. Lo and behold, 20 or 30 years later, software is actually on everything. Suddenly this really narrowly tailored legal language… can be applied to tractors on a farm,” says Paul Roberts, the founder of securepairs.org, a group of security professionals advocating for the right to repair. The shift has effectively been turning farmers into tenants rather than owners. And as ownership becomes hazy, so does accountability.
“If a computer [makes a farming decision], what can farmers do if it’s wrong?” Rose asks. “Where does accountability lie? If company says, ‘Apply X amount of nitrogen because it will maximize yields,’ but then a weather event happens that can’t be anticipated that changes the nitrogen necessary and the crop doesn’t turnout how you expected. Whose fault is that and what happens? Does the company pick up the bill?”
The Price of Progress
Beyond farms themselves, the tech-fueled farming revolution is poised to have staggering ripple effects on the rural communities that surround and rely on them as smaller, local farms struggle to keep up. The North Carolina hog industry offers a look at the ongoing relationship between agriculture and technology says Wyatt Fraas, assistant farm and community director at the Center for Rural Affairs.
As technology evolved to allow for the confinement of larger numbers of hogs, the investment required to participate became largely an option only for big farms with the necessary capital. Because one large shipment of pigs is easier to work with than several smaller loads from multiple farms, the market shifted in favor of large farms. “The processors only wanted to work with the larger operations—gave them preferential prices and eventually [processors] became owners of the animals and created the contract systems that we have now where they control all aspects of production,” Fraas says.
As the larger hog farms prospered and offered lower prices, most smaller, local operations were squeezed out of the market. Between 1992 and 2009, there has since been a 70 percent decrease in hog farms across the country, while the number of animals produced has remained roughly the same. This shift has also led to a system in which hog farmers have largely morphed from businesspeople in charge of their operations to little more than landowners who supply companies with a place to mature their pigs.
[pico_box]When technological advancements that come in the form of proprietary software on every conceivable farm device are combined with weak antitrust enforcement and oversight, particularly regarding tech acquisitions, it can lead to consolidation. It’s a quick slide from there into monopolies that “can do what any monopoly does, which is increase costs and decrease service and availability—so you pay more for crappier service,” Roberts notes.
Most American commodity farmers already understand this; they’ve already lived through the advent of consolidation in the seed industry.
“You can grow seed from your own bins as long as you’re not doing something with the genetic trait that’s protected,” Watne says. “But all the new technology out there is being held pretty much in three companies, and we’re paying more for our seed than we ever have.”
As technological advancements that push the farming-as-a-service model proliferate across the farming industry as a whole, “the larger [farms] are more and more going to be leasing equipment rather than owning it,” Fraas says, eliminating the need for local businesses that traditionally serve local farms while enabling the transfer of ownership, and the power that comes with it, to companies rather than people.
Larger farms have less economic activity in the community, fewer farm laborers and owners, and “some less numeric qualities such as less feelings about ownership in the community or interest in participation in the community,” Fraas says of research on industrial farming in rural communities. The opposite was found to be true in communities still buoyed by small- and medium-sized farms.
“What that does is in your local community you end up with fewer farmers and ranchers, and you have fewer people coming to town to do business,” Watne explains. “As those farms grow, they tend to buy further away which, again, hurts that local business. Then, you see these small towns starting to dry up,” unable to sustain local businesses, access to healthcare, grocers, and more.
“It’s serious, and it begs the question if that is what we really want to happen,” Frass says. That ag tech and efforts like Grand Farm will play a central role in this determination is undeniable.
‘Is That the World We Want to Live In?’
“Grand Farm sounds absolutely fantastic,” Rose says, but in the next breath he cautions that it’s important to ask the deeper questions that can stem from this kind of innovation. “It’s the Wild West, when you don’t have legal or ethical guidelines to govern [technological advancement].”
Both Roberts and Rose have taken the issues surrounding software and data ownership and more that recent technology has raised as an opportunity to interrogate the kind of world we want to live in and to start advocating for that vision of the future now.
The right to repair movement that Roberts is involved in—which, at its core, challenges the notions of eternal corporate ownership that software has created—is sweeping across industries, agriculture included. Their effort to fight back against unfair terms that limit farmer’s ability to repair, and thus effectively interact with their equipment, is a noble one, but their path isn’t easy, as manufacturers out-lobby equipment owners 28-1. While corporations have resources—to the tune of billions of dollars spent each year—to pour into lobbying Congress and other federal agencies on their behalf, local farmers simply don’t often have the same ability to get their voices heard.
What the right to repair movement has already accomplished, though, is a glimpse into the regulations that may be required if AI and ag tech are going to be as beneficial to users as they are to the companies that make them. “We need new laws to really make clear that owners own things. Even if they’ve got software on them,” Roberts says. “Anything that the company would use to repair it, the owner should have that, too.”
“I often hate top-down [rules], but when you’re dealing with some of these big players, it’s really only governments that have teeth to do something about it,” Rose adds. Any change, according to Rose, results in winners and losers. For him, this doesn’t mean we should curtail advancements like Grand Farm. But it does mean that extra thought should be given to those on the losing end and put plans in place to support them along the way.
“The future of farming with tech might make more food, but is it all worth it? And is that the world we want to live in?” he asks.
The post What AI Down on the Farm Could Mean for Rural America appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post After Midwest Flooding, Volunteer Hay Drops Provide a Lifeline for Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>After losing a season’s worth of feed for his animals, Cluck headed to nearby Columbus, Nebraska, where the University of Nebraska’s extension office had organized one of several hay handouts. Once there, he realized there was a five-bale limit—a quantity that would last less than a week on his roughly 600-acre operation. Luckily, he happened to encounter a representative of Farm Rescue, a North Dakota non-profit dedicated to helping farmers in need. The group arranged for Cluck to receive a 30-bale load of hay.
“That will get me far enough down the road and get [my cattle] into the pasture and I’m in the clear at that point,” Cluck says. “My worry went to zero the minute I got a semi-load of hay.”
The “bomb cyclone” that caused historic flooding that inundated Cluck’s farm and others across the Midwest in March, followed by a mid-April blizzard, damaged and destroyed everything from roads and levees to homes and farms across Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas and left billions of dollars of destruction in its wake.
Perhaps more devastating than the flooding has been the lack of federal resources available to the farmers whose livelihoods have been literally wiped out as a result.
Bill Northey, the Under Secretary for Agriculture, told Reuters earlier this month that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has no mechanism to repay farmers for losses to the estimated 5 to 10 million bushels of corn and soybeans kept in storage bins on farms across the Midwest. Worth between $17.3 and $34.6 million, these largely uninsured crop storages have reached epic proportions in the U.S. in recent years as a result of saturated markets, low prices and trade wars.
While the government has fallen short of helping those whose lives have been upended by the flooding, the community response to the disaster—as shown by Farm Rescue and a number of other groups—illustrates just how much life remains in a region all too often decried as “dying.”
Farm Rescue, which was founded in 2005 by Bill Gross, found Cluck during its second Operation Hay Lift. The operation is part of Farm Rescue’s mission to support family farmers and ranchers enduring crises like major injuries, illnesses, and natural disasters. Funded through donations, fundraisers, and grants from entities including the Englestad Foundation, over the last 14 years, Farm Rescue has helped more than 600 farms with critical donations of equipment, labor, and hay.
So far, the group has organized the delivery of 72 loads of hay ranging in size from a pickup load to a big-rig trailer full—and fencing materials along with a handful of cattle protein supplements. The drops have been made possible by the effort of just a few staff members and 40 or so volunteers from as far away as Michigan.
The team of Farm Rescue volunteers and employees.
Gross says the hay drops “will continue to go throughout the summer because pastures have been ruined. These are hard-working people who typically don’t ask for help, but need it.”
After Cluck received help from Farm Rescue, he paid the support forward by helping the organization distribute hay and other supplies with his equipment and connections in the local community.
“Farmers don’t want to sell their cows,” says Cluck, but that’s the likely fate of any farmer who can’t feed their herd for one reason or another. “They love taking care of their cattle, they’re like extended family… there are guys who tear up, they just can’t say enough how much they appreciate it.”
Taking in the Rural Landscape
Gross, who grew up in Cleveland, North Dakota (population: 83 in 2010), has flown around the world in his work as a Boeing 747 pilot for UPS. Over time, he noticed even from the skies that there were fewer and fewer farms across the States.
“I went to a high school that’s no longer there,” Gross says. “There were too few children to attend to make it viable, and when that [school] closed, the town closed. There’s no gas station, only a post office and a grain elevator. The grocery store and bar closed down at the same time the school did.”
Bill Gross.
He came of age during the farm crisis of the 1980s and watched the repercussions of farm consolidation ripple across the region. And, like so many farm kids who might want to stay and farm, he was forced to look elsewhere for a viable future.
“My folks couldn’t help with land or equipment or anything, so they told me to go to college and get an education and the farm would be there, hopefully, when I got back,” recalls Gross.
The current farm landscape also makes it difficult, if not impossible, for farmers to help one another other the way they used to because they’re all stretched so thin. In this context, major illnesses, injuries, and natural disasters can often mean certain doom for family farms and ranches.
“In the big cities, there’s all kinds of nonprofits that help people,” adds Gross. He asked himself: “What is [here] to help these hardworking farmers and ranchers, other than each other?”
Originally, Farm Rescue was his retirement dream, but in 2005, Gross shared his vision with a fellow pilot, who then asked, “Why wait until you retire?”
Rural Revivals Everywhere
Last month, at the height of the flooding, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman published a piece in which he declared that, like the “backwards” regions of southern Italy, there’s “something the matter” with rural America. “Reviving declining regions is really hard. Many countries have tried, but it’s difficult to find any convincing success stories,” he wrote.
Yet, efforts like Farm Rescue’s fly in the face of Krugman’s logic—and that of other coastal outsiders. In addition to the array of local relief efforts that have popped up in response to the floods’ devastation—just as they have in big cities after events like Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina—many who live in Middle America see evidence of deep-rooted, systemic resources that are creating success stories every day, and have been for at least a century.
Take the Bank of North Dakota for example. The country’s only public bank, it was created in 1919 explicitly to finance farmers. The institution still operates with a clear directive to support farmers as well as other rural North Dakotans by partnering with small credit unions to give residents banking options, like 30-year mortgages, they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. In recent years the bank has begun to include venture capital under its mission to provide services that promote agriculture, commerce, and industry while explicitly never competing with private business.
Then there’s the University of Minnesota’s Center for Rural Design—the only center in the world that uses design to help rural communities survive by reinventing themselves. [Editor’s note: the Center for Rural Design has closed, but founder Dewey Thorbeck tells Civil Eats that he is now doing the same work at UMN’s Minnesota Design Center.] Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs is another “unapologetically rural” organization with a track record of success. It has offices across the Midwest dedicated to engaging the region’s changing communities with its evolving economy and culture.
“In rural Nebraska, we do small business development and 40 percent of our clients are new Americans, mostly Latino,” explains Brian Depew, the Center for Rural Affairs’ executive director. “We’re working in around 12 or 15 small and mid-sized communities that are experiencing high rates of immigrants … there are a lot of small communities out there that are at the beginning of, or are already being transformed by, immigration. These communities are growing as well.”
These are hardly signs of a dying region—but they’re also signs of major change and adaptation that can be a rocky process, as seen in the anti-immigration clashes bubbling up in some parts of the country.
“Will rural America change? Absolutely. What’s important to us is to try to maintain the good in the values of rural America,” says Depew. “One of the reasons we got into small business development was because it’s important to us to create opportunities in other industries to create ownership, for people to participate in their communities.”
While Gross acknowledges that the tangible side of Farm Rescue’s efforts—the hay drops and labor that often arrives within 24 or 48 hours of need—are the center of attention, it’s the intangible effects of his organization’s work that he values most.
“Helping them out makes it more likely for their children to be able to continue farming or for their children to go onto higher education. If they go out of business or have to take on a lot of debt, they can’t provide those opportunities,” he says. “We’re helping future generations of family farmers.”
All photos courtesy of Farm Rescue.
The post After Midwest Flooding, Volunteer Hay Drops Provide a Lifeline for Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>