Since Lopez is trying to figure out how to add herself and other siblings to an existing SNAP household, her case is more complex than some others. Yu instructed her to call the Food Bank for New York City, which assists with applications and also has a special hotline for thorny questions.

The semester was about to start and Lopez told Yu that she really needed textbooks. “[Textbooks] are ridiculously expensive—[but] we found a website for affordable textbooks online,” says Yu. “And she also mentioned that she was trying to figure out her resume and cover letters for after graduation, so I gave her contact info for [Lehman College’s] career center. She was so grateful—we [students] don’t realize we’re paying for these things that are there to help us out.”

By early February, Yu had taken on 65 CUNY clients with varying challenges—although none, yet, who’d needed her to speak in Cantonese (other navigators speak Spanish, Urdu, and Bengali). By that point in time, navigators had helped 270 students at 21 CUNY campuses—116 with SNAP applications, and 166 with other food resources including food banks and public school Grab-and-Go meals within walking distance of where they were living. It takes 30 days to process a SNAP application and longer for benefits to actually arrive, which underlines the importance of emergency food providers for getting students through lean days and weeks.

Several clients stuck out in Yu’s mind because of the depth of their need. A few students had requested mental health service recommendations. Others are “more concerned about housing—it could be a landlord issue, or they can’t afford to pay rent, which a local tenant housing official can take up” on their behalf, Yu says. Two students didn’t have documents to prove their addresses, although Yu knew from her training that “You can still apply if you’re homeless or don’t have identification—it’s [the SNAP office’s] responsibility to get you an ID.”

Meanwhile, Yu had been grappling with her own housing and food insecurity—as well as with discomfort about asking for assistance. She says that acting as a navigator for other students has been eye-opening. “They are experiencing similar things to myself. It’s normally just me feeling isolated and like things are insurmountable, and it’s really wild how little we know about each others’ lives. It’s really revealing.”

She’s heard from other navigators that they’re all beginning to feel more confident in contacting students and teasing out information in unobtrusive ways. “A lot of struggles are unseen, and sometimes people [also] struggle with admitting they need help,” she explains.

The navigators were also planning to hold weekly virtual workshops for each other, to share the skills they’d been accumulating along the way—such as how to address the nutritional side of food access, and ways to offer trauma-informed care (Yu’s specialty). They were thinking, too, of hosting open-to-the-public watch parties for documentaries and an upcoming food forum hosted by the mayor’s office. She thought the watch parties might create space for food justice conversations to happen, and an opportunity to alert more students about the peer network.

What success rate the program can expect is still unknown. However, SOH conducted a pilot during the spring and summer of 2020 that connected 656 students with $628,000 worth of SNAP benefits over a three-month period.

CUNY’s Urban Food Policy Institute (UFPI) piloted a similar effort in 2018 at Hostos Community College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. UFPI director Nicholas Freudenberg says in that program, “Ten [student] advocates working limited hours connected 1,200 students to campus-based services. That tells you about the scale you need to get to 10,000, or 100,000 students. It also provides proof of concept; the majority of students we surveyed said they would accept help from a peer.”

In California, Bartholow says a conversation with peer navigators a couple of years ago revealed that they were able to help student clients make it to the end of the “SNAP application maze” 100 percent of the time. Could clients manage it without help? Their overwhelming response was, “No, it’s not possible,” she says.

Not everyone believes the peer navigator/SNAP approach is the best or only solution to helping students. Some colleges have implemented what nonprofit Hunger Solutions Maryland director Michael J. Wilson calls a “brilliant” workaround, by scanning a student’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to see who might qualify for SNAP, then reaching out to those students directly. FRAC’s Vollinger thinks there should also be expanded effort around enrolling student parents in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), “because it doesn’t have as many barriers as SNAP,” she says.

Meanwhile, as of this writing, America Lopez had made an appointment to speak with a financial aid specialist at Lehman. She’d filled out her SNAP application but hadn’t yet found time to call FBNYC to figure out her best approach. She was gearing up for it, though, and Christal Yu was standing by to help however else she could. “I’m so thankful I can work with students so they don’t need to feel like they’re alone in this,” she says.

*Disclosure: The reporter’s spouse is employed by CUNY, though not in relation to the needs-assistance programs.

This article was updated to correct the spelling of Jessica Bartholow’s last name.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/10/06/ensuring-homeless-americans-get-enough-food-has-never-been-easy-now-its-next-to-impossible/ Tue, 06 Oct 2020 09:00:21 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=38526 Even before the pandemic hit, many food-insecure Americans were forced to make difficult decisions. Some gave up some meals so their children did not, as they waited for a new month’s SNAP benefits to kick in. Others opted to pay their rent, a doctor’s bill, or bus fare to work instead of buying a full […]

The post Ensuring Homeless Americans Get Enough Food Has Never Been Easy. Now, It’s Next to Impossible. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> Even before the pandemic hit, many food-insecure Americans were forced to make difficult decisions. Some gave up some meals so their children did not, as they waited for a new month’s SNAP benefits to kick in. Others opted to pay their rent, a doctor’s bill, or bus fare to work instead of buying a full load of groceries. Many also visited food pantries and soup kitchens to see them through hungry days—a need that has exploded since March.

Things are even more radically precarious for those who are unhoused. Before the pandemic, between 3.5 and 5 million people in the U.S. experienced homelessness over the course of a year. Now, despite a temporary—and hardly encompassing—federal eviction ban, enacted in early September, many landlords have nevertheless turned out tenants unable to pay rent. Some economists project the nation’s homeless rates will surge by as much as 45 percent by the end of 2020.

What, how—or even if—unhoused people eat is often largely out of their hands. They might couch surf with friends, beholden to the whims of someone else’s household. Food pantry staples won’t help much if they’re living out of their cars, in a motel, or other “no-cook facility.” If they’re spending nights in a shelter, they probably receive a prepared meal there.

But if they’re living on the streets in, say, Los Angeles, leaving an encampment to visit a soup kitchen is a risky prospect; the city has been conducting sweeps, despite legislation banning them in March, that involve trashing unoccupied tents, sleeping bags, barbecues, and the other worldly possessions that allow homeless neighbors to survive.

Instead, unhoused people might rely on the outreach of individuals like Melissa Acedera. In 2017, when she was still working full-time as a compliance manager for a food and beverage company, she began handing out 100 breakfast burritos each Saturday to men and women on L.A.’s Skid Row. Several months later she started a mobile food pantry, Polo’s Pantry.

Polo’s Pantry has since become one cog in a community-based mutual aid coalition that includes an expanding network of lawyers, farmers, grocers, university researchers, activists, longstanding homeless organizations, and other nonprofits. A similar coalition has also developed in New York, seeking to bring together previously disconnected—or actively competitive—players in the emergency food aid system. Together, the rise of these cooperative groups show how, with COVID, the needs of our nation’s hungry have ballooned precipitously beyond what the established emergency food system can handle.

Even before the pandemic, more than 11 percent of Americans endured food insecurity. California and New York accounted for the greatest number of homeless individuals in the country, at 22 percent and 16 percent respectively. In New York City, 40 percent of residents there—or 2.5 million people—lacked “self-sufficiency,” or the ability to cover basic necessities including food, housing, healthcare, and childcare.

In July, The New York Times reported that illegal evictions were underway in New York, and 14,000 more (legal) evictions were anticipated in that city alone before housing court reopened earlier this month—this in spite of a moratorium that’s meant to see tenants through December 31. There’s a similar situation brewing in L.A.

Polo’s Pantry, the Instituto Educación Popular, and Everytable partner to hand out food in Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of Polo’s Pantry)

No one is sure just how large the eviction crisis will become, but the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that 40 million Americans risk eviction by the end of 2020, and the repercussions of this could be felt for as long as a decade, according to executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, Donald H. Whitehead, Jr. “Frontline jobs occupied by people of color? They may never come back, and we’re going to see homelessness reach more deeply into the middle class,” he says.

This need has left Acedera and other services providers in L.A., NYC, and other cities scrambling for new ways to think about the structure of emergency feeding. “The charitable food system [wasn’t] equipped to handle the pandemic,” Acedera says. She and others are trying to re-scaffold that system on the fly, even as they attempt to meet the surge of hunger that has already arrived at their feet.

A Band-Aid on Hunger

Andrew Fisher, anti-hunger activist and author of Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups, has argued that emergency feeding through large-scale food banks and other nonprofits is a lucrative enterprise—a “hunger industrial complex” that allows for tax write-offs for corporate donors and a shrug from legislators who justify inaction by pointing to the charities filling the void.

Even with this problematic system in place, though, the number of hungry people is not significantly diminishing, and the number of homeless people, especially those living outdoors, has been on the rise in the last few years, says Whitehead. With each national crisis—from the 2008 economic crash, to 2012’s Superstorm Sandy on the East Coast, to today’s pandemic—those numbers have surged.

One emergency is enough to plunge a family that’s struggling to find resources into homelessness, says senior attorney Shayla Myers of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA). And the pandemic, with its swift eradication of over 22 million jobs in March and April, has provided more than its fair share of hits on the stability of America’s working- and middle-class residents.

Volunteer chefs with Polo’s Pantry cook a community breakfast for all at an encampment in Van Nuys. (Photo courtesy of Polo’s Pantry)

Before the pandemic, Acedera had already begun coordinating with homeless advocacy groups Ktown for All and the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition to provide 450 weekly meals to L.A.’s homeless and other marginalized populations. Even then, she says, “We were a Band-Aid.”

Since March, confronted with toddlers shacked up in RVs with their parents and freshly unemployed day laborers living in places like “a weird corner of a gas station,” she says, she and her partners—which now include the meal subscription company Everytable—distribute an average of 4,500 meals a week. And other mutual aid feeding coalitions have risen up alongside them. “It feels like we’re going to war every day,” she says.

On the other side of the country, NYC’s largest soup kitchen, Holy Apostles, served 30,000 meals in July of 2019. A year later, that number had climbed to 123,000, including over 20,000 meals for unhoused New Yorkers.

“We’re here to pick up the pieces [when crises happen] but is it sustainable?” asks Holy Apostles’ Chief Operating Officer Michael Ottley, in a voice flecked with weariness. The group was founded in 1982 with the notion that feeding hungry people was “a temporary problem,” he says. “We [planned to] work our way out of a job because we’d solved this issue. It’s 38 years later and we’re no closer to solving the issue.”

Ananya Roy, the director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, partners with advocacy organizations like Ktown for All and the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), which use her research on poverty to lobby legislators. Like all the experts interviewed for this piece, she anticipates the housing and related hunger fallout from COVID-19 with dread, and she’s frustrated that policymakers have failed to act in ways that will stanch the worst of what’s to come.

“We’re starting to see an urban majority facing many kinds of insecurity, but the policies and programs people deserve are not going to arrive in time, and I have no idea how people are going to survive,” she says. “At all levels of government, inertia is very much driven by the fact that those who are going to get evicted and those who are already unhoused are politically unimportant.”

Assembling a Broader Coalition

On behalf of Polo’s Pantry and her first partners, Acedera was already piecing together food resources to make the nurturing, culturally relevant meals they deliver to Korean, Filipino, Oaxacan, and Caribbean populations, among others, and assembling a Rolodex of suppliers, including farmers at the Hollywood famers’ market, a local Ralphs, the World Harvest Food Bank, and craft services for film shoots.

When the pandemic hit, Acedera realized her efforts paralleled and sometimes intersected with those of the Hollywood Food Coalition, Hunger Action L.A., and Daniel Park’s Skid Row People’s Market, which trains and employs unhoused men and women. They recognized they had greater power if they banded together. Some started to schedule regular working groups to discuss potential for collaboration, says Acedera. “[We asked]: ‘How do we share resources, create better flow, create our own distribution system, have bigger asks of our partners, and figure out what we want out of this?’”

From left: Danny Park of Skid Row Coffee and Skid Row People’s Market, Goose Dolce of God’s Pantry, and Alex Yoon and Ray Ricafort of Eayikes, loading up food deliveries. (Photo courtesy of Polo’s Pantry)

One of their biggest priorities was building a vendor system that everyone involved could access. They started looking for a warehouse space where they could store an onslaught of welcome but sometimes flummoxing donations—two pallets of cheese one week, two pallets of frozen meat another, dozens of sheet cakes left over from a cooking show—while they figured out how to make meals out of them; and they started fundraising to hire out-of-work chefs to cook those meals.

In New York City, established feeding centers like Holy Apostles already has a strong network of suppliers, and it certainly relies on some facets of the “hunger industrial complex” for influxes of cash and food. “We’d love to live in a society where food assistance programs aren’t needed, but that’s easier said than done,” Ottley says. But the soup kitchens that are still open for business have also had to recalibrate and forge new alliances.

The city’s largest emergency feeding operations compete for the same funding and, as a result, they used to regard one another as enemies rather than allies. Now, Ottley takes monthly calls with managers at sister organizations to figure out how to turn uneaten food destined to be dumped (remember March’s plowed-under potatoes, lettuces, and onions?) into reliable supplies for the network instead. They’re also working on how to eliminate waste in the system, and how best to advocate for healthier donations and for social services.

Preparing the lunch line outside Holy Apostles. (Photo by Ada Cowan)

Still, like Acedera’s network in L.A., Holy Apostles suffers from the whims of food rescue organizations—“A pallet of low-sodium vegetable stock and another pallet of walnuts? What kind of meal is that?” fumes Ottley. Unanticipated donations also make it difficult for chefs to plan menus, or to cook the food before it spoils. Case in point: Ottley recently used grant money to purchase milk from an upstate dairy, only to get a milk donation soon after. “We’ll use it,” he says, “but we could have used our purchasing power on something else.”

Ottley can get slammed in other ways when he purchases food. Without a corporate discount from distributors like Sysco and Driscoll’s Foods, he navigates fluctuating and frequently steep prices that cut into his limited financial resources. In an attempt to counter this, he’s talking with other emergency food providers about making their purchases collectively. “It’s what we should have always been doing,” he says.

An Urgent Need for a Federal Response

What would help mitigate these intensifying crises? Long-term and enforceable eviction bans would help until the economy stabilizes, advocates for the homeless agree; so would cancelling back rent. For people who’ve already lost housing, one approach would include converting hotel rooms used as emergency shelter into functional living spaces with kitchens so that “people have control over cooking for themselves,” says Roy; decriminalizing various aspects of homelessness is another much-needed solution.

For years, LAFLA has been suing the City of Los Angeles on behalf of advocates for the homeless, for seizing and destroying their belongings, including nonperishable food and cooking supplies. Those cases, says Myers, are ongoing. Social justice workers talk a lot about peoples’ rights to housing and shelter, but in the U.S., “We have a system of negative rights,” Myers says. “With food, it’s the right not to be arrested for consuming food in public when you have no other place to do it.”

Preparing meal deliveries inside Holy Apostles. (Photo by Ada Cowan)

Litigation, though, is only a small (and slow) piece of a much larger fight. The real work, Myers says, has come from mutual aid coalitions that “can get people to think differently about what food looks like, what compassion looks like, and what society we actively want to build.” And although the idea and practice of mutual aid are nothing new, the pandemic has “opened up new avenues of collaboration and partnership, and ways people leverage support”—in California, New York, and elsewhere.

Despite much optimism around the achievements and creative thinking of community-based mutual aid and coalitions such as the one Holy Apostles has forged, NCH’s Whitehead sees little hope for meaningful relief for the secondary pandemic of homelessness intertwined with hunger without strong federal action. “We have to let Congress know that they need to get money on the ground right now,” he says. “A slow response will be devastating.”

While Americans wait and wait, “The work has been pushed on us, and it’s time for the most radical ideas to come forward,” Acedera says. “Things are completely broken. We need to plan for [emergency feeding] being a more permanent thing.”

Ottley agrees. “There’s no end in sight—for any of us,” he says.

The post Ensuring Homeless Americans Get Enough Food Has Never Been Easy. Now, It’s Next to Impossible. appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2020/09/16/how-a-south-carolina-farmer-is-adapting-an-heirloom-rice-to-withstand-climate-change/ https://civileats.com/2020/09/16/how-a-south-carolina-farmer-is-adapting-an-heirloom-rice-to-withstand-climate-change/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2020 08:00:30 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=38324 “When I was a kid, my parents were growing no rice; all the rice had vanished,” says Hardeeville, South Carolina horticulturist Rollen Chalmers with a soft lilt to his voice. Though the generations-deep Gullah tradition of growing rice had faded by the time Chalmers was growing up, he tapped into his family’s experience later in […]

The post How a South Carolina Farmer Is Adapting an Heirloom Rice to Withstand Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> “When I was a kid, my parents were growing no rice; all the rice had vanished,” says Hardeeville, South Carolina horticulturist Rollen Chalmers with a soft lilt to his voice. Though the generations-deep Gullah tradition of growing rice had faded by the time Chalmers was growing up, he tapped into his family’s experience later in life.

Chalmers is now what Glenn Roberts, founder of the South Carolina grain company Anson Mills, calls a “quiet force” behind the food revival of the Sea Islands and, in particular, the renewed interest in heirloom rices. Though his face and name are largely absent from documentaries about the subject, Chalmers is responsible for developing many acres of the grain, “from north of Hilton Head Island down into Georgia,” Roberts says. All along the way, he’s been restoring habitat and heritage.

Some of Chalmers’s most important work happens on 30 marshy acres at the Turnbridge Plantation, one of hundreds of 18th-century estates that enabled white Southerners to build vast fortunes off the backbreaking, often deadly labor of enslaved men, women, and children from West Africa’s “rice coast” countries.

In the 1980s, the plantation’s then-new owner rematriated long-lost, long-grained Carolina Gold rice. Today on the property, Chalmers conducts trials on seed varietals and planting methods that can fight off salt intrusion and invasive weeds, as well as provide delicious flavor to eaters. Roberts says these trials are necessary to bring rice-growing into the future. “With sea level rise, we’re going to have to switch to salt-tolerant rice husbandry,” he said. “Already we’re looking at what we can save from these low areas, and it’s not what we’ll be growing there in 10 years.”

Chalmers has also planted other rices around the Lowcountry, including Carolina Gold’s shorter, less-fragrant cousin, Charleston Gold, on the site of the former Wormsloe Plantation in Savannah. Some of those crops are earmarked for local chefs, to boost appreciation of rice culture.

Next year, he’s also hoping to plant trials of upland red bearded rice, the ancient West African variety recently rediscovered in Trinidad.

Civil Eats spoke to Chalmers in late July about re-forging a link to his own rice-growing history, trying to drum up enthusiasm for heritage grains among a sometimes blasé populace, and what’s challenging about growing rice.

What are some hurdles to growing rice in the Lowcountry?

Working out good rice is always a challenge. You have to worry about water. You don’t have access to fresh river water like back in the days my great-grandparents were farming. Back then, you had canals that came from the Savannah River, and everyone had access, with a ditch cut into their property. Now you got to pump water.

Salt’s another problem here. We got freshwater rivers, but my fields are right on the marshes. With Hurricane Matthew [in 2016], two feet of saltwater came across the embankments. Rice will not tolerate the least bit of salt. I usually plant 30 acres at Turnbridge, but the fields are flooded now to get that salt out, so I planted up a seven-acre field this year.

You could have a super good crop, but once rice lays down [in a hurricane], it’s not gonna come back up and it’s hard to harvest, even with modern machines.

And then of course you’ve got live alligators in those fields. They lay out there all day in that fresh water, and there’s water moccasins, copperheads, all these different snakes hanging out catching frogs and mice. When you plant, you got to be real careful and watch where you’re stepping. It’s beautiful in these marshes, rivers, and creeks, but a lot of things lurk in these waters.

And yesterday, we were looking at 105 degrees, really choking, wet-hot heat—real Southern living. This is no joke; growing rice the way I grow it is the real deal, just like it was happening in the 1760s.

Is growing rice something your family did?

Both my parents were always farming, and their parents farmed, too. I pawned that off from them. My mother would tell me how they would grow Carolina Gold rice [when she was younger] and cut it and thrash it and mill it themselves, the old way. It was a whole different deal than what’s going on now.

Kids back then played a big role. Parents would grow it, and kids would go in and cut it, get it in the house, clean it up, and get some of it over to the mill. The mill was right down the road; you would take it to these people to mill it up and give them some of the harvest. But that was long gone before I was born. When I was a kid, all that rice had vanished.

How did you learn to grow it, then?

Mainly I got it from my mother, talking with her, trying to listen to what she was saying. She would tell me the time of year to go in and plant, what areas to look for where the rice grows better. These would be some of your lower areas on the property, but here in the Lowcountry, that’s why it’s called low—everywhere down here is low land.

My parents told me about getting water on the rice and keeping it at a certain level once the rice gets growing, to help stabilize it and for weed control. Certain weeds you got to get rid of to get a crop or they take over the rice field. You got hemp sesbania but the most invasive is alligator weed; it chokes everything out.

(Note: Alligator weed (Alternanthera philoxeroides) is native to South America and entered the U.S. via waterways. It can propagate from stem fragments alone, growing into dense mats of foliage that are almost impossible to eradicate.)

Does using water like that allow you to use fewer chemicals? Are there lessons here for other rice growers?

Absolutely. Other people use chemicals and tend larger fields, but I prefer working with smaller fields—that’s what I’m into. I would like to see more of it. I hope other people would start back growing with smaller rice fields in communities, if possible.

One of Rollen Chalmers’ rice fields. (Photo credit: Sarah Ross)

You’ve worked to bring Carolina Gold back. How did it get lost in the first place?

Things get lost because people lose interest. Back when my granddad was farming rice, he got seed from his mother, then he gave it to my parents, and that’s how you kept it. It started vanishing away because my uncles and aunts, nobody was interested in farming rice. They could walk in a store and buy a bag of rice for five bucks. Then all that was erased, all that was gone.

Does working with rice make you feel connected to the past?

I got a small rice field I started on Daufuskie Island five or six years ago, located at the Bloody Point Lighthouse that was built to keep ships coming out of Calibogue Sound from going into the Atlantic Ocean. A friend of mine bought it, put in a small vineyard, and I also replanted some indigo plants and sea island cotton. They grew a lot of cotton back in the 17th century and I wanted to show tourists how sea island cotton is a different, long-strand fiber that got sent back to England to make clothing for emperors.

I can see some Carolina Gold remnants on the embankments on that island. It makes you feel connected to [the past]. My ancestors were growing rice like that. The thing about it, they mainly grew it to live and survive. You would grow that rice, and it would take you through to the next year for food. It’s a real connection there, seeing how my grandparents were growing these different things. I had never seen it ’til I got into doing it myself.

Do you think people are starting to be more interested in bringing traditional varietals back? 

Some people my age—59, 60—are getting back into this thing; smart people are taking an interest. People in their 30s and mid-20s, they still think we’re not gonna run out of food; they think because we’ve got farmers and government, we’re gonna have food. But with this pandemic going on, if you own land, you could survive even if you can’t get to grocery stores. I’ve got deer, wild boars, wild turkeys, and I grow grains and rice and sweet potatoes; I can stay on my property and survive.

But some people there’s no convincing. They don’t understand that at high-end restaurants the food they’re getting comes from folks just like us. If you see Carolina Gold on the menu, that’s coming from smaller guys.

We’re losing a lot of land in this area where I’m at. You got development going on: apartments, stores, houses being built. Wild quails are disappearing almost totally here in the South, but when I was a young kid, quails were everywhere. On my property and for my customers, I plant oaks and other trees that’ll produce seed and cover for birds. You bring different kinds of birds to hang out on the marshes when you plant rice on these traditional fields; they come in to get crawfish when you take the water off them.

A little bit of work with the right knowledge, and you can get these lands back up and running. But you have to have revenue to tackle these jobs of restoring and planting. There’s not a whole lot of grant money coming from the USDA because they don’t recognize it’s necessary to go back and do some of these things.

A lot’s been written about B.J. Dennis, who unearthed upland red bearded rice back in 2016. Do you think stories like that help people understand what you’re trying to do?

I think it does help; it gives us recognition with him being a chef. [In 2013], me and my wife hosted chefs here at Turnbridge during a Cook It Raw event. I took those guys deer hunting, alligator hunting, casting for blue crabs, and all this stuff was cooked in the middle of a field in a pit I dug in the ground. We showed them how you can live off the woods and the water out here.

You have to educate people. I talk to quite a few tourists on Daufuskie Island, and most of them have not seen or heard of the rice that I grow. Communicating with these people, coming out and having events like Cook It Raw, that’s the key. But we’ve also got to get the local people back into this, and for that, we need small gathering places where people feel comfortable. It comes back to the one thing it takes—money—to get this kicked off, and we don’t have it.

What kind of climate changes have you seen in the Lowcountry?

You notice that the weather, first thing in the spring, is still a little bit cool longer than it would be years ago. You got to get the soil temperature up right for rice to come up, so maybe you plant a little bit later. The way the weather is now, you don’t get frost till the last of November; years ago you’d get it by the first of October. Now you could get two crops out of rice because you get 80-degree weather in October when you should be looking at 65-degree weather.

But because of hurricane flooding, you may have to go to a hill rice instead of flood rice. With hill rice, you got to do more cultivation [to get rid of weeds], and plant in rows. It’s more work. You’ve got to get more people in and get different equipment to handle it. We started trialing hill rice a year ago, right here [at Turnbridge], just a little handful of seeds to see how they grow with no water. It grows pretty good, produces some rice, but it’s still trial and error. When I grow B.J.’s rice, I’ll try it dry and wet, probably.

If we grow hill rice at Turnbridge, we’ll have to move to a different variety; it probably won’t be Carolina Gold because that loves water and mud. It would change everything. But rice is gonna be here one way or the other.

Top photo: Rollen Chalmers prepping the Wormsloe site. (Photo credit: Sarah Ross)

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/09/16/how-a-south-carolina-farmer-is-adapting-an-heirloom-rice-to-withstand-climate-change/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2020/07/27/college-food-pantries-are-reinventing-ways-to-feed-students/ Mon, 27 Jul 2020 09:00:23 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=37711 When Brandon Mathews was a senior in college at the University of Arkansas, he interned at his campus food pantry, running its day-to-day operations. He was also a client. “I often dressed in a button down and slacks, which might suggest to the world everything was fine despite my struggle with food insecurity, [because] as […]

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]]> When Brandon Mathews was a senior in college at the University of Arkansas, he interned at his campus food pantry, running its day-to-day operations. He was also a client. “I often dressed in a button down and slacks, which might suggest to the world everything was fine despite my struggle with food insecurity, [because] as a young Black man, I really felt ashamed,” Mathews says.

Seven years after he graduated, Mathews is now a consultant for nonprofits and small businesses, and co-director of the campus food pantry network College and University Food Bank Alliance (CUFBA), founded in 2012; it currently has 700 members nationwide. Mathews says that, without his college pantry, “I think I would have been in a lot more debt, or [would have] not completed my degree.”

Over the last 20 years, American college students—more likely to be older, parents or caretakers, or the first in their families to get a higher education—often get clobbered by “the new economics of college,” says Edward Conroy. He’s associate director of research communications for the Hope Center for College, Community and Justice at Temple University in Philadelphia, which has partnered with CUFBA since 2017.

American workers have experienced wage stagnation since the late ‘70s. Regardless, today’s students and their families typically pay more for tuition than in decades past, partly due to the fact that financial aid hasn’t kept pace with rising college costs, says Conroy. Within this burdensome equation, the victory of a college acceptance can be quickly tempered by another reality: the inability of a college student to reliably afford three meals a day.

Food insecurity was already rampant among college students before the pandemic, ranging from between 42 and 56 percent at two-year schools, and between 33 and 42 percent at four-year schools, according to 2019 research from the Hope Center. Indigenous and Black students experience disproportionately higher food insecurity.

When COVID-19 began to close down the country in March, hunger spiked to crisis levels for students at some institutions; they lost meal plans, housing, and jobs. The City University of New York (CUNY) reported in April that the rate of food insecurity doubled among its students over 2018 numbers, for example.

In some cases, campus pantries were able to help. In other cases, they were not, as students moved away and colleges shuttered. “So many students were already close to the edge, just surviving,” says Conroy. With the pandemic, “entire support networks disappeared.”

As researchers assemble data to assess the magnitude of what befell—and continues to befall—hungry college students, advocates are also attempting to figure out how to protect this demographic in the event of another emergency shutdown, no matter where they are.

Campus Food Pantry Shortfalls

The total number of campus-based pantries across the U.S. is unknown. What is known is that they’ve become more prevalent in the last five years in response to growing recognition of need.

The pantries vary in the ways they operate. They may be student- or administration-run, staffed by paid workers or volunteers, or open for set hours or by appointment only. They may provide shelf-stable items or supplement with fresh produce from a campus farm; function as a stand-alone entity or in conjunction with a broader Single Stop initiative that provides information on applying for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, unemployment, and housing, as well as finding legal services and filing taxes.

What campus food pantries are not is a long-term solution. “They’re a Band-Aid,” says Conroy. “We’re never going to food pantry our way out of food insecurity.” In the short-term, though, pantries can provide necessary sustenance to students on non-resident campuses and those who can’t afford a meal plan. The research is clear that college students without reliable food access earn lower grades and suffer higher levels of stress.

The pandemic, too, increased stress levels, as well as food insecurity and parallel concerns as students were turned away from campuses; not every student, point out advocates, has a family residence to return to. Unfortunately, says Mathews, “as staff and administrators were scrambling to put together emergency action plans, campus-based food pantries may have fallen off the list in the hierarchy of things that had to be done.”

The Hope Center report corroborates this observation, finding that “students already saddled with basic needs insecurity appeared to be further forgotten by some institutions and policymakers [who] simply told students to ‘go home.’”

Despite the lack of attention and support, the report says, frantic food pantry directors tried to figure out how they could continue to feed students while still complying with orders to shut their doors—and reach students who were no longer living on campus.

“Getting food out from pantries . . . relies on students being able to get to campus,” says Conroy. This was an impossibility for anyone who moved out-of-state, and a hardship for those quarantining or facing reduced local public transportation. Some campus pantries that did remain open saw their clientele reduced to a trickle.

Mathews says that back in April, some CUFBA members reached out to the Alliance “trying to figure out alternate ways to distribute food [and] get students help at community-based food pantries. It was a perfect storm of challenges,” he says. “We were overwhelmed.”

Before that, in March, the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute had surveyed a representative sampling of students to see how they were weathering the pandemic. They discovered that only a fraction were using CUNY food pantries (the system has 18 of them spread across 25 campuses). Instead, “70 percent went to a pantry in their own community,” says Institute director Nick Freudenberg. That makes it clear, he says, “that campus-based food assistance doesn’t make sense if people are not coming to campus. [University administrators] need to put their minds and resources to thinking of other services.”

CUNY did receive city funds to distribute $400 to each of 1,595 food-insecure students for groceries. But with an estimated 35,620 students experiencing hunger, that met only a fraction of the need.

Shifting Strategies

Challenges were similar, if smaller in scope, at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. Its pantry remained open as the pandemic took hold and students were sent home. But as at CUNY, fewer students came in to avail themselves of food; clients served went from 512 in February to a low of 15 in May.

Eighty-five percent of Philander Smith students’ families have income below the federal poverty rate, so providing them with food relief meant quickly cobbling together three new initiatives, largely supported by private donations, according to its pantry director, Shannon Clowney-Johnson. The pantry began offering (local) students in need grab-and-go food baskets, but it also supplemented that program with $50 grocery gift cards and emergency funds in varying amounts, which could be used anywhere a student wound up.

California’s Central California Food Bank (CCFB) in Fresno, which works with eight colleges, explored the best ways to get food out to hungry students. Its partner Fresno City College, for example, increased the operating hours of its pantry during the pandemic. It also opened itself up to the general public; as a result, it experienced a 40 percent increase in clients—from 3,900 to 5,700 a month, although how much of that traffic was from students is unclear.

Other college pantries affiliated with CCFB either closed or saw radical decreases in clients. In these instances, CCFB reduced programming, says co-CEO Natalie Capales, and “tried to fill gaps by increasing services through other agency partners serving the same geography, as well as creating programming to expand our reach.”

One of these expanded services is Groceries2Go, which allows clients to make an appointment for an in-person pickup. The other is Take Care, a delivery service that proved a success, with nearly all pick-up slots, for between 800 and 1,000 boxes a week, reaching maximum capacity, says Capales.

“Restaurants have gone to mobile apps and curbside delivery, and we’ve seen a sprinkling of that kind of tech in the hunger relief sector,” CUFBA’s Mathews first told Civil Eats in early June. By July, he’d heard from even more pantries that had adopted services like Microsoft Bookings to allow students to virtually arrange pick-ups.

The Future of Feeding?

Those interviewed for this article don’t expect the increased levels of food insecurity among college students to drop off anytime soon. “These challenges are not temporary,” cautions the Hope Center in its report. That’s not only because epidemiologists predict that the novel coronavirus will linger for months, if not years, but because the havoc it has created in many already at-risk systems cannot be easily undone.

“Levels of food insecurity among the general population of New York are still sky-high,” says CUNY’s Freudenberg. “People are regularly spending more money on food than pre-COVID, and large numbers of households have unemployed members and no income.”

Freudenberg, Conroy, and others already strongly advocated for revised thinking about how to address food need among college students. The pandemic has only increased their insistence on the urgent necessity for change.

For starters, Freudenberg wants to work to ensure maximum student enrollment in SNAP. A pre-pandemic report showed that 41 percent of surveyed CUNY students were eligible, but only 20 percent were enrolled (for starters, many students believe, erroneously, that they aren’t eligible). “If they can get $100 or $200 a month for food, that’s a concrete way to increase food security,” Freudenberg says.

University administrations everywhere should prioritize connecting students with SNAP, which contains regulations that were “actively written to discourage them from applying, to reduce the cost of the program,” Conroy says. “This is where institutions can help.”

Additionally, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding a new Hope Center project “to look at emergency aid as a potential solution,” Conroy says. “There’s some increasing evidence that [this] could help students bridge gaps in resources and stop them from dropping out of school.”

And there’s also some chatter around the idea of a universal free meal program at colleges—an extension of the National School Lunch program—which Conroy calls a “genuine, ambitious, policy proposal that we’ve suggested.” Already, on an individual institutional level, a vaguely affiliated concept, Swipe Out Hunger, which transfers unused meal swipes from student to student, shows some promise, he says.

These overhauls go hand-in-hand with calls from various quarters to rework the financial aid system or pivot to debt-free college. More immediately, though, advocates hope universities will work quickly to prepare for future pandemics.

Do campus food pantries “have disaster plans in place?” asks Capales of CCFB. “Are they taking the time to evaluate what they did well and where they had gaps they need to shore up? They need to reflect on how they could’ve responded differently [this time] and start institutionalizing some of those processes now. Don’t wait.”

 

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]]> https://civileats.com/2020/05/15/community-food-co-ops-are-thriving-during-the-pandemic/ https://civileats.com/2020/05/15/community-food-co-ops-are-thriving-during-the-pandemic/#comments Fri, 15 May 2020 09:00:09 +0000 http://civileats.com/?p=36534 When the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the schools, coffee houses, and other wholesale customers of Kilgus Farmstead, a beloved family-run meat and dairy operation about 100 miles southwest of Chicago, its owners were forced to dump product, thin their herd, and scramble to find new outlets. Then Green Top cooperative grocery in Bloomington, Illinois, stepped in […]

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Photo courtesy of Kilgus Dairy.

When the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the schools, coffee houses, and other wholesale customers of Kilgus Farmstead, a beloved family-run meat and dairy operation about 100 miles southwest of Chicago, its owners were forced to dump product, thin their herd, and scramble to find new outlets.

Then Green Top cooperative grocery in Bloomington, Illinois, stepped in to help. They took Kilgus’s plight as a call to (social media) arms, advertising a two-for-one milk special and appealing to community members to “help some farmers unload some milk and bring in some income,” says board member Melanie Shellito.

Soon after, early in the morning on April 14, a Kilgus refrigerated truck arrived at the co-op to deliver crates of milk. Within hours, that stock was sold out—a feat repeated the next day and which yielded, all told, milk sales 10 times higher than average for the co-op. “Everyone was thrilled to help,” says Shellito.

Similar tales of co-ops stepping in to take farmers’ otherwise market-less bounty—and concurrently boosting their own inventories—have been unfolding across the country since mid-March. Partially as a result, “A lot of co-ops have seen their biggest sales days in their histories,” says Erbin Crowell, executive director of the 39-member Neighboring Food Co-op Association (NFCA) based in Massachusetts. (Grocery and beverage store sales overall went up more than 25 percent in March, while stores prices nationwide experienced their highest jump in 50 years in April.)

This is an alternative narrative to reports of thwarted national supply chains hampering supermarkets’ ability to keep shelves stocked. And it’s left many in the cooperative grocery world wondering why, in an era of discussion about the importance of regional connections to food security, co-ops—with their built-in devotion to the local food movement, relationships with small farmers, and commitment to community building—have been overlooked as a vital cog in that wheel. And they wonder, too, if the current crisis will show Americans, once and for all, why shopping at a food co-op is worthy of their consideration.

Designed to Support Their Local Communities—and Each Other

Cooperatives are simply businesses or organizations that are owned and run by their members; in addition to consumer-facing entities like grocery stores, they include health centers, daycares, and credit unions. The first co-op groceries opened in North America in the early 20th century. Ever since, their popularity has ebbed and flowed, then often spiked in response to stock market crashes, corporate exploitation, and the racism that cut African Americans out of the usual procurement chains—and which compelled civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois to call for a separate, cooperative, economy as a means to financial independence.

“Out of necessity, Black folks during the Civil Rights movement had to create co-ops to get services,” says Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC), an association of 75 Black (mostly) farmer co-ops that share costly resources like trucks, marketing, and packing and distribution facilities.

Packing greens for local markets at Indian Springs Farmers Co-op in Mississippi. (Photo courtesy of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.)

During one of their heydays, through the tanking economy of the 1950s, consumer co-ops numbered around 20,000 and boasted 6 million members. Today, an estimated 380 co-op storefronts pepper the American grocery-scape, a number that includes 93 co-ops that opened after the 2008 recession.

Co-op groceries have gone out of their way to be responsive to the needs of their communities.

Co-ops suffer an unfortunate reputation, possibly left over from their association in the 1970s with the natural foods movement, as being “only for hippies or the food ‘elite,’” writes Jon Steinman in his recent book, Grocery Story. In truth, according to Crowell of NFCA, food co-ops have evolved since those patchouli-scented days. “They’ve gone out of their way to be responsive to the needs of their communities,” he says. “What you’ll see now is a broad mix of mainstream products alongside natural, sustainable, bulk organic products.”

In the co-op world, buying local is a given. On average, local sales account for 20 percent of co-op revenue nationally, versus 6 percent at supermarkets, “and we’re serious about getting it to 30 percent,” says C.E. Pugh, CEO of co-op member association National Co+op Grocers. The average co-op also sources from 300 vendors, as opposed to 30 among conventional grocers. “That diversity of supply served co-ops well during the pantry-loading season of the first three pandemic weeks, and that resiliency is holding up,” Pugh says.

In addition to sourcing locally, the cooperative movement considers building a support system among co-ops another of its seven guiding principles. It’s why NFCA helped launch five new co-ops in the Northeast in the last 10 years; and it’s why they’re collaborating with Blanding and FSC to buy pecans and watermelons from the organization’s farmers, who lost 85 percent of their markets in the pandemic. It’s also why National Co+op Grocers members have been holding frequent tele-meetings to share best practices for keeping staff and shoppers safe.

Photo courtesy of Green Top Grocery.

As new customers are pulled in by reports of full shelves, they find, as a bonus, that safety protocols not in evidence at some supermarkets—masks, hand sanitizer, staggered entry, even pre-paid curbside delivery—are often out in full force at the co-op; the hope is that they’ll be inspired to return even after the pandemic has run its course.

Co-ops are entities that are designed to serve community members, whether staff, shoppers, or farmers, and as such, they’re “show[ing] how inherently different they are than other retailers,” says Benjamin Bartley, a Penn State extension educator who contributed to a brief on COVID-19 farm-to-consumer sales. Over the last three chaotic months, that difference has helped some of them thrive.

Pivoting in a Pandemic

That’s because the things that make a co-op a co-op make it flexible in a crisis. “Most grocery stores are run by very large corporations,” says “Supermarket Guru” Phil Lempert. “Even when you look at small chains like Stewart’s,” which has 335 locations in New York and Southern Vermont, “there’s a corporate hierarchy that doesn’t exist in co-ops. That allows [them] to make decisions quickly.”

For example, “When my local Kroger was running out of eggs, produce, flour, my co-op contacted local farms and said, ‘Where are you hurting, what can you not sell, how can we help?’” says Jacqueline Hannah, assistant director of the Food Co-op Initiative, which advises co-op startups.

“The best thing about the local food movement is that we have a different supply chain, and when demand increases, we’re able to move more quickly with local suppliers,” says Jeremy DeChario, general manager of Syracuse Cooperative Market in upstate New York. “We’re also going onto Facebook groups for farmers that have seen a decrease in their wholesale business and saying, ‘Give us a call if you’ve got product,’ so we can help them stay afloat.”

When the pandemic first hit the Northeast, most available local produce was winter crops such as squash, potatoes, and apples pulled from cold storage. That’s shifted to include lettuces, asparagus, and other fresh vegetables as the growing season has begun even in chillier regions of the country.

Katie Bishop is a farmer at PrairiErth, a 35-acre operation outside Atlanta, Illinois, that in 2019 supplied 60 percent of its vegetables to restaurants and retailers, including three Midwestern co-ops; the other 40 percent went to CSAs and farmers’ markets. Now that there’s no restaurant business to speak of, and “customers don’t feel comfortable at markets or coming to the farm, co-ops provide us with a safe place to continue to do business,” Bishop says.

(Photo courtesy of PrairiErth)

Unlike supermarkets, which require a steady stream of “usuals”—perfect-looking broccoli, peppers, romaine—co-ops can take almost anything Bishop offers. “As soon as we sell out of sweet potatoes, [customers] want our seconds,” she says.

Nevertheless, for farmers to have success supplying co-ops in the long-term, there’s a huge need for aggregators, says Bishop. This is because “so many farmers in our area are of a [small] scale where [lower] wholesale prices don’t fit their business plan. But if they have produce they can’t sell at a farmers’ market, or they have no experience with CSAs, they’re gonna be stuck.”

At the moment, there’s only one existing U.S. distributor, Co-op Partners Warehouse in St. Paul, that’s built its business on supplying co-ops. A co-op itself, when the pandemic began wreaking havoc on supply chains, “we found we were able to get product where other distributors, which carried items from the same farms, could not,” says inside sales and marketing manager Lori Zuidema. Why? “Co-ops have a long precedent of being ethical, and our buyer has a 20-year history of developing relationships with small farmers. Also, we’re good at paying.”

Overcoming Barriers, Serving with ‘Love and Care’

“After every disaster, co-ops fill the void, and you start having a groundswell of people who want to join,” says FSC’s Blanding. But the barriers to starting co-ops, let alone keeping them running, are hefty.

For starters, there’s an educational hurdle: People think they have to become members (not necessarily) or work on-site (rare, due to labor laws). Also, the power of “community ownership and democratic control is not a story that’s familiar,” says NFCA’s Crowell. Although he admits, “It’s easy for co-ops to blame lack of awareness for our difficulties when we need to better communicate what makes us different.”

Co-ops are expensive to launch and operate. “There was a time when for $1 million you could open a nice store,” says Pugh of NCG. “Now it can be as much as $10 million, and a grassroots organization has a great deal of difficulty raising that much capital, period, the end.” (And it’s worth noting that the famous and usually sturdy Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn—of which this writer is a member—is struggling during the pandemic, because it’s hiring all paid employees, rather than using mostly member labor, for the first time in its 47-year history.)

There’s also stiff competition from conventional supermarkets, which have jumped on the local and sustainable bandwagons—whether or not their offerings truly meet those criteria. Explains Crowell, “We’re never going to beat a monopoly like Amazon [on price]; it’s not how scale works.”

“We have great potential to build local infrastructure and build a more healthy and just sustainable food system.”

Regardless, the list of pluses is long, and for those inclined to rattle them off, they far outweigh the challenges—especially during crises. “Co-ops serve with love and care and kindness, and people are coming in and finding new community, which resonates in a time of uncertainty,” says Pugh. That concept of community extends to workers, to whom many co-ops are providing hazard pay.

For Crowell, community building and outreach are where co-ops shine. “We have great potential to build local infrastructure, and to work across class and race and regions to build a more healthy and just sustainable food system,” he says.

Blanding agrees. “It all comes down to people helping themselves, and in order for that to happen, you have to cooperate. The pandemic opens our eyes to how basic our need for human contact really is.”

“The way we’ve come together to support our communities in this crisis has been a moment of light in the darkness and for us to realize, we weren’t playing around,” says Hannah of the Food Co-Op Initiative. “We’re collectively building something that makes a difference. Imagine what would happen if we doubled down.”

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April 15, 2020 update: New York City  Mayor Bill de Blasio announced today a $170 million emergency food plan, which includes spending $50 million to stock 18 million nonperishable meals.

On March 22, with New York City grappling with 9,654 confirmed cases of COVID-19, Mayor Bill de Blasio named Kathryn Garcia, commissioner of the Department of Sanitation, as “COVID-19 food czar” to the five boroughs. The news came two days after Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered non-essential businesses to shutter and residents to shelter in place, and as de Blasio was taking heat for what the Columbia Journalism Review described as a “lackluster” response to the pandemic.

Regarding his decision to appoint Garcia—touted as the city’s “go-to crisis manager” for her work responding to the housing authority’s lead paint scandal, for example—de Blasio spoke of the need for “New Yorkers [to] have a steady supply of food, whether that is a home-delivered meal or provisions from a grocery store,” with a special emphasis on the city’s most vulnerable populations, including those made newly food-insecure as a result of the pandemic.

In the two weeks since her appointment, Garcia has coordinated a massive effort to get food into the city and out to the people who need it most. She’s working closely with the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy “to ensure we are connecting all the dots and not leaving any New Yorkers behind,” says Director Kate MacKenzie—as well as with many other city agencies, food banks, and philanthropic organizations. She spoke with Civil Eats on April 4, just after the city expanded the Department of Education’s grab-and-go meal program from serving children exclusively to serving New Yorkers of any age.

What are the challenges to keep supply chains strong right now?

We’re seeing massive consumer changes, [and] not only with panic buying, which is working itself out. With everyone at home, we suddenly have a city of bakers, and people are looking for more calorie-dense foods. There is food coming into the city, but on any given [normal] day, 40 percent of it goes to restaurants, and we’re now scrambling to serve the grocery market. The real challenge there is in the labor sector. People are sick, people are scared, and [that leads to] not having enough people in stores to shelve food. It’s a significant constraint.

One thing that has been somewhat helpful is that there’s strong diversity within the system: We’re not reliant on any one supply chain. But there is concern that in a month or two, other parts of the country will be significantly impacted [by COVID-19], which could impact our supply chain. So we’re looking back to the Midwest: Are they planting? Getting the labor they need into the fields so we don’t have issues in two months’ time?

We’re also doing things like counting the number of trucks coming into [Bronx food distribution hub] Hunts Point every day and trying to figure out how to keep them coming; drivers need a layover space, access to restaurants and food that’s socially distant so they’re not spending any time in the city and encountering people, so they can stay safe.

School-based grab-and-go meals for kids went into effect in mid-March, and on April 3, you expanded the program to include three free meals a day for all New Yorkers. How is it working so far?

We’re really beefing up all our emergency feeding programs, whether at food pantries or through grab-and-go at [435 public] schools. And with philanthropic support, we continue to expand our ability to do home delivery for fragile populations. We’re also figuring out which populations are on the sidelines and getting them back into the labor force; we’ve activated taxi and Uber and Lyft drivers who are now unemployed and are pairing them at [six] distribution sites [at parks and recreation centers] to do meal delivery.

We’re also working with Small Business Services to figure out how to get grocery stores more employees for restocking. We’re in contact with big associations of grocers, with ethnic associations of grocers, with trucking associations, with the nonprofit and advocate sectors, talking to them about what they’re seeing on the ground, how we can be more supportive, how we can keep them strong so they can still be providers. It’s a lot of coordination and rebuilding of the market at a moment of incredibly rapid change, when people have turned on a dime and are behaving completely differently because they’re sheltering in place.

New York on a “normal” day has 1.2 million food-insecure residents, and that number is thought to have increased exponentially since coronavirus became an issue. How much of the need for meals have you been able to meet?

We did north of 200,000 meals [on April 3 alone], between grab-and-go and all the other programs going on in the city; [about 70,000 of those meals] went to seniors. [Editor’s note: The Department for the Aging is working to serve its usual population, but with senior centers closed, this means grab-and-go options and delivery by the Office of Emergency Management.] There is more need out there but also a lot of fear, with people afraid to go outside. That’s why we are rapidly trying to expand the capacity to do home delivery, even for seniors who are usually independent, who went to the grocery store and made their own food, because even if they’re well-off and can pay, grocery delivery is hampered by not having enough staff.

We also need to get food to people that’s what they’re used to eating. Obviously, we have very diverse communities, with many dietary restrictions [and preferences]. We’re working with foundations and trusted organizations in Mexican-American and Asian-American neighborhoods—and we also have a very large Orthodox population—to get them foods they’re accustomed to.

How are you reaching people in low-resource communities that might not be able to access relevant information online about where to go for food?

We’ve done a lot of robo-calls into those communities to get the word out, and anyone can call 311, which has language access. For the sheltered population, delivery for [COVID-19] isolation and other shelters is being run through the Department of Social Services, which has its own emergency feeding contracts.

For the undocumented, there are no screens for citizenship, and no screen of any kind on any of the meals we’re home delivering. We are connecting with trusted social service organizations and coordinating with them to get food to those populations. For example, we are actively trying to work with our farmers’ market network to reach in there and do pop-ups.

Who is actually making meals right now?

Right now [essential cafeteria workers at] schools are making meals for grab-and-go, and we have been contracting with bigger firms, like [food recovery non-profit] Rethink Food, that can put together meal delivery in a standardized way [so there’s no duplication or overlap in efforts, or inconsistency in service].

Have you been learning from the emergency feeding efforts of other cities, or vice-versa?

We’ve talked to some folks on the West Coast, but we all have different challenges in terms of how many people were food-insecure before and how many people are suddenly food-insecure now. We are sharing what we’re doing, and looking for opportunities to think outside the box, but no one was prepared for something of this scale, and obviously in New York, it’s hitting faster than it is in other places.

There’s been a surge of interest in growing food, and community gardens in NYC opened on April 1. Are there ways to support these efforts?

Any of the normal things you would do in a hunger crisis, like big soup kitchen feedings, do not work here. The issue with community gardens is social distancing, and we really need to make sure we’re not together in any way and that when we are outside, we are covering our faces with masks. Right at this moment, it’s not viable to put people together communally. Being safe is more important. The next two weeks are going to be really tough, until we bend that curve.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post NYC Food Czar Kathryn Garcia is Overseeing a Massive Supply Chain and Feeding the Hungry appeared first on Civil Eats.

Adding insult to injury, organic processor Trickling Springs shuttered amid a financial scandal in September, leaving farmers with one less outlet for their milk. And the biggest milk company in the U.S., Dean Foods, filed for bankruptcy in November; its attempted merger with the country’s biggest co-op, Dairy Farmers of America, is currently facing an antitrust probe.

But in a move that surprised some industry analysts, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF)—an insurance company and lobbying group that has often been closely aligned with Big Ag—voted to “support the creation of a farmer- and industry-led milk management system” at its annual convention late last month.

Dairy supply management—matching milk supply and demand in order to stabilize prices for farmers—is an approach some U.S. ag interests considered too radical as recently as last year, when AFBF voted against it at its 2019 convention.

“AFBF has [actually] supported supply management since the 2014 Farm Bill,” says Travis Klinkner, a sixth generation dairy farmer who sits on the dairy committee of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau (WFB). Although, that portion of the bill “was ditched at the last minute before voting.”

But wording in AFBF’s policy lumped supply management with mandatory per-state quotas, a prong of the more than 50-year-old Canadian system that AFBF opposes. Decoupling these two concepts this past January allowed AFBF to vote in favor of the former while continuing to dismiss the latter, according to AFBF chief economist John Newton. “It was really just a matter of semantics,” he says.

Still, Austin Frerick, deputy director of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University, describes the shift as “a very big moment for the Farm Bureau. They’re at a fork in the road where they have to decide: Are they on the side of farmers, or are they on the side of industry?”

Without quotas to stanch the tide of cheap milk flooding the market from large-scale dairy operations exploding in Arizona and elsewhere, Frerick—a lifelong Iowan and ag-industry observer who has been critical of the Iowa Farm Bureau—says he isn’t sure how a supply management program would prevent further farm losses. A concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) that supplies a $1.30 gallon of milk to Walmart, he says, “has an unfair advantage in cutting corners to get to a lower price that drives family farms out of business.”

AFBF is in favor of “free and fair trade,” in Newton’s words. But constantly changing export markets for American milk have also helped drive oversupply, which is directly linked to low milk prices. When those markets have proven “fickle,” says Lynne McBride, executive director of pro-supply-management California Dairy Campaign (CDC), “it’s caused unprecedented stress in the industry.”

A Way Forward

Nevertheless, McBride says there is a way forward. She sees the first step as instituting an incentive program whereby “if [farmers] increase production beyond profitable demand, they’re not going to get paid the same for that milk.” McBride says that without such incentives, some dairy farms will continue to overproduce. “[That’s] why you see surges in production now, to take advantage of that,” she says. A farmer might overproduce when prices are low, to boost revenue, or when prices are high, to make as much money as possible while they’re able.

Milk co-ops such as Massachusetts-based Agri-Mark and Prairie Farms in Illinois already function like this, with base excess plans that do not reward overproduction. Some would like to take this a step further, with a “market access fee plan” that would also charge farmers who overproduce a fee to be distributed to other co-op members who’ve stayed within agreed-upon production limits, says Klinkner. He and the rest of WFB’s dairy committee has been working with the Vermont Farm Bureau to develop a supply management model—they call it “growth management”—that could garner broad support.

“You can have growth management and not have a monetary quota like Canada … which in some cases created unnecessary headaches by creating artificial values” for cattle and other dairy farm investments, Klinkner explained by email.

The industry also needs other strategies to cut back on production. “Milk productivity of cows has gone up over the years, but you can change [their] nutrition to limit that,” CDC’s McBride says. (The diet cows are fed can either increase or decrease the amount of milk they produce.)

Additionally, McBride says, “excess milk doesn’t make sense with the environmental challenges we’re facing”—why spend money on water and fertilizer for milk that could get dumped?—“and it hurts milk prices.” It doesn’t take much curtailing to see an improvement, though. McBride explains that a tiny decrease in production of .1 percent last March is what led to 2019’s price rise—which had a significantly positive affect on struggling farmers. But the fact that this drop “just happened” due to a variety of triggers, rather than being purposefully implemented by the dairy industry, “just points to the problem we’re facing,” says McBride.

CDC and the Wisconsin and Vermont Farm Bureaus support “manag[ing] supply at a level nationally [to] generate a stable and profitable pay price,” which benefits consumers, too, says Klinkner. He says that a $5 increase per hundredweight of milk would increase the price of a gallon by only 43 cents, while providing meaningful stability for farmers.

Yet another strategy: building a market for local whole milk within the National School Lunch Program. “Imagine if in Wisconsin schools all the milk they served was coming from Wisconsin family farms. That procurement [change] would be so powerful for the climate, and for rural development,” says Frerick.

And the support such a policy could engender for local farmers, says McBride, “is really important to those economies, because they have a ripple effect. Dairies generate a lot of jobs that lead to a thriving rural economy.”

The Route to the Farm Bill

The overarching benefit of these strategies is that they can be implemented now, by farmers and processors, “to help ease the stress in the short term,” says Klinkner. Larger, systemic change has to wait for the next renegotiation of the farm bill, which isn’t scheduled for an update until at least 2023.

Nevertheless, “We’re on track to get [supply management] into the next farm bill if we can come up with a unified plan among industry organizations,” says Klinkner. “More farmers and processors are tired of the system we are in and fighting to survive.”

Which leads to the question on many people’s minds: What would an AFBF-supported milk management program look like? CDC and the Wisconsin and Vermont Farm Bureaus endorse a three-tiered plan that includes managing supply on a national level, negotiating fair prices, and establishing a more effective trade policy. Getting this into the next farm bill means that all the various industry-related organizations will have to agree on it. “We need a nationwide, coordinated approach to change the direction and fix the system,” says McBride.

“We haven’t endorsed a specific proposal at this point,” says AFBF’s Newton. “If the industry comes forward with a concept, our members can look at it and evaluate it to see if it’s something we want to consider.”

Frerick calls AFBF’s January vote in support of supply management largely “symbolic.” But what it does, says Klinkner, is “open doors. It puts AFBF and all the state Farm Bureaus in a position to work with other organizations … toward a common plan.”

Says McBride, “We think for the Farm Bureau to even have supply management in its policy [now] is a big deal, and I’m hopeful this will improve our outlook. It couldn’t happen too soon.”

The post The Farm Bureau Takes a Step to Shore Up the Struggling Dairy Market appeared first on Civil Eats.

But a confluence of cultures, mashed together by oppression, produced a rich, hodgepodge local cuisine based on corn and squash from the Americas, pigs and brassicas from Europe, and field peas, okra, and sesame from Africa. A quintessential Lowcountry dish is Hoppin’ John, which is made of red peas, rice, and salt pork.

When chefs began to revive this and other 200-year-old recipes a few years back, “the oldest generation of diners said, ‘There’s something wrong,’” explains food historian David Shields. “Chefs were using a grain-commodity rice called cocodrie and California #10 black-eyed peas.” What was wrong with the dish, Shields says, is that the flavors had been eradicated by commercial monocultures.

Sarah Ross is working to change this. Three years ago, Ross, the executive director of the University of Georgia Center for Research and Education at Wormsloe (UGA-CREW), founded a (now) nonprofit seed company called Social Roots. She wants to use the organization to bring flavor back to the region. But more than that, she says, “We need to increase the repertoire of heirlooms that can meet new growing conditions brought on by climate change.” For that, she aims to get a whole lot of people growing out her seeds—and learning to save them like the critical food-security resource they are.

Reseeding the Lowcountry

Ross is hardly alone in her desire to “reseed the Lowcountry,” as her company’s tagline describes. Glenn Roberts of South Carolina grain company Anson Mills, for example, has revived heritage varietals such as Carolina Gold rice, Sea Island red peas, and benne (AKA sesame). Small local (for-profit) seed companies like Sow True Seeds and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange offer heirlooms and landrace varieties such as Alabama blue collards, Georgia jet sweet potatoes, and the rare White Stoney Mountain watermelon.

For her part, Ross in 2016 started pulling together heirloom crop seeds—beans, okras, squashes, peanuts—that were either historically grown in the region, or that might since have become climatically appropriate. They come from the USDA’s seed banks, more than a dozen local seed companies, and from swaps Ross has participated in for years. After researching the varietals’ deliciousness and resilience, she whittled her possibilities down to 470 varieties of fruits and vegetables. Then she started growing the seeds out, “to see which ones have the widest range of tolerance to erratic weather patterns, so they can adapt,” she says.

Photo by Bill Durrance.

Ross conducts field trials on two farms. One is on the site of the former Wormsloe Plantation in Savannah, where she’s received permission to farm for free in the sandy soil of the oldest agricultural field in Georgia. Records of 18th century life at Wormsloe—first farmed by colonizers in 1735—show that at least three varieties of corn were grown there, as well as pumpkins, tomatoes, sugarcane, and the black runner peanut, which Ross is raising on-site. She says it’s “finicky to cultivate, but its flavor is out of this world—deep, sweet, like a toasted pecan.”

The other farm is Ross’s own heavy-clay-soil acreage in northern North Carolina, which sits at an elevation of 3,000 feet and is outside Lowcountry borders. “Everything about these locations is very different,” she says. “I want to make sure the seeds I distribute are indomitable, so a 10-year-old child without adult supervision could be successful growing them, and that they’ll work almost anywhere.”

Last year was the most difficult growing season Ross can remember, with hotter hot days, warmer cold days, and an overabundance of ravenous insect pests. Climate change is handily making the case for the relevance of her project.

Giving It All Away

Ross is drawn to what she calls “the most typical Southern foods.” She’s trialed 37 varieties of collard greens—chosen after an exploratory trip to Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa—seven varieties of sweet potatoes, seven kinds of kale, and 40 types of okra. The brassicas have been especially challenging to raise for seed, requiring half-mile isolation distances between them to keep their genetics pure. Growing them out has meant “timing the plantings to be vigilant about not having flowers blooming from multiple varieties at the same time,” she says. In the end, if there ever is such a thing, she’d like to further reduce her seed varieties to 150.

Last year, having registered Social Roots as a nonprofit, Ross implemented the next phase of her project: giving seeds away. Anyone can request seeds through Social Roots’ website; she’s sent packets to people in more than a dozen states, no more than two per customer. Ross says making money is “almost the antithesis of the point for me,” and that her focus is on empowering local communities to take charge of their own food security.

“What Sarah is doing is making people aware of their own agency in this changing world,” says Ira Wallace, a worker/owner at the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange cooperative. “She sees the possibility to reinvigorate individual participation in the food system, not just as cooks and eaters, but as growers again.” For Ross’s “gift economy” approach to work, free access to Wormsloe’s land helps, as do small, anonymous donations.

Photo by Bill Durrance.

Throughout spring and summer of 2019, Ross handed out a total of 1,600 seed packets to shoppers at five farmers’ markets in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia, doling out advice as well, giving talks to garden groups and clubs. She sent other packets on to interested gardeners at state parks, historic sites, Charleston’s public libraries, and churches. Some recipients promptly started growing them out and sending her photos, “of plants growing behind their house, in pots and rows,” she says. “They text me about what they’ve done and how excited they are.”

What she’s hoping they’ll all do next is save seeds from the crops they’ve grown—what Wallace calls the critical, “traditional activity to maintain diversity, so we’ll have choices in an unpredictable future.”

A colleague of Ross’s, Luke Roberson, grew out rattlesnake beans and candy roaster squash this past spring in Richmond Hill, Georgia. As Adopt-a-Wetland program coordinator at UGA’s Extension, Roberson is keenly aware of the need for seeds that can withstand the Lowcountry’s “saltier water due to seawater rise, droughts becoming more common, and the fact that it’s becoming harder and harder to find water to keep backyard gardens going,” he says.

Beyond the academic necessity of the enterprise, he says he also enjoyed the simple act of “stripping” dried beans with his son, “I grew up doing this kind of thing with my family in Kentucky, sitting around and snapping beans for hours and hours. It was a good family bonding moment.”

Sharing Seeds, Across the Planet

Historian David Shields thinks that “reseeding” on a transformative scale requires the input of many—including institutions like the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation (not related to genetically modified Golden Rice) that he and Ross both sit on the board of, which aims to restore regional grains; and universities that educate young farmers on specialty crops that will bring them a high price in the marketplace. But he also thinks Ross’s act of putting seeds into the hands of regular folks is necessary to “disrupt humans from their sense that food comes from the grocery store.”

Ross points out that seed archives are fragile, and easily lost. She tells of giving back okra seeds she’d received from the noted, now-deceased Gullah-Geechee historian Cornelia Bailey, whose family had grown them since the 1800s, to Bailey’s son, who no longer had any, and the beauty of reestablishing deep agricultural roots. To her, this kinds of hyper-localized community efforts, rather than those of large international seed banks, are where the real work of global food security lies. “As phenomenally important as the USDA [seed banks] and the Svalbard [Global Seed Vault] are, they are repositories for biodiversity, not places we can call up to get seeds to plant five acres of corn,” she says.

As Ross gets ready to continue her trials in the 2020 growing season, she’s also hoping that she gets enough donations in the coming months to hire a student assistant to set up community gardens with her product. In such places “all across the planet,” she envisions gardeners young and old, new and established, growing the seeds that we “need to share, or risk losing forever.”

The post Social Roots Seed Company Wants to ‘Reseed the Lowcountry’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

“A guy on the block with me, he did a lot of time,” says Williams, whose own father went to prison when Williams was two years old. “When he saw me out there [again] he said, ‘Why you being selfish, walking around when you got a wife and kids?’ I’m a certified hustler. I can get a lot of money. But that right there made me say, ‘I’m gonna work.’”

Williams is one of the 9,000 people who leave prison in New Jersey every year only to be confronted with a dilemma: What comes next? Life back on the streets beckons, with easy cash and familiar parameters, and many are likely to return to prison. According to the official stats, New Jersey’s 2016 recidivism rates were around 31 percent, about the same as the federal numbers.

James Williams at Ironbound Farms.

Seeking a job is hardly an obvious counter-move. Many reentrants often have interrupted educations, few viable skills, and little to no employment history. They may only have the option to earn minimum wage—currently $10 an hour in New Jersey, a rate that doesn’t cover monthly basics. And they often have a host of both practical and emotional wrap-around needs. Additionally, it’s common to have potential employers “looking at your criminal background and saying ‘no, no, no,’” Williams says.

Charles Rosen founded Ironbound Farm with these inequities in mind. A former ad agency owner who had launched several alcohol brands, Rosen was looking to put his “progressive values” to meaningful use. He wanted to “create a model for Newark’s chronically underserved people in order to rekindle the local economy,” he says. Hard cider, a historically important Newark beverage, was the fastest-growing segment of the alcohol category at the time, and a way, Rosen hoped, to build a self-sustaining business to keep his social-justice work going.

As Rosen discovered, though, even the strongest intention to do right by this hard-to-serve population does not guarantee the desired results. It does, however, offer a swift education in a thorny, deeply racist corrections system that puts a majority percentage of American men and women of color behind bars and seems to do everything in its power to keep them there.

One man and one business can’t solve the challenges underserved communities face, but can one man make his business work better for some—and serve as a role model in the process? “My success,” says Rosen, “is connected to theirs.”

First Missteps

It’s not that Rosen didn’t know there were challenges going in. As a “typical social-justice-warrior-white-knight,” he says, in semi-mocking self-derision, he saw the ways opportunity is stripped for communities of color in battered cities like Newark. There, only 18 percent of jobs are held by local residents, as opposed to commuters, and almost one in four Black men have been involved in the criminal justice system.

Newark is where Rosen started a workforce renewal effort in 2012—for the first year partnering with reentry organization Prodigal Sons and Daughters—with a job-readiness class for hirable reentrants. “A lot of these guys had never had a legal occupation before,” says Rosen, and the class was a way to “create a routine” in preparation for employment.

Charles Rosen.

In 2013, with a Columbia University professor, he developed his own curriculum for reentrants: weekly classes that touched on identity value, emotional intelligence, and conflict resolution. (The curriculum is currently being revamped, although classes still meet at the farm about once a month.) When he bought the orchard, where all crops are raised regeneratively, he “hired farm managers trained in horticultural therapy as an additional tool in helping heal and strengthen our chronically underemployed community.”

Rosen also knew of the data linking employment to staying out of prison. According to New Jersey’s Assistant Commissioner for Workforce Development Hugh Bailey, research shows that “the longer the gap between getting out and connecting with some form of employment-based intervention, the greater the chance for recidivism.”

To lessen that risk—successfully, as it turns out—the state’s departments of Labor and Corrections partnered to give the soon-to-be-released access to Workforce Navigators, who guide them in possible careers. They’re also made aware of “which of 21 One-Stop [Career Centers] are ready to receive them when they’re released and provide a pathway to employment,” says Bailey.

Rosen owns that he thought he could simply hire a bunch of these folks and bring them to grow apples in his orchard, then sit back and watch the “environmental repair, community development, and human healing” begin. He calls that hubris “audacious” now.

For starters, not all reentrants were interested in what he was offering. Rosen’s first orchard workforce was a 10-person crew heavy on current and former gang members, says Williams, “going, ‘I ain’t listening to them‘”—even for $15 an hour, plus health insurance and transportation costs. Some wound up back on the streets and back in prison in short order. Williams admits that he started “with one foot in and one foot out” and experienced a “slip-up,” briefly dealing drugs again.

“We learned that providing living wages was just the very beginning of the process,” says Rosen.

Reentry Challenges

Ultimately, finding a job is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reentering society.

The formerly incarcerated often need help getting driver’s licenses reinstated. They may have lost critical forms of ID, like Social Security cards. They don’t have suitable work clothes or access to childcare. They might need addiction counseling or job training. Reentrants with felonies might be banned from subsidized Section 8 housing, so may not be able to return to their families without risking them getting kicked out. They can incur criminal justice debt—for everything from medical care they received in prison, to court filing and victim restitution fees—that follows them when they’re released.

“Intentional work is needed to address employment for people with prior histories,” says Nicole Porter, director of advocacy at Washington, D.C.-based criminal justice reform nonprofit The Sentencing Project. She says New Jersey has done a good job in this regard, in part by “banning the box” (i.e., disallowing a criminal history question on job applications), and opening Day Reporting centers that give reentrants parole opportunities that include treatment and training. These developments are important, Porter says, “because the consequences follow [the formerly incarcerated] for the rest of their lives.”

Some of the challenges they face are subtler. Rosen talks about the time one of his employees locked his keys in his car, didn’t have the money to pay a locksmith, and was too embarrassed to call him to ask for help. “He missed three days of work because he doesn’t have problem-solving skills,” Rosen says.

That’s another barrier: All the things employers don’t know about the travails of their formerly incarcerated workers. For example, says Porter, “They might have to meet with their parole officer in the middle of the day and can’t schedule work around it. It’s just another work/life balance for people actively on parole.”

Ironbound Farm’s cider vats.

It’s also why New Jersey’s labor department coaches employers about, “What does it really mean to work with someone with a criminal background?” says Bailey. The department also offers federal bond insurance for a “great work candidate” an employer has reservations about hiring. Such employers, he says, are often surprised to find that, “those just coming out [of prison] have low attrition rates, are loyal, attend on time, and view this as second chance.”

Robert Asaro-Angelo, New Jersey’s commissioner of labor, says the state’s current administration is focused on “giving folks entering society from incarceration proper training” in high-growth industries like hospitality. Reentrants find jobs in kitchens in Atlantic City’s casinos—not at the front of house, though, because they’re often barred from preparing or serving alcohol. Four New Jersey prisons also have career-training programs in horticulture, including Bayside, where Williams did landscaping while he was behind bars the second time. He says he likes to work outside, and “feel the dirt with my hands.”

He also clearly relishes the stability farm routine has allowed him: “Be here at 8:00, morning meeting at 8:15, talk about what we’re gonna do and how we’re gonna attack it for this day. You’re either weeding and planting, or clearing land and digging ditches, or maintaining apple trees. My job description varies all over place, but I can do it all.” At least one Ironbound reentrant also has a spouse who works at the farm, which provides an additional layer of security for his family.

On the Ground

Whatever metaphor Rosen once harbored about how nurturing trees could heal his distinctly challenged workers, he eventually tempered it. The first year, his crew planted 10,000 organic heritage apple trees, partly as a proof-of-concept for other, conventional orchardists. They failed to thrive due to disease and other issues and had to be ripped out.

Young apple trees at Ironbound Farm.

“It was devastatingly hard for the [guys],” Rosen says. Another 5,000 young trees they’ve put in over the last few years have borne some fruit that’s made it into the cider, but mostly they haven’t yet; as a result, Ironbound still buys most of its apples from eight family orchards in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. As a result, Rosen’s workers had no idea what full-grown apple trees were supposed to look like. When the farm managers took them to a mature orchard last year, “they were blown away,” Rosen said. “We didn’t know they needed that deep connection.”

So his five current reentered employees could experience the “literal fruits of their labor,” Rosen has switched them to raising 10 acres of cider-infusion ingredients like ginger, as well as row crops such as collards, beets, and radishes. The latter are cooked up for patrons of the cidery’s tasting room. And they’ll form the base for a line of prepared foods that Rosen’s starting in order to launch businesses for local immigrant women—yet another vulnerable population.

All of this seems an unlikely pursuit for a cider maker. But even as Rosen gets ready to expand from Jersey-only distribution and into New York in Spring 2020, he says he accepts that “I’ll never be able to employ as many people as I want” on his farm. What he can do is train people in his fields and kitchens and then say to other business owners, “‘Jane Smith spent time here and she is now ready to rock for you,’” Rosen says. “I have the opportunity to be part of a bigger system.”

Commissioner of Labor Asaro-Angelo agrees that Ironbound has a role to play beyond the handful of men and women it hires. “It’s hard to bring employers to the table when you can’t show [return on investment], frankly,” he says, although many worthy U.S. businesses have hired reentrants. With Ironbound “leading by example, we can show success and say, ‘What can we do to replicate this?’”

As for Williams, his diligence and listening skills helped him get promoted to crew chief in 2017, overseeing a fluctuating band of workers. He’s looking forward to the day he “graduates” from Ironbound and can get his own farm, maybe back in the city. He’s grateful to Rosen, “because that’s a person who gave a dedication to a bunch of people he didn’t know,” he says. “But the growth gotta keep going. I want to expand and bring farming back to everybody.”

Top photo by Kira Buxton. Other photos by Lela Nargi.

The post The Formerly Incarcerated are Reviving Newark’s Cider Industry at Ironbound Farm appeared first on Civil Eats.

One morning in mid-September, Jed Colquhoun, an expert in fruit and vegetable production systems, hopped on the phone to discuss the state of cranberries and climate change in the state of Wisconsin, our country’s most bountiful producer of that tart indigenous berry.

“Today’s a great example of what we’re dealing with,” he said from his office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches and conducts research. “A hundred miles northwest of me, towards cranberry country, some areas just got six inches of rain. That’s two Septembers’-worth of rain in a morning.”

Since whatever public consciousness exists of the cranberry industry likely starts and ends with a flooded marsh (a.k.a. bog, if you hail from Massachusetts, our second top cranberry-producing state), a day of downpours may seem a shrug-worthy affair. But as Colquhoun explains, everything from how farmers could (or couldn’t) complete scheduled work, to whether soil remained intact in the runoff, was impacted by this weather anomaly.

Climate Change Ups and Downs

In fact, unseasonal deluges are just one of the many variable effects of climate change on cranberries that are “creating ups and downs and leading to an inability to predict the weather, which is very troublesome for the industry’s growers,” Colquhoun says.

This doesn’t mean there’s likely to be any shortage of cranberries for sauces and pies this Thanksgiving. In fact, the industry is digging out of a glut whose affects started to be felt in 2017, thanks partly to growers adding acreage to meet a past increase in demand. But, says Katherine Ghantous, research associate at the University of Massachusetts’s Cranberry Station in East Wareham, when it comes to the longterm health of the cranberry business, “We are worried.”

What Cranberries Need

Cranberries are an amazingly hardy fruit that thrive within an optimal cold-producing range that stretches latitudinally from Canada to New Jersey; in addition to Wisconsin, they’re also grown commercially in Oregon and Washington. Like grapes, they grow on woody vines. Like lowbush blueberries, they prefer acidic, sandy soil. Like both these fellow North American natives, they can stay productive for a long time under the right conditions.

“We actually don’t know how long they’ll live,” says Colquhoun. In both Wisconsin and in Massachusetts, 100-year-old cranberry vines are still bearing fruit and “don’t have an endpoint that we know of.”

Cranberries do have special needs, though. One is several acres of supporting wetland or forest for every acre of marsh, to store water for cranberry production and filter out impurities. Another is “chilling hours,” accrued during winter’s frigid dormancy period. Yet another is ice, a thick covering of which helps protect those still-growing vines from cold — in Wisconsin, temperatures of -40 degrees Fahrenheit are common. Ice also makes it possible for growers to drive buggies over their marshes every few years to spread sand, to rejuvenate the vines and control pests.

Unsurprisingly, erratic weather is a threat to the delicate balance between what a cranberry vine requires and what it receives from its surrounding ecosystem.

Climate Change Necessitates Changes

Water Irregularities: For starters, no amount of deluge, which only temporarily wets the soil, can temper the needs of a marsh for consistent water levels in its surrounding lands, which is something that used to be a lot more of a given. “Annual rainfall totals might be higher, but epic, less-frequent downfalls mean we have to change the ways we irrigate our crops,” says Ghantous. Since cranberry marshes are flooded for ease of harvest — the low-to-the-ground hollow berries float — “changes in available water change the way we harvest, too.”

Fluctuating Temperatures: There’s also the issue of how fluctuating temperatures affect numerous interrelated species. For example, earlier springs or later winters mean ecological mismatches—times when a cranberry plant may flower to find no bees available to pollinate it or, conversely, insects hatch too early to find forageable flowers.

Less cold and less consistent cold have their own ripple effects. “Lots of invasive species, like kudzu, are moving north so there’s a chance we could have an influx of new pests, weeds, fungi, bacteria,” Ghantous says. “Things that were previously nudged out of the region by cold can now sweep in.” In fact, Wisconsin cranberry growers have already been contending with increased insect and weed influxes, according to the Bergen Record.

Loss of Ice: In Massachusetts and New Jersey, where Ghantous says “loss of ice is significant for us already,” growers are sanding by retrofitting manure- or salt-spreaders to drive over dry marshes. Wisconsin still gets good ice but it doesn’t necessarily last the winter anymore; temperatures can veer rapidly from January thaw to polar vortex, exposing crops to inhospitable cold. “In summer, we see winter injury with plants browning and dying off in places,” says Colquhoun. The plants may survive but “there’s yield reduction and overall stress.”

With conditions now difficult if not impossible to predict, growers are scratching their heads about how to manage their marshes from year to year on multiple fronts. And experts like Ghantous and Colquhoun are at a loss for how to authoritatively advise them. “Not knowing what that variability is going to look like over the next 10 years makes it hard to pose a hypothesis that’s testable,” Colquhoun says. “And if we don’t know what we’re mitigating against, we’re being asked for an answer before we see the question.”

Building a Better Marsh and a Hardier Cranberry

That doesn’t mean researchers aren’t trying to piece it all together with what resources they’ve got.

Ghantous says that although money for cranberry-specific studies is more limited than in some other sectors (cranberries are a $2 billion drop in the $1 trillion bucket of U.S. agriculture), the industry is able to draw parallels from ecologists, agronomists, and others looking at the impacts of climate change on similar woody crops with similar growing needs.

She’s been encouraging growers to develop better water management practices, support native bee species, and reduce pesticide use in controlling for insect invaders. “I would hope improving ecological functions would help stave off some of the effects of climate change, but there are so many unknowns,” she says. She’s also been looking south, to New Jersey, the state that contended with warming first and where cranberry specialists have been developing new, hopefully more resilient varietals.

Colquhoun believes that the best hope for the industry might lie in those varietals, even if lower yields are the tradeoff for increased hardiness. But he and his team have also been figuring out how to use machine-learning algorithms to stabilize an industry he says is “wholly based on predictability.” By analyzing what is known — the last time there was a warm February, yields from one year to the next, how pests and soil fertility were managed during past anomalies — they think they can get a handle on where trends might be heading. Colquhoun predicts it will be possible to one day determine optimum care for each marsh, possibly even each bed on a marsh.

A warming climate means agricultural zones are shifting northward, and some farmers of more mobile seed crops, like canola, are picking up and moving. Reports from a decade ago predicted that cranberry farmers might have to follow suit. But Ghantous points out that Canada’s got it’s own cranberry industry; US growers, with their high-needs marshes that are costly to replace, will be staying put and trying to adapt.

And as most cranberry farmers are generational growers “who are thinking about the farms they are going to leave to their kids,” says Ghantous, she hopes wide-ranging best practices will help them prepare for whatever’s in store. “And who knows? Maybe we’ll find that cranberries have more resistance built in than we know.”

The post Climate Change Is Making the Future of Cranberry Growing Uncertain appeared first on Civil Eats.