The post ‘I Was Coughing So Hard I Would Throw Up’ appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>For hours every day, Angela Smith walked atop the concentrated excrement of thousands of pigs. As she tended to sows in the massive barns of an industrial hog facility north of her hometown of Canton, Missouri, the animals’ urine and feces continually fell through slatted floors into manure pits below her feet.
The smell of their excrement was often overwhelming. Fecal dust and ammonia—a hazardous gas produced from decomposing manure—burned her eyes and made them water. The dust and gas set her throat on fire, making it difficult to breathe.
After about a year of getting hired at Expedition Acres LLC, Smith developed a permanent cough. Her voice became raspy and laughing would throw her into coughing fits, even outside of work.
“My lungs couldn’t take it,” Smith told Civil Eats. “I was coughing so hard I would throw up.”
Smith—who asked that her real name not be used in this story to protect her privacy—started working at Expedition Acres just a few years after the facility opened its doors as a concentrated animal feeding operation or CAFO, a factory farm with thousands of animals densely packed in barns with little to no access to the outdoors. Though newly built, Expedition Acres’ three barns lacked proper ventilation, Smith said.
The company did not educate workers in the importance of using personal protective equipment and managers repeatedly ignored complaints about high ammonia levels. After two years, Smith’s cough got so bad that she gave notice.
“I stopped coughing after I quit,” she said. “I haven’t had an issue since.”
Expedition Acres did not respond to a phone call or detailed questions from Civil Eats about ammonia levels and ventilation at its facility or whether the company provides protective gear to workers. Smith’s story is meanwhile just one example of the severe respiratory health burdens animal agriculture workers face at the tens of thousands of hog, chicken, and cow CAFOs in the United States. The workers, many of them immigrants, are exposed to high concentrations of toxic fumes at levels that likely far exceed recommended health limits, impeding their ability to breathe and leading to illnesses and chronic conditions such as bronchitis, asthma, lung disorders, even death, according to numerous studies.
CAFO contract growers—the farmers contracted by large corporations to house and feed chickens and hogs in CAFOs on their land—face similar hazards, as do the family members they employ. Despite such dangers, the people toiling inside factory-scale animal farms often stay silent—they’re afraid, sometimes unaware of the dangers, and face insurmountable obstacles to better conditions within the meat production system.
While CAFOs efficiently and speedily churn out low-cost meat, they produce mountains of waste and pollution that can pose significant risks to the environment and human health, especially for workers.
“The children often have asthma, the adults, too, but they say they have a cold. They don’t put it together with their employment issues,” said Leila Borrero Krouse, a Maryland-based organizer for CATA—the Farmworkers Support Committee. Borrero Krouse works with chicken CAFO workers who, she says, often downplay their illnesses. “They don’t like to shake the boat. They want to have a job, free housing, and support their family here and abroad.”
Despite a significant body of research documenting CAFOs’ adverse health impacts on workers’ respiratory systems and the continued growth of animal factory farms across the country, the health of animal agriculture workers has been ignored for decades, though their problems are systemic. CAFOs get a free pass from air emission regulations. CAFO owners often fail to offer proper training or protective equipment to workers. And the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rarely investigates workers’ respiratory illnesses or deaths.
Moreover, an increasingly popular corporate structure that organizes networks of investor-funded CAFOs and CAFO service companies into limited liability companies (LLCs) is making it even more difficult for workers and their advocates to decipher CAFO ownership, file lawsuits, and demand action on health and safety issues.
“The workers, the farmers, we’re all just cogs in the machine. We’re expendable resources,” said Craig Watts, a former poultry contract grower turned whistleblower. “To the industry . . . it’s all about how cheap can we do it. They don’t care if we get sick or die, they’ll find somebody else.”
CAFO Pollution Leads to Worker Illnesses, Deaths
Intensive animal production inside CAFOs has become the norm in the U.S over the past six decades, thanks to a growing demand for meat here and globally. And many of the giant barns, sheds, and corrals are built in low-income, minority communities, raising social and environmental justice concerns.
While CAFOs efficiently and speedily churn out low-cost meat, they produce mountains of waste and pollution that can pose significant risks to the environment and human health, especially for CAFO workers. As much as 1.4 billion tons of manure is produced every year in the U.S. by the 9.8 billion heads of livestock, dairy cows, and poultry.
The gases and particle matter that emanate from CAFO facilities and their manure storage areas are highly toxic. They include ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter (PM 10 and PM 2.5 fine particle pollution), organic dust such as animal dander and feces, endotoxins, allergens, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Some workers are also exposed to the fumes of hazardous pesticides used to clean CAFO buildings. (In addition, CAFOs emit methane and nitrous oxide, which are linked to climate change and also indirectly impact human health.)
A significant, long-standing body of research has shown that people who work inside the giant enclosed barns and sheds and are regularly exposed to such gases face a bevy of impacts to their respiratory and neurological health. Those include respiratory diseases and syndromes like chronic bronchitis, mucous membrane inflammation syndrome, asthma-like syndrome, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and organic dust toxic syndrome and also accelerate yearly losses in lung function. Some of these conditions present themselves in newly employed workers like Smith, who develop occupational asthma after a relatively short-term exposure, while others intensify after long term exposure in CAFO work environments.
CAFO emissions also cause the early death of some workers. Scientists estimate that animal agriculture is now responsible for 12,720 annual air quality–related deaths from particulate matter (though the estimate doesn’t say how many are workers and how many other area residents).
OSHA’s small farms rider is “a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. Corporations take advantage of these loopholes.”
The problems are worsening as the number of CAFOs in the U.S. has increased over the past decade. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there are currently more than 21,000 CAFOs, though that number is likely a severe undercount, which means that hundreds of thousands of CAFO workers, as well as CAFO owner-operators and their family members are impacted by hazardous emissions.
Automation of feed and water distribution and ventilation mean just a handful of workers often tend to thousands of hogs or tens of thousands of chickens, making them exempt from OSHA enforcement because a rider attached to OSHA’s budget in 1976 excludes farms that employ 10 or fewer workers. Historically, the rider aimed to protect small farms from onerous government oversight. But today, said Robert Martin, director of Food System Policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, “It’s a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. Corporations take advantage of these loopholes.”
What the Worker Who Developed Asthma Didn’t Know
Local residents had opposed the permit required to build Expedition Acres for months, afraid that 8,500 pigs housed in three large barns would pollute the area’s air and water. When they lost, the factory farm became one of about 500 CAFOs operating in Missouri, according to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Angela Smith didn’t know about these health impacts when she took her job.
Smith also didn’t know that Expedition Acres wasn’t just an ordinary industrial-sized farm owned by a farmer on contract with a meat processing company. Instead, it was associated with nearly 30 other CAFOs in the Midwest. All were under the umbrella of Illinois-based Carthage System and its associated LLC, Professional Swine Management, both founded by local swine veterinarians. Carthage’s model of creating many legal entities that purport to be family farms but are run by a single corporate management firm may allow it to avoid OSHA oversight of some barns.
OSHA inspectors view Expedition Acres LLC as an individual entity, not part of a larger corporate structure, the agency’s spokesman for the region told Civil Eats, meaning the other branches of in the Carthage model would not bear any responsibility for worker injuries or deaths that take place there.
“Workers who are employed through this system . . . are the ones who are going to have to bear the brunt of the consequences when something goes wrong,” said Loka Ashwood, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky who has studied the Carthage model.
Smith didn’t know she was part of this system. She also wasn’t aware of how dangerous CAFO work could be for her respiratory health. She applied for the job of swine production technician in Expedition Acres’ breeding department, a short drive from her hometown, where nearly 20 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. At the CAFO, she did the breeding and tended to the sows in the “wean room.”
“It was dirty, hard work, and stressful, but I enjoyed it,” said Smith.
However, Smith was also never informed of another crucial piece of information: In 2018, another breeding room worker at Expedition Acres was hospitalized for a respiratory system burn due to elevated ammonia levels. Thirteen employees were exposed, and OSHA cited Expedition Acres at the time with eight serious violations, according to the agency’s records. The violations included failure to communicate to workers how the presence or release of hazardous chemicals in the work area is monitored and what employees can do to protect themselves.
The company was also cited for lacking a hazard communication program, failing to label hazardous chemicals and to provide safety data sheets for those chemicals, and failing to report the hospitalization to OSHA within 24 hours It reported the workers’ respiratory burn more than two weeks later. Expedition Acres paid a $30,000 penalty, reduced from $79,000 as part of a settlement.
Expedition Acres did not respond to detailed questions about what changes had been made in response to the OSHA violations.
Scott Allen, an OSHA spokesman, told Civil Eats that the penalty was reduced because Expedition Acres agreed to “a rapid abatement of all hazards and enhanced employee safety steps,” including hiring a full-time safety and health professional.
When Smith was hired, however, little seemed to have changed. Trainings were scant, she said. So was personal protective equipment and worker awareness of the risks. “They may have had masks of some sort somewhere around there, but I’ve never seen anyone wear anything,” Smith said. Managers also routinely ignored complaints from workers about high levels of ammonia, she said. And they didn’t believe that the ammonia had caused Smith’s breathing problems.
“Management would say, ‘It’s allergies,’” she said. “But I told them it’s not allergies . . . The ammonia. It was awful.”
Carthage System’s founders, Joe Connor and Bill Hollis (also partners in Professional Swine Management) were contacted on behalf of Expedition Acres because contact information for all three companies is identical in public documents. Neither responded to detailed questions from Civil Eats or to the allegation that the issues noted in the OSHA citations had not been addressed.
Documents filed with the Secretary of State’s office indicate the business registration for the Expedition Acres LLC has since been dissolved, though the facility itself still exists.
Air Quality Unchecked, Workers Unaware
When it comes to toxic emissions, CAFOs have been allowed to skirt regulations for decades. In 2005, the EPA made the lack of oversight official through a backroom agreement with the industry under which the agency agreed to refrain from enforcing key air pollution controls and public disclosure laws against CAFO owners who agreed to pay a small fine to fund a nationwide air monitoring study. The EPA said its goal was to gather data to establish methodologies to measure CAFO emissions to help animal farms comply with the Clean Air Act.
That process was supposed to end in 2010. But 17 years later, the CAFO emission methodologies have yet to be released and the industry continues to be exempt from air pollution enforcement and associated litigation. The EPA still has no air monitoring program for CAFOs. Over the past three years, the agency has released updated draft CAFO emission models, but officials say they don’t know when the process will be complete. And experts have said the air pollution data collected through the monitoring study is deeply flawed because it lacked adequate peer review and was based on a very small number of CAFO sites.
Environmental and public interest groups last year filed a legal petition asking the EPA to scratch the industry agreement and start enforcing federal laws to control CAFO air emissions. It’s one of several petitions related to CAFOs filed recently with the EPA. And earlier this summer, advocacy groups again sent a letter to the EPA demanding the agency protect communities from CAFOs’ harmful impacts. They cited President Biden’s Executive Orders on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad and on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities, which establish environmental justice and racial equity as administration priorities.
The petition and letter are but the latest salvos in a years-long battle to highlight the harms experienced by rural residents who live near CAFO operations, many of them people of color. In recent years, rural communities across the U.S. have pushed for more such regulations and moratoriums on new CAFO construction, arguing that pollution from confined operations harms the environment, public health, and people’s quality of life—though the health of workers is rarely included in such campaigns.
Simultaneously, the industry is pushing legislators to pass the Livestock Regulatory Protection Act, which would exclude livestock emissions from Clean Air Act regulations. The legislation prohibits the EPA from issuing permits on emissions to industrial livestock operations for greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, or methane. A similar bill has been introduced in each Congress since 2009.
A 2018 study of Latin American immigrant swine confinement workers found that two-thirds of the workers interviewed did not perceive their jobs to be dangerous, though 28 percent self-reported occupational health problems, including coughing, nausea, nasal congestion, and sneezing.
While CAFOs skirt emission rules, workers on the ground have scarcely any safeguards from the hazardous air. Even CAFOs that have more than 10 employees and do fall under OSHA’s jurisdiction often don’t conduct necessary trainings—including offering them in languages that the workers understand—or distribute PPE, according to worker surveys by researchers and Civil Eats’ interviews with half a dozen workers across the nation.
“Workers are not aware of the dangers,” Gabriel, a swine worker at the Smithfield-owned Whitetail CAFO in Unionville, Missouri, told Civil Eats. (He said his managers don’t provide PPE and asked that his last name be left out of the story.) “Most of them have high school diplomas and don’t know much about respiratory illness,” he said.
A 2018 study of Latin American immigrant swine confinement workers in Missouri found that two-thirds of the workers interviewed did not perceive their jobs to be dangerous, though 28 percent self-reported occupational health problems, including coughing, nausea, nasal congestion, and sneezing. Some reported working 13 days straight and then having one day off. Many lacked health insurance and had not seen a doctor in more than a year.
Dr. Athena Ramos, the study’s principal author and a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said the findings were not surprising. In another related study, Ramos found that among workers who’d been injured on the job all those who spoke English (about 20 percent) had received safety training, but about half the rest, who did not speak English, received no training at all. Other non-English speaking workers received training in English or through an unqualified interpreter.
The training “is basically a check the box for the employer. Yes, we’ve done it. But the workers themselves didn’t actually get anything or much out of that training,” Ramos said.
“There are long-term consequences to not using the types of PPE that are necessary in that job.”
Even when workers reported respiratory and chemical exposures in surveys, Ramos said, “most workers did not know what types of things they were exposed to . . . they couldn’t name the chemicals.” Similarly, many workers who have access to PPE—in one survey, more than 92 percent—did not use it. Workers told Ramos there was a wall with respirators and other PPE, however, “Nobody told them that they should use it, how to use it, or when to use it. So they don’t,” Ramos said. “They may not understand or may kind of downplay the fact that there are chronic health conditions that may develop. It’s not just a nuisance. There are long-term consequences to not using the types of PPE that are necessary in that job.”
The National Pork Producers Council explained by email that “worker health and safety are key priorities for all pig farmers.” The group pointed to a set of principles adopted by the industry roughly 15 years ago, which includes a commitment to employee education and training as “crucial in creating a safe and ethical workplace.” The council declined to comment on why many CAFOs fail to provide promised training and PPE to prevent worker sickness and injury. The council also did not comment on whether some corporate models allow farms to skirt responsibility for workers’ health and safety.
Even when workers do grasp the risks or notice elevated levels of toxic fumes or dust, speaking out may not be an option, Ramos said. Many workers choose to work at CAFOs because they lack work authorization and industrial farms are one of the few places that hire them without asking for “papers.” Workers may prefer to work at remote rural locations that aren’t subject to OSHA inspections so they can live under the radar and avoid immigration raids, Ramos said. And because it can be extremely difficult for undocumented workers to get work, they don’t dare speak up and risk losing their jobs.
“Even if they know something is hazardous or causing them harm, the likelihood of them speaking up about it is dependent on a lot of factors. Am I going to lose my job if I speak up? Are they going to report me? Am I going to be able to sustain my life or my family’s livelihood?” Ramos said. “You’re, in a sense, powerless.”
Some CAFO workers also keep quiet about hazardous emissions to protect their housing. Chicken workers often live with their families in employer-provided trailers or other types of housing next to the massive barns—but the trailers are available to them only as long as they are employed, said Leila Borrero Krouse at CATA.
Last year, Borrero Krouse said, several families of chicken workers were evicted in separate incidents in Maryland, a state with more than 500 CAFOs where poultry accounts for 60 percent of the gross agricultural income. One worker was fired after taking time off to drive a sick child to a doctor in another state. The farmer immediately disconnected the family’s water and electric service, forcing them to leave their home—a common tactic to evict workers’ families, she said.
“They work so hard, and then within a moment’s notice, they have to be gone off the property,” Borrero Krouse said. “They’re expendable, they have no job security.”
Living in trailers or houses next to the chicken barns also means the workers are exposed to hazardous fumes and flies 24 hours a day. Their spouses and children also breathe in the concentrated ammonia that blows out of the chicken houses via large exhaust fans.
One worker whom Borrero Krouse visited in Wicomico County, which has some of the highest number of CAFO operations in Maryland, would take his then 2-year-old into the chicken barns, leaving the toddler strapped into a car seat, breathing in toxic fumes, while he tended to the birds. The family had no access to childcare in the remote area where they lived, his wife was at work herself, and the worker faced an impossible choice about whether to protect his child’s health or keep his job and housing, Borrero Krouse said.
Smith, the former Expedition Acres worker, was in a less precarious position because she didn’t have to worry about such pressures. As an American citizen, she knew she would likely be able to find another job if she was fired after speaking up.
For others, the choice is much more difficult. “The company cares more about the pigs than the workers,” said Gabriel, the Missouri animal agriculture worker, who added that managers require biosecurity measures, such as coveralls, and safety protocol in order to protect the pigs in contrast to the limited protective gear provided for workers. “There are many people who, out of fear, do not report anything.”
Contract Growers Also Exposed to Fumes, Lack PPE
Contract growers—who are entirely controlled by chicken corporations and work alone or alongside the hired laborers, sometimes with other family members—are just as vulnerable, said Watts, the former contract grower.
During more than two decades of raising broilers (chickens for meat), Watts says he and another laborer were exposed daily to high levels of ammonia and particulate matter, including dust from chicken feathers and feces. At first, Watts told Civil Eats, he shrugged off the risks: “When I was young, I was very stupid. I didn’t wear any protection.”
But as time went on, he started having headaches and respiratory problems. And he developed allergies to chicken feathers and dust. “It was allergies just getting me up at night and I could hardly breathe,” he said.
Watts started wearing a dust mask. It eliminated some of the dust, but was useless when it came to filtering out ammonia. Eventually, he bought a half mask respirator with a filter and an ammonia cartridge. He wore the respirator to work daily, he said, even though a respirator “cuts your wind when you’re walking around picking up dead chickens all day.” He also offered a respirator to the laborer he had hired, but the man preferred to wear only dust masks.
Workers sent by Perdue Farms to retrieve chickens for processing sometimes also wore dust masks, Watts said, but never respirators—though they stirred up huge clouds of dust.
Watts also applied pyrethrin-based pesticides in his barns in between loads of chickens to control for darkling beetle, a ubiquitous pest in chicken barns. He wore full protective gear doing that, he said. Still, applying pesticides “wasn’t as bad as working with chickens because I was in and out within just a couple of minutes,” he said.
Watts eventually got fed up with the health hazards of his work and the chicken industry’s dishonesty. He quit. He has since transformed his farm into a mushroom growing operation. Six years out of the CAFO business, his allergies and breathing problems have finally cleared up.
“I realized,” said Watts, “you only get one set of lungs.”
Previously: The lack of OSHA oversight on smaller animal agriculture operations puts workers at risk of injury and death.
Next: Despite harms to workers, the federal government is incentivizing biogas. Those incentives may be deepening consolidation in the industry and making barns even more densely packed with animals. Read the full series here.
The post ‘I Was Coughing So Hard I Would Throw Up’ appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post A New Film Documents the Immigrant Farmworker Journey appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>It seemed like a dream. The sisters grew up hearing about a village high up in the mountains, where their parents had once lived without running water or cell phones—a place where their grandmother made delicious food and grandfather eked out a living planting corn, where everyone spoke Triqui, an Indigenous language hardly heard in the United States.
Esmirna Librado and Noemi Librado-Sánchez, and their cousins Heriberto and Esmeralda Ventura were all born in the U.S. to farmworker parents. They only ever had seen relatives from their family’s village in Mexico in faded photographs. The children grew up together in overcrowded apartments, wondering if and how the American dream might apply to them.
In 2016, the four cousins, who were by then teenagers, decided it was time to meet the grandparents and see their parents’ ancestral village for the first time. In December of that year, a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, they travelled together by truck from California to San Martín Itunyoso, Oaxaca, a distance of more than 2,000 miles. Seth Holmes, an anthropology professor and family friend, accompanied the youth.
They recorded their journey to the village and their two weeks in Oaxaca on video. Back in the U.S., they decided the footage was worth sharing with a wider audience. Five years after the epic journey, the cousins co-directed and released a 30-minute film called First Time Home. Unscripted and raw, it offers a rare, authentic glimpse into what life is like for farmworker families and the reasons why immigrants choose to sacrifice their lives in Mexico to pursue better opportunities up North. Earlier this year, the film won the award for Best Youth Film at the San Diego Latino Film Festival.
Civil Eats recently spoke with First Time Home’s co-directors Esmirna Librado, 22, and Noemi Librado-Sánchez, 18, about growing up with farmworker parents, how the trip to their ancestral village changed them, and their plans for the future.
First Time Home’s co-directors: From left, Esmeralda Ventura, Noemi Librado-Sánchez, Esmirna Librado, and Heriberto Ventura.
What was it like growing up in a farmworker family in the U.S.?
Esmirna Librado: Our parents were both very young when they got here, around 15-16 years old. They came because there were not enough well-paying jobs [in Mexico]. A year after they came, I was born, and they decided to stay so I could have a better future. But growing up was hard for me. Our parents picked strawberries and blueberries in Washington State and peaches and grapes in California. When my dad would go to work, we would be asleep, and when he came back, we’d be asleep. That’s how it was most of the time. We barely got to see him or my mom because they had to work in the fields to keep their kids fed, pay rent, and stuff like that.
Noemi Librado-Sánchez: My uncle—our dad’s brother—he’s the one who helped raise us. He took care of us whenever our parents were working really late. My uncle would do my hair or take me to church with him. He was my father figure growing up.
One thing that really struck me in the film was how incredibly overcrowded the living conditions were for your families. Multiple families lived in one small apartment.
NLS: Yes, it was quite a few people. Rents are really high and farmworker wages are low. Plus, undocumented people get paid less than regular Americans. Luckily, things have changed for us in recent years, but our families lived like that for a really long time. Living together was a way to make things work.
EL: It was the only way we could help each other out. When our parents went to work, the older kids would take care of the younger ones. That was a way for our parents to save up money. It was hard. When we got older, my dad decided that it was time to stay put and have a steady place. So, we stayed in Washington State, and that’s where I started school.
But we continued migrating back and forth between Washington and California during the picking season. [When we went to California,] it was hard to find a place to live right away so there were times when we would even stay in cars—we would be homeless for a week or so. But if we knew a family that had a house, we would go and rent with them. We eventually stopped migrating, but my uncles continued to go back and forth. Until last year, they were still doing that.
Working in the fields isn’t an easy job, but our parents have done it for years. And they had no other choice. . . . Farm work was the only way they can make money. They have to work outside in extreme heat and during wildfires to bring food to the table for their families.
NLS: Moving back and forth means having to change schools multiple times, and it can really mess up your education. Many children of farmworkers have this experience. My dad didn’t want us to go through that. That’s a major reason why our parents chose to stay in one place.
If you could tell Americans one thing about farmworkers’ lives, what would it be?
EL: Working in the fields isn’t an easy job, but our parents have done it for years. And they had no other choice. They have no education; most of our relatives didn’t even get to finish middle school in Mexico. They came here for better opportunities, but farm work was the only way they can make money. For many of them, documentation is an issue. They can’t go and get a more comfortable job indoors. They have to work outside in extreme heat and during wildfires to bring food to the table for their families.
When you made the journey to your family’s village, Noemi was just 12 years old and Esmirna was 16. What was the experience like? How did the trip impact you?
NLS: The trip felt like stepping into a story that you’ve been told multiple times. You could finally picture it all. When I was a child, my dad would tell us about walking through the dirt, the field of corn just beyond their doorstep, and the lack of running water. He would describe our grandma’s good food. And when we got there, everything was just like [he’d described]. For a moment, it felt surreal. Like, “Wow, I’m actually here. These are actually my grandparents.” Before I went to Mexico, I felt like the United States was the only place for me. Now, I feel like I have two places to call home.
The trip also taught me to think more about my decisions and to focus on how I want to live my life. When I think about what I’m going to do next and who I really want to be, I remember my time in San Martín Itunyoso. I realized that I want to do something to help people, whether it’s through writing a book, making a video, or some other way.
EL: Before I went, I was kind of lost. I’m Mexican-American, but I did not feel American, I didn’t look American. I also did not feel Mexican. Now, I feel I’m more connected to both [sets of] roots somehow.
Most people migrate here from Mexico to make a better future for their families. And for so many of them, that opportunity means having to live under the same roof as five other families and working from sunrise to sunset in the rain, the mud, or under the scorching sun.
In Oaxaca, I learned how hard life can be. In the past, I could see how hard it was for my parents in the United States. But now, I also understood how difficult it was for them to make the decision to come to the U.S. For so many immigrants—not just my mom and dad—living close to their parents or grandparents is what they give up to give their own children a better chance at life. They can’t see their parents grow old, they can’t be with their parents when they need them.
Just recently, my grandpa died and relatives here were not able to say goodbye or attend the funeral. None of them were able to go back. You hear a lot of stories on the news about people who do go back just to see their aging parents or attend a funeral and they end up getting kidnapped or killed while crossing the border back to the U.S. Our family didn’t want to go through that risk. But I know that not going back is something that weighs on them. I also imagine my grandpa leaving this world without having his children there for his last goodbye. It’s heartbreaking.
Why did you decide to make a film out of this very personal trip? What message did you hope it would tell?
NLS: After we had everything recorded, the footage felt valuable. It’s not like we scripted anything or filmed with the intention of using it later on. But around this time, Donald Trump was running for president and he was publicly saying that Mexicans came here to steal jobs, that they were criminals, and other horrible things. Since we had all these clips showing what it’s really like, we decided to prove that his words were not true, that you can’t blame a whole community just because one person might have done something wrong. Most people migrate here from Mexico to make a better future for their families. And for so many of them, that opportunity means having to live under the same roof as five other families and working from sunrise to sunset in the rain, the mud, or under the scorching sun.
EL: In the film, we show footage of people working in the fields and my dad saying [on camera], ‘Oh, you don’t see Americans here.’ It’s not that he wants to be rude. But everyone who works in the fields is Hispanic. Based on our family’s experience, there’s no way [Mexicans] could be stealing people’s jobs. White Americans don’t want to do the heavy work of harvesting crops. So immigrants like our parents have to do it.
During the trip to Oaxaca, you were the emissaries of your parents. You brought video letters for your relatives in Mexico. And you then returned home with recorded messages from the village. Why were these video letters so meaningful?
EL: We made video letters with our parents in California and Washington for our relatives in the village. It was a way for them to connect with each other. They’ve always had phone calls, but it’s not the same thing as seeing your relatives’ faces and watching them say something “live.” Even phone calls are rare since there is no phone reception or internet service in the village. It’s in the mountains. If our relatives want to talk to anyone here in the U.S., they have to go to a nearby town to make a phone call [from a phone booth in a store].
Esmirna Librado reviewing footage on an iPad with family.
Your film has been shown in several cities throughout the U.S. How do you feel about the reception that it has received?
NLS: I was pretty surprised. I flew out to San Diego to watch it during the film festival there and it was one of the coolest experiences. I think the film gives people a place to start a conversation. I was happy to see so many people who connected to it and who want to do something. We met with students who have the same feelings we do: they see their parents struggling and they want to help, but they can only do so much. This film builds a community outside the community, if that makes sense.
EL: A lot of people connected to what we recorded. I think people saw a more universal story about returning home.
I think the film gives people a place to start a conversation. We met with students who have the same feelings we do: they see their parents struggling and they want to help, but they can only do so much. This film builds a community outside the community.
Your film focuses on a community that many people don’t even know exists, Indigenous Triqui immigrants from Oaxaca. Can you tell us more about your community and the unique challenges it faces in the U.S.?
EL: As you know, Mexicans in the U.S. face a lot of discrimination. But being Indigenous and Mexican—having a darker skin color, being a little shorter, and speaking a different language than Spanish—brings even more discrimination [from both Americans and Mexicans]. Some of our people still don’t know how to speak Spanish. Our dad didn’t know Spanish coming here. The only language he knew was Triqui and he learned some Spanish while going to my mom’s prenatal checkups because the clinic only had Spanish translators. Triqui is still the language my parents and relatives speak at home.
I’ve worked for several companies and I have witnessed a lot of discrimination. People with the lighter skin color, those who [can pass as white] get the lighter jobs. And people who are darker-skinned have the harder jobs. I fit more into the darker-skinned crowd, so I was given a hard job. And I had to say to my managers, “Is there a way I can change that?” For me, it’s easier to ask because it’s fine if I get fired, I can get another job. But when I get into the shoes [of people who don’t have legal status], I understand why they don’t speak up.
My uncle and my dad are always saying, “Don’t let them put you down, because you have opportunities. This is why we came here.” And that’s another reason why we made this film. It gave us an opportunity to be able to speak up for the people who can’t speak.
NLS: The Triqui community here is very connected, though in Washington it’s not as big as in California. Our family was very close, united. We went to California every year to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s. In California, the Triqui community organizes parties and celebrates traditions from back home. It’s so beautiful, seeing so many women and girls in their huipils, a traditional garment worn by Indigenous women in Mexico.
Have either of you gone back to Oaxaca since your first trip?
EL: I have not gone back, but I hope to in the future. I have a 4-year-old daughter; I plan to take her one day and show her where my parents are from.
NLS: I went the year after. And that was the last time I saw my grandpa. I do wish to go back again, but my grandpa’s [death] deeply affected me. It makes me so upset to think that once I’m back, he’s not going to be there. There was this moment in the film when he and I just looked at each other. And every time I see it, I [get emotional].
In the film, your uncle says, “Tu historia vale mucho,” or your story is important. Do you hope to tell more stories about farmworkers and their families? How do you hope to shape your own future story?
EL: My uncle is right because each one of our stories is different, but they are all valuable. In the fall, I’ll start college again to study nursing. I had started and stopped going. Now, I plan to get to the finish line. My parents have inspired me to take up those studies because I want to do something to help people get better health care and better access to various resources.
NLS: I do hope to tell more stories. I’m going to be attending university and I hope to major in journalism and communication or psychology. I want to expand my storytelling, to talk about other serious situations that impact the Latino community and that aren’t talked about, including mental health issues.
Writing is something that I love to do, but I’m also fascinated with how the brain works. Growing up, I was always told that I was a rebel. I was a troubled kid, pretty much. But I felt that it was a lot more than just me being “troubled.” A lot of it had to do with being a kid who wanted and needed my parents’ attention. But obviously, because they were farmworkers and they were working so much, they couldn’t give it to me.
This interview was edited for length and clarity. All photos courtesy of the filmmakers.
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]]>The post What the Story of DDT, America’s Most Notorious Chemical, Can Teach Us Today appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT, is a notorious pesticide that was once considered a panacea in the United States. It was unleashed with abundance from the 1940s to the 1960s, used to fight a wide range of agricultural pests and human diseases, but its toxicity and carcinogenicity in animals and humans soon came to light, and the chemical’s use was discontinued.
While DDT has been banned in most countries across the globe (with an exception for malaria control), for five decades, it has persisted in our environment and continues to cause disease in humans and animals. Despite that, in recent years, some have been calling for more use of DDT to fight not just malaria, but also West Nile Virus and the Zika virus.
In How to Sell a Poison, historian of medicine Elena Conis traces the history of DDT, its impacts, and the implications of the shifting science. In a masterful narrative style that reads like a novel, Conis tells the stories of ordinary people and the nascent environmental movement that sought to expose the chemical’s harms. Her book offers insights about the mechanisms of science denial, disinformation campaigns, and the role of politics and other social forces in shaping a nation’s approach to regulating a toxic substance.
Civil Eats spoke with Conis about the light that DDT’s story sheds on the many other toxic chemicals used today, how social inequality, race, and environmental pollution are linked, and why the tobacco industry funded a secret campaign to bring back DDT.
Why did you decide to write a book about DDT, and why now?
I grew up in the 1980s, a decade after DDT’s ban. I knew of it as one of our most toxic chemicals. I knew that it was responsible for the loss of major numbers of bald eagles and, where I lived in New York, a loss of osprey, among other birds. Then, as a graduate student, I attended a conference where some global health experts talked about the problem of malaria getting worse, particularly in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. They all mentioned the need to bring back DDT. That alone surprised me. But what surprised me even more was that nobody else in the audience seemed to find that strange, weird, or troubling. I carried these questions around for a long time: What had happened to DDT? Had its reputation changed? Had people reconsidered how toxic it was?
Fifteen years later, I became a historian of medicine. I had been a journalist focusing on health and medicine for a while, I got my PhD in history [at the University of California, San Francisco], and found an electronic archive at UCSF that contains scanned versions of corporate documents disclosed in the mid-1990s during hearings on the tobacco industry. I stumbled upon a couple of curious documents about DDT. It turns out the tobacco industry had an expressed interest in the return of DDT. That’s when I realized the chemical had a more complicated story. It had gone from war hero to public enemy to a third act a generation later, when we completely reconsidered it. It seemed like an interesting case study for understanding how we change our minds about science, who is involved in shaping what we know, and [shaping] technology based on our scientific knowledge.
As a society, we’ve been fighting about science for the past decade or so, with many people seeming to reject accepted scientific claims. And people who believe those scientific claims feel completely frustrated when they aren’t simply accepted as a matter of fact. DDT’s story to me showed how scientific facts can change depending on the context, the questions that we ask, and the interests pursuing the answers to those questions. It seemed a helpful case study for understanding why we fight about science and what we’re actually fighting about when we do. In the story of DDT, I found that the debates about the chemical were proxy battles for struggles over gender, race, class, and the economy.
You describe in shocking detail the ubiquitous, constant, large-scale spraying of homes, fields, pets, cattle, and entire American cities with DDT. Why was this chemical so widely used?
If you could put yourself in the shoes of people who first encountered this chemical on a large scale in the ‘40s and ‘50s, you would see that the earlier generation of pesticides and insecticides—those used before DDT—were so much more toxic. They were known poisons, compounds made with lead and arsenic. It was an accepted fact that if you were going to kill insects, you would use something that was poisonous to people. DDT wasn’t toxic in the same way. Animals and people could be exposed to a lot of DDT in the very short term and they would be okay.
The fact that we had something that could kill insects and not make us sick in the short term suddenly made DDT seem like the answer to everything. People became dependent on it really quickly because they didn’t have to go to great lengths to rid their houses of ants or roaches, or their whole community of flies or mosquitoes. DDT offered a way to keep things clean, salubrious, “healthy.” At the same time, it was a way to make agriculture more profitable—because with a sweep of DDT, farmers could eliminate some of the worst pests.
Despite these benefits, other countries did not use DDT in such huge quantities. The U.S. was unique in how abundantly it sprayed the chemical, even though it had actually been developed by a Swiss chemical company. Why?
DDT’s story was woven into the story we told during and after the Second World War about how the U.S. became a superpower. Americans constantly heard about how DDT had protected our troops, prisoners of war, and refugees from malaria and other devastating diseases. The chemical, they were told, had essentially transformed the war. So, DDT was accepted as part of this bigger project of seeing ourselves as a global leader.
The big companies manufacturing DDT were also subsidized by the federal government during the war. So, they emerged bigger and more powerful than they had ever been. Combine that power with the enormous American appetite for DDT and suddenly, it was huge. It just took off.
Thousands of other chemicals have since been released on the market and the federal government regulates only a tiny percentage of them. What lessons does your book offer about the regulation of chemicals?
The first takeaway is that DDT created a set of problems that we gradually became aware of and then we thought we solved by banning the chemical [in 1972] and later through the passage of Superfund [a program of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established in 1980 to clean up hazardous waste dumps]. But here we are, 50 years later, and this chemical is still with us. It’s still affecting people’s health, and it’s still in wildlife, in birds, and in marine mammals, affecting their health too. It continues on in the environment, including in places we didn’t even know about or we allowed ourselves to forget about. We’ve been cleaning up DDT on land, but we recently discovered that loads of DDT were dumped into the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of California. So, one of the big takeaways is that when we move with haste, we have no idea how long the health and environmental consequences of our technological developments are going to last.
Second, when we take steps to solve those problems, we also don’t have a good handle on the timeframe required for those solutions to be meaningful. We “solved” the problem of DDT by banning it and by cleaning up the environment. At one of the Superfund sites that I looked at, the EPA created a cleanup plan in the early ’80s that involved rerouting a river and monitoring fish over time to make sure that their DDT levels were going down. After 30 years of cleanup and monitoring, the fish had DDT levels that were considered safe [at the time], but today we don’t think that level is safe enough. The moment we create a technology or a chemical, we start running a race to understand all kinds of ways in which it’s going to reshape ourselves and our environment. We’re forever going to be playing catch up.
How did the science on DDT evolve and what are the lessons about science that this history exposed?
DDT was and still is one of the most well-studied chemicals we’ve created. It was so well-studied because it was used so extensively. During the war, men serving in the armed forces spent morning, noon, and night just spraying, spraying, spraying. They were covered in DDT all day. And everybody studied them—the manufacturers, the army—and concluded these men seemed fine. The war was over, they were discharged, and that was it. Then there were studies after the war to follow not just sprayers, but also people working in the factories that manufactured DDT. There were studies in which DDT was fed to prisoners. Typically, scientists would study a small group of men, ask a limited set of questions, and conclude that all was fine.
Then, after the war, the horse was out of the barn. Everybody knew about DDT, its formula was published, and all of the big and little manufacturers were making and selling it. There was so much research—including on DDT’s accumulation in fat tissue and in breast milk—that was published, reported, and for all intents and purposes, ignored for decades.
Over the latter half of the 20th century, we shifted from short-term toxicology studies to longer-term epidemiological studies. We also started to change the questions we asked. And we began looking at DDT’s effects in much more representative samples of the population, including women, children, the elderly, people with pre-existing conditions or diseases, and people who had been exposed to DDT in different ways and for different lengths of time. A lot of this research took place after DDT was banned, so they had to be creative about the questions that they asked. Also, the way people were exposed to DDT was shifting. During the war, people were exposed to the spray. After the war, they were mostly exposed through their diets. So, scientists had to ask entirely different questions.
We treat science as a source of concrete, unyielding, indisputable answers. But science is, in fact, a process we use for understanding ourselves and our world. And over time, that process is going to give us new kinds of information. The process itself is going to change the kinds of questions we are interested in asking, how we ask them, and how capable we are of getting certain kinds of answers. At the same time, science is social. It’s carried out by human actors. And scientists bring to this process all of their pre-existing biases, prejudices, and assumptions. If we could just acknowledge that and see it more clearly, it would help restore public trust in science.
Rachel Carson, the famed author of Silent Spring, often gets much of the credit for bringing DDT to the attention of the American public. But your book focuses on other actors, including farmworkers. How did the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) fit into the battle against DDT?
The contribution of farmworkers has not gotten nearly the amount of attention that it deserves. I came across a quote from Cesar Chavez in which he claimed responsibility for the public turn against DDT. At first, I thought, “That’s a really big claim!” But the more I read, the more I realized that farmworkers did do a lot to turn the public against DDT. There were a few instances of mass poisonings of farmworkers, and as Chavez began to organize boycotts of grapes grown in California, some of the workers asked to include pesticides on the list of demands made to growers. They publicized the fact that if you bought non-union grapes, they might have loads of pesticides on them. This was effective and got the public’s attention.
When the UFW finally got its first union win, the contract included a ban on hard pesticides, including DDT. This was one of the earliest bans of DDT in the United States. So, before the EPA banned it at a national level and before states banned it at the state level, farmworkers got DDT banned in their union contracts. This is a part of the story that has gotten lost in our focus on Silent Spring and the environmental movement.
You tell the stories of ordinary people impacted by DDT, from soldiers to housewives to farmers. Why did you choose to focus on them, as opposed to the big players?
I’ve always been interested in gaining a deeper understanding of why certain people can place their trust in science more easily than other people. We often turn to institutions and experts for answers to this question. I felt like the best way to explore it was to set the institutions aside. I made a deliberate choice to make the small farmer just as important as the chemist. It was important for me to let them all stand on level playing ground, to see their interactions more clearly and understand exactly why regular people came to the conclusions they did and took the actions they did.
Science historians sometimes point out that, years ago, science took place when people engaged in observation or experimentation right where they lived. Today, by contrast, science is far removed from where ordinary people live. As soon as DDT was released for public sale in 1945, all of these chemists got the formula and made it themselves. For example, there was a man who lived in Georgia who ran a pharmacy and he wanted to sell DDT. His daughter got the formula from a journal at the college library. She gave it to her dad, he made DDT in the lab in his garage, and then sold it in his shop. Today, this sort of thing is unthinkable [because of patenting and intellectual property rights]. This makes us dependent on experts and institutions to know what’s going on. That removal is related to the breakdown of public trust in science.
I also tried to get inside the heads of people who defended DDT. They would do things like eat DDT on camera, before a reporter on the evening news. DDT didn’t seem that toxic to them; so many other chemicals were clearly more toxic. They believed so strongly in its benefits and they thought those benefits outweighed the harms.
Your book shows how social inequity, race, and environmental pollution are inextricably linked. How were these inequalities addressed by the government, if at all?
Without a doubt, people of color were exposed to far greater amounts of DDT and for longer periods of time than white people, especially white middle-class people. So much of it was used on cotton, and in the South many of the farmers and those working in the fields were Black. But there was little attention to the implications of that fact. Studies looked at how many of the persistent pesticides were in the diets and the bodies of children and average Americans. And if you took those results and then stratified them by race, Black people had higher levels of chemicals, including DDT, in their bodies than white people. We had this evidence starting in the ’70s, completely correlated with what we knew about where and how DDT had been used for decades. And we didn’t act on it.
I tell the story of Triana, a small African American town in northern Alabama. Its mayor, Clyde Foster—who was a scientist and mathematician at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—became aware of high DDT levels in the fish in the river running through his community. He turned to the federal government for help investigating exactly how much DDT the town’s residents had been exposed to. The results of Foster’s actions was that the company that was responsible for manufacturing the DDT reached a $24 million settlement [to compensate the town’s residents], and the EPA agreed to make Triana a Superfund site, meaning the agency would oversee DDT’s cleanup.
In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agreed to study how much DDT was in the bodies of the people living in that town and what it was doing to them. Triana’s story revealed that we had focused on the middle class food supply. In the town of Triana, people were eating fish right out of the river because it was free. People were consuming DDT at levels that scientists hadn’t even thought were possible.
Eventually, studies investigating people’s exposure to persistent and other chemicals through the diet started to take these variables into account. They began to ask: How we can fully account for the different diets that people living in the U.S. are consuming and what that might mean for their chemical exposure? As a result several studies looked at dietary patterns of Alaska Natives, including those who ate large amounts of marine animals with high retention of DDT in their fat. We began to see different patterns of exposure decades after people had been exposed.
Subsequent studies have shown that the children and grandchildren of people exposed to DDT suffer the impacts of this chemical, so $24 million isn’t actually a very large settlement.
Yes, and it’s just one chemical. As scientists started studying people in Triana, they found that people in town also have high levels of PCBs. These are industrial chemicals used in electronics and other products. So there was something there that nobody even knew to ask about. The legacy of environmental racism is so much bigger than we imagined.
Why did the tobacco industry want to “bring back” DDT after its ban?
In the beginning, the industry studied DDT because it was used in tobacco fields. In the early ‘60s, when the Surgeon General linked smoking to cancer, smokers actually wrote the tobacco companies saying, “maybe it’s the pesticide.” Then, as European countries proposed limits on the amount of DDT on imported crops [including tobacco] . . . the tobacco industry started pressuring growers and the USDA to stop using DDT. The USDA eventually moved to ban DDT on tobacco before the full national ban.
Fast-forward to the late 1990s, when the tobacco industry started fundraising for a campaign to bring back DDT. It was a communications campaign to convince the public that DDT should never have been banned in the first place because millions of people, particularly children, were dying around the world due to malaria and DDT was a tool to fight it. Big Tobacco didn’t actually care about DDT. The industry was trying to protect the [global] market for cigarettes by undermining public support for federal regulations and for the idea that western nations should be dictating global health policy. This wasn’t a simple story of the tobacco industry being the bad guy. Conservative think tanks had approached the industry with this idea because they wanted to promote a right-wing ideology and knew the tobacco industry would fund it.
Campaigns aimed at discrediting science seem to be a threat in many current scientific debates. How do we remain vigilant in the face of those campaigns?
When it comes to some of the scientific debates today, we might not even know who’s in the game, who is behind the scenes pulling levers and determining what we hear and what we don’t hear. One of the biggest takeaways from the book is that it’s crucial for us to know who we’re hearing from and why we’re hearing from them . . . to know what their real interests are and who is giving them the power and the voice that they have. And it’s not just about interests, but also about how those interests create allies out of different people. It isn’t always as simple as looking for industry sponsorship or ties. Rather, it’s a matter of understanding the ideological bent and objectives of the people who are sharing scientific stories.
DDT’s fall from grace is touted as a major success story by the environmental movement. But we’re still awash in toxic chemicals. What has the ban accomplished?
The ban distracted us from the fact that pesticide use was only increasing and has continued to increase. We banned persistent organic pollutants, including DDT and other organochlorine pesticides, but we replaced them with organophosphates [such as chlorpyrifos], which are actually more toxic, and we use them in greater amounts. We then started to ban some of those pesticides and have replaced them with neonicotinoid pesticides and so-called systemic pesticides. We’re just repeating everything all over again, using new chemicals without understanding the full scope of their impact or their long-term effects.
We’re not reducing our reliance on pesticides at all and we’re further and further diminishing the total insect population in the U.S. and the globe. We need insects for our survival, and we haven’t even begun to grapple with where we’re headed. This is the thing that scares me more than the toxicity of a chemical like DDT. It’s the bigger questions related to our utter dependence on and over-use of such a wide array of ever-changing and insufficiently studied chemicals that are indisputably reshaping the world we live in. Probably not for the better.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The post What the Story of DDT, America’s Most Notorious Chemical, Can Teach Us Today appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post ‘Slaves for Peanuts’ Tells the Tragic Story Behind America’s Favorite Snack appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Peanuts are a key ingredient in many of America’s quintessential snacks. Yet few of us know that the ordinary peanut has a turbulent history linked to the slave trade and to colonization on the African continent.
Jori Lewis, an American journalist who has lived in Dakar for the past 10 years, has reported on Senegal’s agricultural sector throughout her career. In her debut book, Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History, she unearths the stories of African kingdoms and colonial settlements, showing how demand for peanut oil in Europe drove the expansion of the peanut trade in Senegal in the 19th century and ensured that slavery and indentured labor in West Africa would continue long after the Europeans had abolished it.
The book’s engaging narrative, based on meticulous archival research, is told in rich detail through the eyes of West African men and women—from missionaries to rulers to peanut growers and slave traders. Lewis doesn’t shy away from complexity. She shows how enslaved people often escaped their captors and struggled to get their “freedom papers,” only to be returned by European authorities. She also describes the ways that a safe house run by a Black missionary from Sierra Leone—himself deeply enmeshed in the Europeans’ civilizing mission—offered enslaved people a chance at freedom.
Civil Eats spoke with Lewis, whose book hits shelves this month, about how peanuts became a tool for colonial expansion, how the colonial approach to peanut farming destroyed some of Senegal’s prime cropland, and why the nut is so popular in the U.S.
Why did you decide to write a book about peanut cultivation in West Africa?
I came to Senegal in 2011 on a two-year fellowship from The Institute of Current World Affairs. The project I pitched was on food security in West Africa. I’d been to Senegal before, and it was a country I felt was really manageable [to report on]. It’s small but has a strong democratic tradition. It’s easy to get around, not as difficult as many other countries in terms of bureaucracy, and people are pretty easy to get a hold of. My interest in food security was also about understanding how the agricultural economy works. I had done reporting on Senegal’s fishing industry and on rice cultivation. I ended up spending a lot of time in this area called the Peanut Basin, which is three hours south of Dakar.
When I first moved to Senegal, I understood that peanuts were a huge part of the economy, and that they had also influenced how the cultural economy has been structured. I remember reading a book about the Muslim brotherhoods, which were organized around peanut agriculture. So, I ended up regularly going to check out what was going on in the Peanut Basin, seeing how people were cultivating, what shifts were happening, observing the market going up and down. I was interested in thinking about this particular place and why the peanut had so much power here. When I finished my fellowship, I decided to stay. Fairly soon after that, I started thinking about writing this book.
Your book centers on the connection between European colonialism and slavery in French West Africa, which continues after it had been banned by France. How did peanuts fit into the European ambitions for expansion? Why was this crop so pivotal?
In the early 19th century, Europeans were established in coastal West Africa, but had not formally colonized large parts of the interior. They were mostly practicing mercantile capitalism. They set up in coastal villages and islands and traded with people from the interior. And for a long time, that trade was [indirectly] linked to the slave trade.
By mid-century, there was a slow-down in trade and the merchants established in West Africa were looking for new objects of commerce; they settled on peanuts. The colonial authorities also had commercial interests—many came from large trading families—so that became their rationale for pushing into the interior. There was also the burgeoning logic of colonial domination. The French weren’t just thinking, “we can grow nice peanuts here, so we should dominate Senegal.” They were thinking, “we should secure our economic and political interests here” because of the imperialist logic that was becoming widespread. So, as time went on, the French attempted to expand their empire. That led to a union between the commercial interests and the colonial political interests. The peanut trade, despite its dependence on slave labor, was an integral part of that union.
Were peanuts present in West Africa before the Europeans arrived?
The peanut [which originated in Bolivia] had been grown in West Africa for hundreds of years—though not on any grand scale. Our best guess is that Portuguese explorers and merchants brought it there. And the Portuguese were already exploring [and extracting resources from] Senegal in the mid-15th century. I spent a lot of time trying to trace how the peanut might have moved, from either the Caribbean or from Brazil to Cabo Verde or to Spain and then down to what’s now Guinea Bissau. The historical records are difficult to pin down because there was a plant that grew in a similar way called the bambara groundnut. And the peanut in various West African languages sometimes had similar names.
You tell the story of the rise of peanuts in West Africa through Walter Taylor, a Protestant missionary. He was a Black man from Sierra Leone who later became a French citizen and who, in addition to evangelizing, ran a shelter for formerly enslaved people out of his own home. What role did missionaries play in Europe’s conquest and pillage of West Africa, and how did they influence the growth of peanut production?
During my research, I came across one reference to this mission for runaway slaves. I had never heard of it before, although I knew there was a French Protestant church in Dakar. And when I went to France, I found 20 years of correspondence between Taylor and the director of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society. And I realized that I could use Taylor’s voice to tell the story. I wanted, as much as possible, to privilege the voices from below and the history from below— the history compiles the voices of commoners, peasants, and sometimes the enslaved. It’s a voice that is difficult to unearth because it is not often captured in archives or even epic poems. For me, it was preferable to tell the story from Taylor’s point of view rather than from that of some French merchant’s. I became so enmeshed in his own personal story and in the end, it resonated with me in so many ways.
His character represented the very idea of colonialism. It was clear to me that for all his good points, he was very much involved in the “civilizing mission” of the Europeans. He was a man of his time, which doesn’t excuse anything, of course. Being from the Liberated African community of Sierra Leone with a British surname, he aspired to a type of excellence that he was conditioned to believe was the best route for both him and other newly freed, liberated [Black] men and women he was helping in Senegal. You get the sense that he really cared for them, that he wanted the best for them. And he thought that what was best . . . was to collaborate.
You write extensively about Kajoor [also known as Cayor], the African Wolof kingdom on the mainland just south of Saint Louis.
Kajoor was at the center of the peanut trade. It was premium peanut-growing land. But the Peanut Basin of today is not the Peanut Basin of the 19th century. That intrigued me. To think that there once was this fertile place where the best peanuts were grown, the capital of the peanut, and now it’s no longer relevant. Today, the Peanut Basin is in a region called the Saloum, and this has been the case since maybe the 1920s.
In the Senegalese National Archives, I saw all these letters from Lat Joor, the [king] of Kajoor, talking about his runaway slaves. I knew that not all of these slaves who were running away from Lat Joor were connected to peanuts. But I wanted to understand why there was still so much slavery in this place. [Lat Joor is also known for battling the French and opposing their expansion efforts. He’s considered a national hero in Senegal.]
In the book, you describe how slavery was prevalent in West African societies, practiced by tribes and kingdoms and wealthy families, before the arrival of Europeans. Can you talk about how Europeans used those structures to fuel their colonial ambitions and the peanut trade?
There was slavery everywhere [in the world] and it existed on a continuum. In this particular part of West Africa, there existed many extremely hierarchical societies and they included people who were enslaved. That enslavement had different types of functions, different types of durations, and different levels of integration. And that’s fundamentally one of the biggest differences between African slavery and slavery in America, where integration was much less likely. There are, of course cases, many cases, of people in America buying their freedom, and then maybe eventually buying the freedom of their children. That did happen, but it was less likely. And even though it’s controversial to say, not every place in the United States was a plantation with 500 slaves who were dying every day. There were also family farms with one or two slaves who did have closer relationships with the people who had enslaved them. These types of paradoxes existed in both places.
In West Africa, it was possible and much easier to buy yourself out of slavery and to integrate. Still, because West African societies were hierarchical, being formerly enslaved was a difference that was known about you. It meant you could make money and acquire land, but you couldn’t get married to certain people or do certain other things.
There was a system in place in West Africa for the acquisition of slaves, usually through wars in which they would be taken as hostages and ransomed off, and sometimes kept as laborers. At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, the Europeans mobilized those networks. So, the people who normally would be ransomed off instead found themselves on slave ships heading to Brazil, Havana, or Virginia. Of course, once there was demand for enslaved people, the system mobilized itself to enslave more. [Even though the French empire had abolished slavery,] as peanut production ramped up in the 19th century, so did the demand for more labor and a push to put even more land into production. Many of the peanut farm laborers were enslaved or in various states of indenture and the Europeans turned a blind eye to this and even returned runaway slaves to their owners, essentially supporting the perpetuation of slavery.
Why was this pattern of turning a blind eye to the continued use of slave labor so pervasive and so convenient for the Europeans?
The Europeans’ territorial control was limited. And they were afraid of wide-scale rebellion [among African leaders who depended on slave labor]. For example, as the region around Dagana [in northern Senegal] was annexed and came under direct French administration—meaning the French were going to have to impose their own rules—many of the herders and farmers in the region started to migrate to Mali. Slavery was not the only reason they were moving. But in their reports, the French administrators were worried about finally having control of a territory and having all its people leave. They worried about not having enough labor to produce the peanut crop. So, they tried to negotiate this line. At the same time, they also created a rhetoric about their concern about slavery. It was like [spin]. It took me a while to start reading the documents in a way to integrate the kind of hypocrisy that was present.
The French described their railroad project to export peanuts from Kajoor as a mechanism to fight slavery. Was that, partly, their justification for building it?
The explicit reason for that particular project, known as “the peanut train,” was to bring “civilization” to the region. As the track and stations were built, they were annexed and became French land, where the French should have imposed their own laws by freeing runaway slaves who managed to arrive there. But the French were loath to do so. That situation feels like America in Afghanistan. Whenever you have an occupation, you can tell people what to do and maybe when you have enough firepower, they listen to you the moment you’re there. But if you don’t convince them in other ways to collaborate with you through various corrupt means, your occupation doesn’t work.
When the rail line was finally built, it led to more peanut production and even more enslaved people being brought into the area to raise those crops. Eventually, the French occupied the entire region. Was there was any silver lining to the arrival of the railroad?
When I was working on this book, I considered the peanut to be its own character. This is the peanut’s dramatic arc. The peanut is this tool for colonial expansion, but it paradoxically also becomes an instrument for certain people to become free. It was similar in America as well, with kitchen farms for slaves, where they could sell [food] on the side and gain a little money. But because peanuts were grown at such scale and people were selling them for a meaningful amount of money, some were able to buy their own freedom more quickly than before. And because there was this peanut rush, they could move to other places and acquire land to grow peanuts and would have a way to support themselves. The [enslaved people] often hailed from societies where even if they wanted to be free, they wouldn’t have access to land and wouldn’t be able to support themselves. And in Kajoor, as the peanuts continued to grow in demand, more people could use them as a tool for their own freedom. That’s one of the surprising arcs of the peanut’s story.
After the railroad was built through Kajoor, how did the pressure to expand peanut production impact that region?
As production expanded in Kajoor, there was also an expansion of an extractive form of agriculture. There was less crop rotation, fewer fallow periods. Many trees were cut down to clear land and grow more peanuts. It was a burgeoning monoculture. All this reduced the primary productivity of the land over time. It was a short-sighted extraction. In addition, because farmers became indebted, they were getting junk seeds from merchants and that led to peanuts of lesser quality. It was a gradual decline.
Today, the landscape of Kajoor feels bereft of life. Some people there still grow peanuts, but it’s on a much, much smaller scale. In fact, when you drive through the area, it feels devastated. It doesn’t seem fertile at all. Over the years, there has been even more deforestation, leading to problems with water erosion. When it rains it squalls, hard and fast. And because of deforestation, the erosion caused by these violent rains is significant. Such man-made disasters have changed the topography and economics of Kajoor.
Today, the U.S., China, and India dominate the peanut trade. Do peanuts still fuel the economy and the culture in Senegal?
Senegal is number six in world production and number four in world peanut exports. Granted, it’s producing just 3 percent of world’s production [China is churning out 36 percent], but I still think it’s pretty extraordinary that this country that is slightly smaller than South Dakota is growing such a large amount of peanuts. From talking to people on the ground, I know that the peanut is still grown on a wide scale in many regions in Senegal. It’s traded mostly to China and India, which are top producing countries but don’t have enough peanuts [for the people there].
Peanuts are a quintessentially American food; people love peanut butter, roasted peanuts, and peanut candy. And peanut consumption has risen dramatically in the U.S. during the pandemic. How did peanuts become so popular here?
In West Africa, people don’t eat peanuts the way we eat them in the U.S. They don’t eat peanut butter sandwiches, oh no! Senegalese people like savory sauces. In the book, I briefly focus on the peanuts’ rise, mostly to explain why this man—Samuel Cobb—was importing peanuts from West Africa where Walter Taylor was the accountant. He was selling peanuts from Senegal to foreign nut and fruit sellers in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—places along the Eastern Seaboard where there was a burgeoning desire for peanuts for newly popular leisure activities such as baseball, theater, and the circus.
Another strange part of this story is that many of New York’s earliest peanut grinders were Italian. Italians in the late 19th century weren’t particularly well thought of, so maybe they were less afraid to touch the peanut? Peanuts suffered from a reputation as “slave food,” because initially Black people in the South were the only ones eating them. I have seen a few recipes for peanut-based dishes in old Southern cookbooks, but guess who was cooking for the Virginia housewife? So, the peanut had this bad reputation and after the Civil War, and Thomas Rowland, a white man from Virginia, made it his mission to increase the cultivation and popularity of this nut. It eventually became much more popular thanks to these new entertainment forms for the masses.
Agriculture is usually controlled by white men and done for the benefit of white men. Your book talks about how Europeans often believed that African farmers didn’t know much about peanut cultivation. Do you see this narrative repeating in Africa today?
There’s an inability in the Western context to believe in, for lack of a better word, Indigenous knowledge. As a result, there are all these efforts to reinvent the wheel even though we could sometimes just talk to the people who are already growing these crops and dealing with these systems to understand how they measure the world around them. There’s often a lot of lip service to this question of Indigenous knowledge, but it’s almost never put into practice.
And yet, even in Africa, people grow things differently now. I mentioned in my introduction that great grandfather was growing a number of diverse crops on his land, and then everyone pulled them out and started growing just one or two crops. And that’s happening everywhere now, this movement away from holistic systems designed to be sustainable and to help farmers with various needs. In the past, the peanut was grown on a small scale, alongside millet, tomatoes, okra, and cow peas. People were growing everything they needed to live. But that now rarely happens. There are all these efforts to “modernize agriculture” — that’s the catchphrase you hear in development circles in Africa—and Senegal is not immune to that trend
Are there other places in Africa with similar trajectories, where the Europeans used their trade and political powers for expansion? Is this still happening?
The story of Senegal doesn’t exist in isolation, it’s just one adaptation that the people of Senegal had to make when faced with the [trade and expansion] needs of the French. The peanut story is analogous and happening at the same time as the rise of palm oil culture. Of course, palm oil grows naturally in West Africa and there’s a whole tradition associated with it. It had a similar trajectory to the peanut and the British exploited it for the same reasons . . . the soap industry, the Industrial Revolution. There are many iterations of this principle. Essentially, the Europeans, and later the Americans and the Asians, absorbed what they could from Africa. Using trade is, of course, the playbook of every diplomatic mission. The Americans and the Chinese are always promoting their own trade. This is par for the course. This is the way foreign powers exert influence.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post A New California Law Will Create a Lot More Compost—but Will it Make it to Farmland? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Since January, new regulations in California now require all residents and businesses across the state to separate food and other organic materials from the rest of their garbage in an effort to reduce organic waste in landfills. The new law is seen as groundbreaking, a significant step in combating climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, producing fuel, and creating compost that can help sequester carbon in soils.
But compost advocates say the law could make it difficult for farmers to access the so-called “brown gold” at scale, thwarting efforts to increase adoption of climate-friendly agriculture. The regulations don’t require that the newly generated compost be used on farmland, include funding for costly transportation to farms, or mandate that compost be of a quality that would make it appealing to farmers and ranchers. And because each municipality must decide how to implement the rules, there is no uniform approach that could lead to an increase in on-farm compost applications.
“Everyone is looking at California as a hopeful example. It’s a huge win to get the food scraps and green waste out of the landfills,” said Anthony Myint, executive director of Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit that distributes grants for sustainable agricultural practices. “But the regulation could also create a challenge for farmers.”
Undervalued ‘Brown Gold’ Can Increase Carbon Capture
California generates 23 million tons of organic waste every year, including 5 to 6 million tons of food waste, according to CalRecycle, the state agency overseeing the new regulations. As it decomposes in landfills, organic waste emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas with a 25 times greater impact on global warming than carbon dioxide. Organic waste is the third-largest source of methane emissions in the U.S.
Senate Bill 1383, which was signed into law in 2016, aimed to reduce the level of organic waste sent to landfills by 50 percent by 2020 and 75 percent by 2025—though the state has acknowledged it failed to meet the 2020 target. The newly diverted organic waste will be transformed into compost, mulch, and energy via the burning of biomass. But the state says compost will make up the bulk of the new material given that California produces limited amounts of biogas and compressed recycled natural gas (RNG).
“It’s a huge win to get the food scraps and green waste out of the landfills. But the regulation could also create a challenge for farmers.”
Compost, long used by organic growers and backyard gardeners, has in recent years become popular among mainstream farmers interested in regenerative agriculture. Several studies have shown that spreading a layer of compost on farmland and ranchland can lead to increased carbon storage, especially if the compost is coupled with cover crops. Compost also increases the water holding capacity of soils. And while compost use on urban landscapes, including in parks and school grounds, may improve soil health, applying compost to farmland has multiple co-benefits, experts say, including boosting food’s nutrient content, increasing crop yields, helping soil absorb and retain more water (which cuts irrigation costs), and reducing the need for expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
CalRecycle estimates that about 5.5 million more tons of compost should be produced in California by 2025—enough to apply to an extra 27 million acres or up to 4 percent of the total cropland in the state. Ramping up compost production through organic waste diversion dovetails with California’s efforts to sequester carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including improving soil health through “carbon farming.” Nearly three quarters of the agricultural projects that received grants from the state’s signature Healthy Soils Incentives Program include compost applications. But the number of funded projects—around 600 so far— is small relative to the enormous number of farms in California. Experts say expanding access to compost could help more farmers reduce emissions and put them on track to adopt other sustainable practices.
A Recology truck drops a load of compostable material at a transfer station in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“We have an impetus to try to build bridges between compost producers, generators, and farmers. Getting compost to agricultural land is a critical part of closing the loop,” said Neil Edgar, executive director of the California Compost Coalition, a statewide lobbying group.
Some cities in Northern California, such as San Francisco, have run food waste diversion programs for years and already have robust compost markets and relationships with local composting companies. But many other cities and counties—particularly in the southern part of the state, where most residents live—are scrambling to accommodate the new law. While some existing waste-processing facilities will expand, several dozen facilities still need to be permitted and built around the state. Meanwhile, fines for failing to separate out food and other organic waste from garbage bound for the landfill are set to go into effect in 2024.
The new regulations also require that cities and counties purchase a certain amount of compost and other products made from recycled organic waste every year—based on the jurisdiction’s population size—and either use it or give it away to residents for free. Localities can procure and distribute the products anywhere in the state. But the regulations do not specify who should receive the compost, where, or how to pay for the transport and spreading costs.
Will Farmers Get More Compost?
About half of what California composters currently produce is compost, and they sell 65 percent of their compost to the agriculture industry, according to a report commissioned by CalRecycle. The market is tight, with agriculture-quality compost in very high demand, especially in areas with access to composting facilities, transportation, and spreading services, said Cole Smith, a staff research associate with the University of California.
Still, for many other farmers, the cost of compost—and that of transporting and spreading it, which often double the price for farmers—is prohibitive, Smith said. While some small and medium farms do use it, their budgets don’t allow them to do so every year, the interval that would be optimal for their soil and for the environment. When money gets tight, Smith said, compost applications are among the first practices to go. Growers of high-value fruit, vegetables, and cannabis tend to rely more on compost, Smith said, because they can afford it.
“Yes, we want to bring organic waste out of landfill and reduce landfill emissions. But growers . . . think you want to use their fields as a disposal [site].”
But by far the biggest challenges are contamination and convincing farmers to use compost in the first place, Smith said. Many will use it from agricultural, on-farm waste but avoid urban-generated compost. The distrust is partly linked to California’s history of direct farmland applications of green waste without composting, said Smith. Similarly, it echoes a decade-old controversy over a San Francisco program that aimed to transform human waste into backyard compost. The distrust is also a direct result of farmers receiving badly contaminated compost batches.
“Yes, we want to bring organic waste out of landfill and reduce landfill emissions. But when growers hear that, they think it has hit the plate, then the trash, and now you want to use their fields as a disposal [site],” said Smith.
Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, a 400-acre diversified operation in northern California, said he stopped using urban compost several years ago.
“The compost we were getting had a good deal of foreign material in it . . . there was glass, plastic, forks, and bits of non-carbon material that we ended up spreading on our fields,” Muller said. “We were concerned about microplastics and also about handling safety for our crew if small bits of glass were spread around.”
Muller also said since compost quality is poorly defined in the state, the material was often “pretty raw,” meaning it had to break down in the fields.
Trucks deliver fresh compost from food waste to Tresch Family Farms in California. (Photo courtesy of Zero Foodprint)
Smith has been working to build trust and communication between compost facilities and growers. Part of that work is teaching farmers how to assess compost for quality before it’s delivered or spread on the fields. Smith is also working with Edgar of the California Compost Coalition to run workshops for farmers on how compost can improve soil, boost productivity, and help fulfill the state’s climate goals. The two hope for more funding to continue similar outreach to farmers across the state. But all of those efforts, Smith said, are dependent on local governments teaching their residents how to effectively sort their trash.
Where Will All the Compost Go?
As California’s new law goes into effect, it’s hard to predict how much compost will be available and where it will end up. With food waste diversion just starting up for many localities and a dearth of composting facilities, the law’s procurement requirements are currently unattainable, said Kelly Schoonmaker, program manager with StopWaste, a public agency that helps residents and businesses in Alameda County, just east of San Francisco, recycle better. And yet the requirement also means California will soon see a huge unmet demand from cities and counties for compost.
But over time, as new collection schemes ramp up the supply of compost will grow. And once supply increases, there won’t be enough space in cities to spread the compost purchased by local jurisdictions, added Schoonmaker.
“In theory, the law has the potential for a lot of greenhouse gas benefits if we’re putting the compost in the right locations and in appropriate ways.”
Two years ago, a study showed that “enough farmland exists near every city in California for the distribution of 100 percent of . . . . diverted organic waste as compost.” But it’s unclear how many communities will choose to work with farmers because that would entail willingness to produce and purchase higher quality compost and pay additional money to transport it to the farms. Under the current regulations, a jurisdiction could potentially pay for low quality compost and let it sit in an empty lot.
“In theory, the law has the potential for a lot of greenhouse gas benefits if we’re putting the compost in the right locations and in appropriate ways,” said Ian Howell, a resource conservationist at the Alameda County Resource Conservation District. “We need to work with local governments and farmers to ensure that . . . . it isn’t just put wherever.”
Some cities own large tracts of land where they can potentially apply compost to fulfill their procurement requirement. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, for example, owns approximately 60,000 acres of rangeland, more than half of which is leased out for grazing.
Rangeland could offers a significant home for municipal compost, given that there are about 38 million acres of it in California. Recent studies at the Marin Carbon Project have shown that compost significantly increases carbon sequestration on rangeland—however, the impact of compost applications can last for decades, meaning that annual applications aren’t needed. And some rangeland may be difficult to access and spread compost on.
Cities or counties that don’t own much land could focus on using compost to help solve food justice issues, said Edgar. They could distribute the compost to urban farming projects, food banks, and gardeners in food deserts or send it to smaller and mid-size, disadvantaged, and BIPOC farmers who usually cannot afford compost, such as the Latino farmworkers-turned-farmers who are members of the ALBA farm training program in Salinas.
“Local jurisdictions could be part of a solution to bridge the gap on food insecurity,” Edgar said.
Compost Brokers Connect Cities, Counties with Farmers
Assuming compost quality is high enough and farmers want to use it, several innovative approaches already exist for getting it to growers. The new regulations allow local governments to contract with so-called “direct service providers” to fulfill their procurement requirement on their behalf.
One model is for local Resource Conservation Districts (RCDs)—special independent districts that offer expertise in conservation, agriculture, and wildlife—to step in to work with farmers. There are around 60 active districts across the state.
For instance, the San Mateo Resource Conservation District is already teaming up with San Mateo County to start a two-year compost brokering pilot program for farmers. The pilot program will launch later this spring and the county hopes to pay for initial implementation costs through a pending grant from CalRecycle, said Adria Arko, senior program manager of the conservation district’s Climate and Agriculture program.
San Mateo county has only one small composting facility that doesn’t offer transportation or spreading services, so farms typically bring it in from other counties.
“Farmers here are interested in using it and sequestering carbon, but they tell us it’s too expensive,” Arko said. “So it seemed a great opportunity to connect the county with farmers to get the compost to them at no cost.”
A tractor drives past piles of compost at the Jepson Prairie Organics compost facility outside Vacaville, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The conservation district has the staff and expertise to identify the farmers in need and distribute the compost to them. “We can help connect the dots,” Arko said. “We want to develop a system that could be scaled up and replicated by other RCDs.”
The pilot will distribute free agricultural-quality compost to any farmer in the county, though initially the number of participating farms may be limited, Arko said. The county’s average farm size is 191 acres, well below that of the rest of California.
If interest proves high, the conservation district can apply for additional funding from the Healthy Soils program or the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), Arko said. But the ultimate goal, she added, is to find a consistent source of funding to help farmers adopt regenerative practices that lead to carbon sequestration—practices that require the kind of money many small and medium-sized farmers don’t have.
Opting in to Fund Carbon Farming Practices
Zero Foodprint already offers a funding mechanism. The nonprofit teams up with restaurants and other food businesses to collect a 1 percent opt-in fee from dining customers (usually a few cents per meal) to fund the adoption of regenerative farming practices.
The nonprofit then distributes grants to farmers and ranchers. Two-thirds of the projects Zero Foodprint has funded involve compost applications, said Myint, the executive director. Currently, the organization works with restaurants and farmers in California, Colorado, and is expanding to other parts of the U.S. and the world.
Over the past two years, Zero Foodprint has distributed grants to more than 30 farms, Myint said. And while any farmer can apply, BIPOC farmers and small farmers are prioritized in the process. Farmers work with cooperative extension and other technical assistance advisers to track project benefits.
In anticipation of the new regulations, Zero Foodprint is preparing to help match farmer demand for free compost with cities and counties that need to buy and give away enough to fulfill their procurement goals. Its Compost Connector program will identify and coordinate farm compost projects and share the costs of additional regenerative practices so as to maximize the amount of carbon sequestered. The nonprofit already has pilot contracts with Alameda and San Mateo County and is in talks with the city of San Francisco.
But for compost to fulfill its carbon farming potential, systemic solutions are needed, Myint said. Instead of local governments trying to claw the funding for compost procurement out of existing budgets and fee increases, they could set up formal programs to fund healthy soils, giving local customers the solution. This could include funding structures similar to Zero Foodprint’s, with local businesses—restaurants, wineries, even online food retailers—opting in to pay a small percentage per customer to fund these practices, he said. Alternatively, a small fee could be added to waste collection or energy bills. Government agencies would then equitably re-distribute the funding to farmers.
“If you had all these local businesses contributing, you could hit huge ambitious carbon farming targets,” Myint said. “Customers would still buy the sandwich if it’s 6 cents more.” And, he hopes, as the links between healthy soils and resilience in the face of extreme drought and other aspects of the deepening climate crisis become clearer—some may even be eager to contribute to a solution.
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]]>The post Farmworkers Bear the Brunt of California’s Housing Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On most days, Rosalia Martinez finds it unbearable to live in the converted garage she shares with her husband and three young children. It’s a single room without privacy and the rent—$1,350 a month—is a lot more than the farmworker family can afford. But in Greenfield, an agricultural town on California’s central coast, it’s the best they could find.
“It’s uncomfortable, but here we are,” said Martinez. “We want to move, our children need more space, but there are no other homes for rent, there is literally nowhere else to move.”
Martinez’ plight is not unique, as farmworkers throughout California’s agricultural regions face an extraordinary housing shortage. At the end of last year, Governor Gavin Newsom announced with great fanfare that the state would invest over $30 million in upgrading its 24 migrant housing centers. The governor also committed $100 million for the construction and rehabilitation of permanent farmworker housing. The funding comes as the state tries to dig itself out from the pandemic slump while its affordable housing crisis continues to deepen and its share of homeless residents is projected to rise.
But while farmworker housing advocates and developers have welcomed the money, they say much more is needed given the overwhelming scale of the problem and the fact that farmworkers are essential to the productivity of California’s lucrative agricultural sector.
“It’s a significant investment, but we need to do a lot more,” said Assemblymember Robert Rivas (D-Salinas). “Farmworkers feed our state and our nation every single day and have been doing it for generations . . . but they live in some of the worst conditions imaginable. They are still sleeping in their cars. But now it’s not just individual workers, it’s also their families.”
Ildi Carlisle-Cummins, the executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies (CIRS), put it more starkly: “The new funding is woefully inadequate—a drop in the bucket,” she told Civil Eats. It’s better than nothing, she added, but “doesn’t begin to match the need.”
Many Farmworker Families Share a Single Room
“The new funding is woefully inadequate—a drop in the bucket.”
In the early days of California agriculture, farmworkers lived in substandard, deplorable conditions, much like the ones described in the Grapes of Wrath. They shared cramped rooms and shacks in squalid migrant camps, and slept in cars and in the fields.
It turns out, little has changed. Today, California growers rely on approximately 400,000-800,000 farmworkers to churn out more than 400 commodities—including the lion’s share of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Most of those workers now live permanently with their families in the U.S. and earn an average annual pay of $20,500 due to the seasonal nature of their job, and often live in areas that suffer severe shortages of affordable housing.
California is deep in the midst of a state-wide housing crisis and although its cities often get the most attention, the crisis is just as acute in rural areas, where rentals are extremely expensive and hard to find. At one school district in Salinas on the Central Coast, 40 percent of the student population is considered homeless. The housing that’s available is in substandard condition and many farmworkers can’t afford the fees associated with applications and move-in costs, said Sarait Martinez, executive Director of Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, a nonprofit that works with Indigenous farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley and on the Central Coast. Several families often share a small apartment or even a single room—and those are the lucky ones, she said.
“We have families with kids that have been evicted and they have nowhere to go. There are no places available and people don’t have access to shelters until they are on the streets,” said Martinez. “Our families have to constantly move from county to county because they cannot find housing.”
In Greenfield, Martinez and her husband are struggling to get by. They’re seasonal workers and agricultural jobs are scarce during the winter months. She stays home to care for the couple’s 9-month-old baby. Her husband has been out of work, but just last week found a temporary job pruning grape vines for minimum wage. Their landlord just raised the rent by $200. The family has been relying on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), i.e. food stamps to survive.
“I have no cash in my pocket,” Martinez told Civil Eats. “And I have no idea where we’re going to find enough money to pay the rent. Maybe the lottery?”
Like many in Greenfield, she hails from the Mexican state of Oaxaca and is part of the Indigenous Triqui community. Martinez applied for a unit in a farmworker housing project six years ago. Since then, she has heard nothing back.
Many people are facing similar challenges. California has done little to help agricultural workers and their families find a permanent place to live. The state’s Office of Migrant Services operates 24 migrant housing centers that are scattered throughout California and open during the peak harvest season. The centers offer almost 1,900 rental units that can house up to 11,000 agricultural workers and family members, but that’s likely a tiny fraction of the housing that’s needed.
The state has not created any new migrant housing in decades. And it’s unclear just how much permanent housing would stem the tide of homelessness among farmworkers. California’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) does not have data on how many units are needed statewide, department spokeswoman Alicia Murillo told Civil Eats. In fact, the state hasn’t ever completed a state-wide farmworker housing study.
“It’s the NIMBY response. People love the produce, but they don’t want farmworkers living in their communities.”
In the coastal area of Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties, a consortium of local agencies released their own housing report in 2018 and found that about 73,000 workers live in the two valleys year-round. Most are married and many live with children. An estimated 77 percent live in overcrowded or extremely overcrowded conditions, with multiple families sharing bedrooms, living rooms, garages, and other spaces. Just over 1,000 subsidized farmworker housing units are available to those workers.
The study concluded that an additional 45,600 units of farmworker housing are needed for year-round farmworkers and their families in the two valleys alone to end “stunningly high rates” of overcrowding. Advocates say similar farmworker housing deficits exist in every single agricultural valley in the state.
Racism, Lack of Infrastructure, Funding Barriers to Housing
Advocates say building housing for all or even most agricultural laborers in the state would be a huge challenge. Because so many people are suffering homelessness across the state, it can be politically difficult to ask for funding for farmworkers, said Carlisle-Cummins. But it’s essential to focus on this group, she added, because farmworkers are one of the most vulnerable populations and they’re also the backbone of the state’s lucrative agricultural industry.
“Without their knowledge and labor, we don’t eat and we don’t have a food system,” said Carlisle-Cummins.
The pandemic has exacerbated the need for more farmworker housing. From the start, they were deemed essential workers and publicly praised for risking their lives to feed the country—yet they also saw higher rates of infection with COVID-19 due in part to their severely overcrowded living conditions. And housing costs—already astronomical prior to the pandemic—rose further in rural areas, said Assemblymember Rivas, as tech workers and other affluent families were newly able to work outside of cities.
“COVID has intensified the farmworker housing crisis,” said Rivas, who grew up in a two-room farmworker housing unit with 10 family members. “Rents are now even higher. And the severe overcrowding means farmworkers have no room to quarantine or isolate. Social distancing is nearly impossible.”
Despite the clear need, some local governments reject farmworker housing projects. There are restrictions to build on undeveloped land and localities use zoning to make building difficult. Two car garage ordinances, elaborate parking requirements, or low density requirements—meaning the project would not be able to house enough people to pencil out financially—can lead many housing projects to going nowhere, said Rob Wiener, executive director of California Coalition for Rural Housing, a group of nonprofit and public developers, activists and local government officials who advocate for the creation of more farmworker housing.
“It’s the NIMBY response. People love the produce, but they don’t want farmworkers living in their communities,” Wiener said. “There’s racism and prejudice against farmworkers who are overwhelmingly Latino immigrants.”
The lack of basic infrastructure in rural areas is also a problem, as local governments—many of which are low on funding—can’t pay for adequate sewers, water, or roads, Wiener said. This adds to the development costs. Lack of access to schools and transportation are also barriers.
The recent trend of agricultural employers bringing thousands of temporary H2A workers from Mexico and elsewhere is also exacerbating the affordable housing crisis in rural areas, Wiener added. Because employers must guarantee housing to H2A workers, some growers are buying up or renting out old motels, trailer parks, and single-family homes, which were previously traditionally used by farmworkers who live in the U.S. permanently.
Not Enough Funding to Meet the Need
But by far the biggest challenge—for developers of any affordable housing—is the lack of financing to cover development costs, Wiener said. Those costs are driven by the rising prices of land, labor, building supplies, local government fees, and financing. Developers must layer subsidies from 5-6 sources for affordable housing projects to pencil out, he said.
And farmworker housing can be particularly costly because agricultural workers can only afford low rents—meaning developers can’t take out too many loans because they won’t be able to cover management and repair costs enough to pay them back. Hence the need for more grants and tax credits, Wiener said.
The state’s principal program for developing new farmworker housing is the Joe Serna, Jr. Farmworker Housing Grant Program, which is named after a farmworker who grew up in public housing and later became Sacramento’s first Latinx mayor. It finances the new construction, rehabilitation, and acquisition of owner-occupied and rental units for agricultural workers as well as grants for home buyers. Current, retired and disabled farmworkers qualify, with no questions are asked about legal status.
Last year’s $100 million allocation (as part of California’s 2021-2022 budget, or the “California Comeback Plan”) is one of a series of investments the state has made into the program. In 2002, the program received $200 million. And in 2018, $300 million. Last year’s budget agreement also included $37 million for the upgrades to the 24 migrant housing centers and additional funding for repairs and new developments is in the pipeline.
Most other funding sources available to farmworker housing developers are inadequate, said Wiener. There’s California’s Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, which has a set-aside of state low-income housing tax credits for farmworker housing developments. (It’s modeled after Oregon’s Agriculture Workforce Housing Tax Credits program.) The program allows corporate investors who help finance the development or rehabilitation of agricultural housing to get a tax break.
But the farmworker set-aside accrues at a rate of just $500,000 a year, meaning it’s not a major funding source, Wiener said. In addition, the tax credit program has a set-aside for rural projects, which can theoretically benefit farmworker housing. But again, it’s limited and most projects don’t receive the credits they seek.
Developers can also apply for a loan from the state’s Multifamily Housing Program, in which case the housing can be open to other residents in addition to farmworkers. There’s also $50 million set aside for farmworker housing projects in the newly established California Housing Accelerator program, which launched last year and will distribute $1.6 billion in zero-interest loans to shovel-ready projects that have already received a state award and are financially unable to move forward due to the shortage of low-income housing tax credits and bonds.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Labor Housing Loan and Grant Program provides financing to develop or upgrade rental housing for year-round and migrant or seasonal domestic farm laborers. But the USDA funding has declined steadily, said Wiener. And even if it were a larger pool of money, there’s a hitch: only farmworkers who can prove they are U.S. citizens or permanent residents can live in the housing. This disqualifies many workers since half of all crop farmworkers in the U.S. lack legal status and the share of unauthorized workers is highest in California.
Other Solutions to the Farmworker Housing Crisis
Beyond allocating more funding to stem the farmworker housing crisis, Wiener said the state needs to incentivize localities to be more proactive in making space for affordable housing in their communities. This includes penalizing local governments that outright reject farmworker and other affordable housing projects or create zoning and other rules that make it challenging to build.
CIRS’s Carlisle-Cummins would like to see the state totally rethink its farmworker housing models. She said in the current set-up landlord arrangements can be exploitive and often involve residency restrictions tied to immigration status or migration status (in some cases, the housing is available only to families that move every six months). The current housing options don’t allow workers to save money or build wealth, she said, and are often built to maximize the profits of large developers. And farmworkers are excluded from the design process.
“There are alternative housing projects that can create communities for farmworkers and others in rural areas and transfer some power to them,” Carlisle-Cummins said.
Alternatives include the mutual housing model—such as Mutual Housing at Spring Lake in Woodland—where the property is owned by a nonprofit mutual housing association and residents play a role in its governance and in the property’s operations. Housing cooperatives on the other hand, allow farmworkers to collectively own and democratically control their own housing.
At least 11 such cooperatives currently exist in the state, many of them in Monterey County. Another option is for a community land trust to acquire the property to keep it affordable, in which case the residents own their homes but lease the land underneath them from the land trust. And mutual self-help housing allows groups of typically 10 to 12 families to build each other’s homes with construction supervision provided by a nonprofit housing organization.
Of course, as Carlisle-Cummins sees it, the most promising solutions would keep farmworkers from needing subsidizing housing in the first place. “The issue comes down to a dignified salary and citizenship status,” she said. “Farmworkers should be able to afford decent housing.”
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]]>The post Glass, Plastic, Or PLA? Dairies Struggle to Replace Single-Use Bottles appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Alexandre Family Farm prides itself on being America’s first certified organic regenerative dairy. It’s a large-scale operation—4,500 mature cows pastured on about 9,000 acres—and it successfully uses rotational grazing and compost applications to boost soil health, build up carbon, and foster biodiversity.
But one aspect of its operation remains contentious: the packaging. Like most dairy products in the U.S., Alexandre Family Farm’s milk and yogurt are sold in plastic jugs and containers, to the chagrin of some customers. Most plastic packaging is made from fossil fuels and more than 90 percent of it is not recycled. Instead, it fills our landfills, ends up as tiny particles in our soil and our bodies, and more than 8 million tons of it is dumped into oceans annually.
As more dairies turn to organic and regenerative practices, consumers are pushing for packaging that eliminates single-use plastics, and dairies like Alexandre are actively looking for new solutions. But, it turns out, there is no simple fix. Switching to glass milk bottles is one approach that has become popular among some consumers, but it comes with the potential for high carbon emissions and logistical challenges. New technologies, including containers made from plants, aren’t yet optimized for holding liquids. And, even if they were, our waste systems can’t process them, meaning most end up in landfills.
“We’re not happy to use plastic . . . but there aren’t yet alternative solutions, especially for beverage companies,” said Robert Brewer, Alexandre’s chief operating officer, who has been focused on finding new packaging since he was hired two years ago. “We just can’t continue to put billions of pounds of waste into the ocean and expect to have life on earth.”
The dairy industry’s pursuit of new packaging also reflects the ongoing debate about whether society’s focus should be on inventing and refining disposable single-use packaging that is compostable or biodegradable or on improving recycling and reinforcing a circular economy that continues to rely on plastic. The makers of plant-based milks (almond, oat, rice, and soy)—many of which are also sold in plastic bottles—face similar conundrums.
Retailers, Distributors Refuse Glass Milk Bottles
Regardless of how milk is produced, in the U.S. most of it is sold in plastic containers made from virgin high-density polyethylene, also known as HDPE or No. 2 plastic. Nearly two-thirds of milk containers sold in North America are HDPE bottles, followed by cartons (24 percent) and plastic bags (7 percent). In recent years, some dairy companies—including Alexandre Family Farm—are turning to containers made from transparent, sturdy polyethylene terephthalate, which is also known as PET or No. 1 plastic, and commonly used in water bottles.
Reba Brindley, a project manager at the University of California, San Francisco, said she gave up on buying Alexandre’s milk specifically because it came in plastic bottles—a choice she finds incompatible with the farm’s other values.
“I am impressed by their work and dedication,” Brindley said of Alexandre. “But considering how little plastic is recycled and what an inefficient process it is, I don’t see how they can be held up as an environmental example when they pump out plastic bottles . . . I just can’t handle throwing out a plastic bottle every week.”
Brindley switched to milk from the Straus Family Creamery, which comes in reusable glass containers. “There is so much emphasis on recycling when I think we need to move towards reuse and reduce,” said Brindley.
Brindley is not alone in believing that glass—once the material of choice for milk bottles—is the dairy industry’s best shot at sustainability. Over the past decade, glass manufacturers have seen a resurgence of glass milk bottles across the U.S., particularly among small dairies and creameries. Some companies offer old-fashioned glass milk delivery to consumers’ doorsteps, while others offer reusable glass bottles that and can be returned to grocery stores, as in the case with Straus.
But while using glass may keep plastic out of landfills, prevent some toxic chemicals from leaching into our milk, and cater to our nostalgia and notions of improved taste and freshness, it’s not a panacea. Each packaging system has environmental impacts that go beyond the issue of solid waste, said Gregory Keoleian, professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. Those environmental impacts stem from material production, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life processing and include energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use.
“There will be tradeoffs with respect to these impacts and also between packaging performance and cost,” Keoleian said.
Glass bottles weigh much more than other containers, so they take more energy to transport and result in higher transport-based emissions per volume of packaged milk. Extracting raw materials for new glass is also energy intensive, fueled mainly by natural gas. And only 31 percent of all glass containers are recycled—most end up in landfills, where they will take more 1 million years to decompose. Despite these drawbacks, when Keoleian and his colleagues studied milk packaging systems, they found that glass refillable bottles can outcompete single use containers such as plastic HDPE milk jugs and gable-top cartons with respect to energy and carbon footprints as long as they are reused at least five times—and the savings increases at higher reuse rates.
Keoleian’s research also found that refillable plastic bottles—which are not used much today— can have an even lower environmental impact than glass because they can have higher reuse rates. But the most sustainable choice for milk packaging? He says it’s lightweight plastic pouches, which are used mostly in Canada and have a significantly smaller environmental impact than reusable glass or plastic. Aluminum, which is recycled at very high rates, could also serve as a sustainable packaging for milk.
But most consumers want traditional bottles, Alexandre’s Brewer said, hence his dairy’s search for an alternative to standard plastic. Brewer was vice-president of sales and distribution for Straus from 2004 to 2008, overseeing its glass bottle reuse system. At the time, a significant number of retailers and distributors were willing to offer glass bottles, Brewer said. Today, it’s difficult to get them into large grocery chains.
The system, he adds, is a logistical nightmare. Straus buys the glass bottles, made of approximately 30 percent recycled glass, sanitizes, fills, and counts them. They are then sent to a distributor, who is charged a deposit. The distributor delivers the bottles to retailers who, in turn, are charged another deposit, and retailers then sell the milk to customers, who get charged yet another deposit. The whole process is then repeated backwards, until the used bottles are returned to Straus for sanitizing and refilling. In all, it entails six different accounting steps, Brewer said. In addition, the bottles can break during shipping, increasing costs.
So while Straus bottles are reused an average of five times before they are recycled (that number is primarily driven by the consumer return rate, which prior to the pandemic was close to 80 percent, and by ink wearing out on bottle labels), it’s a limited retail niche.
“It’s not a bad system, it’s just that we were told clearly by retailers and distributors that they were not willing to do it,” Brewer said. “They told us, ‘If you want to come into our stores, you have to put the milk in plastic bottles.’ So the choice was existential.”
A spokesperson from Straus Family Creamery, which has bottled its milk in reusable glass since 1994, told Civil Eats that “it may take longer for some stores to adapt and implement new sustainability programs.” But, the creamery added, the bottle logistics and accounting are not onerous once in place and “when retailers realize that there is demand among their shoppers . . . they are willing to invest time in developing the program with us and our distributor partners.” The creamery’s analysis has shown that its glass reuse program prevents approximately 500,000 pounds of milk containers and plastic out of the landfills each year.
There’s one limiting factor: Straus operates a regional distribution model, with its milk sold in California and other Western states, primarily in natural food co-ops and independent grocers, as well as a few retail chains (Sprouts, Whole Foods, and Fred Meyer). Because it’s minimally processed, the milk’s shelf life is also shorter, making it more difficult to sell in other regions.
“The reusable glass program would be more costly to implement in a national distribution model,” the spokesperson said.
Alternatives to Single-Use Plastic in the Works
With glass no longer an option, Alexandre Family Farm is searching for other green options to replace its PET bottles. Brewer has worked with the Climate Collaborative—a natural foods industry group of companies committed to climate action—on finding new packaging solutions and assessment tools.
Virgin plastic bottle alternatives, including recycled plastics and plant-based bioplastics, are being rapidly developed and have attracted significant attention from the food industry, Brewer said. But for now they’re mostly suitable for dry packaging.
“The packaging is in the final steps [of development] and then it’s about manufacturers being willing to make the packaging,” he said.
Bioplastics—the most commonly used being polylactic acid or PLA—have characteristics similar to plastic, but are made from plants such as corn, sugarcane, sugar beet, or cassava. Bioplastics help companies continue with their disposable, single-use packaging status quo. But because they are biodegradable or compostable, and because they can reduce non-renewable energy inputs and greenhouse gas emissions, they’re championed as a greener solution to stemming the growth of plastic pollution. Bioplastics are now used to make everything from bottles to cups to cutlery and bags.
But PLA and other plant-based materials are far from perfect. Bioplastics also require a complex mixture of chemical additives to improve their functionality—and because of those additives, biopastics are just as toxic as other plastics, according to a 2020 study. And PLA requires specialized, high-temperature industrial composting facilities to decompose. Because few such facilities exist and because most consumers assume they can simply dispose of plant-based packaging in garbage or compost bins, most PLA containers end up in oceans or landfills where they emit methane and don’t actually decompose for hundreds of years. And when PLA containers are recycled alongside other plastics they tend to look nearly the same, making it impossible to separate them out and prevent them from contaminating recycling streams.
And while bioplastics tend to generate fewer emissions in their lifecycle—since the crops used to make them absorb carbon out of the atmosphere—those crops also tend to be genetically modified, grown using monoculture agricultural practices, and sprayed heavily with pesticides. They also require a lot of water and take vast amounts of land out of food production. Bioplastics don’t create as enough of a barrier between milk and the outside world, meaning they let in some gas and light that degrades and eventually allows the milk to spoil faster, Brewer said. They are also more brittle than plastic bottles.
PLA milk bottles aren’t yet available—but the dairy is looking into bottles currently being developed by PLA Bottles EU, a company based in the Netherlands which has an ambitious goal of collecting 90 percent of its bottles after use, 90 percent of the time, assuring they do not end up in landfills. Alexandre is also evaluating containers made with PLA beads by Gaia Herbs and Earth Renewable Technologies as an alternative to its plastic yogurt tubs.
One major challenge, Brewer said, is the fact that legacy plastic packaging manufacturers tend to be unwilling to run unfamiliar resins through their molding machines, because they fear gumming up the machines. Cost is also an issue since testing milk bottles made with custom molds is a sizeable investment, he said. Now that Alexandre Family Farm has become a successful brand and has increased its packaging purchases, the company has a better chance of convincing plastic manufacturers to try something new and it can afford to pay for testing the alternatives.
“We’ve grown a lot in the past few years,” said Brewer. “So now our plastic usage is large enough that it’s a priority for us.”
Another option Alexandre is exploring for its packaging is post-consumer (recycled) plastic. It’s another recent trend in the food industry, with several U.S. beverage companies already in the process of switching to bottles made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET). While no dairy company in the U.S. is currently using such technology, it’s been deployed in other parts of the world. The Austrian milk processing company NÖM AG introduced a milk bottle made of 100 percent rPET in 2019. Similarly, the Dutch multinational dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina and New Zealand dairy producer Lewis Road Creamery have both switched to bottles made entirely of recycled PET.
Is Chemical Recycling the Future of Food Packaging?
Alexandre Family Farm is also teaming up with King Plastics, a food container manufacturer in Orange, California, to do a test run of a yogurt container made of chemically recycled polypropylene (rPP), by using the latest advances in plastic recycling.
Polypropylene—one of the most widely used materials in packaging for consumer goods, including yogurt tubs—is currently marked with number 5 and is one of the least recycled post-consumer plastics (just under 1 percent of it is recycled). Most curbside recycling programs don’t accept it. Since it’s difficult to distinguish between food grade and non-food grade containers during the sorting process, what little polypropylene is recycled is potentially contaminated and unavailable for food-grade packaging. Instead, most is reused by decking companies, furniture manufacturers, and crate and bin makers.
Enter chemical recycling, an emerging industry that promises a solution to the plastic pollution problem by recycling plastics in an infinite recycling loop. The process is purported to “purify the plastics” at the molecular level and restores them to a “virgin-like” quality that’s devoid of contaminants, colors, or odors. Chemically recycled plastic can potentially be reused an infinite number of times, while mechanically recycled plastic falls apart after just a few uses. Chemical recycling also has the potential to recycle multiple plastics and composites together and may still be used for food-grade packaging.
When it comes to polypropylene, a new chemical recycling process invented by Procter & Gamble could vastly increase the amount recycled. PureCycle is developing facilities to collect, sort, and chemically recycle polypropylene plastic. The company will provide chemically recycled resin (rPP) to King Plastics to make the test yogurt containers for Alexandre Family Farm.
Tom Bryan, director of sales with King Plastics, said chemical plastic recycling has many advantages over manufacturing new packaging with plant-based bioplastics. Not only does chemical recycling result in a cleaner product that’s food-grade safe as compared to mechanically recycled polypropylene, Bryan said, but container manufacturers across the country who currently use virgin polypropylene could use existing machines and processes. If they wanted to make containers with bioplastics, on the other hand, they would have to invest in new equipment infrastructure.
“We think chemical recycling is a faster and better solution,” Bryan said. “There’s already a recycling infrastructure in the U.S., the pieces are there, and there’s more investment year after year. And recycling feeds into the circular economy.”
Even if manufacturing compostable or biodegradable containers made of plant-based material was easier or less costly, Bryan added, the lack of industrial composting facilities that can handle these products makes their current use questionable.
“A lot of brands are trying to find compostable, disposable plastic so the customer can feel good about throwing it away,” Bryan said. “But it’s a false narrative meant to convince customers they don’t bear any responsibility for those products. Right now, the technology just isn’t there.”
But chemical recycling’s technology is also untested and not yet commercially viable. So while billions in capital are being invested and startups in the U.S. and Europe have announced plans to build chemical recycling facilities, critics point out that quickly building enough commercial plants to make a dent in the plastic pollution problem doesn’t seem feasible. And a report published last year by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) reveals that the chemical recycling process generates chemical byproducts toxic to the environment and to human health, is extremely energy intensive, and produces high greenhouse gas emissions.
“Chemical recycling . . . is not at present, and is unlikely to be in the next 10 years, an effective form of plastic waste management,” the report’s authors conclude.
Keoleian, the University of Michigan professor, said the U.S. should focus on developing a circular economy that aims to reduce all lifecycle impacts, including the resource extraction stage and energy use, not just solid waste. Reducing overall consumption and production of plastic is also key, he said, as is improving the recycling process. A major challenge is that the market doesn’t currently drive a circular economy, he added, because markets for recyclables are weak, meaning “the costs of petroleum and the natural gas feedstocks needed to make plastic are relatively inexpensive compared to the value of recycled resin.” The cost of plastic disposal is also relatively cheap. In addition, he said, the costs of climate change aren’t currently reflected in the economy.
“Until we put a price on carbon and better value the use of nonrenewable resources, it will be more difficult to create sustainable solutions,” Keoleian said.
While none of the milk packaging choices are impact-free, it’s clear that consumers have a role in reducing the environmental impact of the milk they buy. And they can start by using it all before it spoils. Keoleian’s research showed that packaging impacts can be dwarfed by the impacts of consumer food waste.
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]]>The post How I Changed My Relationship to Grocery Shopping—and My Financial Future appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>I’m standing in a warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Portland, Oregon, tearing mounds of plastic wrap from a pallet stacked tall with hundreds of cardboard boxes of salvaged fruits and vegetables. The wrap curls in mounds at my feet as I slice boxes with a carboard cutter and sort through clamshells filled with strawberries, flats of organic peaches, giant cantaloupes in mesh bags, and a mammoth bin of herbs in tiny plastic cases.
Some of the produce is rotten—this I dump onto another pallet—but most is perfectly good and I arrange it on a warehouse cart. I volunteer once a month here as a member of a local food redistribution nonprofit, Birch Community Services, which aims to uplift working families and to staunch the river of waste inherent in our food supply chains. Birch membership has given me an incredible backdoor glimpse into the challenges that plague our food system—and the solutions available to solve them.
Birch Community Services is one of Oregon’s largest food distribution programs—last year it redistributed 13.7 million pounds of food and household goods—but it’s no food pantry dispensing emergency food assistance. Using rescued food as a base, Birch also runs a financial literacy program that helps families take control of their money—and gain consistent access to healthy food—over the long term. It could serve as a national model for how to address some of the roots of food insecurity and to stop more food from heading to the landfill.
“It goes back to the old saying, we’re not just giving people fish,” Birch’s warehouse manager, Andrew Rowlett, told me. “The participants are the answer. We give families the tools to be successful and we do it in an environment where people are supporting each other.”
Financial Stability Through Groceries
Food insecurity has soared for some Americans during the pandemic. Many people were already living paycheck to paycheck. When COVID-19 hit, their cars lined up for miles outside food banks while volunteers loaded pre-packed boxes of food into their trunks. Communities of color and immigrants, who historically have had higher food insecurity rates, were especially impacted.
And while the food crisis has eased a little, it continues at pre-pandemic levels, with many food banks expanding their warehouses to accommodate the higher demand and others struggling to meet demand. But experts have warned for years that food banks and pantries are meant as temporary solutions and other programs and policies are needed to address the roots of the problem—namely, financial instability and systemic racism. In other words, anti-hunger organizations have to start thinking beyond food, according to Katie Martin, executive director of the Foodshare Institute for Hunger Research and Solutions, and author of Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries.
Birch offers one such approach. The nonprofit is a cross between a members-only food bank, a food co-op, and a financial fitness club. Every month, member families pay $80 and volunteer at least two hours at the warehouse—where they can then shop weekly, at no cost, for food and household products. Each family is paired up with a financial counselor (the organization employs two in-house) and is required to take a multi-week financial course. Families meet with their counselor to set financial goals, craft a savings plan, and create a “family vision” to align their budget and spending with their values. They check in every three months on accomplishments and challenges. Families also get free access to a budgeting app and financial literacy books for their children.
“[Our program] vastly reduces the cost of [members’] groceries and builds a margin, a bubble that goes back into their budget to be repurposed,” said executive director Suzanne Birch, who founded the organization nearly 30 years ago with her late husband Larry Birch. “The accountability, combined with the finance class, gives people tools to succeed.”
Birch serves a different demographic than most aid programs. It focuses on working, lower-middle-class families who are struggling to get ahead financially due to low salaries, sudden job losses, illnesses, and large debt burdens. People who are unemployed and/or already receive government food assistance like SNAP or cash benefits (TANF) are not eligible to join, unless they are actively looking for work.
“There are lots of people who don’t qualify for assistance and yet are having a hard time,” said Birch. “Those people often fall through the cracks.”
My partner and I both have university degrees, yet we live paycheck to paycheck. Over the past five years I have worked only part-time as a freelance journalist, raising our young son and watching my income shrink. My partner works full time as an early childhood family specialist, a profession notable for low wages. We have educational and other debts and a mortgage to pay. And, as two first-generation immigrants, we can’t rely on our parents for help. Joining this program has allowed us to start paying off some debt, build an emergency savings account, and start breathing easier.
Birch isn’t a charity. Participants are essential to the functioning and financial stability of the organization. Families and other volunteers account for 65 percent of the nonprofit’s labor; the work they put in equates to that of more than 20 full time employees. Membership fees pay nearly 70 percent of the nonprofit’s operational costs. The remaining revenue comes from individual donations and grants. Birch has never applied for nor received government funding. Most of its paid staff and two members of its board of directors are former Birch members. In other words, the emphasis is on working as a community to become self-sufficient and to help others do the same.
“We call it the dignity of the exchange,” Birch told me. “Everyone has something to offer—a service fee, the volunteering. Even if you’re broke, you can make a positive impact. People realize this place would not be open if it wasn’t for them.”
This sense of reciprocity also removes the stigma that is often associated with receiving emergency food assistance. “I’ve heard many participants tell me about previous experiences of getting food boxes or going to food banks and just feeling bad,” said Valerie Rippey, Birch’s community development manager. “Here, there is no shame. Everyone is going through a hard financial time and needing a little extra help, but no one is looking at them with pity.”
Over the past three decades, the organization has served close to 20,000 families directly. About 600 are currently part of the program. Last year, the average Birch family included a household of five with three children, $25,000 in debt, and $60,000 in annual income. In Multnomah County, where most Birch members reside, the living wage for a family of five with one working adult is $89,000 (or $120,000 with two working adults). The average family belongs to Birch for two to three years, though there is no time limit to membership. About 70 nonprofits are also Birch members with shopping privileges, including drop-in food pantries at churches, community centers, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters. These partnerships help the organization reach another 15,000–20,000 people weekly.
Keeping Food Out of Landfills
Birch members can also feel good knowing that 100 percent of the food and household items the nonprofit redistributes is rescued from the landfill. Most food banks purchase new food in addition to receiving private donations and U.S. Department of Agriculture food aid. But, said Birch, “our policy is to never buy anything.”
Birch volunteers pick up food from 300 different corporate donors, ranging from local distribution centers to individual grocery stores, Costco, a produce company, a dairy cooperative, and a large bread company. Out-of-town truck drivers whose loads get rejected by distribution centers or stores also often drop off perfectly good products at Birch.
Much of this food would be rejected by a regular grocery store due to slight damage or product changes, said Rowlett, the warehouse manager. Packaging is routinely damaged at distribution centers as workers accidentally drop boxes or run into pallets with fork lifts. Manufacturers retire products after changing packaging styles, ingredients, or UPC codes—or launching a new product line. Some products are “excess inventory,” don’t sell, or get too close to their best by/peak freshness dates (though they aren’t usually expired). Bakeries overproduce bread, chips, and other goods. And grocery stores throw out everything that has even a minor blemish or damage—such as a large bag of potatoes with one bad potato in it—because their customers expect pristine products and store employees don’t have the time to pick through boxes to find the damaged ones.
“[In the distribution and retail world] everything is move, move, move, constantly,” Rowlett said. “The manufacturer doesn’t want it back, the vendor doesn’t want it, they can’t quickly find a third-party liquidation company to sell it to, so they used to just throw it away. Now they give it to us.”
Birch also receives new and experimental food products that never make it into mainstreams stores. “We once got cappuccino-flavored chips, 80 pallets of them,” Rowlett recalls. “I think it was a flop.”
The nonprofit prides itself on how quickly and efficiently it can take donations. That’s why it has seen such growth, Rowlett said. He personally answers the donation hotline 24/7—sometimes at 1:00 in the morning—and dispatches the organization’s five trucks to pick up waiting food. “When they call, we’re there. We get it off their dock so they can feel good about it and continue working,” he said.
To Rowlett, Birch has always been “a microcosm of the rest of the food industry.” The unwanted products that come into the warehouse offer a window into what’s selling, what’s not, and where the biggest sources of waste are. This past year, that included fruits and vegetables, dairy products, and baked goods, Rowlett said. Plant-based dairy and meats were also in over-supply—and they aren’t popular with most of the shopping families.
To further cut down on what goes to the landfill, Birch donates spoiled produce to more than 20 livestock and compost farmers. The organization recycles cardboard, cans, pallets, and metal. It has also worked over the years to expand the number of families and diversify the type of nonprofits it works with. Still, there is waste left over. After several months spent working it the warehouse, it has become clear to me that Birch cannot do it alone; the manufacturing and distribution sectors must change to reduce food and plastic waste before food reaches families like ours.
Drowning in Debt, Paying it Back
My family is new to Birch, so we’re not yet financially stable. But the program appears to work for those who stick to their financial goals. Take Sara and Ray Hurst of Woodland, Washington. They worked long hours—one as a cosmetologist, the other as a construction worker—and their toddler had special needs requiring countless specialists. Ray’s work was seasonal, making it difficult to budget, and the unpaid bills began to stack up. And yet their income didn’t qualify them for food assistance either.
“We starved in winter and thrived in summer, and we were poor money managers,” Hurst told me. “We were drowning in debt.”
When they joined Birch four years ago the Hursts finally stopped worrying about food. As their cupboards filled up, they could focus on paying down their debt. Since then, Hurst and her husband say they have paid back $31,000 in credit card, personal, medical, and family debts. They bought two used cars and put all their bills on auto-pay for the first time. They were even able to “live a little,” buying new clothes for their three children and ordering pizza and donuts on special occasions.
“I never knew much about money,” said Hurst. “Birch is great about food, but the financial education aspect is even better. Having the support makes all the difference.”
Their story is not atypical. According to Rippey, most families who join Birch eliminate $10,000–$40,000 of debt within the first few years and accumulate significant savings. They’re able to pay cash for emergency expenses and many are able to send their children to college debt-free.
Hurst no longer worries about not having enough food, and she’s confident that sense of security will remain even once she leaves Birch. “With the new tools I’ve learned, plus my budget shopping skills, our family will be ok,” she said.
Wanting Less, Wasting Less
Birch families also often undergo a personal transformation when it comes to food waste. Unlike at many food pantries, where clients receive a pre-packed box of food, Birch shoppers get 50 minutes to shop—though what’s available at the warehouse varies widely from week to week and day to day. Sometimes, there are 20 different varieties and flavors of yogurt. At other times there’s no yogurt at all. Some produce is incredibly fresh, some is overripe. Staples such as white flour and tomato sauce are hard to come by, meaning creativity is sometimes required to make a meal.
Still, the sheer array of goods at the warehouse is dizzying, including many organic, high-end, and novelty products that cost top dollar at the grocery store. There are snacks, hot sauces, ice creams, and teas galore. Limits on some items—”one box per family,” or “choose two different items from specialty shelf”—ensure that less abundant products get shared equitably. Everything else is unlimited. Shopping is done on an honor system—families promise not to sell the food or give it away outside the household—and there is no checkout counter or cash register.
Every year, new families calculate the retail value of all the items they receive during one month of shopping at Birch, as if they had purchased them at the grocery store. On average, that value is about $1,000. It’s a significant amount, but that number also exposes a flaw of the Birch program, or rather a flaw of human nature—yet it’s one that over time can turn into a strength.
The incredible abundance of goods at the warehouse can be overwhelming at first, making it difficult not to take home more than you need. During our first few months at Birch, we certainly took a lot more than we ever would have if we were shopping at a store and paying for it all. After becoming Birch members, as our pantry and fridge filled to the brim, I kept asking myself, “Do we really need quite so many boxes of organic quinoa, slabs of grass-fed butter, and boxes of artisanal crackers?!”
I felt incredibly grateful for being able to bring these products home and proud for rescuing them from the landfill. Yet, I also worried we were learning to want too much. I fretted that we were contributing to our planet’s waste problem by consuming too many fancy organic foods—pistachios, almond flour, apricots. It was like being invited to an all-you-can-eat buffet and overeating every single time.
Suzanne Birch told me most families struggle with this impulse—at least at first. The program doesn’t want to control what people take, she said, especially as many come to Birch after significant hardships. “When you have gone without for a long time, it’s hard to pass it by,” she adds.
But here is the beauty of Birch: Its financial literacy program also teaches participants how to spend less, consume less, and want less in order to reach freedom from debt. At the grocery store, people usually think about whether they can afford to buy something. At Birch, they start thinking: Is this the best choice for my family? Do we really need it? It took time, self-reflection, and a determined mouse who started nibbling at our pantry’s overflowing provisions to help us realize we did not need to take it all.
Making Birch More Diverse
Suzanne Birch says the nonprofit still has work to do to improve its program. At the top of the list is making Birch more diverse and culturally responsive, especially given that food insecurity and financial instability are more rampant in immigrant communities and communities of color. Currently, less than 1 percent of Birch participants are Black, 1 percent are Asian, and just 6 percent are Latinx (in a county where 6 percent of the population is Black, 12 percent is Latinx, and 8 percent is Asian). Also, the nonprofit is located on the edge of Rockwood, one of Oregon’s most diverse neighborhoods where Latinx people make up one third of the population, making it imperative to widen access.
Since Birch isn’t just a food pantry, communication for non-English speakers is a major challenge, Suzanne Birch said. In the past, the nonprofit employed translators, but the results were awkward and inefficient. Within the next 10 years, she said, Birch plans to hire a Spanish-speaking financial counselor and other multilingual staff, and to translate its written curriculum to better serve more diverse families.
“Many local Spanish speakers fit into our target demographic,” said Birch. “And we ultimately don’t want language to be a limiting factor of who can receive our services.”
With the holiday season upon us and so many still struggling with food insecurity, I have often wondered why there aren’t more nonprofits like Birch. It’s easier to hand out a food box than to accompany someone for a few years as they attempt to make a significant life change, Rowlett, the warehouse manager, told me. But when you do, the results are lasting.
“We’re not just here moving boxes,” he said. “We’re supporting families as they go through tough times. When someone comes into the program, the moment they can finally breathe and see a path forward . . . watching that transformation unfold is worth it.”
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]]>The post In ‘Required Reading,’ Indigenous Leaders Call for Landback Reforms and Climate Justice appeared first on Civil Eats.
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As the world watches what transpires at COP26, the United Nations climate summit taking place this week in Glasgow, the U.N. has blasted governments and businesses for utterly failing to meet their climate obligations. There’s a sense that time is running out and radical change is the only hope–including a sweeping transformation of industrial agricultural practices to more sustainable and regenerative ones.
At the same time, Indigenous peoples from the U.S. and from across the globe are converging in Scotland to talk about the climate impacts on their communities and to advocate for their own solutions–ones they have successfully used to manage land for millennia. And on the brink of crisis, people may finally be willing to listen.
The new book, Required Reading: Climate Justice, Adaptation + Investing in Indigenous Power, can serve as a practical guide to this movement—during COP26 and after. It was curated and produced by the NDN Collective, a national organization based in South Dakota. It’s a handbook for grassroots advocates, Indigenous leaders, and mainstream politicians on how to support Indigenous communities and their allies in healing our planet and moving forward to a post-oil future.
The book features in-depth essays and analytical pieces on topics ranging from the growing LANDBACK movement to return Indigenous lands to the impacts of lithium extraction in the Andean Altiplano and the critique of mainstream environmentalists’ rigidity when addressing climate change.
Civil Eats recently spoke with Kailea Frederick, NDN Collective’s climate justice organizer and the book’s editor; Jade Begay, the group’s director of climate justice; and Demetrius Johnson, NDN’s LANDBACK campaign organizer, about the power of kelp farming, the problems with carbon markets, and why climate solutions don’t need to be “scalable.”
Frederick, Begay, and Johnson are currently in Scotland as part of NDN Collective’s COP26 delegation and have been handing the book out to U.S. governmental officials, policymakers, and world leaders there this week.
Before we get into the essays in Required Reading, can you talk about what the NDN Collective is and its role in the climate justice movement?
Jade Begay: We are an Indigenous-led collective that aims to build Indigenous power through advocacy and philanthropy. Our work in philanthropy isn’t just about doing granting and sharing resources, it’s about intentionally organizing within philanthropy. Indigenous communities receive just 0.4 percent of all philanthropic dollars in the U.S. [although they represent 2 percent of the population]. When we do the math and we acknowledge that Indigenous peoples protect and sustain 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, it makes zero sense that we receive a smidgen of the resources, especially in investment into nonprofits and frontline environmental organizations. So our collective builds strategies to dismantle white supremacy within philanthropy so we can remove barriers and gatekeeping in that sector.
NDN Collective also has a subsidiary for-profit [NDN Partners], where we do community development and support tribes and Indigenous entrepreneurs who are building regenerative, renewable solutions to combat racial injustice and climate injustice. And we have an impact and investing arm, which does similar work to help finance projects that are really meant to move our communities into the realm of building regenerative economies and local systems to address deep-seated inequities. Our advocacy arm houses four campaigns: climate justice, LANDBACK, racial equity, and education equity.
Kailea Frederick: Our climate justice campaign has the same goal as the collective: We’re trying to build power throughout Indigenous communities to tackle the climate crisis. We run and support campaigns aimed at ending extraction, contamination, and violence because these three are closely interlinked and very prevalent on our land and our territories. We also do policy work, broader coalition building, and advocacy.
One of the main messaging points in our book is that Indigenous peoples hold climate solutions inherently through our cultures and through our land-based practices, which we have not lost touch with. That’s a direct bridge to our LANDBACK campaign work because returning land back to Indigenous peoples is a core part of climate mitigation work. We need land returned in large quantities at this moment so that Indigenous peoples can be in direct conversation with the land and engaged in their traditional practices, which inherently mitigate climate change.
More Americans are becoming aware that they’re living on land that was taken by white settlers who exterminated many of the original Indigenous inhabitants. Your LANDBACK campaign is a direct response to these injustices. Can you talk about that work and why it’s so important?
Demetrius Johnson: Our LANDBACK campaign focuses on making sure that before we help grow other people’s gardens, we can take care of our own. We need to understand that public land is stolen land. We’re talking about national parks, national forests, and other wild areas that are now areas of recreation but once were [Indigenous] lands, which we took care of. We’re now focused on reclaiming these public lands, which are under the control of the federal government. One of our most important works currently is reclaiming the Black Hills, which are located near Mni Lúzahaŋ Otȟúŋwahe, or Rapid City, South Dakota.
That’s where Indigenous activists protested stolen land and white supremacy
and were arrested last summer when Donald Trump visited Mount Rushmore National Memorial. What is the significance of the Black Hills?
Johnson: The Black Hills protest is where the seed of our LANDBACK campaign sprouted from. But the narrative of LANDBACK didn’t start there. Its history goes back to the time of our people resisting colonization, resisting invading governments. More recently, the term was popularized by a group of Indigenous youth who started making memes and it caught on. Everyone can make it their own and I think that’s why it’s a very powerful campaign and movement. It can be used domestically in the United States, but it can also be used internationally.
LANDBACK also directly connects with the issue of climate. For Indigenous peoples to survive, we need to have a connection to the land. When you steal land from us, you’re literally killing us, you’re committing acts of genocide. What happens to the land happens to us. And this violence has been happening since the arrival of settlers. We also need to understand that Indigenous peoples hold the keys to saving the world, and that’s not hyperbole. Within the last few decades, we’ve seen an increase in wildfires, droughts, and floods in places that were previously protected by Indigenous peoples. What we are seeing now is a direct result of taking land away from people who loved it and putting it into the hands of people who use it for profit.
Even today, when we try to protect our sacred sites, when we try to protect our land and water, the military and police come after us, arrest us, even kill us. So, as part of the LANDBACK movement, we have to take a stance on militarism, incarceration, and capitalism—because they are all related and all of them actively kill our people.
The book amplifies an array of Native solutions to the climate crisis and the fact that Indigenous people are in the unique position to develop them. Can you share some examples of solutions happening across the country?
Frederick: Jade is a board member of Native Conservancy, an Eyak-led organization based in Alaska that’s working to empower the Indigenous community through kelp farming and other projects. Kelp farming is a huge opportunity for emission drawdown across our oceans and Native Conservancy is doing incredible work in this area.
Begay: The executive director and founder of Native Conservancy, Dune Lankard, created the first Native-led and Native-owned land trust. Ever since, it has been responsible for protecting large swaths of land—and not just putting it under Indigenous peoples’ management, but actually taking it in a very brave new direction by moving those lands out of the corporate model. Unlike federally recognized tribes in the so-called U.S., where tribal councils run sovereign governments on reservations, Alaskan Natives are required to organize as corporations under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA).
There’s a big effort now for Alaska Natives to pull out of these corporate systems. Dune not only pulled land from the authority of non-Native folks, but has made sure that it’s also not incorporated. It’s fully managed by a non-capitalist entity.
NDN Collective has recently joined as a partner in Native Conservancy’s work to scale up a regenerative local economy rooted in the traditional knowledge and wisdom of the Eyak people. It is focused on enhancing and revitalizing the relationship between the fish and the kelp. Their endeavor is to build an economic model of farming kelp that not only cleans the ocean and helps remove carbon dioxide but can also serve as a food, fuel, and infrastructure source. It’s a great example of taking land back and having a plan to go with it to revitalize community and culture. And although the Eyak community has lost all of its Indigenous speakers, by working with the land and doing cultural work there’s an effort to bring the language back.
That’s a great example of a solution that not only tackles climate change but also strengthens the Indigenous community.
Begay: What sets NDN Collective apart from other organizations is that we’re able to invest in these types of models and in Indigenous leadership. Take the work we’re supporting with a buffalo sanctuary in South Dakota. [Sixty buffalo were released on the Wolakota Buffalo Range and Wildlife Sanctuary, 28,000 acres of grasslands where the Rosebud Sioux Tribe plans to raise up to 1,500 bison to revitalize the land and the tribe’s cultural connections to the buffalo.] That’s holistic systems change work. We need all communities to see these models and ask how can they adapt them. We want to encourage our communities to think about these type of approaches that can really shift the systems have been exploiting us and making us sick.
The essays in the book discuss the importance of localized projects. How do you reach a balance between doing local work and sharing solutions among tribes and outside Indigenous communities so that the projects and their impacts are scalable and have more impact?
Begay: This word “scalable” is one I hear all the time in the climate space, and I really have to turn this word on its own head and reframe it. Because we don’t need scale. The term “scalable” is rooted in capitalism. And what we’re needing right now is anti-capitalist solutions to the climate crisis. When we show up in spaces like COP26, “scalable solutions” is what the majority of industry, tech, and governments are trying to do. It’s a buzzword. What we do is look at solutions in terms of an Indigenous community, nation, or tribe. Each of these communities has its own traditional ecological knowledge to inform its own solutions. We’re not interested in blanket solutions that are meant to keep production or consumption going at the rate that it has been going at.
Things will be changing so rapidly that we need to have regions and local communities adapt in the ways that make sense to those ecosystems, and it’s not going to look the same for everyone. So we’re welcoming, encouraging and leaning into these local, regenerative solutions that really honor the biodiversity of our people and our communities.
Frederick: The reality is we are heading into a post-oil future, one that must move at a much slower pace and will involve smaller lives. But it will also involve the possibility of more enriching lives. One thing that our campaign asks is: What if the best times are ahead of us, while simultaneously asking what does the post-oil world look like? We’re looking to bring forward ideas and models of a different way of engaging in day-to-day life and very different ideas of what success looks and feels like. We just can’t get around the fact that we need to move away from fossil fuels.
The opportunity comes through inviting as many people as possible across as many diverse communities, regions, and geographies as possible to be sitting with a question of what does a local, regenerative economy look like in their own communities.
Can you speak to the barriers for Indigenous communities across the country in implementing their own climate solutions?
Begay: It’s systemic racism in all aspects of [preventing us from] being self-determining. When it comes to a just transition away from fossil fuels, one of the biggest barriers is resources. A just transition towards renewable energy will, I hope, ensure that regenerative and sustainable economies are a part of our lifeways and of how we move in the future. The reality is that a lot of our communities and tribal economies are dependent on fossil fuels right now, which is unsustainable. This drives up climate change, but it also makes us vulnerable. If there’s a pipeline leak or the closure of a mine or a refinery—whatever that tribe or community is dependent on— it devastates that community. So it’s also about recognizing that removing ourselves as dependent on or reducing the dependency on fossil fuels also protects us from future catastrophes.
One of the essays in the book heavily criticizes so-called “nature-based solutions.” These include carbon markets that rely on crops or trees to sequester carbon. Can you talk about why regenerative agriculture, reforestation, and carbon markets can be misguided, and what the alternatives are?
Frederick: There are quite a few issues when it comes to carbon trading. One of the biggest ones is that it allows governments and companies to continue polluting and emitting. Actual solutions are pretty simple. We need to stop emitting at the scale we’re emitting at and we need to do drawdown. Another problem is that carbon trading can lead to continued colonization and land dispossession of Indigenous peoples, including land grabbing that’s happening as different companies are trying to buy up their credits. Then there are issues around companies or governments double-counting their emission reductions so it looks like they’re reducing more emissions than they actually are.
Begay: We should be concerned when companies like Nestlé are promoting “nature-based solutions.” It should be a big red flag that the companies and industries that have blood on their hands, that have been human rights violators for decades, are now promoting these types of solutions. “Nature-based solutions” are greenwashing. It’s just a tool to continue business as usual. And as these companies take land—yes, this is a Land Back issue—to do so-called reforestation or tree planting, they are displacing Indigenous peoples, especially in the Global South. It’s complex, and we also acknowledge that some Indigenous communities have promoted “nature-based solutions.” But we also know some of these communities are put between a rock and a hard place; it’s about their livelihoods and putting food on the table—or not. And so they’re forced into these decisions, compelled to join false solutions or to work with the oil industry. We want to build the conditions in which those are not the only options for Indigenous communities across the world.
Johnson: When we’re talking about regenerative economies, we’re ultimately talking about caretaking economies: how to take care of the land and take care of each other. And that’s something that we don’t have here in the U.S. Indigenous peoples understand that you don’t just take care of your nuclear family, but that we have responsibilities to the land and to our community. I’m not totally opposed to farmers getting compensated for drawing down carbon. But there needs to be a broader approach to regeneration: a systemic change for people to have their needs met, to have healthcare, electricity, enough food to eat, and the ability to access transportation. We don’t live in an era of scarcity; that’s a myth.
One of the essays in the book mentions that the climate justice movement will require serious commitments from white allies. How can non-Indigenous allies support Indigenous climate solutions, including NDN’s campaigns?
Johnson: We are establishing toolkits and resources to direct people on how to give land back, specifically spelling out what that process looks like. I’m also personally excited for a collaboration with Nuns & Nones. It’s a group of nuns nationwide that’s working on issues of social and climate justice. And these nuns are shifting resources and land from the church back into Indigenous communities. Finally, we’re writing to legislators and making presentations to our local tribal governments. Getting land back is going to take a lot of different avenues, a lot of different specialties and people to make it happen.
Frederick: Our climate justice campaign this year published a memo that we sent out to various offices within the White House and to Congress, titled “Mobilizing climate and environmental justice investments to Indigenous frontline communities.” And that’s one aspect we really need. We need support in terms of building out the infrastructure to move funding equitably and through a lens of justice.
This question also made me think of a meme I’ve seen circulating, a quote that resonates with me as someone who is half Black. It’s something like: “Slavery needs to be taught not as Black history but as white history.” This is a critical reframe. This work of advocating for Indigenous rights within the Indigenous led climate justice movement is often seen as only an Indigenous issue. When in fact, what we’re trying to do is create a planet that’s going to be just and habitable for everyone. That’s why it’s so important that colonization be taught globally not as the history of Indigenous peoples, but also as the history of those who come from the lineages of the colonizers.
I have quite a few friends who are direct descendants of original colonizers of North America. These are people whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, started a colony, or got down on one knee with the flag and said, “This land is now mine.” And they have been some of the most important relationships I’ve built and tended to over the last six or seven years of my life. Mostly because the friends that come from these lineages are willing to actually be honest about who they come from and what resources they have inherited and are currently holding. Some of the work they’re doing is just so critical. They’re the first in their lineage who understand the responsibility they hold to redistribute resources that were made off the backs of my mother’s people and off the land of my father’s people. They understand it doesn’t belong to them anymore and that a big part of showing up honestly in this world right now is starting to redistribute those resources.
Oftentimes, people reach out to me and say, “I’m the granddaughter of so and so, and I have so much guilt about all of this stuff.” And the one message I have is that it’s time to let go of the land, let go of the money. Brace yourself for what it means to participate in your family’s businesses and board spaces so that you can be an advocate and an active voice in moving funding. This is how you can show active solidarity, not just solidarity through reposting and reading a book.
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]]>The post Climate Anxiety Takes a Growing Toll on Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Nikiko Masumoto grew up revering the peach trees and grape vines on her family’s farm in California’s Central Valley. The orchard and vineyard have been passed down through her Japanese American family for generations and their fruits were the juicy economic engines that fed her community and assured the farm’s survival.
But this year, there’s anguish in the peaceful groves as record-breaking heat waves, air-polluting wildfires, and droughts repeatedly pummel California. Warmer winters and more severe droughts spell poorer fruit sets and smaller fruit. And Masumoto, who returned 10 years ago to farm with her father, author and well-known farmer (and Civil Eats advisory board member) Mas Masumoto, will be responsible for transforming the farming operation so it remains viable into the future. It’s a calculus that likely includes using much less water and replacing some or all of the farm’s beloved peaches and grapes with other crops.
“We will need to adapt, even if it means the painful reality that I might not get to leave this living cathedral of memory—the orchards—to a next generation,” said Masumoto. “If it comes to it, I fear the weight of that grief.”
As climate change-fueled extreme weather events such as storms and droughts become more frequent and intense, farmers and others in the agriculture community across the country are increasingly feeling the brunt and contemplating a dark future. Beyond the inherent stress of farming, they face anxiety, depression, and grief linked to a fast-changing natural environment on which they’ve staked their livelihoods—at a time when few mental health-related resources are available to them.
“The weather has become a more dominant factor in farmers’ stress than it was in times past,” said Mike Rosmann, an Iowa farmer and agricultural psychologist. “We’re seeing more concern. Even the farmers who are climate deniers say spring is coming earlier than it used to or are seeing longer periods without rainfall.”
Farming In the Era of Climate Change
This year is proving to be one more in a series of disastrous years for farmers. Intense heat waves have ravaged the western U.S.—from Washington state to California and Arizona—and most of the region is experiencing extreme or exceptional drought conditions, leading to severe irrigation water restrictions, farmers fallowing fields, and ranchers culling cattle they can no longer feed. Mega-fires across the West have destroyed crops and infrastructure. Drought is also spreading in the Northern Plains and the Midwest, putting key commodity crops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans at risk. And in the Northeast, producers have seen repeated heavy rains this summer, and post-Hurricane Ida flooding imperil crops and food distribution networks.
These ongoing, often long-term disasters are impacting farmers’ well-being, experts say. The farmer crisis hotline run by Farm Aid (1-800-FARM-AID or through an online form) has seen a significant increase in calls related to “natural disasters that are exacerbated if not caused by climate change,” said Jennifer Fahy, the group’s communications director.
For Lori Mercer, a Farm Aid hotline operator, several recent calls come to mind. An older California rancher called to say he had woken up one morning to take care of his livestock—but when he opened up his well, nothing came up but sand. He couldn’t afford the $15,000 to $30,000 it would take to drill a new well, Mercer said.
“The dearth of care is incredible. In farming communities, people just carry on and put their health as the last priority.”
Another call came from the western region of the U.S.: a producer’s entire farm, including his farmhouse and all of his crops, had burned down in a raging wildfire. His plea to the hotline, Mercer said, was elemental: He needed help finding emergency housing. And a more recent call from a farmer in one of the southeastern states devastated by Hurricane Ida revealed another desperate situation: livestock missing and/or killed, crops ruined, all of the fences, the power, and the computer down, and all crops in the freezer and fridge storage spoiled.
“It’s terribly hard for farmers to talk,” said Mercer, who stressed that the calls are fully confidential. “And the calls we get are just the tip of an iceberg. Most don’t reach out because of their streak of independence and pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality.”
Farmers calling the hotline get to vent about their experience to supportive listeners and often get help crafting a plan of action, Mercer said. They receive referrals to local organizations in their county or state that can help them address the crisis on the ground and support them in its aftermath. Farm Aid also links farmers with a slew of resources and sends out $500 emergency checks to help the farmers with bills such as household expenses and food. (It can take up to six months to two years to get help through a relief program, said Mercer.)
But in recent years, in response to mounting calls for help related to the climate, Farm Aid has shifted to organizing workshops that can proactively help farmers address the climate crisis. The workshops focus on how farmers and ranchers can become more resilient to future disasters by implementing sustainable methods of farming such as rotational grazing, soil regeneration, and habitat restoration. Others train farmers on how to document their losses and apply for federal financial relief.
The increase in climate-related disasters and calls for help is also forcing the organization to reframe the very idea of disaster relief, said Fahy, the communications director. In the past, isolated natural disasters motivated giving. But in recent years, getting the public interested in giving money to a group of farmers facing a localized crisis is more challenging, she said, given that such weather events have become “the new normal.”
“How do we raise public awareness and ask for support when the disasters are a constant, ongoing extreme situation?” Fahy said.
Painful Decisions on Family Farms
Climate change is especially stressful for beginning farmers who must find a way to continue farming and remain profitable for decades to come. For Nikiko Masumoto, whose family grows organic peaches, nectarines, and grapes on 80 acres 15 miles southeast of Fresno, the pressure and potential losses are significant. Already, the Masumoto family has pulled some vines and trees to fallow land because of dwindling groundwater reserves and a lack of rain and snow that in the past fed surface water sources. They have reduced their irrigation by 20 to 30 percent, leading to smaller peaches, which are more difficult to sell.
The family is looking at planting more drought-resistant perennial crops such as fig or olive trees—or even annual vegetable or grain crops, Masumoto said. This would be a radical change, but it might be necessary. And as she’s struggling with the weight of the decision, she remembers the resilience of her jiichan (grandfather) who was imprisoned during World War II in a Japanese-American concentration camp and later returned to Central California to buy the farm’s first 40 acres and plant its first crop of peaches.
“Climate change can get depressing,” said Masumoto, “but I think of my ancestors and their incredible will to survive. I have no right to give up now.”
Forty miles west, in Madera, another young farmer contemplates the uncertain future of her farming family. Allie Quady said her family’s winery, which grows some of its own grapes, had to drill a new well this year because the casing of the old one was broken and it was pulling up sand. And because the water table had dropped significantly—10 feet per year for the past seven years, compared to only 10 feet over a 20-year span prior to that—the new well had to go in much deeper, said Quady, the winery’s health, safety, and organization manager.
It has taken three months for Quady Winery to get its new well because hundreds of other wells in Madera County have also needed replacement. The county’s aquifer is vastly over-drafted by farmers, some of whom rely entirely on groundwater that is not being replenished due to long-term drought. The Quady family’s yields were much lower as a result, but the grapes were saved, Quady said, thanks to the back-breaking work of the winemaker who went out every day, three times a day, even at temperatures that surpassed 100 degrees to check the drip lines and replace a filter that kept some water flowing.
“It was very stressful . . . to not be able to water the grapes consistently and efficiently,” Quady said. “[They] do die pretty quick if you don’t get the water to them.”
The family is contemplating moving some of its operations to other parts of California, Quady said, although its muscat grapes require heat as well as abundant water, which is scarce everywhere in the state. If the water runs out, Quady also worries about the livelihood of the area farmers who sell grapes to her family.
“We’re tied to the local community of growers,” Quady said. “We all rise and fall together.”
Diminishing Mental Health Stigma in Farm Country
Small- and mid-scale farmers and ranchers have long experienced high levels of stress and anxiety. They can’t control prices or trade policies, and many have faced increasing debt levels and diminishing incomes.
Farmers are also known for their grit, self-reliance, and perseverance, despite holding down one of the most dangerous occupations. They’re used to working alone, in far-flung isolated areas. They also are among the occupational groups with the highest rate of suicide. But, experts say, climate change is challenging the very nature of farming—and causing farmers even greater emotional distress—because the job engages directly with the shifting forces of nature.
And yet, the stigma of seeking help in rural communities remains real, said Fahy. “Everyone knows everyone and knows that’s your truck parked in the therapist’s parking lot,” she said. And many farmers continue to lack access to care. In some Iowa counties, for example, there’s one professional mental health care provider for roughly every 12,000 residents. Another barrier is the lack of therapists, behavioral health care professionals, and extension specialists who actually understand the nature of farming. And even when enough trained providers are available, farmers often lack the health insurance to cover care expenses, Fahy said.
“The dearth of care is incredible,” she said. “In farming communities, people just carry on and put their health as the last priority.” But, Fahy added, there’s growing willingness in recent years to acknowledge the stress farmers face and services are expanding rapidly in states including Illinois, Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire.
The shift toward more services and increased openness in the farming population are partly due to a transition to the term “behavioral health,” which carries less stigma than mental health, said Rosmann, the agricultural psychologist. “Farm stress” is also commonly used.
“We once thought it was sacred, but depression is now viewed more like diabetes, it’s something we have to accept and manage,” Rosmann said.
“I think the time is coming where the understanding of how we manage our behavior is a central factor in our success as farmers.”
To improve access to behavioral health among farmers, Rosmann said the federal government should establish a permanent program—and permanent funding—similar to the AgrAbility program that supports disabled farmers or programs that support veteran farmers. Currently, the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) grant program, established in 2008 and run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, is up for reauthorization in the farm bill every five years. The grants fund hotlines, training and workshops, support groups, and outreach services. Last year, NIFA awarded $28.7 million to four regional entities and funded additional Farm Aid hotline operators and expanded hotline hours, among other services.
More research and academic training is also needed, including support for agricultural behavioral programs that are just getting established, said Rosmann, who is working on the first textbook in the field. Behavioral skills—including coping with stress, establishing a support network, curbing substance abuse, or effectively managing family relationships and employees—also need to be taught in agricultural and vocational programs, he added.
“I think the time is coming where the understanding of how we manage our behavior is a central factor in our success as farmers,” Rosmann said.
Farmers who are bearing the burden of climate change should also consider modifying their farming practices if the current ones no longer work, he added. Research has shown that farmers’ job satisfaction—and hence their emotional well-being—is often higher when they employ more sustainable, non-extractive practices, Rosmann said. In one study, done in Iowa in the 1990s, researchers from Iowa State University found that sustainable farmers reported “improved physical health, reduced job stress, more challenging and satisfying work activities, and more satisfying family and community relations”—all potential boons to their mental health.
“When you feel you are farming in a way that benefits consumers and sustains the resources needed to farm, you feel satisfaction. And satisfaction is more important than money,” Rosmann said. “It’s hard to change, but if farmers don’t, they’re going to lose out.”
Agricultural Community Feels Weight of Desperation
Matt Angell, a well fixer in Madera, knows first-hand that a farming community is more than just its farmers—and that climate change is also causing distress to everyone who supports agriculture. In recent years, an unprecedented number of well drillers, pump service people, and water district officials—who are under constant, intense pressure to keep agricultural wells running—have suffered heart attacks and strokes, said Angell, the owner of Madera Pumps. During the 2012–2016 mega-drought, Angell was diagnosed with diabetes because, he said, he ate dozens of donuts every day to keep up his energy and smother the incredible stress.
“We’re going after deeper water, and as we go deeper, the aquifers aren’t as strong. Tier 3 drilling is coming. It’s kind of like Stage 4 cancer; it’s terminal.”
Homeowners in agricultural areas are also facing extreme stress levels, Angell said. In counties like Madera, where more than 720,000 acres—representing more than half of the county’s land—are harvested and many people live near the fields, home wells are going dry as the farmers dig increasingly deeper ones in a race to suck water out of the dwindling aquifer. Those homeowners, just like the farmers, also call well fixers for help. Often, the farmers and homeowners are the well fixers’ family and friends.
“We’re a community. People are connected with one another. And when wells start to fail, people reach out in desperation. Desperation then turns to fear and anger,” Angell said, emotions that everyone in a farming town must face just about daily during the drought.
This year, Angell said, he is seeing an unprecedented number of wells drilled during the previous drought broken, their steel casings crushed by subsidence. And because the water table has dropped down further than Angell has ever seen, new wells must now be drilled even deeper to hit water. This is likely the third and final round of drilling before well fixers hit granite and/or water that’s too salty to irrigate crops, said Angell. And it could spell a decline of the community he calls home.
“We’re going after deeper water, and as we go deeper, the aquifers aren’t as strong,” Angell said. “Tier 3 drilling is coming. It’s kind of like Stage 4 cancer; it’s terminal.”
Angell is concerned that the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, which was signed into law in 2014 and requires addressing the groundwater overdraft by the early 2040’s, won’t make a difference in time to save the aquifer or its farming community. He said most farmers he works with—despite the deep anxiety they feel about the drought—are unwilling to change their practices. And it’s probable, he said, that unless they soon pull some trees and fallow land, the aquifer will continue to disappear.
“We’re not trying to solve the problem, we’re just kicking the can down the road,” he said. “Everybody’s in denial.”
Quady agrees. She says for now, the race is on as to which farmer can dig the deepest well—which causes anxiety to the small and mid-size farmers who will likely lose out in that race. “I feel a lot of frustration because if everybody would recognize the problem, we could find solutions,” she said.
Mental Health Resources
If you or someone you know needs immediate mental health support, there are a number of national hotlines available:
- Farm Aid Hotline: 800-FARM-AID (327-6243) Monday-Friday 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. ET
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-TALK (8255) 24/7
- 211, a comprehensive hotline that connects callers with local resources
- 911 in an emergency
The Rural Health Information Hub also maintains a detailed page dedicated to farmer mental health and suicide prevention.
The post Climate Anxiety Takes a Growing Toll on Farmers appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Is the Future of Big Dairy Regenerative? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Fourth-generation Kansas dairy farmer Ken McCarty is all in on regenerative agriculture. He’s planted cover crops, reduced tillage, and fosters biodiversity by creating wetlands and planting trees on the land where he grows the crops that feed his animals.
“We’re young and we’ve really staked our future livelihoods on these regions and their resources sustaining us for the next 20, 50, 100 years,” McCarty told Civil Eats. “Taking care of the assets that sustain you simply makes economic sense. And there’s a moral obligation . . . regenerative agriculture is the right thing to do.”
And yet, unlike many of the regenerative farmers who have been in in the spotlight in recent years, McCarty isn’t a small- or medium-scale farmer. His is one of two conventional operations that make up the MVP Dairy partnership, a company that owns a total 26,000 cows, including 13,000 milking cows, holds all its cows in barns, and grows grain—predominantly corn—on approximately 9,500 acres in two states.
Three years ago, MVP Dairy joined a new regenerative dairy program sponsored by Danone North America, the company behind Dannon yogurt and Horizon organic milk. Danone’s program has allowed the farmers to measure the impacts of their practices, further refine them, and publicly talk about improving soil health, a chief goal of regenerative agriculture, said McCarty.
Ken McCarty of MVP Dairy.
And dairy farms like his may be the future of regenerative ag—a fact that could signal an important transformation to a struggling, often controversial industry.
Danone, General Mills (maker of Yoplait yogurt and Häagen-Dazs ice cream, among other big dairy brands), and yogurt maker Stonyfield have all recently launched soil health programs specifically aimed at dairy producers. The voluntary programs, which offer training, tech support, and financial assistance, are seen as key to transforming dairy farms—a major source of emissions—into “carbon sinks,” allowing Big Food companies to reduce their carbon footprints and open up new avenues to market their products.
And they’re coming at a time when many dairy operations are struggling, milk consumption continues to decrease, and the market share for plant-based milks has been on the upswing, leading the dairy industry to focus on other products (cheese and yogurt consumption is up, for instance).
“There’s a moral obligation . . . regenerative agriculture is the right thing to do.”
“Food companies have a tremendous amount of influence on their farmers. So if they are actively promoting these practices, that speaks volumes to the farmers,” said Allen Williams, a co-founder of regenerative agriculture consulting firm Understanding Ag and the Soil Health Academy coach hired by General Mills. “It signals to them that companies are getting serious about regenerative agriculture and maybe the farmers should, too . . . otherwise they won’t want to buy from them. It’s an impetus that can help drive this movement more rapidly.”
But it remains unclear whether regenerative agriculture can actually deliver on its promises of significantly reducing emissions and helping to reverse climate change. And while experts say it’s possible that corporate dairy programs can help accelerate the transition to regenerative production, they also take issue with large confinement-based dairies like McCarty’s entering the fray.
At a time when a number of multinational food corporations are working to control the narrative around concepts like sustainability and agroecology, these dairy companies will also help define how consumers see the term regenerative in the years to come—a vision that includes some sustainable practices but works to ultimately preserve an industrial food system.
“It should be clear and transparent what companies are doing along that [regenerative] spectrum so that it does not mislead people to think that they’re doing more than they are,” said Urvashi Rangan, co-chair at Funders for Regenerative Agriculture (FORA), a national initiative of funders and investors.
Conventional, Organic Dairies Welcomed
Over the past decade, as regenerative agriculture has exploded from a niche movement to a global sustainability trend focused on combating climate change through carbon sequestration, Big Food companies have been jockeying for a place on the stage. Myriad agribusiness giants—from Cargill to PepsiCo and Nestlé—have made public commitments to help finance farmers’ adoption of regenerative practices. The world’s largest retailer Walmart, Bayer, and even fashion brands have also joined in. Locking carbon in farmland is also a key piece of President Biden’s plan to combat the climate crisis, as the administration works to support an agricultural “carbon market.”
Much of the interest and support has focused on crop farmers, but dairy farms may be the new frontier in part because their operations have a sizable carbon footprint.
Agriculture contributes about 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and dairy farms are an important source, due to both livestock and crop cultivation. As they digest food, cows constantly belch methane, a greenhouse gas that is nearly 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And their manure is a significant source of methane and nitrous oxide—a gas with 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. And the feed crops such as corn, alfalfa, and soy are typically grown using practices that lead to the use of massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides, also significant sources of emissions.
The new regenerative dairy programs include a small number of farms for now, though they already encompass thousands of cows and tens of thousands of acres of farmland focused on growing animal feed. Danone, which four years ago became the first to launch such a program, is now supporting the transition to regenerative practices on 80,000 acres managed by 34 dairy farms. Twenty of those farms are conventional dairies that together manage 52,000 acres of land; the rest of the land is managed by 14 organic farms, members of Horizon Organic, the largest supplier of organic milk in North America.
Danone—which buys milk in the U.S. directly from approximately 700 farms, more than 600 of them organic)—considers dairy farmers key to slashing its emissions in half by 2030 and to becoming net zero by 2050. Its brand, Horizon, intends to become the first carbon positive dairy brand by 2025.
“Nearly two-thirds of our corporate footprint is tied to our upstream agriculture sources. So regenerative practices are a critical opportunity for us . . . to reduce our carbon overall,” said Deanna Bratter, Danone’s head of sustainable development.
Stonyfield Organic is also betting on regenerative practices to help it cut emissions by 30 percent by 2030. It launched a pilot program with five dairies in 2020 and has since expanded to include 10 of the milk producers it works with in the Northeast. The pilot includes more than 5,000 acres—mostly pasture and hay land. Though Stonyfield has not adopted a specific definition of regenerative agriculture and says its program is focused on managing climate change and going beyond the federal organic standards, the company is helping dairies improve soil health and other ecosystem services.
“We’re hoping to get climate benefits and increased carbon sequestration,” said Britt Lundgren, director of organic and sustainable agriculture at Stonyfield. And she said that dairy farmers also get soil that is more resilient in the face of flooding and drought, higher yields, and they end up spending less on inputs like fertilizers. “Regenerative agriculture can potentially impact their bottom line,” added Lundgren.
Also small in number for now, the new regenerative dairy programs encompass thousands of cows and tens of thousands of acres of land growing animal feed.
General Mills, which buys its milk from dairy suppliers and co-ops, not directly from farms, launched the most recent regenerative pilot program last year with three dairies in Michigan’s Great Lakes region. This year, the company added six more dairies, for a total of 17,000 acres in the pilot. The company already runs two other regenerative pilot programs for oat growers in North Dakota and Canada and wheat growers in Kansas. The company says the three programs are part of its commitment to advance regenerative agriculture on 1 million acres of farmland by 2030, at which point General Mills hopes to reduce its absolute greenhouse gas emissions across its full value chain by 30 percent (compared to 2020). The company hopes to achieve net zero by 2050.
Although Stonyfield intends to pay dairy operators to take up regenerative practices, Danone and General Mills are offering other forms of support instead. The promise of higher profits and opportunity to get a foot in the door in the regenerative supply chain—for products that will don regenerative labels in the future—also draw farmers in. However, because most farmers don’t see a return on investment for around four years, said Nicholas Camu, vice president of agriculture at Danone, “what we try to do is bridge those four years financially.”
Giving Farmers the Tools to Make the Transition
The three companies’ regenerative dairy programs have different focal points and approaches. Danone’s main focus is on helping farmers assess their practices, providing on-farm support, and unlocking financial resources to cushion the transition. When a dairy farm joins Danone’s program, it undergoes a full farm audit using the Cool Farm Tool, an online greenhouse gas, water, and biodiversity calculator. The assessment offers an accounting of the farm’s CO2 footprint and helps farmers develop action plans by showing how their fields would respond to specific practices. Then, each farmer receives an improvement plan with a list of best practices and a baseline for monitoring progress, including soil carbon, biodiversity, water retention, and animal welfare.
The Danone dairies use a Return on Investment calculator to assess the financial impacts of the regenerative changes each farmer plans to implement. The tool was developed in collaboration with Kansas State University and Sustainable Environmental Consultants and their management platform EcoPractices, a third party that’s working closely with the dairies in the regen program. In addition, the company is helping them connect with new sources of financing to help with the costs associated with changing their practices, including government funding.
In the case of its Horizon dairies, Danone has established a $15 million Farmer Investment Fund that allows farmers who institute regenerative practices to access low or no-cost loans. But it’s unclear how committed Horizon is to its farmers’ regenerative pursuits: At the end of August, the company announced it would terminate contracts with 89 Northeast organic dairies, effective next year. Danone cited “growing transportation and operational challenges in the dairy industry” as the reason for the terminations and told Civil Eats that it had “onboarded more than 50 producers new to Horizon Organic that better fit our manufacturing footprint.” Vermont Agriculture Secretary Anson Tebbetts told the Associated Press that the company planned to “focus on larger farms in Midwest and West.”
“It’s really important that our farmers don’t feel like the transformation toward regenerative agriculture is a burden,” said Danone’s Bratter. “We’re not just coming with education opportunities, we’re also helping them assess the economic benefits and investments needed. And then we’re working to unlock resources and funding.” Danone has also formed several cross-industry partnerships to advance regenerative agriculture, including One Planet Business for Biodiversity and Farming for Generations.
Stonyfield’s pilot, in its second growing season, is focused on developing the right technology and digital tools to help dairy operators easily integrate regenerative practices and measure outcomes, including improvements to soil health and carbon sequestration. To this end, in 2019 the company helped develop and launch OpenTEAM, a collaborative, open-source agricultural management technology platform for farmers across the world. Its goal is to help farmers enter data, track it, and run agronomics forecasts to improve practices and apply for organic or regenerative certification, incentive programs, or even carbon credit opportunities, said Stonyfield’s Lundgren. And they can regularly measure their own carbon on the farm, without having to send soil samples to the lab.
Testing soil carbon as part of Stonyfield’s regenerative dairy pilot program.
While farms in Stonyfield’s dairy pilot will conduct core sampling and lab testing—an expensive and cumbersome process—the company is also helping to calibrate two new on-farm sampling tools that give instant readings of carbon content. The tools, Quick Carbon and Yard Stick, are both hand-held spectral analysis drills featuring cameras that “read” the soil’s carbon content based on its color. Several Stonyfield dairy operators will take up to 50 samples per farm this season using the drills, and the company plans to compare their readings with lab samples to see which gives the most accurate results, Lundgren said.
“We’re looking for the tools to make it easier to participate,” she said.
General Mills’ approach includes comprehensive group and individual education and one-on-one coaching/technical assistance over a minimum of three years, coupled with a train-the-trainer program that has the potential to expand regenerative practices on a regional scale, well beyond the company’s supply chain.
The company pays Williams, the consulting trainer from Understanding Ag, to work with the dairies. The idea, said Jay Watson, General Mills’ head of sourcing sustainability and regenerative agriculture, is to first help dairy operators understand how a regenerative system works. This includes teaching the principles of soil and ecosystem health and how to restore natural cycles that are broken in the current agricultural system. Based on this knowledge, dairy operators build a management plan that’s unique to their farms.
“Once the dairy producers embrace a different mindset, that’s when we see a greater propensity to try new things,” said Watson.
Because intense education and coaching are expensive and difficult to scale up, Watson said, General Mills plans to keep the number of dairies it brings into its regen program small. But it plans to pay others, such as nonprofits, conservation groups, and crop advisors to train and support hundreds of other dairy operators in their regions. An early example funded by the company is the Sustain our Great Lakes initiative, which seeks to increase the adoption of regenerative agriculture in the Great Lakes region, improve soil heath and water quality, and enrich fish and wildlife habitat.
“We believe we will have a more significant impact on our supply chain if we’re investing in the system around it,” Watson explained by email.
All three companies are also working with the public sector to advance policies and programs to help farmers. Danone, for example, says it advocates for policy changes, including government targets to protect and restore soil health and strong incentives that encourage farmers to adopt regenerative practices. General Mills’ senior agricultural scientist has testified before a U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry about the need for more public research on regenerative agriculture. And Stonyfield recently contributed comments to the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding how the agency could better engage in agriculture that fights climate change.
Can Grain-Based Operations Really Be Regenerative?
Despite all these laudable ideas and plans, some experts say that truly regenerative systems of animal agriculture must be based on pasture, and it is incongruous to consider dairies focused on confinement feeding as regenerative. And while the animals raised on organic dairies must be on pasture for at least 120 days every year, regenerative dairies should go beyond these standards, they say, to rely on year-round, managed (or rotational) grazing as the key to both soil and animal health.
In the case of both the General Mills and Danone pilots, most participants are conventional operations with herd sizes that range from several hundred to several thousand cows held permanently in large barns, with no access to pasture.
“If we’re really going to use regenerative agriculture as a pathway to unlock carbon reductions, we’ve got to … do it in conventional farming systems.”
Both companies say that helping conventional confinement-based operations transition to growing and sourcing grains grown with regenerative practices is crucial. “The reality is that 1 percent of acreage in the U.S. is organic. And so if we’re really going to use regenerative agriculture as a pathway to unlock carbon reductions and transformation of our systems, we’ve got to be willing to take the steps to do it in conventional farming systems,” said Bratter.
Dairy operations holding animals in confinement cannot be considered regenerative, even if they engaged in other beneficial practices, said Randy Jackson, a professor of grassland ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worries that the dairies in these programs will call themselves regenerative without truly accounting for the way they produce feed, the fertilizer and other emissions-intensive inputs for that go into it, and how animals are transported, to name just a few.
“The point of regenerative is that it’s regenerating. There’s got to be more [natural resources] there after you’re done with it, or at least the same amount. But if you’re taking more than you’re leaving behind, it’s still extractive,” said Jackson, who leads a research project called Grassland 2.0 that aims to help Midwestern farmers convert from growing row crops to managing perennial pastures. “Just because they grew some cover crops on the corn they feed the cows, they’re not regenerative. It’s less bad, but still bad.”
But Danone and General Mills both contend that large, conventional dairies can still be regenerative —animal welfare figures prominently in both companies’ regenerative policies.
Danone points to MVP Dairy, the large, multi-state operation mentioned above, as an example. The two-family partnership feeds all its cows in freestall barns featuring misters, fans, sand bedding, and cow brushes. They’re certified and audited for animal welfare. The families have been using a slew of practices in the regenerative playlist for years and the company regularly publishes reports on its sustainability practices.
According to McCarty, one of the big changes the dairy has made since joining Danone’s program, is to focus on conserving the amount of water it draws from the declining Ogallala Aquifer. By further cutting back on tillage and adding more cover cropping, it has reduced a great deal of the erosion and water loss it was seeing before it took those steps. And last year, the dairy secured a low-cost loan through a new partnership between Danone and rePlant Capital to install moisture probes on its cropland. (The financial services firm will invest up to $20 million to support Danone’s farmers in their conversion to regenerative or organic farming.) McCarty said all these changes combined will allow MVP Dairy to save a billion gallons of water over the span of five years.
Stonyfield and Danone’s Horizon Organic farms already focus on grazing—but both companies said there’s room for improvement when it comes to sequestering carbon. Stonyfield’s pilot focuses on improving dairies’ rotational grazing techniques, by rotating animals through a series of smaller paddocks, or pastures. Dairy operators will also bring in an expert to help farmers improve their pastures and seed a greater diversity of perennial plants with improved nutrients, Lundgren said.
“The farms are doing well from a carbon perspective because the land is already in permanent cover, but they also have a lot of room for improvement,” she added.
When Is a Dairy Regenerative?
There’s also the question of when, exactly, a farm becomes regenerative enough that its products can be marketed using that term. Stonyfield doesn’t have plans to use the word “regenerative” on future dairy product labels and both General Mills and Danone declined to specify either way. But multiple General Mills brands, including Annie’s, Cascadian Farm, EPIC, and Muir Glen, already tout the benefits of regenerative agriculture from crop farmers. And Danone has begun to message its “carbon positive” commitment for its Horizon Organic brand on its milk cartons.
“General Mills continuously listens to consumers to . . . identify ways to showcase the ability of agriculture and the food system to be a part of the solution to climate change,” company officials told Civil Eats.
(Photo courtesy of the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment)
Experts point to the potential for green-washing and misleading consumers because Big Food companies’ definitions of regeneration are not uniform, their dairies aren’t required to follow any specific federal standards (as is the case with organic) and the current certifications in the market such as Regenerative Organic Certified or Land to Market are strictly voluntary. (The three companies said they did not plan to ask the dairies in their regen programs to get certified. A single General Mills brand, EPIC Provisions, has one of its meat protein bars certified through Land to Market.) As a result, farmers may adopt one or two practices such as no-till, cover cropping, or grazing management and stop there.
FORA’s Rangan says that shouldn’t be enough to warrant a regenerative product label. “The challenge is that you can’t just check a single box and call yourself regenerative,” she said. “It is a systems approach, a full accounting of everything you’re doing. . . We don’t want people to make claims if they are not fully there yet.”
The companies echoed Rangan’s systems approach vision of regeneration. Danone officials called it “a journey and a process with ultimately the goal is to nourish the land.” Leaders at General Mills described it as “a long-term process of restoring and improving farm ecosystems with cumulative benefits to the environment and economics,” adding that it’s never “done.”
“You can’t just check a single box and call yourself regenerative. It is a systems approach, a full accounting of everything you’re doing.”
But while their visions may align with the regen movement’s highest aspirations, it’s unclear whether or how companies will hold farmers’ feet to the fire if they don’t follow through on the journey. And the companies’ benchmarks for actual carbon sequestered are still in the works. That lack of clarity could create loopholes, much like it has in the past with other marketing terms not backed by regulation.
Both General Mills and Danone emphasize that their pilot programs are focused on measuring outcomes and are non-prescriptive, meaning the dairy producers don’t need to follow specific practices.
For instance, General Mills plans to take soil samples every three years to measure soil health and carbon sequestration, as well as monitor impacts to water quality and usage, animal well-being, farm profitability, and plant, insect and bird biodiversity. Many of the measuring tools and protocols are still in development by the company’s small in-house science team, which is working in collaboration with university researchers and conservation groups, including on a comprehensive insect survey by the Ecdysis Foundation. Beyond such measurements, the pilot relies on modeling.
“We feel very strongly that we need to measure regeneration, otherwise we could mislead,” said General Mills’ Watson.
Danone plans to measures the same metrics as General Mills. The dairies tested soil samples in 2017, over the course of year one, and will retest the soil in 2022. In the meantime, Danone has rolled out a soil health scorecard that serves as a guide in helping the company and its farmers to track progress over time.
Stonyfield also plans to measure the total farm emissions and changes in soil carbon over time. The goal is for its entire dairy supply to be carbon positive by 2030, meaning the dairies will collectively sequester more than they emit, Stonyfield’s Lundgren said.
Both Jackson and Rangan recognized the difficulties large dairy companies face in moving their farmers to regenerative practices. But, they said, companies should not use the term “regenerative agriculture” on their labels until the farmers in their supply chains shift their entire farms to pasture-based, fully regenerative systems.
“It’s going to be confusing for consumers,” said Jackson, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor. “I don’t want to ascribe nefarious motives. But consumers don’t care about such nuance.”
Instead, they both said, companies’ programs should be clear with consumers that their farms are in transition, perhaps by using a certification or label similar to transitional organic.
“What they’re doing carries value . . . and we can’t expect a farm to become regenerative right away,” said Rangan. “But they need to be honest about where they are. When companies make big claims and don’t fulfill them, that’s when the bottom falls out. And once consumers don’t trust regenerative, we won’t be able to turn the tide in agriculture.”
In addition to being transparent about the transition process, companies with regenerative programs should also create strategic plans to incentivize farmers to gradually improve their systems, Rangan said. She cited the new Regenerative Organic Certified label, which features three levels and asks participants to phase in more rigorous practices over time.
“We don’t want companies to come in [into the regenerative agriculture movement] and just sit at the bottom because they can make a buck,” she said.
Early Successes for Farmers, the Environment
Although they’re still new, the programs are seeing early successes, company officials said. Danone says that its dairy operators, now in their fourth season of the program, have thus far planted cover crops on 64 percent of the program acreage and practiced reduced- or no-till techniques on 77 percent of the land. Ninety-three percent of the fields in the program doubled the number of cover crop and cash crop species they grow to promote crop diversity, planted buffer strips, as well as expand wildlife habitats and wildlife boxes.
Danone also says that, to date, its farmers have reduced more than 80,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent and sequestered more than 20,000 tons of carbon through regenerative practices.
As a result, the dairies have reduced soil erosion, improved water retention, and diminished the use of synthetic fertilizers, said Danone’s Camu. They can also now spread manure on fields with less impact to the environment. Some farmers are also changing their crop rotations, or beginning to rotate at all. (Many of the farms were growing corn six to seven years back-to-back on the same acreage, which is detrimental to the soil.)
The main challenge, said Camu, is that implementing regenerative practices takes time and hence requires patience and a certain level of trust–but eventually, the benefits become self-evident.
“In the beginning, we really had to convince our farmers to please join, and today they’re asking us to put more acreage into the program on their farms,” he said.
Peer learning has proved to be one of the most important aspects of the program. Some of the farmers became ambassadors of best practices, and before COVID-19, the company flew participants to farms across the U.S. as well as Belgium, France, and Russia to learn from each other.
“In the beginning, we really had to convince our farmers to please join, and today they’re asking us to put more acreage into the program on their farms.”
General Mills’ dairies are also seeing positive changes in the first year of the dairy pilot, said Understanding Ag’s Williams. All of the dairies in the program have started reducing tillage and experimenting with more complex cover crop mixes, he said. They’re improving their manure management by applying the manure to living plants instead of bare soil. And they’re working to diminish the use of herbicides. Some dairies, which are primarily confined operations, have also started to incorporate grazing on cover crops.
“This is a major, major step forward for most. . . . When you can incorporate regenerative grazing, it rapidly speeds up your soil health progress,” Williams said.
Williams also finds himself encouraging the farmers to stop second-guessing themselves when it comes to breaking with existing industry norms. “We’re there to help with the challenges they face and to ease their fears,” he said. “Because typically, the fear of change can paralyze farmers and they fall back to the same old thing they’ve always been doing.”
Farmers in Stonyfield’s dairy program also praise the support they receive from the company and the access to technology and more efficient record keeping systems.
“We’re getting more stringent and accurate with our data and as a result can measure carbon and organic matter more in-depth and get a broader, better baseline,” said Eric Ziehm, an organic dairy farmer at High Meadows Farm in Hoosick Falls, New York who is part of the OpenTEAM project and in Stonyfield’s direct milk supply program. Ziehm, who grazes 350 cows on 300 acres, said he is experimenting with different cover crops and fine tuning his rotational grazing techniques.
Because changing to a regenerative system takes time, Stonyfield said the company isn’t expecting results from dairies like Ziehm’s for a few years. In 2023, Stonyfield will ask all of its farmers to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving soil health. “By 2025, we’ll hopefully start seeing some real results,” Lundgren said.
Cash Incentive or Intrinsic Motivation?
Scaling up and ensuring continued improvement are two big hurdles for regenerative agriculture. Stonyfield’s Lundgren said her company is planning to develop a cash incentive program to encourage all of its dairies to participate and continue to refine their systems. For now, farms in the pilot are paid $2,000 per year.
“Everybody recognizes the fundamental challenge is scaling this up,” Lundgren said. “It will get harder as we move out to farms that are less savvy in technology, less interested in electronic record keeping, or not as interested in improving their pasture plan or grazing activity. There’s got to be something more to bring them to the table.”
Neither Danone nor General Mills plan to offer their farmers a cash incentive or ingredient premium. Both companies emphasize that the training and tech assistance are much more valuable and, they say, the economic benefits that result from regenerative farming are self-reinforcing.
(Photo courtesy of the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment)
But Lundgren said one of the reasons a financial incentive might be needed to keep a regenerative dairy program on track is the growing popularity of carbon markets for farmers. The markets pay farmers based on the amount of carbon sequestered and then sell carbon credits to companies to offset their emissions. But Stonyfield wants to be able to count the emission reductions dairy operators make toward its own emission reduction goals (they can’t be counted twice), and hopes that a cash incentive will keep them from trying to enter the market themselves.
“For now we hope that we are providing farms with enough support and incentives that they don’t also need to participate in external carbon markets,” she said. But if the price for carbon becomes high enough, she realizes it could shift.
General Mills has been making it easier for some of farmers it works with to participate in carbon markets, and they say they’re seeing interest in them grow. The company was one of the founding partners of the Ecosystem Services Market Consortium, a nonprofit that, starting next year, will run a national market for farmers to get paid for sequestering carbon, improving water quality, or generating other environmental benefits. Currently, farms in General Mills’ wheat regenerative program can choose to be a part of the market’s pilot tests—and be one of the first to get paid for storing carbon. But dairies in the company’s regen program aren’t yet eligible to join.
It’s not yet clear how corporate regen programs will impact farms that operate outside of the companies’ supply chains—those who may be competing for the same federal dollars and other support to make the transition to regenerative farming. Given the challenges and costs, relatively few dairies have made the switch on their own in recent years.
Blake Alexandre, who co-runs Alexandre Family Farm, the first regenerative organic dairy certified in the U.S., said he’s glad large corporations are running regenerative agriculture programs to offer additional financial and tech support to farmers who want to make the switch. But, he added, he’s also afraid the term “regenerative” might get co-opted and whitewashed by Big Food, just like “natural” and “organic” did—leaving individual farms like his behind.
“What if big companies take the term, the concept,” Blake Alexandre said, “but they don’t live it . . . and it becomes just a marketing thing?”
This article is part of a 2-part series produced with support from the Solutions Journalism Network. Read the first part here.
The post Is the Future of Big Dairy Regenerative? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post The Nation’s First Regenerative Dairy Works with Nature to Heal the Soil—at Scale appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>On a recent July morning, as Stephanie Alexandre crossed the lane from her farmhouse to the office housed above the milking barn, fog hung low over the pastures and the air filled with the sounds of eagles and hawks. A group of dairy cows were on their way to a new allotment of tall grass. Down the road, past the grazing heifers, a large herd of wild Roosevelt elk roamed the land.
It was a typical day managing 1,800 cows and 2,500 acres on one of the four grass-based organic dairies that make up the Alexandre Family Farm, based in Crescent City, California, in the far northwest corner of the state. At a time when large dairy companies ranging from Danone to General Mills and Stonyfield Organic are investing in regenerative practices for their farmers in hopes of reducing their industry’s sizable carbon footprint, Alexandre is among a small number of dairies that have embraced regenerative agriculture, boosting soil health and biodiversity, without access to corporate support.
Cows grazing within a movable fence at Alexandre Family Farm.
Earlier this year, Alexandre Farm became the first dairy in the U.S. to become “certified regenerative”—receiving both the Land to Market verification (EOV) and the Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) seal for their 100 percent grass-fed milk and yogurt.
It took the Alexandres more than three decades to fine-tune their system of building up soil, restoring wetlands, and bringing a multitude of birds and wildlife to their property, from bald eagles to coho salmon. Stephanie and her husband Blake are both fourth-generation dairy operators who grew up on conventional dairy farms in California. They met at Cal Poly, where, they said, they were taught plenty about farm chemicals and livestock antibiotics but nothing about soil biology. But they were willing to try different approaches, and it turns out that willingness to farm against the grain has been key to their success.
“We were open-minded and willing to listen, learn, and experiment,” says Blake Alexandre.
As a number of other dairy farms small and large prepare to follow in their footsteps, the Alexandres’ certification also provides a window into an ever-evolving industry, where organic farmers are pushing to improve their practices beyond the federal standards and conventional farms are seeking support in stepping off the commodity treadmill—and getting it.
Build Up a Grassroots Regenerative Movement
In recent years, a number of individual dairies across the U.S. have committed to regenerative agriculture practices. They include Maple Hill Creamery and Dharma Lea Farm in New York state, Perucchi Dairy and Sweet Grass Organics in California, Cedar Mountain Farm in Vermont, and Stonewall Farm in New Hampshire, among others. Many of these dairies have been building up soil for years. Most are relatively small, but Alexandre Family Farms is proof that regenerative dairying can be done at scale, on very large dairies managing thousands of cows and thousands of acres.
When the couple bought their ranch, they decided to become better environmentalists, Stephanie Alexandre said. They fenced off areas around waterways and planted trees with their children. They opened up the ranch to Aleutian geese—a then-endangered species that feeds on large quantities of grass as they fly south—and other wildlife species.
In the late ‘90s, the Alexandres made the switch to organic farming, at a time when a market for organic milk did not exist and no federal standard existed. The couple befriended a soil agronomist named John Snider who encouraged them to look at their soil organic matter and helped hatch a plan to improve it. He suggested the Alexandres spread compost every fall on the most needy 20–30 percent of their ground, till it in very lightly so as not to destroy existing root mass and soil tilth, and broadcast new seed to improve the variety of grasses and other plants on the pasture. The couple are still following this advice today. Because the soil in their region is very wet, the Alexandres grow no row crops; they focus on improving their pasture and buy organic grain to supplement the feed of a portion of their herd.
Blake and Stephanie Alexandre on Alexandre Family Farm in Crescent City, California.
The compost is made on the farm by mixing the cows’ manure solids with wood shavings from a local mill, fish waste from local fisheries, the farm’s culled chickens, local green waste, and egg shells and shrimp or crab shells when in season. The farm’s manure liquids are stored in a holding pond, where mechanical aerators and whey from a cheese plant cause microbes to break down solids. The result is a “nearly odorless” nutrient water that is then used on the other 70 percent of the fields where compost isn’t. (It’s generally used to add nutrients, but also serves as a first irrigation water in the dry season.) The Alexandres wish they could spread the compost on more of their pasture, but they don’t have enough manure—a “problem” many dairies struggling with waste management wish they could have.
But the “real art” to their regenerative system lies in rotational grazing, Blake Alexandre says. Twice a day, after each milking, the mature cows move to a new allocation of pasture covered with tall grasses. They have plenty of space, at two to four cows per acre, and they graze intensively all day and night. (The young stock and dry, non-milking, cows remain on a larger field for two to four days at a time, because they don’t need to return to the barn for milking.) While the cows eat the grass, their waste feeds the soil with nutrients. They are then rotated to the next paddock. Thus fertilized, the land rests for an average of 40–50 days. In addition to cows, the family also runs a sizeable egg business, rotating more than 35,000 chickens in open mobile coops through the pastures year-round.
The ‘real art’ to the Alexandre’s regenerative system lies in rotational grazing, according to Blake Alexandre.
The couple currently farm on about 9,000 acres (up from 560 acres when they first bought the ranch) with 8,000 head of cattle, including 4,500 mature cows, spread across four locations. All of their cows are on pasture after 5 months of age and the entire land gets grazed eight to nine times per year.
The Alexandres live at the main dairy across the road from the milk barn. At one of their four locations, the cows are fed 100 percent grass, with 65 percent of their annual diet coming from fresh grazing 10 months out of the year. The cows also receive supplemental alfalfa hay and a little molasses. At the other three locations, the cows are on pasture the same length of time but also get a small amount of grain, which raises the quantity of milk they produce. All of the milk contains the A2-beta casein protein that only certain cows produce and some say is easier to digest for humans.
The impacts of the managed grazing and compost applications on the soil have been significant. Thirty years ago, the Alexandres say their soil samples came in at 2–3 percent organic matter. A few years ago, when the same soil was sampled again, the pastures ranged from 8 to15 percent organic matter. As a result, the soils have better water-holding capacity, so less irrigation is needed. The Alexandres use no fertilizer other than the compost and nutrient water. And both the quantity (yield) and quality of the forage have improved, they say.
So why aren’t there more large dairy farms moving to regenerative agriculture?
Unique Challenges on the Road to Regeneration
While there is plenty of talk about regenerative agriculture across the industry, there’s still an ongoing debate about whether it’s possible to call a dairy regenerative if it doesn’t focus primarily on grazing animals on pasture. But in the case of large, conventional dairies, experts say that those making the switch to regenerative face unique challenges that come with both raising hundreds or thousands of animals and (in many cases) growing the hay and/or grains to feed them.
One major consideration is the dairy’s nutrient management plan, which spells out how it stores its manure. For large conventional operations that has typically meant storing manure in a lagoon, and applying that manure to farm fields as fertilizer. But many dairies have more manure than they have land to spread it on, and it can be a challenge to keep the nutrients in the soil in balance and protect the air and waterways from nitrogen and phosphorous runoff.
Similarly, when a dairy farmer who grows their own grain for feed decides to plant cover crops or replace corn with a more environmentally-friendly crop, they have to consider whether the replacement crop will take up the same amount of nitrogen from the manure that corn would, said Renee Leech, animal husbandry specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
Dairy cows and free-roaming hens on Alexandre Family Farm certified regenerative dairy farm.
“You would not want to switch to something [like a legume] that produces its own nitrogen,” she said. “You really need to pay attention to your crops and the nutrient level of your soil.”
Those making the switch from confinement to grazing their cows on pasture—or grazing on cover crops—must have enough land as well as adequate fencing and watering facilities. Additional labor or equipment may also be needed to rotate the cows between paddocks, Leech said. Most importantly, dairy producers should understand that the transition to pasture can lead to lowered milk production. In a confinement situation, all of the energy a cow consumes goes into making milk, while grazing cows expand energy walking and foraging. Dairy farmers should also ask whether their cows have the right breeds and genetics to switch to grazing, she said.
“There’s going to be a learning curve initially, like in everything,” said Leech. “It’s about perseverance and whether a farmer has the budget to take that ‘hit’ upfront to be able to get the long-term goal.”
Despite that drop in production, grazing is overall a lower-cost approach to producing milk that can increase a dairy’s profitability, said Randy Jackson, a professor of grassland ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The approach has the potential to bring the cost of production in line with the money coming in. “What’s clear from scientific and anecdotal data from the Upper Midwest is that raising your dairy livestock on perennial grass primarily gives you the best chance to make it as a producer,” Jackson said. “Unfortunately, we’ve been conditioned [to think] that more production equals more profit.” The dairy industry has often suffered from the problem of overproduction, and there’s a small but growing movement in some states to reduce the overall supply as a way to stem the tide of farm closures.
“What’s clear . . . is that raising your dairy livestock on perennial grass primarily gives you the best chance to make it as a producer.”
Another challenge in making the switch to regenerative, said Jackson, is the fact that many dairy farmers have already gone deeply into debt to buy specialized equipment and machinery and grow their operations. And the revenue from grazing alone isn’t usually enough to pay down that debt. Jackson’s organization is working to develop financial options—government grants, impact investors, ecosystem service markets, specialty food markets, even agritourism—to bring additional revenue to farms in transition and help them get out from under the debt burden.
Equally difficult, said Jackson, is dealing with the social ramifications of the decision to become a regenerative dairy. When a farmer shares his or her plan with family members, neighbors, and friends Jackson said, the assumption is often that they have failed at making a living in conventional dairy.
“We’re trying to create space for folks to share about that, so they can realize they are not alone,” he added.
High Bar of Regenerative Certification
Dairies that would like to get certified as regenerative face a number of hurdles. They must improve on or add practices that often go beyond those required for organic certification, said leaders of both Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) and the Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV).
ROC, which is entirely practice-based and requires organic certification as a baseline, focuses on three pillars: soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness. Unlike the organic standard, which only requires that animals have access to pasture 120 days a year, ROC calls for more or less continuous access, said Elizabeth Whitlow, the executive director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance that oversees the ROC certification.
ROC also requires that cows’ diets be made up of a high percentage of grass and that livestock operations practice intensive grazing, meaning that, like the Alexandres, farmers place many cows in each paddock for a short time, followed by a recovery period. As part of its animal welfare requirements, all ROC dairies are required to keep their cows on permanent pasture or install free-stall barns, in which they can move about as they please. Both can be difficult rules for dairies that otherwise tend to permanently tether their animals in place. And as part of the social pillar, ROC-certified operations must be committed to paying a living wage.
“It’s a super high bar,” Whitlow said of the certification. “It’s a little bit intimidating.”
Despite the stringent requirements, getting the certification appears to be paying off for Alexandre Family Farm. The farmers say it has provided more recognition and traction with consumers. “It separates us from other dairies . . . We are making the connection between brand and land more directly through regenerative marketing.”
Intentionally managed grazing—a nuanced art-form of moving mobs from pasture to pasture based on a large number of factors, including grass height—is key to carbon sequestration.
More than a dozen Northeastern dairies (all small-scale, with 100–150 cows) are currently going through the ROC certification process, Whitlow says, and the hope is that once those are announced, “it’ll show what’s possible.”
Whitlow recognizes that many consumers are already confused by the “sea of labels,” they encounter in the grocery store. But she hopes to make it clear that ROC is “a seal you can trust.”
The second regenerative certification, the Savory Institute’s Ecological Outcome Verification protocol, which is part of the Land to Market program, takes a different approach. The EOV protocol is farmer-led and focuses on outcomes, not a set of prescribed practices as with ROC. The protocol measures soil health, sequestered carbon, biodiversity, and ecosystem function.
“Regenerative agriculture is synonymous with a net positive impact to the environment,” said Chris Kerston, who co-leads Land to Market. “We’re in full support of organic, grass-fed, fair pay, and fair trade. . . . But we’re believers in what gets measured, gets managed. Practices are not going to get us there.”
The program suggests farms and dairies create a planning framework and assess and build resource budgets and choose practices based on that. It then brings in monitors who go through the protocol, establishing monitoring sites and baselines. They take photos, lab samples, and do other assessments. Short-term verification happens annually, with long-term monitoring every five years. The data indicators are “‘normalized”’ for each particular ecoregion. Farms that get net positive results are added to the Land to Market program’s supplier roster and can partner with companies that are looking into regenerative agriculture as a marketing advantage, among others and hedge funds and capital markets that use it as a way to collect impact data.
“Consumers want to make purchases based on their values, and farmers want to farm to their values, so they can both side-step the oligarchy. This grassroots approach is driving so much change.”
The biggest challenge the Alexandres have faced over the years has been staying in business in the face of volatile organic milk prices. That’s one of the reasons why the couple has pushed forward on implementing the regenerative agriculture system, said Blake Alexandre.
The way the dairy industry has been run for generations hasn’t typically allowed farmers to sell their product directly unless they make it into cheese or yogurt. Instead, they’ve relied on dairy co-ops that buy milk at a set price that fluctuates based on the overall market. But dairy operators who get certified regenerative, like the Alexandres, can break out of this mold, reach new audiences, and build relationships with retailers and consumers from the ground up, without the help of co-ops, brands, and corporations.
“Part of what’s driving this change now is that consumers want to make purchases based on their values, and farmers want to farm to their values, so they can both side-step the oligarchy. This grassroots approach is driving so much change,” Kerston said.
Transitioning to Regenerative Dairying
Although it’s not easy, help is available to dairy farmers who want to make the switch to a regenerative system on their own, without corporate backing. Talking to other producers who have made the transition and following their work online is key, Leech and Jackson both said. And numerous resources exist for dairy farmers who want to get started with a pasture-based, regenerative approach.
Financial and technical assistance are also available through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Dairy farmers can go to their local NRCS field office, said Leech, to get support and help with filling out an application. Conservation Innovation Grants are also available for on-farm trials and other projects. Last but not least, university extension programs and myriad nonprofit organization can offer training on regenerative principles and practices.
The Alexandres believe that any dairy—whether conventional or organic, large or small—can reach success similar to theirs. They encourage farmers to work with their local NRCS advisors and apply for federal and state-level conservation funding. They were lucky to have access to California’s Healthy Soils Program, for instance.
A large herd of Roosevelt elk now graze the pastures with the cows on Alexandre Family Farm.
“The question from large farmers who would love to do the regeneration thing, is how it fits into . . . their size of operation and way of doing things,” said Stephanie Alexandre. “We’re proving that regenerative is doable at scale.” And the biggest payoff, added her husband, is financial stability.
“Once you understand how soil biology works and do the practices that help [build up soil] and stop those that harm it, then yields start going up,” Blake Alexandre said. “You [invest in those practices] because it works better for you and it will increase your profit.”
This article is part of a 2-part series produced with support from the Solutions Journalism Network. Read the second part here.
The post The Nation’s First Regenerative Dairy Works with Nature to Heal the Soil—at Scale appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Palm Oil Is in Almost Everything We Eat, and It’s Fueling the Climate Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Haven’t encountered any palm oil yet today? Give it a few hours. Made from the fruit of the oil palm tree, this oil is now an ingredient in more than half of all packaged goods, from infant formula, ice cream, and granola bars to lipstick, bread, and shampoo.
Palm oil production—which takes place in the tropical nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Liberia, and Colombia, among others —has also been implicated in rampant deforestation and human rights and labor abuses, many of them ongoing. Yet most of us know little about its impacts.
Journalist Jocelyn Zuckerman has spent years traveling across the world, investigating the environmental, health, and human impacts of the palm oil industry. In her new book, Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World, she takes readers into the heart of Palm Oil Nation for a fast paced and detailed look at the destruction the commodity has sown. Zuckerman follows an environmental activist who dismantles illegal oil palm plantations, visits a conservationist who rescues endangered orangutans, sits with poachers who kill thousands of critically endangered birds, and calls on a man who survived electrocution while harvesting oil palm fruit. She interviews doctors, shopkeepers, bureaucrats, and workers, and goes undercover with investigators to track illegal shipments of the oil.
Civil Eats spoke with Zuckerman about the costs of the palm oil business, the industry’s role in destroying rainforests critical to absorbing carbon, the oil’s strong connections to poverty and processed food, and what consumers can do to help clean up the industry.
Can you start by painting a picture of what it was like when you visited an oil palm plantation?
I got the idea to write this book in Liberia. I had gone there to report a story about land grabs and I really didn’t know anything about oil palm. I went to a remote corner in the south of Liberia, an eight-hour drive from Monrovia, the capital, on really bad roads. We woke up early in the morning—I was with a photographer—and drove to this area where there had been some villages. The oil palm company had come in and bulldozed for miles and miles. I talked to the villagers and they said, “They knocked down our houses, they plowed right through our crops and gravesites.” It felt like a war zone; it was just astonishing. This landscape went on and on for miles and it had been a tropical rainforest, dense and alive with animals, birds, and insects.
I also went north of Monrovia to another county where the [palm oil] industry had already been operating for a couple of years. We drove around plantations with young oil palm plants, which look like little bushes two-three feet tall, little fronds hugging the ground. Again, it was miles and miles of this. You invariably get lost because these landscapes are so huge. The oil palm is native to western and central Africa, including Liberia, but in the past the palms didn’t grow on plantations. They were intercropped with other crops. But in these landscapes where I found myself, they had been deliberately planted in rows and rows [with nothing else].
You write that oil-palm plantations now cover an area the size of New Zealand. And the result isn’t just the destruction of habitat for animals like orangutans, but also the continuous displacement of local and Indigenous communities. What happens to these uprooted people?
Both in Liberia and Indonesia, people said to me, “The forest is our supermarket.” That’s where they get their building materials, all their plants and roots, their proteins (the small animals in the forest), their water supply, and their medicines. You knock that all down and then the agrochemicals get in the rivers; in so many of these communities, they can’t drink the water anymore because it’s polluted from the farm chemicals. So, they’re just marooned. Ian Singleton, the British primatologist [featured in the book] . . . says, “These people have nothing. They’re totally screwed.”
I saw that in Guatemala, I saw it in Indonesia, in Liberia, over and over again. In Indonesia, I spent some time with Indigenous people. It was devastating; they were living in a clearing, surrounded by plantations, under blue tarps they had gotten from an aid agency. They had some pots and pans, a lot of cigarettes, and nothing else. A youngish guy in his 20s, who was visibly angry, said, “Just a few years ago, we could hunt wild boar here. Now we have nothing. They’ve taken everything from us.”
One of the places that’s being destroyed by the spread of palm oil plantations is the Leuser Ecosystem, a World Heritage Site on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Can you tell us more about this place, how it’s being impacted, and why it’s so important?
The Leuser Ecosystem is a tropical rainforest in the northern part of Sumatra, and it’s the only place in the world that has a forest big enough in size and in the right place on the planet to support populations of orangutans, tigers, rhinos, and elephants. There are also all manner of amazing birds living there. That’s why Leuser is often called “the last place on earth.” It’s one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. And its forests and peatlands store massive amounts of carbon. Part of Leuser is a national park. [The area includes] high mountains, but there are also low-lying areas that the industry is targeting for palm oil development. They’ve been eating away at the edges and they’ve even gone into the park and cut down the rainforest to plant palms. In some cases, it’s smallholder farmers who are planting the oil palms, trying to make a living. The problem is that they know that [even if they plant illegally] they can always find a mill nearby to sell to, no questions asked.
Indonesia and Malaysia, which together account for 85 percent of the global palm oil supply, often point out that a large percentage of their plantations are managed not by corporations but by these smallholder farmers you just mentioned. How do these small farmers fit into the palm oil industry picture?
That’s certainly the talking point of the Malaysian Palm Oil Council and the Indonesian government. Both say that 40 percent of their country’s palm oil industry is smallholders. And if anybody ever says, “We need to put curbs on the palm oil industry,” “We shouldn’t use palm oil as a biofuel,” or “We’re going to cut down on imports,” they say, “You’re oppressing these poor small farmers.”
The palm oil industry hired a Washington-based lobbying firm called the DCI Group that previously developed campaigns for tobacco and oil multinationals. Reporters at Reuters got a hold of their public affairs proposal and it was focused on smallholder farmers. The goal is to make Western countries look like they’re being prejudiced against these farmers. And yet, the smallholders don’t necessarily benefit from all this development. Just last year after the Indonesian government announced subsidies for the palm oil industry, there was a big outcry among the smallholders. They said the government acts like it’s helping the little people, but in fact all the subsidies go to help the big palm oil corporations. Also, last year, Indonesia moved to end the smallholder guarantee, meaning palm oil companies will no longer have to allocate 20 percent of their land for smallholder farmers.
In your book, you dedicate an entire section to the history of palm oil—which is full of massacres, rapes, murders, child labor, and other horrific events—and roughly corresponds to the history of colonization. Why was it important to describe this history?
I had no idea that palm oil was this commodity going back to the 18th century and that it had literally replaced the slave trade. . . . The infrastructure for the slave trade in Nigeria basically adopted palm oil where it used to traffic humans from the interior of the country. And the further back I read, the more I saw the links between colonialism, racism, and multinational companies and who’s doing what to whom in the global South. I was fascinated by this George Goldie character [a British aristocrat who through violence controlled the Niger Delta’s palm oil trade], by William Lever [a British grocer who built vast plantations rife with forced labor and founded the company Unilever], and by King Jaja [a former slave who became one of the most powerful palm oil traders in Nigeria]. There are many parallels between the origins of this industry and what’s happening today—mainly because it’s a crop that grows right around the equator, in poor countries where the governance isn’t great and where powerful forces—whether it’s foreign corporations or corrupt politicians—are taking advantage of [those facts].
If you look at the stories coming out of Malaysia today—the slave labor tied to the palm oil industry, the trafficking, companies taking their [workers’] passports and not paying them—it’s not that different from what happened in the past, sadly. And the agrochemicals involved today may be worse. A Human Rights Watch report out of the Congo, where researchers interviewed more than 40 men working on a plantation, comes to mind. More than two thirds of these men said they had become impotent since they started the job. And these were guys in their 20s and 30s.
Your descriptions of the impacts of toxic chemicals on palm oil workers are really striking. The complete lack of protective gear or grossly inadequate gear that does more harm than good, the lack of showers to wash off the chemicals, workers riding home for hours in pesticide-soaked clothing and, when they get home, having to choose whether to use the limited water they have for washing or for cooking dinner for their kids. What can American consumers horrified with such labor conditions do to help change them?
People can get informed and write to their legislators. After an Associated Press investigation into labor and human rights abuses in Asia’s palm oil industry was published at the end of last year, the U.S. announced that it was going to ban shipments. It is currently blocking shipments of palm oil from two major Malaysian producers over the allegations of forced labor, child labor, and physical and sexual abuse on palm oil plantations. A couple of years ago, I was talking with the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum about these issues and they were trying to get the shipments from these companies blocked from entering the U.S. But at the time, legislators were going along with it, maybe because they thought it didn’t matter to the public. Well, this AP series got a lot of attention, so senators demanded action and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued several bans.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum have been working on these issues for a while. They have lots of reports and information, and they’re in touch with different communities on the ground. They also have ongoing campaigns, so you can get involved and get the message out on social media. Social media can go a long way. And if you’re interested in animal rights, you can look at the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme and the Rainforest Action Network. It seems to me that getting the word out is crucial, so that companies realize we know this is going on, we care about it, and we want to see some changes. Part of why this industry has gotten away with abuses for so long is that everyone has been in the dark about it.
Given the harm and destruction wrought by the palm oil industry, what have countries like Indonesia and Malaysia done in response?
They have not done a lot. The changes have really come as a result of work by NGOs and the industry, and have also involved consumer-facing companies. That has gone much further than any reforms that the governments have put in place.
Many of the activists and organizations who are fighting to stop the encroachment of palm oil plantations on tropical forests are local to the areas most impacted. This goes against the narrative that it’s white Westerners who save the rainforests and help the animals.
I encountered them everywhere I went: in Honduras, where it’s very dangerous for them to speak out, in Guatemala, Liberia, certainly in Indonesia and Malaysia. They are the ones who watch their livelihoods and their cultures being destroyed. And they are very brave to speak out against it because these activists and journalists routinely get harassed, assaulted, and even murdered. What I also found out is that western organizations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have really close connections with all of these grassroots activists on the ground. They meet with them, spend time with them, and they’re coordinating campaigns with them. Sometimes they help to bring them to testify in Washington. And while these Western organizations might have more money and can amplify the messages to Western audiences, they’re really taking their cues from the folks on the ground. One of the activists I met in Guatemala was getting death threats. He was very fearful. He was moving around, sleeping in different places every night because he knew that the palm oil industry was not happy with him.
India imports more palm oil than any other nation, and it also has seen an epidemic of obesity. Because it’s cheap, a lot of street vendors use it. It’s also the oil of choice for the processed food companies that have flooded the country over the past few years. You talk about this health disparity as an equity issue. Doesn’t it really point us to the elephant in the room, which is poverty?
Part of the irony here is that both in Indonesia and Malaysia the palm oil industries grew as a result of poverty alleviation schemes right after independence. The governments had these big, very poor populations and they had lots of forested land. So they cleared the land, moved people, gave them seedlings, and encouraged them to grow oil palm. [The governments also launched campaigns to promote domestic consumption of palm oil.] In 1965, palm oil accounted for just 2 percent of Indonesians’ cooking oil usage, and by 2010, it had soared to 94 percent. So, it grew as a result of these governments trying to figure out how to deal with all of their poor people. This is the problem with so many products and capitalism.
Part of the challenge in India is also that the country is being flooded with is all this processed food and fast food. In that context, I would say it’s the multinational corporations who are behind the dumping of this shit in these countries. That’s a very different issue from that of the street vendors, who are just poor people trying to get by, and they don’t have the luxury of using more expensive oils.
Palm oil is a common a replacement for partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. In 2015, the U.S. banned trans fats and that ban left a vacuum, which palm oil filled gladly. Can we really tackle the palm oil issue if we’re not tackling the exponential rise of junk food? Because junk food is reliant on cheap oil, and if we simply take palm oil away, the processed food industry will look for another replacement.
I totally agree. The growth of palm oil needs to be looked at holistically. We are on the verge of climate collapse and we have a finite amount of land, particularly tropical rainforests. And the oil supply in the global diet has gone up by an insane amount. We’re ingesting far more oil than we ever did and it has increased far more than sugar and other sweeteners. It’s not like we need all this oil in our diet. We’ve never needed it, and it’s part of the reason for the global obesity epidemic.
Developing countries such as Malaysia use the phrase “eco colonialism” to defend their support of large-scale palm oil production and say that Western activists have no right to encroach on developing economies. Should we, in the West, expect that poor countries like Malaysia or Liberia stop or slow down palm oil development, given that our own environmental records are so bad?
Western governments and societies can’t just sit over here saying, “You people are so terrible for chopping down your rainforests; you’ve got to stop doing that.” If we expect these governments to stop development, then we need to compensate them because it’s in our interest. We need to start legislating on this side of the globe so that stuff happens.
I am a little bit optimistic that between the pandemic and climate change really coming on as a reality, people are starting to feel like we really need to change. The reality of it is finally coming home. I think corporations also are realizing this. It’s self-preservation. Time is running out, and [the people running] these companies are going to be as screwed as we are if the planet collapses. The LEAF [Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance] Coalition, a new initiative to lower emissions by protecting tropical forests, was announced during President Biden’s climate summit. It’s made up of governments, including the U.S., Britain, and Norway, and a group of large corporations like Amazon, Airbnb, Unilever and Nestle. The goal of this coalition is to create an international marketplace in which carbon credits can be sold in exchange for avoiding deforestation. It’s an improvement on a previous initiative called REDD+, a United Nations program that started in 2008 and has faced some challenges.
You mentioned the new initiative focused on preventing deforestation in exchange for carbon credits. I’m wondering if palm oil’s role in intensifying carbon emissions is becoming more of a flashpoint, and in particular the damage caused to peatlands in these tropical rainforests. Most people have never heard of peatlands, so can you talk about what they are and why there are so crucial to all of humanity?
Peatlands are basically soils formed over thousands of years through the accumulation of organic matter. But they’re waterlogged so they don’t decompose. In Indonesia, Borneo, and Sumatra, peatlands can be up to 60 feet deep . . . it’s basically coal in the making. When the palm oil companies want to establish plantations, they dig canals and use the waterways to bring in their excavators. Then they cut down all the trees, let the water drain out, and then set it all on fire. And because it’s so damp, these peat fires can smolder literally for years, even decades, while emitting carbon. It’s a carbon bomb. According to the Center for International Forestry Research, a forestry organization based in Indonesia, the annual carbon emissions from Indonesia’s forests and peatlands rival those of the entire state of California.
In the mid 2000s, President Bush announced a new biofuels mandate [known as the Renewable Fuel Standard or the “ethanol mandate”]. The European Union also passed a similar mandate to get more biofuels from plants. It was hailed as this great opportunity for American farmers and for the environment, a way to curb our carbon emissions. But what we didn’t realize is that if you’re going to start using more soy and corn ethanol in this country to make fuels, then those crops are no longer going to be available in sufficient amounts for the food supply. And so either Americans will have to stop eating so much processed food or you’ll need to bring that oil from somewhere else. This was a disaster we created. The mandate basically gave a green light to palm oil companies to expand, chop down large swaths of tropical forests, and destroy the peatlands because they now had a new market. And in the European Union, unlike in the U.S., they were also using palm oil for biodiesel production.
The results of these policies were catastrophic. If you actually do the carbon calculation and you factor in the fact that companies are destroying tropical rainforests and burning the peatlands, leading to huge carbon emissions, you realize biofuel is not a sustainable fuel at all. In fact, it’s far worse than petroleum-based fuels. So the EU changed its mandate last year and you can no longer use palm oil in biofuels there. But the mandate in the U.S. has stayed the same, and we’re still importing more palm oil to fill that vacuum.
What about sustainable, certified palm oil that touts itself as socially and environmentally responsible? Should American consumers trust these claims?
In 2004, when people started making an outcry about environmental and human rights issues linked to palm oil, the industry started the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, or RSPO. It’s a certification scheme that requires companies to comply with a set of environmental and social criteria. But it’s mainly an industry group—of the 16 members on its board, 12 are from the palm oil industry. Another issue is that even now, after 17 years, only 19 percent of the global palm oil supply is certified RSPO. So, they haven’t gotten very far. The RSPO has really lax standards. Although those have improved a bit over the past couple of years, the certification relies on third party auditors who visit the plantations to make sure the companies are doing everything right.
When I was in Honduras, I heard a lot of stories about how the RSPO is basically a greenwashing organization. So I went and talked to people on a plantation, and they said the RSPO auditors had been there the week before. The workers told me that their superiors on the plantation had coached them before the auditors came to say they have the best working conditions and they never plant close to the river. Their managers were standing right next to them when they were being interviewed by the auditors, and afterward the ones who performed badly were punished or fired and the ones who said the right things were given banquets. The other problem is that these auditors are paid by the companies to come in, so that’s obviously a conflict of interest.
In 2013, Wilmar—the biggest oil palm plantation owner—signed a new pledge called the No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation (NDPE). The company said they weren’t going to deforest, develop new plantations on peatland, or exploit their workers. The following year, other big palm oil traders followed suit and also signed this pledge. And it has had more teeth than the RSPO. But there’s still a lot of illegally produced oil finding its way into the global market.
There is also a company called Natural Habitats, which focuses on sustainable, organic production. I visited some of the smallholder farms it works with. The oil palm was intercropped with passion fruit and other crops. I met with three farmers and toured their farms, which is also where the farmers live, so these are not plantations. They also had a health clinic and schools. It was very impressive and well run. The problem is just that it’s tiny, the company is currently only working with small farmers in Ecuador. Their oil goes into Nutiva, [and its sold as] an unrefined red palm oil. Natural Habitats and some other companies also started a campaign called Palm Done Right. It’s a group of brands, retail and business partners, and farmers who are trying to grow oil palms in a way that’s sustainable both environmentally and in terms of human social progress. It’s a small initiative, but if people start getting interested it could expand.
You mention that even when companies are RSPO-certified, they still get shipments from illegal plantations. Why is that?
Companies say they have traced their palm oil from the mill. The process is that oil palm fruit comes from the plantation, then goes to the mill, then to the refinery and finally to consumer facing companies. It all gets mixed together. I went undercover with [investigators from Eyes on the Forest, a Sumatra watchdog group] and witnessed this firsthand. In many cases, the fruit processed at a mill is presumed to be from legal places, but in fact there’s a lot of shenanigans happening, with fruit harvested from peatlands, protected wildlife reserves, or national parks that comes to these mills. It’s coming from an illegal source, and either the mill doesn’t realize or it looks the other way.
In Indonesia, they put a moratorium on developing on peatlands a couple of years ago and they did all this mapping. But there is so much corruption that all the maps somehow mysteriously change; what used to be designated peatland is no longer peatland. So there are a lot of moving targets.
Should consumers boycott palm oil? I read that some NGOs, including the World Wildlife Fund, argue that palm oil boycotts may not work because substituting other oils for palm may require significantly more land to produce the same volume. What’s your stance?
That’s an industry talking point. It’s true that palm oil is really productive, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. Most of those other oils don’t only grow in the tropics. Soy is grown in Brazil, but we also grow it in the Midwest. I think we need to consider what else that land can be used for in terms of carbon sequestration, including peatlands and biodiversity. There’s certainly no worse terrain to use for producing oil than tropical rainforests. Another issue is that other oil crops (e.g. corn and soy) are annual crops. And in the tropics, you can plant and harvest up to three crops per year. But the oil palm is a perennial so you’re only harvesting once. The other thing is that some of those other oil crops, particularly soy, also produce protein meal [that feeds animals]. It’s sort of comparing apples and oranges.
It’s a lie that we need this much oil in the world. Our bodies don’t need it. I don’t think it’s my place to say whether or not you should boycott palm oil. But I would say: Learn what what is involved in the production of this product, both in terms of planetary health and human rights, and start talking about it. That will put pressure on governments and on the industry to at least begin cleaning up this industry.
You mention that the challenges posed by the industry may soon be lessened because we may gain access to an alternative oil that’s similar in character to palm oil but is produced in a lab. Could technology potentially solve some of the issues we’ve discussed?
The company you mention, Xylome, based in Madison, Wisconsin, [which uses a fermentation process to create oil with a chemical profile identical to palm oil], is not the only one. Another one, New York-based c16 Biosciences, is also making synthetic palm oil in a lab. And there’s also a group at the University of Bath in the U.K. that’s working on synthetic palm oil. I imagine there are others as well. That’d be cool if we could eventually produce palm oil in a lab, using waste materials like corn stover, and over time restore those peatlands and rainforests so that they can sequester carbon and help preserve biodiversity. Of course, we’ll also need to help those economies transition to other crops and/or industries. All of this is likely a ways off, but if we can attack the problem from various angles—including demanding labor reforms and cutting down on junk foods—I think we’ve got a chance of tackling the bigger problem.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The post Palm Oil Is in Almost Everything We Eat, and It’s Fueling the Climate Crisis appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post ‘Inhabitants’ Digs Deep Into Indigenous Solutions to Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As the climate crisis picks up speed, the Biden administration has responded with renewed urgency. Not only has Avril Haines, the new director of national intelligence, recently called it “an urgent national security threat,” but Robert Bonnie, the new climate advisor at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is preparing to “lead the world in climate-smart agricultural practices.”
Across the country, Native American communities are also responding to the crisis and many have been adopting climate action plans to protect their lifeways. But the land management practices these communities are focused on stand to have a much wider impact. Increasingly, they’re being recognized as a key to the future of our planet.
Inhabitants, a new documentary by Costa Boutsikaris and Anna Palmer, explores Native Americans’ role in climate mitigation and adaptation by focusing on the continuation of ancestral practices in five Indigenous communities. The film explores intentional burning among the Karuk Tribe of California; sustainable agricultural practices on Hopi land in Arizona and the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin; the return of buffalo on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana; and the renaissance of Native Hawaiian food forests. Inhabitants builds on Boutsikaris’ previous film, Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective, which looked at the history of permaculture as a solution to local and global challenges.
Civil Eats recently spoke with Boutsikaris, Palmer, and producer Ben-Alex Dupris, an enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, about why Native land stewardship is overlooked, how to build collaborative relationships with tribes, and the challenges of implementing Indigenous practices on a wider scale.
What motivated you to make a film specifically about Native people’s perspectives on adapting to and preventing the impacts of climate change?
Costa Boutsikaris: The first documentary I made was about permaculture, a branch of the regenerative farming movement. Permaculture was “created” by two Australian men in Tasmania, but it turns out they got a lot of their research from the Aboriginal people in Australia and from other Indigenous people. And although they write about these origins a little bit in some of the early texts on permaculture, this part of the movement is overlooked. It wasn’t until I made that film and got deeper into that world that I realized while there’s a nod to Native wisdom and Indigenous practices, there really hasn’t been much space for Native people in this movement.
I was trying to figure out a way to be helpful in bringing more Native guidance into the sustainability movement. That guidance is severely lacking across not just regenerative farming, but also land management and wildlife conservation, all the different practices that are connected to working with a changing climate. My partner Anna had met tribal project leaders who were looking for ways to document Native people’s conservation practices and wanting to get their voices heard in a more urgent way. We worked with multiple partners to create a collaborative documentary; our goal was to find a way to bring these stories together and inspire a wider audience, but also to inspire Native youth to see what’s possible.
One of the things we heard from tribal leaders was, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” They felt there’s a real need for seeing success stories in order to bring back traditional [land management] practices. So, that was really our impetus, and then it spiraled from there, as a lot of amazing Native people guided us and advised us on how to tell these stories appropriately.
Ben-Alex Dupris: As Indigenous people, we have always been engaged in a relationship with the land. This is what we do, this is our way of life. And our relationship to the history of the land has never really been told. But I don’t think that there’s a choice for Native people. Because of our unique status with the federal government, we are sovereign nations and we have land bases. We are responsible for these relationships and we want to make sure that our children and their children have a sustainable future that they can look forward to, and that corporate America doesn’t just get to have free reign over the environment, simply because it’s profitable. So, it’s deeply ingrained in me to align with filmmakers who want to spread this message. It’s the most urgent message of our time.
What is the significance of the film’s title, Inhabitants?
Boutsikaris: Inhabit was focused on how to inhabit a place and how to design that space. As I started to work with Anna and the tribal leaders, a phrase that continually came up was “original inhabitants.” And I realized that ‘inhabitants’ is such an important idea. The word builds onto the identity and the history of the people who live in that place, and asks about how they inhabit their home.
Anna, how did your work as a researcher investigating the impacts of climate change in tribal communities inform this documentary?
Anna Palmer: I have a Master of Science in Environmental Studies. Throughout my studies, the role of Native people in advancing climate-resilient conservation practices wasn’t taught. As part of my graduate research and later as a research scientist, I worked for the USDA on The Native Waters on Arid Lands project, which seeks to help tribes in the Southwest adapt to climate change. It was through that research that I got the opportunity to hear directly from tribal leaders about the conservation work they have been doing for thousands of years. And I realized their work wasn’t being recognized in the climate adaptation space.
During the USDA project, I also noticed the “experts” talked to the Native American farmers as if they didn’t know how to live in the places they had lived for millennia. For example, one of the solutions that climate researchers suggested to Hopi farmers was to irrigate their crops, saying this would help them adapt to climate change. But the Hopi farmers [who practice dryland farming] said they don’t irrigate and that’s what makes them so resilient. And then I would get to talk to them and they’d be like, ‘Yeah, come out here and see what we’re doing on our farms. We will continue to survive the way we’ve been surviving here for thousands of years.’ And I feel so lucky that I got to go out and see it, because hopefully we can help future researchers see things from Native people’s perspectives.
Films are often made about Native communities by non-Native directors. Ben-Alex, how do you feel Inhabitants fits into this legacy?
Dupris: The commodification of Indigenous narratives has existed for as long as film has. The first “documentary,” Nanook of the North, was by a white man looking at a Native person and judging how his life was similar and dissimilar [to his]—an anthropologist-type clinical observation that permeates documentaries today. What’s different now in the 21st century is that we [Native people] are empowered and educated. We have our own narrative teams. The catalyst was Standing Rock. After working for six months at Standing Rock documenting the occupation, my friends and I knew we had lost the battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline for the time being. But we also knew that the most important lesson we had learned was to collaborate with allies so that we can place our narratives on the front lines of the media space.
It would be really beautiful if we could do that all internally, but the reality is we don’t have enough time and energy to . . . reach out to the nearly 580 [federally recognized] tribes. There is a lot of relationship building that we need to do to make change. And although I prefer Native films to be told from an Indigenous perspective, what the Inhabitants team has done is build a really great model of cooperation with a tribal advisory board and a Native producer like myself. This isn’t a new model, but it’s definitely new in the film space. I do welcome filmmakers to collaborate with Indigenous producers because I think that the results outweigh any of the controversies that surround these issues, especially in the case of this film, which does a great job of sharing the nuances of each one of the cultures and what they represent. Working with allies and Indigenous filmmakers alike is the future of this work—which is political by nature.
Can you talk a little more about the significance of having a tribal advisory board?
Boutsikaris: We wanted to ensure that the stories in the film were made in a way that the Indigenous communities felt was beneficial and respectful to them. This meant they were able to see their stories before the film was publicly released. For a lot of filmmakers that sounds like a nightmare, but for us it was the only way we could have done this project.
We made mistakes and it was really important that the tribal advisory board watch the film [as it was being produced]. For example, we found a piece of archival footage made by the USDA that was [downplaying the] impact Native people had on the land. We thought it might be interesting to highlight how the government had publicly talked about Native people in this way. But we got feedback that it was not appropriate and it might be confusing for Native youth to see that. There were also pieces of interviews that people realized they didn’t want out there. On the other side, the advisory board recommended that we dig deeper on some issues. As a result, we created a much more collaborative relationship that I think most documentaries don’t have.
Palmer: We had to give up a lot of creative control in that process. But we decided we’re going to give up some of that control so that [the Indigenous communities] can feel like they can trust us in holding their stories. Because not all information is meant to be shared. And being able to work together in that way was really helpful. One of the first people to join our [curriculum] advisory board was the executive director of FALCON (The First American Land-Grant College Organization Network). There’s over 37 tribal colleges and we wanted to make sure that this film was going to be distributed in the tribal college space.
Boutsikaris: People often ask me how to build trusting and collaborative relationships with Native American communities. The number one thing that you can bring to the table is time. I think Native communities have gotten used to a lot of researchers, journalists, or camera crews showing up for a few hours, leaving, and never coming back.
Palmer: And learn their history before you get out there.
Inhabitants highlights the importance that Native women play in carrying out many of these sustainable land practices, such as Karuk women conducting prescribed burns. Can you talk about their roles?
Dupris: The hidden history of America is that there were many matriarchal societies on Turtle Island (North America). A lot of that disappeared when America was “founded.” For example, the Constitution of the United States was taken directly from The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, known also as the Iroquois Confederacy. But [white settlers] misinterpreted its principles. They saw a chief and assumed he was in charge. Nobody asked about the clan mothers in the longhouse, when in fact it was the women who elected the officials. So what we’re looking at now is a return to our relationship to the earth and to the women in our society. It’s also about identifying all of those different levels of discernment, such as trans or two-spirit people . . . all the different ways that people identify and contribute.
Boutsikaris: We are continually learning that women have for millennia played a major role in land stewardship in North America. We were also surprised by the women’s role in Karuk fire burning. Fire fighting in western society fits into a very masculine world of power, domination, force, and destruction. But the reality is that prescribed burning was grandmothers’ work. The women would light fires and walk with them and clean up around the village sites [to prevent bigger fires.] They also did prescribed burns to grow better acorns, huckleberries, and mushrooms. Their work with fire stemmed from a relationship with the land that wasn’t masculine at all, it was a very feminine process.
Let’s talk about the idea of scientific validation of Indigenous land practices. In the film, Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson talks about how Native people don’t get recognition for their time-proven land management practices. How can we break through this challenge?
Boutsikaris: Johnson went into 10-year process of getting his PhD just to be taken seriously and to find ways to help his fellow Hopi farmers get more funding. There’s this complex tension between traditional knowledge and the PhD/academia points of view.
Palmer: I don’t think academia will be the same 10 years from now. Young scientists are coming of age in a time when the climate crisis is so dire that we need to change the way we do things. It can’t be business as usual. And when you’re looking for something different to try, focusing on Indigenous practices is the best path forward. There’s a lot of power and money in academia. But as more [diverse] people become PhD’s and become eligible for these massive grants, they will be able to use them to work collaboratively with tribes. Already, there are good examples of such collaboration, including Professor Kari Marie Norgaard at the University of Oregon, who has been working with the Karuk Tribe on its climate vulnerability assessment. Her research goes through the same cultural resource advisory board process that our film went through. Because in academia, we’ve seen a similar pattern of researchers extracting data from tribes and not bringing it back to benefit these communities in a reciprocal way.
What about government bodies, what is their view on Native people’s practices?
Palmer: From what we’ve seen, state agencies such as CAL FIRE (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) are starting to take practices such as prescribed fire practices more seriously, though many challenges remain. And they’re cooperating only because they have to, since California is burning up. Federal agencies are also stepping up, in some cases. Kalani Souza, the founding director of the Olohana Foundation in Hawaii, who is featured in our film, now works with FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] as a trainer/consultant on re-building food forests as a way to deal with increasing natural disasters. He has figured out a way to funnel federal money into building back native food systems.
Boutsikaris: This brings up an important challenge for implementing Native land management practices. Although CAL FIRE is now starting to work with the Karuk tribe, this tribe—like many others—has no reservation because the U.S. government never ratified its treaty. They live in the Klamath River Valley, surrounded by millions of acres of forests that they used to tend with fire for millennia. But now they have to apply for burn permits, air quality permits, and environmental reviews, which vastly limits their ability to pursue these cultural practices. Last year, a wildfire broke out and wiped out almost the entire town of Happy Camp, one of the main population bases of the Karuk. Several hundred homes went up in flames. The tribe has said that had it been able to do its cultural burns [beforehand], the fire would never have gotten to their homes. Land sovereignty is a real challenge. So, while there are new collaborations, there’s also an ongoing fight to get Native land back.
As you mention, much of the work with tribes has suffered from extractive relationships. How do you envision your film not being extractive and actually benefiting tribal communities?
Boutsikaris: Because the point of this film is to have a real tangible impact, both for Native and non-Native people, we’ve created content on our website and are distributing it with our screening campaign to help communities in various ways. This includes helping Native communities find grants for land stewardship projects, including through the First Nations Development Institute; a mapping tool to learn about your local tribes; research on Native climate resilience; and information on how to financially support the projects featured in the film and other Indigenous land projects across the country.
Dupris: When I was a young boy, I didn’t see anybody on television or in films who was representing what I knew was the real truth: that our Indigenous knowledge is an important part of maintaining the balance of the earth. And so opportunities to help promote this message to our own people and especially to our youth . . . are very close to my heart. I have three children and I believe that their life will be very difficult because of climate change. I think they’ll look back to the era that I grew up in and think that we were privileged to have clean drinking water all the time, to not have to worry about the extinction of our traditional keystone animals or about disease and sickness that we’ve not seen for thousands of years. My personal investment is in sharing these stories and increasing awareness of Indigenous sustainable practices within our tribal communities.
One of the most poignant parts in the film was watching Native youth playing with buffalo hides on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, where the buffalo—once slaughtered to near extinction—have finally returned in recent years. Another was watching Blackfeet elders seeing buffalo for the first time. The connection between people and animals was incredible.
Dupris: The first weapon against Indigenous people and the best way to steal their land was to kill all the animals they depended on. It was such a level of disrespect, unfathomable, and I don’t know if anyone can understand how devastating it was not only to the people themselves, but to our animal people, to the spirits that provide us sustenance and the harmony of our landscape that was disrupted in the name of progress. When you see a scene like that, if you know the back history, it can bring you to tears. The buffalo and the people are the same, their spirits are the same, and the way that we walk on this earth is to share life with every creature. Those messages got lost over time.
Boutsikaris: This brings up the issue of disruption. We’re starting to hear the buzzword phrase “Native solutions to climate change.” The New York Times and other big publications are publishing articles about such Native solutions. While that is true, that they are Native solutions, it’s critical to remember that these are also ancient practices going back millennia that were, in themselves, disrupted. There was a systematic killing off of the buffalo in the 19th century by the U.S. government. Their population was reduced from about 30 million down to a few hundred. Prescribed fire was made illegal, leading to the arrests and killing of Native people. This pattern repeated itself across the continent as settler colonialism moved west. As non-Native people, we have learned that it’s really important to expand this concept of Native solutions into the history of cultural disruption, restoration, and healing.
That’s a great point. And it’s ironic that today in regenerative agriculture circles experts talk about livestock improving soil health while forgetting that in the past we had the buffalo performing that exact function—except, we killed them off. We’re now reinventing the wheel, after destroying the solutions we already had.
Boutsikaris: All of this research [on regenerative agriculture] is going to lead to the realization of, “Oh, if we hadn’t colonized North America and hadn’t disrupted the lives of Native people and the ecosystems they inhabited, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in.’ People ask us, how should we understand this film? How does it relate to climate change?’ If you actually look at how the Indigenous lifeways were disrupted, those disruptions literally contribute to carbon in the atmosphere. When the buffalo were killed off in North America and white settlers plowed up the Great Plains, we completely shut down the most powerful carbon sequestration processes on the continent. Hawaii, where large corporations clear-cut much of the native forest and replaced it with monocrops, is seeing increased damage from storms. The story is not just about how do we deal with climate change, but also about how we created it. I think that history is really hard for all of us to deal with.
Given all this, how do we not fall into despair? How can we use the historical wisdom of Indigenous communities to move forward?
Palmer: A lot of the barriers that Native people face today are bureaucratic. To change that, we need policy changes. Another level of possibility is personal and cultural changes by non-Native people. For example, when it comes to forest management practices, if more American foresters sought to incorporate practices similar to those on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, the ripple effect could be massive. There are all these different ways that we can go about expanding these types of climate friendly Indigenous practices.
Boutsikaris: The Menominee are renowned for their sustainable forestry system. Their forest has more and better quality trees today than it did 150 years ago, despite years of logging to sustain the community. When you talk about how to change the world, most of the time it comes down to how can people make money. And because the climate is forcing more resilient systems to remain and less resilient systems—like mono-cropping and clear-cutting—to fall off, I think we’re going to see more acceptance of systems such as the Menominee forestry practices because they are working [economically] in the face of climate change. And that’s an important moment to create opportunities for guidance from Native communities.
Dupris: People are beginning to listen to Indigenous communities—not because they have had a change of heart, but because we have been able to vote and develop politicians, infrastructure, and financial wealth. From helping to secure Biden’s win in Arizona, to Deb Holland being appointed to lead the U.S. Department of the Interior, to Janie Simms Hipp’s nomination to General Counsel of the USDA, we have worked very hard as the tribal community to find strong representation that brings our issues to the forefront. And though we’re a small community—Native people comprise about 5 million people in the U.S.—we hold some of the last [undeveloped] land resources, and we don’t want them developed. We don’t want to dig up the sacred hills for gold. We’re building relationships and managing our forests and animals with the state fisheries and state game departments. There’s a lot of interactivity, cooperation, and building within our tribal nations.
Palmer: Jeff Grignon [with Cultural Resource Protection] at Menominee Tribal Enterprises told us about the concept of “cultural climate change,” wherein the North American tribes had to adapt as their culture was disrupted by colonization. When our society in 2021 is thinking about how it’s too hard to change, we should remember what happened to Native American communities over 400 years ago and how every single Indigenous tribe had to adapt. The cultural climate change that they had to overcome, and the fact that they’re still here, resilient and strong, should be an inspiring point for us. Our culture has to change to survive. And we have a lot to learn from Native American communities about how to do this.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Inhabitants kicks off its free screening series this week as part of its Impact Campaign in partnership with The Institute For Tribal Environmental Professionals. To find out about future screenings of Inhabitants at festivals and other events, follow the film on Facebook or Instagram. The film will be publicly available in mid-November. Watch the trailer below:
The post ‘Inhabitants’ Digs Deep Into Indigenous Solutions to Climate Change appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Carbon Markets Stand to Reward ‘No-Till’ Farmers. But Most Are Still Tilling the Soil. appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As the adoption of no-till practices has spread widely across parts of the U.S. over the past few decades, the approach has been touted as an important means of storing carbon in soil—and a key solution to solving the climate crisis.
But despite its recent growth in popularity, “no-till” has no single, agreed-upon meaning. In fact, the phrase is often a misnomer. Most no-till farmers have not cut out tillage altogether and do not engage in other beneficial practices such as planting cover crops. As a result, these “seldom-till” farmers aren’t able to permanently store carbon in their soil.
That trend, coupled with the scientific uncertainty on how to measure and verify carbon sequestration, could throw a wrench into the Biden administration’s plan to fund an agricultural carbon trading program (or “carbon market”) as a central response to climate change.
“The reality is that 100-percent-never-till is [practiced on] a very small percentage of the acres across the United States,” said Steve Swaffar, executive director of No-Till on the Plains, a nonprofit that hosts an annual conference for no-till farmers in the Great Plains region. “There’s certainly a need to change this.”
Herbicide Availability Spurs No-Till Movement
Tillage has been an intrinsic part of global agriculture for thousands of years. Breaking up soil helps clear land for production and quickly uproots and kills weeds. Tilling also aerates and warms the soil, buries plant residue, incorporates fertilizer or compost, and creates a clean, level bed to make seed planting easier.
Some farmers adopted limited soil conservation practices in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl—caused, in part, by intensive tillage practices—but most continued to plow up their fields multiple times every year. It wasn’t until the 1970s that farmers in the Midwest, the Plains, and the Southeast began switching in earnest to no-till and reduced tillage practices, spurred by the widespread availability of broad-spectrum herbicides, including glyphosate (the main ingredient in Roundup), and later by the genetically modified crops resistant to those herbicides.
In some cases, chemical companies such as Imperial Chemical Industries, which developed the controversial herbicide paraquat (also known by its brand name Gramoxone), conducted no-till experiments and helped spread the concept of reduced soil disturbance.
Liberated from the need to plow for weed control, farmers who grew commodities such as corn and soy began to spray them with herbicides and parked their tillage equipment to cut down on fuel and labor costs—a much-needed relief during the energy crisis of the 1970s and the farm crisis of the 1980s.
Today, the no-till movement continues to be concentrated in regions that grow commodity crops with the use of chemicals: states with the highest no-till adoption rates include Montana (73 percent of all acres), Kentucky (68 percent), Tennessee (79 percent), and Virginia (74 percent).
The practice has also gained favor with farmers looking to switch to so-called regenerative practices—either as a way to build healthy soil and reduce input costs, or because the company they sell their crops to is in some way incentivizing the change. General Mills, for instance, has committed to converting 1 million acres to regenerative practices and Danone, Walmart, and a number of other large consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies have taken on similar initiatives—meaning that many farmers are making the change to meet the demands of the marketplace.
According to the 2017 U.S. Census of Agriculture, the number of the farms practicing intensive tillage declined by 35 percent between 2012 and 2017. The number of farms practicing reduced tillage increased by 11 percent. And while no-till farms increased by less than 1 percent during the same time period, the number of no-till acres has continued to increase.
No-till Is a Misnomer; Conservation Tillage, an Oxymoron
On the ground, there’s ample evidence suggesting that the vast majority of no-till farmers occasionally or regularly return to tillage, calling into question the environmental benefits and carbon-absorbing potential of their soils.
A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service found that while nearly half of all corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton acreage was identified as no-till or strip-till (tilling small areas of fields to prepare seed beds for planting) at some time over a four-year period, only about 20 percent of these acres were identified that way for the whole duration.
The terms “reduced till” and “minimal till” can also mislead. They’re both undefined versions of the generic “conservation tillage,” which denotes a wide range of systems that leave at least 30 percent of the soil surface covered by crop residue after planting. In practice, this often means a farmer has slightly reduced the number of tillage passes or simply switched from a moldboard plow—the most aggressive tillage practice—to a chisel plow, a slightly less destructive one.
One former USDA researcher even called “conservation tillage” an oxymoron that “gives a misguided sense of entitlement and conservation,” despite the fact that many of the practices under its umbrella lead to “significant soil loss” and hence are not sustainable.
Reasons No-Till Farmers Return to Tillage Are Complex
Factors such as climate, soil type, crop type, cultural convention, family dynamics, and a limited understanding of how soil works may influence a farmer’s decision to take up the plow again, soil health experts say.
Many no-tillers in the Midwest return to tillage on a regular basis, or alternate between years. Others strip till or till in a way that only disturbs the top two inches of soil, while still others will upturn their entire fields, said Swaffar with No-Till on the Plains.
Some farmers say a changing climate is making it difficult to stick with no-till. Justin Topp, who grows a number of grains and legumes on 14,000 conventional and 1,500 organic acres near Grace City in North Dakota, told Civil Eats that the short growing season in his area means untilled soil isn’t usually warm enough to plant seeds into. And then there’s the erratic weather: It was so wet in 2019, he said, that he had to till his fields in order to aerate and dry out the soil—otherwise, his crops would have failed.
On the other hand, this winter was so dry that he’s planning to convert some of the previous year’s minimum-till fields to complete no-till to retain moisture. (Topp has also tried inter-seeding a rye cover crop with the corn, but it failed to grow both during the wet and dry years.)
“I would love to switch to 100 percent no-till all the time,” said Topp. “We’re trying. But it just doesn’t work. . . . We have to make the best decision for our farm year after year.”
Still other farmers break out the plows because their fields are overgrown with weeds that have become resistant to herbicides (i.e., “superweeds”). There are now several hundred herbicide-resistant weeds in the world, affecting farmers across the entire U.S. One 2018 study found that the spread of glyphosate-resistant weeds is responsible for a 9 percent reduction in the use of no-till practices in soybean production.
Most commodity farmers overwhelmed by weeds don’t grow a diverse enough range of crops to disrupt the weed cycles, Swaffar said. And local cultural mores, family relationships, and pressure from herbicide sales reps all tend to sway farmers toward tillage when challenges in their no-till systems arise.
“Tillage is still culturally accepted and financially supported,” Swaffar added. “It’s promoted by equipment manufacturers, producers of genetically engineered seeds, and other industries that benefit from disturbing the land. The amount of dollars invested into those industries and economies is enormous.”
But perhaps the biggest challenge, said farmer and soil scientist Ray Archuleta, is farmers’ limited understanding of soil biology. They often take up the practice on its own—and continue to spray an excessive amount of chemicals, leave their soil bare, and fail to incorporate other regenerative practices, such as cover crops, grazing livestock, and diverse crop rotations beyond corn and soy.
“No-till by itself is not enough,” Archuleta said. “But if you combine no-till, cover crops, and livestock [grazing], the system changes completely and starts to work a lot better.”
Cover crops are grown on less than 4 percent of the nation’s cropland, meaning they’re absent from the vast majority of no-till farms. The good news, said Archuleta, is that their acreage increased by 50 percent between 2012 and 2017. “We’re working in the right direction,” he said.
Is Occasional Tillage Bad? The Jury Is Still Out
Researchers today widely agree that tillage is destructive to soil. But, because soil science is an emerging field, just how destructive is still an open question. Tilling disrupts soil’s natural structure, and damages the beneficial mycorrhizal fungi networks. It also results in an immediate loss of substantial amounts of soil carbon as it enters the air in the form of carbon dioxide.
According to studies by the University of Nebraska Extension service, occasional tillage may be beneficial every 5–10 years to manage weeds, prevent soil compaction, or incorporate a soil amendment. The university concluded that any loss in soil organic matter is recovered within one year of the tilling event.
Similarly, research at the Kansas State University Southwest Research Extension Center showed that in a long‐term no‐till dryland rotation system of wheat grain−sorghum−fallow, a single tillage pass in a no-till system that was continuous for at least five years prior did not lead to significant effect on crop yield, biomass, available soil water, and water use compared with continuous no‐till.
And a recent study by the Pennsylvania-based Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, a farming education and research nonprofit, found that farms using some tillage can still achieve soil health benefits as long as they plant cover crops, incorporate crop rotations, and utilize other beneficial practices.
But other studies suggest that occasional tillage within long-term no-till systems can adversely affect soil quality and lead to an immediate release of carbon into the atmosphere—and only continuous no-till systems can lead to long-term increased yields and other benefits.
John Dobberstein, senior editor of the publication No-Till Farmer, believes that studies promoting a return to occasional tillage are misleading. He said they don’t tell farmers about the negative side effects of occasional tillage, including that it can cause more weeds to germinate, not less. It can also cause a decrease in soil moisture, an especially dire problem in semi-arid areas. The studies also fail to mention the fuel, labor, and equipment costs that cut into a farmer’s profitability, said Dobberstein.
No-Till Farmer aims to encourage farmers to try other solutions first, from planting cover crops and growing a greater diversity of crops, to changing the timing of herbicide applications.
“It takes a lot of dedication to be in continuous no-till,” Dobberstein said. “We try not to be judgmental. We know people have to do what’s best for their farm.”
Archuleta advises no-till farmers in dire-straights who are wanting to till their fields to consider tillage intensity, frequency, and depth.
“Do I say ‘never till’? If you have a situation and you’re desperate to till, do it when it’s cold and focus on just the affected area, not the whole field. Think about the ramifications,” he said.
Instead of Carbon Markets, a Cover Crop Diversity Index
Soil experts Archuleta and Swaffar say more education and support is needed for farmers to keep their no-till practices going long-term. They also say the emphasis on carbon markets is misguided.
Instead of paying farmers to store and calculate carbon, the government should pay them for the acreage of diverse cover crops they grow, Archuleta said. One reason a carbon market will be challenging, he said, is that building soil carbon is dependent upon climate, temperature, moisture, vegetation type, and soil characteristics. Soils in colder climates, silty clay, or clay soils, and certain types of crops can store more carbon, he said, putting some farmers at a distinct disadvantage.
“Paying farmers for carbon is not a smart goal because carbon [levels] change daily. It’s like paying for blood sugar levels,” Archuleta said. “And it would put a lot of producers on an unequal footing. Even if they were doing the same exact practices, they would never be able to build carbon the same way.”
Furthermore, measuring soil carbon is expensive, time-consuming, and not very accurate. Most soil sampling doesn’t measure deep carbon or account for seasonal fluctuations. It’s also impossible to guarantee that stored carbon will remain in the soil long-term, since a farmer who stopped tilling for years may decide to plow up their field at any point. There is only so much organic carbon that can be stored in soil, leading some scientists to question the long-term viability of no-till systems as carbon sinks.
In April, a coalition of environmental, agricultural, and justice groups sent a letter to Congress members asking them not to pass the newly introduced Growing Climate Solutions Act, a bill that would facilitate farmers’ participation in carbon market programs, because methods on measuring carbon are still being developed, soil carbon storage is limited, and participation in carbon offset programs may lead to further farm consolidation.
Diverse mixes of cover crop species, which have the potential to capture large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and store it in soil, are less controversial and easier to measure, Archuleta said. And this potential means that even if a farmer needs to occasionally return to tillage, he or she can continue to store carbon and improve the soil, Swaffar added.
“Even if you return to tillage, but you grow cover crops instead of leaving your field bare, you would still have a positive impact on your soil biology,” said Swaffar. “If you look at the natural landscape, the soil is always trying to grow something.”
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]]>Last summer, veteran organic farmer Scott Park was bewildered when he surveyed his vast tomato, corn, and sunflower fields. Before planting the crops on 350 acres he had radically cut down on tilling the soil, planted cover crops twice, and let goats graze the land. And he was sure he’d see excellent yields.
The undisturbed soil was loaded with earthworms, but the crops grew sluggishly and didn’t produce enough fruit. Park lost almost half of his yields—and over half a million dollars.
“We thought we were going to cut a fat hog,” said Park, whose farm lies 50 miles northwest of Sacramento in California’s Central Valley. “But the combination of no-till and grazing kicked me in the teeth.”
Though surprising, the result was part of a critical experiment that Park plans to replicate again—this time, on a smaller plot on his 1,700-acre farm: Because there’s more at stake than his own profit.
Park, who has been farming for 48 years and is well-known for his soil health practices, is one of a small group of innovative organic vegetable producers working with the University of California Cooperative Extension, Cal State Chico’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture and California State University, Fresno to decipher how to farm with little or no tillage—and without chemicals. Similar research is also taking place at U.C. Santa Cruz.
For the vast majority of organic growers, tilling the soil is a crucial tool. It helps control weeds (which are a much bigger challenge for farmers who don’t spray herbicides) and helps incorporate compost and other nutrients into soil. But that system may begin to change.
The so-called no-till farming system, which is said to boost soil health, sequester carbon, and bring myriad other benefits, is popular among commodity grain farmers in the Midwest and the Northeast—many of whom rely heavily on herbicides and increasingly use the term “regenerative” to describe what they do. But even among those farmers, most haven’t cut out tilling altogether, alternating no-till with tillage practices.
Switching to no-till on mechanized organic farms—and particularly in organic vegetable cropping systems—has long been considered the holy grail, and practically impossible to achieve, especially in the water-parched arid West, a region that dominates U.S. organic produce production.
Two growing seasons into the California experiment, Park and the other farmers have faced an array of challenges. Some have been economically painful, while others have led to promising results. And yet, if the farmers can get past the hurdles presenting themselves in these early years, their efforts could catalyze a massive shift to reduced tillage—and a new understanding of soil health—in the organic industry in California and nationwide. And because no-till is held up as a central tenent of regenerative agriculture, it could also be seen as a boon for farmers hoping to take part in the carbon markets the Biden administration has put forward in response to climate change.
“When soil transitions to a no-till system, yield reduction is usually a temporary thing,” said Cynthia Daley, a professor at Chico State who is involved in the project. “These farmers see the benefit of going into no-till, but they are trying to find a way to get there that doesn’t result in a negative economic impact in the long run. Their dedication is incredible.”
No-till could also create a carbon sponge to retain water in the soil and cut back on evaporation, a change extremely welcome in California, where water is scarce and droughts are common, said Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, another farmer participating in the no-till experiment. The cooling effects on soil would also be crucial, Muller said, given that hot temperatures can negatively impact the soil’s microorganisms.
“We’re trying to figure out . . . whether there’s a better system without tillage where we can empower the microbial communities under those plants to supply them with what they need,” said Muller. “We’re at the beginning of that curve of knowledge and of understanding how these practices can capture more carbon and put more vitality into our farming system.”
No-Till Catches on with Organic Farmers
Intensive tillage on a large scale took off in the U.S. with the invention of the steel plow in the 1830s. But while it facilitated the conversion of prairie land and large-scale farming across the country, tillage also led to massive erosion, habitat loss, and the release of greenhouse gases. It culminated in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, an agricultural crisis so severe that it caused some farmers to adopt conservation practices and the U.S. government to invest in teaching them how to take care of their soil through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Soil Conservation service, which eventually became the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). And while those efforts convinced some farmers to change their practices, most continued to intensively plow their fields multiple times each season.
No-till rose in popularity throughout several regions of the U.S. in the 1970s and today, its adoption is concentrated in the South, the Midwest, and the Great Plains. According to the 2017 U.S. Census of Agriculture, no-till was used on 37 percent of U.S. acres, and reduced tillage was practiced on an additional 35 percent. Since reducing tillage is part of a wider set of regenerative practices, some farmers are also planting more cover crops to regenerate their soil and prevent erosion. Cover crops use rose by 15 percent between 2012 and 2017, but they still only grow on about 4 percent of the nation’s total cropland.
On most farms, the phrase “no-till” is a misnomer, as many farmers use it to refer to a greatly reduced approach to tilling and not to the continuous lack of tillage. For this reason, teasing out the differences in approaches between regenerative and organic systems can be a challenge.
Some organic farmers have scoffed at the idea of no-till and regenerative agriculture systems that include herbicides. They argue that organic farming, which is built around the idea of soil health, can build up soil fertility or sequester carbon better than regenerative/no-till agriculture. Some research indicates this is true because the addition of manure and cover crops more than offset losses from tillage.
Other research shows that organic farms’ ability to store carbon at deeper soil levels exceeds that of conventional farms, even those using cover crops. Scientists are still learning to understand how soil works, so the jury is out on whether organic production that includes tilling but cares for the soil in other ways equals or outstrips no-till farming.
While science continues to evolve, a third of all organic farms nationwide self-define their operations as “no-till” or “minimal till”—but, as is the case for conventional growers, for most, these terms don’t mean that they have stopped tilling.
The “organic no-till” project at the Rodale Institute, is a good example. The Institute has been working since the 1990s on ways organic grain growers can disturb the soil less.
“On one hand, organic farmers claim to be improving soil health, but with the same breath they’re doing multiple tilling operations in a single season,” said Jeff Moyer, Rodale Institute’s executive director. “Tillage day isn’t a particularly good day if you’re an earthworm.”
Moyer, who spent 35 years as Rodale’s farm director and farm manager, began encouraging large organic grain growers to plant cover crops prior to their cash crops and to use the residue as mulch to suppress weeds. To facilitate the process on large farms, he re-designed the roller crimper as a tool to help organic corn and soybean farmers reduce tilling. Hitched to a tractor, the crimper flattens cover crops, breaking their stems and creating a dense mat of mulch. With the right tool, the farmer can then plant the cash crop directly into the newly rolled mulch.
This system has allowed some organic farmers, mostly in the Midwest, to reduce their tillage—cutting it down to one deep-till pass per crop rotation. In the past, those farmers would make a primary tillage pass over their fields, followed by multiple secondary passes to disc, pack the soil, make a clean bed ready for planting, and then—once the crop is growing—to rotary hoe and cultivate multiple times to manage weeds.
“To the microbial life in the soil, it feels like tillage over and over again, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid,” Moyer said.
In addition to the tillage to establish the cover crop, Rodale’s system reduces multiple passes through the fields to just two, planting and harvesting, Moyer said. And farmers time the deep tillage for late summer, when the weather is dry and the earthworms and other soil life burrow deep in the soil in search of moisture. They also apply compost, manure, or other soil amendments, which—in addition to the benefits derived from the cover crop—reduce the negative impacts of deep tillage, he added.
The roller-crimper system has worked so well for organic grain corn and soybean that some conventional soybean growers are also using it to reduce their use of expensive herbicides, said Moyer, who is also the author of the newly published book, Roller/Crimper No-Till.
The approach has gone from total obscurity to adoption by organic farmers on millions of acres—mostly in corn and soybeans, but also on orchard and vineyard floors, Moyer said. Other institutions, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington State University, and Iowa State University, are also conducting research on reduced tillage in organic farming using the roller-crimper.
Organic Pioneers Form No-till Partnership
In California, organic vegetable growers have made multiple attempts at reducing tillage over the past decade, with little luck, said Tom Willey, an organic pioneer who retired three years ago from his 75-acre farm near Fresno. Willey, who farmed for nearly 40 years, is now helping other growers return to the effort.
“Our early attempts at no-till were so disappointing, we gave up,” Willey said.
Then, in 2018, three well-established organic farms, Scott Park’s farm Park Farming Organics, Full Belly Farm, and Pinnacle Organically Grown Produce joined forces with U.C. Extension, Cal State Chico, and Fresno State to launch on-farm trials focusing on various forms of reduced soil disturbance. Since then, with financial support from a USDA NRCS Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG), the farmers and researchers are trying out various approaches and equipment. While the farmers choose which practices to use, the universities are collecting soil and tissue samples and doing additional reduced till and cover crop experiments on the schools’ farms.
The partnership is especially significant in a state that has always been at the forefront of organics but has offered little to no research development or extension services to organic farmers.
The participating farmers have all grown cover crops, incorporated compost, and managed complex crop rotations for many decades; they have all also experimented with reducing tillage. Yet, in a sense, they have decided late in their careers to go back to farming school, putting aside prevalent, economically secure concepts of organic production to learn a more nuanced, complicated version of soil microbiology. It’s a significant risk, but one they hope will be worth it.
“It’s like looking at the world through a different lens . . . a more reverential one that says we don’t know a whole lot and we should stop screwing it up. And maybe it can teach us if we step back,” said Muller of Full Belly Farm.
The farmers and academics are part of a growing informal network that shares knowledge, swaps scientific papers and on-farm trial updates, organizes farm tours, and hosts a slew of soil health experts, including conventional no-till farmers.
“[There are] too few farmers left in this country to waste time being at war with each other,” Willey said. The hope is to eventually replicate a farmers’ network for organic vegetable producers that is akin to No-till On the Plains, which connects conventional growers from the Great Plains and Midwest regions.
Several hurdles to organic vegetable no-till have become immediately clear, said Jeffrey Mitchell, cooperative extension specialist at U.C. Davis and the lead on the CIG no-till project.
One of them is seed size. Unlike corn and soy, which will germinate well and emerge robustly in soil blanketed with thick cover crop residue, most vegetables seeds are very small and delicate. They don’t have the same ability to push out of mulch-covered soil and establish themselves. The lack of expensive no-till equipment in California is another challenge, said Mitchell, who over the past two decades has conducted reduced tillage studies in conventional farming systems. The farmers in the organic no-till project have “scrambled, borrowed, and modified” existing tools, he said.
California also has unique climate characteristics that make reducing soil disturbance more difficult. Unlike in the Midwest, there is no real winter or hard frost, which means year-round, hardier weeds. And for most of the year, California lacks the rainfall that Midwestern farmers depend on to add moisture and help integrate nutrients into the soil without tillage.
“For high-value vegetable organic farmers in California, the switch to reduced soil disturbance is high-cost and high-risk, so it’s been very challenging to break in with it in our state,” Mitchell said.
Using a ‘Cadillac System’ to Boost Soil Health
To Park, who grows processing tomatoes, dry beans, seed crops, wheat, rice, millet, quinoa, and corn, those risks are all too real.
February found him trying to understand what went wrong with the combination of grazing, double cover crops, and reduced tillage he’d deployed last year. He refers to it as his “Cadillac system,” because it’s a deluxe approach that uses multiple practices that are typically used piecemeal to support soil health.
Following a wheat crop, which Park chopped and used as mulch, he planted a multi-species summer cover crop. Once it matured, he brought in about 6,000 goats to graze it. He then spread compost and shallowly tilled it in 2–3 inches deep, planted a winter cover crop, mowed and lightly tilled the following spring, then planted tomatoes, corn, and sunflowers.
Park’s standard practices include eight soil disturbances (down from about 20 on a typical vegetable farm), but on the trial fields he has further reduced them to four light disturbances.
Park believes that combining multiple regenerative farming practices can improve the soil to a point where it can have a symbiotic relationship with the plants. Such soil can make more nitrogen available to the crops, while cutting down on pest and disease pressure. It also holds a lot more water.
“The idea is to flow with nature and not have to fight nature back,” he says. But this latest attempt at amping up his practices turned out to be a “complete disaster.”
The cover crops added plenty of biomass into the soil. And the fields had 70 percent of normal water and enough time to digest the residue, he said. But something—the decision to vastly reduce the number and depth of tillage passes, the grazing, or both—had “tied up” the nitrogen and starved the plants, he said. Park added granular organic fertilizer to 70 acres of the Cadillac fields, but it didn’t help.
Park is not the only farmer in the reduced-till trials who is seeing a yield drag, and knowing that provides motivation to continue the experiment. Thus far, all of the farmers who are part of the project have seen yield reductions ranging from 20 to 50 percent in most of their trial fields.
Given the weed control and yield issues, Park isn’t sure that organic growers in California will ever be able to cut out tillage completely
“There’s unbelievable interest in moving the dial and I’m 100 percent behind it,” said Park. “But every farm has its own personality and its own needs . . . These practices have to fit your crops.”
Cover Crop–Cash Crop Match-Making
Two-hundred miles south of Park’s farm, on California’s Central Coast, farmer Phil Foster was getting ready to plant carrots and lettuce in his reduced till trial fields. Foster, who co-owns Pinnacle Organically Grown Produce, has a much smaller farm than Park—300 acres split among two ranches—but grows 60 different organic fruits and vegetables in a carefully orchestrated year-round rotation.
During the on-farm trials, Foster and the other farmers have come to realize that cover crops are the key to sustaining a reduced or no-till practice. These crops, planted between cash crops, mainly for their benefit to the farming system, perform different functions: they may suppress weeds, fix nitrogen, or improve the soil microbial community. In recent years, research has pointed to the benefit of cover crop mixes—as opposed to a single species—because they mimic the natural ecosystem.
Cover crops also must be chosen based on cash crops’ planting time and attuned to the crops’ nutritional, pest control, and water needs. And the various species should all have a similar maturation rate. Given all this, Foster say it will take time and a lot of experimentation to find that attunement with all his crops.
“We are continuing to learn the many nuances to cover species,” he said.
Foster has been farming organically for 30 years and keeps careful soil records. By cover cropping about half his acreage every year and incorporating the green manure and compost, he has been able to raise his soil organic matter by several percentage points. “I have seen how much more dynamic the soil is and how much easier it is to farm,” said Foster. “If you can attain a certain organic matter level, the soil takes care of the crops a lot better.”
But over the past decade, the organic matter on his farm plateaued, which lead him to consider reducing his tillage and a renewed focus on cover crops.
“We’re still disturbing the soil, but we’re bringing our soil disturbance from historical levels of 8 to 15 inches with discs and chisels, which we don’t run anymore, to 4 to 5 inches or even just a couple of inches,” Foster recently said during a presentation on the project at the EcoFarm Conference.
After joining the no-till trials, Foster upped his cover crop acreage by 20 percent. He also has increased the diversity of his cover crop mixes, with vetch and oats as the workhorses, and is now using “cocktails” of 5–10 species in different ratios that also include rye, field peas, safflower, sunflower, phacelia, mustard, flax, and tillage radish.
Like Foster, Full Belly Farm’s Muller is also expanding his mixes and now uses 10–12 different species. Muller is trying to make more use of cover crop grasses in his trial fields, including rye or sudangrass, which grow quicker than legumes such as vetch and provide a large amount of biomass. Grasses don’t decompose as rapidly, which has a down side in that they can tie up nitrogen and keep it from getting to the cash crops, but they also provide thick mulch that keeps weeds down for a longer window.
“We want to armor our soil as much as possible through the year,” Muller said. “That’s why we need to keep as much cover on the ground as possible at all times.”
For Park, whose tomatoes get planted in early spring, the options are slimmer. He has resorted to planting vetch in the fall, which matures quickly and can be terminated in March. While its residue supplies a quick boost of nitrogen to the tomatoes, it doesn’t suppress weeds, meaning that Park still has to till a few inches deep to get rid of them.
“Figuring this all out has been “a school of hard knocks,” he adds.
By far the biggest challenge, Foster said, is figuring out when and how to kill—or terminate—the cover crops and to manage their residue on the planting beds before seeding. For instance, not all cover crops terminate well with the roller-crimper. In Foster’s no-till melon field, for example, the cover crop did not die when flattened with the machine and grew back, “meaning competition with the melons and lower yields,” Foster said.
Muller had a similar experience two years ago, when he tried a cover crop mix with oats. The oats didn’t die when flattened multiple times, and he finally brought in sheep to graze them down. It took three weeks to terminate the cover crop.
To deal with the problem, the farmers have mostly resorted to using a vertical tillage tool with undercutting knives or repeated mowing, although the fine clippings don’t keep weeds down for long.
Like Park, Foster isn’t quite ready to take his farm to zero till—mainly because planting the cash crops amidst the cover crops is still a work in progress. For now, he and the other farmers are using a strip tiller, which tills only a narrow, shallow strip for planting seeds in—a technique that’s still rare in California.
Does Plastic Hold the Keys to Vegetable No-till?
Foster and Willey, the retired Madera farmer, have been experimenting with cutting out all tillage on Foster’s trial fields via plasticuture and occultation, techniques often used by no-till gardeners and very small-scale farmers. They involve the use of plastic tarps and cardboard or other barriers to suppress weeds and retain moisture.
The plasticulture trial is the only experiment in the project thus far that has successfully addressed one of the major challenges for organic vegetable no-till in California: how to add fertility to the soil and prevent yield reductions.
Typically, organic producers incorporate compost and cover crop or crop residue into the soil through tillage. But with no-till, the residue and compost are left on top of the beds. Leaving plant “nutrition” on top isn’t a problem in rainier environments, Willey said, since the moisture turns the residue and compost into mush and brings it down to the plant roots. But that’s not the case in the arid West. And most California farms have switched to drip irrigation, which is buried in the soil and doesn’t help break down what’s on the top layer of soil.
The plasticulture and occultation trial fields have avoided this problem, Willey said, by mimicking or re-creating an artificial Midwest or Northeast climate through sprinkler or drip irrigation under the plastic “mulch.” The plastic helps retain moisture and keeps the soil warm. And the moisture, in turn, helps the decomposition of organic matter, which releases nutrients for plants to take in.
Last season, when Foster and Willey grew melons and watermelons this way, they saw high yields. It was a victory, though ironically Foster has worked for years to eliminate plastic from his fields and said he isn’t thrilled to use it on a large scale again.
Muller ran a similar experiment last year, also using a thin sheet of plastic on top of his beds. The eggplants he transplanted into the system had “great plant vigor, earlier set of fruit and better consistent yields,” he said.
Closing the Nitrogen Loop with No-Till
While most of the trials in the no-till project have seen less-than-stellar results so far, Muller takes the long view. He believes that with time, going to continuous no-till will be possible and advantageous to organic vegetable farmers.
“It’s going to take us time and we have to commit to reestablishing the soil microbiome and to providing a habitat for those organisms that fix nitrogen for the plants,” said Muller.
Muller, who was born and raised on a conventional farm, grew up seeing the impact of pesticides on both farmers and farmworkers. Like Foster’s operation, Muller’s 450-acre farm in the Capay Valley west of Sacramento grows over 80 varieties of vegetables, fruits, and nuts. And he has focused on natural practices to maximize the vitality of his farm and his soil, including cover cropping and applying compost. Now, he hopes cutting down on tillage can take the effort further.
Muller hasn’t tilled his trial field for nearly three years. He likes to walk through it examining the soil; he brings a shovel, but it’s easy to dig in with his hands.
“There’s more earthworms, more vitality, more fungal activity, and much better water retention,” he said of the soil. The cover crops have also attracted beneficial insects like ladybugs and lacewings. “I’m not a scientist, but I can see the differences.”
Muller has been rethinking his views about soil fertility and “how farming practices determine the health of microbial communities, on which plants depend for nutrient acquisition, their diversity, who dominates and how both water and nutrient cycling are impacted.”
He and the other farmers are looking to emerging soil health research to understand the impacts of reduced or zero tilling on the living processes happening below ground. In recent years, scientists have come to understand that the soil’s fungi-to-bacteria population ratio is a good indicator of plant growth and nutrient uptake. Most tilled soil is higher in bacterial growth than fungi, which is damaged by tilling. But the ideal is to balance the two.
Higher inputs of nitrogen fertilizer have also been shown to cause lower fungi-to-bacteria ratios. In fact, studies show that adding any nitrogen inputs, including animal manure or other organic soil amendments, to soil can be detrimental to the mutually beneficial relationships mycorrhizal fungi form with plants.
“When you add nitrogen to the soil, you make the plants and bacteria lazy,” Muller sums it up.
The farmers in the trial have been influenced by the work of Australian soil scientist Christine Jones, who has found that the best way to mimic nature and ensure a robust microbial community is by having green plants grow in the soil year-round. Jones’ work has shown that cover crop mixes in a no-till system can create a self-sustaining closed loop in which bacteria and fungi will naturally do the work of fixing nitrogen and make it available to plants as long as enough carbon is available for them to digest. Such a system would decrease fertilizer greenhouse gas emissions as well as input, labor, and fuel costs.
“There’s emerging scientific evidence that diverse soil microbial communities can deliver never-imagined levels of nutrients to crops if our farming practices facilitate, rather than interfere with, their ability to do so,” Willey said.
Is Organic No-Till Farming Even Possible, or Worth It?
If these three California farmers do figure out how to eliminate tillage in their production systems, it’s not clear how long they can sustain such practices.
In experiments at the Rodale Institute, for instance, Moyer has seen that after five years without tillage “things start to break down.” There’s often a shift from annual weeds to perennial weeds, which are more challenging to control. In some areas, shrubs and trees start popping up in the fields. And groundhogs can become a problem.
“In the Northeast, our landscape wants to be hardwood forest . . . so the soil will try to revert back to that. In the Plains states, it wants to be grass prairie,” Moyer said. (In California, which has a Mediterranean climate, lack of rainfall limits forest growth, so this issue may bear less weight.)
“I don’t think we’ll be able to fight back the succession of species with mulch forever,” he added.
It may be, Moyer said, that agricultural soil that isn’t tilled needs an occasional reboot, much like a computer. For organic growers, “tillage is the reboot system,” Moyer said, “while for conventional farmers it’s increasing or changing the chemistry.” Organic farmers can quickly mitigate the damage from the occasional tillage by applying compost or animal manure and immediately planting a cover crop, he added
For the California farmers, who are planning to continue with the on-farm experiments beyond the four years of the CIG grant, the experiment is worthwhile. And they’re hoping other organic farmers will join the conversation. Ultimately, farmers need to figure out whether the overall benefits of reducing tillage outweigh the drawbacks in large-scale vegetable production systems. But the answers may not be far off.
“It’s one of the most exciting times I’ve had as a farmer,” said Muller. “The scientific body of knowledge is making wonderful leaps in our understanding of soil ecology. The hunches we had as organic growers . . . are now being borne out and understood.”
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]]>The post As Mushrooms Grow in Popularity, a Radical Mycology Movement is Emerging appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Behold the (mostly) hidden kingdom of life. Its members number approximately 2.2 to 3.8 million species, the vast majority of which have not yet been described or named. Some are invisible, buried under the earth and inside rotting trees. Some grow above ground. Others appear and disappear. Some taste great; others can kill you.
Despite their mysterious nature, fungi—a category that includes molds, mushrooms, yeasts, lichens, mycorrhiza, and mildews—are essential to human life and play crucial ecological functions. They have also been shown to help people solve a wide range of problems, from oil spills to clinical depression to food insecurity. Yet they are vastly understudied and misunderstood.
Journalist Doug Bierend spent five years exploring fungi and the emerging subcultures that have formed around them for his new book, In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms.
Civil Eats spoke with Bierend about fungi’s under-recognized status, their role as a catalyst in emergent social movements, and what it takes to grow and forage for mushrooms while furthering the ideas they inspire.
I was born in Eastern Europe and have distinct memories of going on mushroom forays with my grandfather. I remember the mushrooms strung together on threads, air-drying in my grandparents’ tiny kitchen, their fruity smells wafting through the house. You write that in North America, people have negative associations with them or think they’re dangerous, a nuisance. Why is this?
Doug Bierend
I think there are a lot of factors at play. It’s a cultural inheritance, an Anglo mentality or attitude towards fungi. You can see fungi portrayed in Shakespeare, in other literature, and turns of phrase as disgusting, associated with death and decay (as if those last two were bad things). The specter of decay and death may come from certain parts of Europe and certain historical experiences. The potato blight that led to the Irish Potato Famine in which millions died, for example, was caused by a fungus-like pathogen. So some specific events or cultural trends led to the people who settled this land holding negative attitudes and bringing them to the New World. The Indigenous relationship with fungi in North America, which I’m not qualified to speak about at any depth, seems to be a lot less antagonistic.
Yes, there are practical reasons to be weary of fungi. If you’re a logger, you don’t want to see your valuable timber compromised by pathogenic fungi. If you’re building a house or working with food, you don’t want mold to grow. It’s obvious why people associate mold with trouble, but mold is just a tiny sliver of the reality of fungi and how we can relate to them.
Why should Americans care more about fungi?
They are the reason you’re alive, in large part. They’re ubiquitous, fundamental, and fascinating. They play key roles and are often overlooked in those roles, for reasons of cultural disdain. They hold many insights into how nature works and how we might live in better accord with her. It’s incredible how useful fungi are and how those uses are only just being uncovered.
Fungi can help us provide food and medicine to communities that don’t have access to them. They are already the source of many of our pharmaceuticals [penicillin, for example, is used to make antibiotics], and could be the basis for new materials for textiles and green construction. They may also be able to help us clean up oil spills. They’re an entire universe, a kingdom of life that has yet to be uncovered.
Why did science neglect fungi for such a long time?
In a historical sense, it comes down to the maturity of the natural sciences when they were being formalized. The British were a particularly important influence, with the formation of the Royal Society, the founding of botanical gardens, and the colonial botany project that was undertaken by the U.K. and other imperial powers to document life on earth and to exploit its natural resources, especially in the colonies.
Fungi were categorized as a subset of plants and they were not prioritized. If you think of what scientists studied at the time, it was the plants and animals that counted as spoils for the kingdom or ones promising a source of income. I don’t think people had the wherewithal to think of fungi as useful. That helped keep fungi as a marginal class of organisms until science began to recognize the valuable roles they play.
“Fungi are an entire universe, a kingdom of life that has yet to be uncovered.”
At the same time, amateur scientists were doing experiments on fungi. They set up the early forms of mycological clubs, but they operated on the margins, mostly outside scientific institutions. [Mycological comes from “myco,” a Greek word meaning mushroom or fungus.]
The dawning of formal science in the Victorian era, which coincided with the invention of the microscope and the formation of scientific societies to elevate these new technologies, helped fungi become a discrete area of focus. But it wasn’t until 1969 that fungi were identified as a distinct kingdom. It was Robert Whittaker, an American plant ecologist who first proposed the five-kingdom classification of the world’s biota, which includes fungi. [Up to seven kingdoms are now recognized.]
What really marked a turning point was the mainstreaming and refining of DNA sequencing technologies over the past three decades.
Part of the problem is that looking for fungi as a scientist is largely a matter of luck. Many fungi don’t express themselves as mushrooms. They are actually invisible. They live within the cells of plants or other organisms and no human eyes ever observe them. We can only find them via recently developed techniques like metagenomics, which take a sample of organic matter such as soil or dung and tease out the DNA codes common to fungi.
Despite the fact that human eyes can’t perceive them, fungi are everywhere. And we’re just starting to recognize that. But the picture this paints is still too complex for science to encompass or articulate.
Can you talk about the role of “citizen” or community science in helping us learn more about mushrooms and how the idea of formal expertise has been complicated when it comes to fungi?
“Fungi are ephemeral and can be hard to spot, so having a bunch of people who can upload photos of interesting mushrooms is like a force multiplier for institutional science.”
Social media, cameras, and DNA sequencing that you can carry in your pocket have made it so that anyone can [learn abut fungi]. And it’s a great benefit. All of these people, whether they’re scientists or not, have the means of documenting fungi, through apps like iNaturalist [and countless others], documenting, identifying, and building a knowledge base around those organisms. You don’t have to have a degree to contribute to the project of understanding fungi.
In fact, institutional science is leaning more and more on citizen science. They both recognize the value of specialists, experts, and access to expensive equipment. But fungi are ephemeral and can be hard to spot, so having a bunch of people who can upload photos of interesting mushrooms . . . is like a force multiplier for institutional science. And as science is funded less robustly, the non-academic might be the only person left to do it.
What is radical mycology culture and where does it happen?
Radical Mycology is a grassroots movement based in the Pacific Northwest; the term was coined by its founder Peter McCoy, who also wrote a book of the same title. But it’s also a facet of a much broader and diverse “mycoculture,” which focuses on working with mushrooms to heal our landscape and waterways, foster food security and medicinal sovereignty, and build a better relationship with nature and one another.
The radical mycologists hold a convergence every few years, mostly in Oregon and upstate New York. But the movement is happening all over the country, as well as outside our borders in places like Canada and Ecuador. Other groups include Fungi For the People, the POC Fungi Community, Bay Area Applied Mycology, Central Texas Mycological Society, Myco Alliance, MycoSymbiotics, and the New Moon Mycology Summit. All these are versions of an approach to fungi as a symbol, a heuristic. Anna Tsing [a professor and the author of The Mushroom at the End of the World] has written that “mushrooms are good to think with.” Basically, this broader movement is taking up fungi as more than just organisms to study or to monetize, but rather as ecological role models, even allies.
In your book, you argue that seeing the fungi movement as just about fungi is kind of like “missing the forest for the mushrooms.” You show that fungi—and the culture that has grown around them—are part of an effort to tackle patriarchy, colonialism, even racism. Can you talk about the social aspects of the fungi movement?
The fact that fungi have been marginalized creates a space where marginalized people are front and center. Radical mycology is serious about “no oppressive language, no othering, or discrimination.” People feel like they have an opportunity to create a space where another vision of society plays out. It’s a project to elevate fungi, but also to elevate a set of values and to smuggle them into the scientific process. The goal is to change the character of local agriculture, environmental mediation, and food systems to reflect values that are easily termed as progressive . . . although this movement feels outside of politics and there are a lot of political views represented in those spaces.
It’s interesting that we’re discovering fungi at a time when we’re also questioning all of our systems. The radical in radical mycology points out how out of whack our society is. Because there’s really nothing radical about saying we should heal the planet or allow everyone to participate in science.
Are the members of this movement practicing what they preach?
It depends on the group. The gathering I attended with POC Fungi Community in San Diego was organized by people of color. It seemed to be an example of 100 percent community agency. For them, fungi is traditional medicine, something they feel a cultural connection to. At the same time, they feel alienated from all that is emerging around that medicine as it is being seized by capital. So, in that instance, I saw a community taking it upon themselves to organize and decide what fungi represent to them and how they want to relate to them.
But it’s also easy to throw diversity around like a catch-all term. At certain events, I witnessed some tensions around whether the event was truly inclusive or representative. To me, the most encouraging aspect was that I was hearing dissent and disagreement rather than feeling completely comfortable as a cis-white male. That’s not something I experience at a lot of gatherings. I took it as a productive thing.
As you just mentioned, in recent years mushrooms have become increasingly popular and have moved toward the mainstream. Is there a fear that the growing popularity could change the fungi movement, strip it of its values and social appeal? That it could lead to inequity and disenfranchisement?
It’s a valid concern and I share it. As soon as capital enters the picture, it reshapes the landscape. There’s a lot of financial opportunity emerging around fungi in various areas. So there is wariness among these communities, where members are motivated by deepening fellowship and resilience and furthering concepts that run counter to the extractive logic of capitalism. There’s an inherent resistance to the trend [factor] that every new, exciting, and potentially profitable thing is subject to.
At the same time, fungi’s popularity is a product of some people’s recognition that our systems are failing us. Fungi are offering alternative ways of producing materials, food, medicine, and showing us new ways of existing in relationship to ecologies. They are fostering communities that are subversive and that exemplify priorities other than wealth accumulation.
Panaeolus sphinctrinus. (Photo CC-licensed by Bernard Spragg)
My hope is that the community side of the trend will outpace the [companies] that are moving to make a killing on therapeutic psychedelics and the medicinal mushroom market. When it comes to the culinary specialty mushroom boom, there is a built-in dynamic that favors locality. Because those mushrooms don’t travel well, people are growing them on small or medium scales for their communities. That’s why a huge aspect of the emerging mycoculture is taking place in the realm of mushroom cultivation.
A lot of the mushrooms that are sold are still foraged. If you go to high-end restaurants that serve oyster mushrooms or maitake, they’re likely using forest mushrooms. There’s a robust foraging economy. At the same time, people are learning how to cultivate mushrooms that were once thought of as uncultivable. Communities are forming online that are sharing tips and advice. You can grow culinary mushrooms in your basement or in your closet. One of the people I spoke with, Julia Coffey of Mycoterra Farm—now the largest mushroom cultivator in Massachusetts—started growing them in her basement.
These mushrooms sold for food and medicinal purposes are not exactly inexpensive or available to everyone. How does that square with the vision of equity that the movement is trying to advance?
Everyone who is preaching about natural food and medicine has to acknowledge that only certain people can afford it. There’s a tension there. But I believe a lot of the people advancing the methods to grow mushrooms cheaply, through low tech/no-tech cultivation methods, want to see those methods become accessible to everyone, including communities of color. William Padilla-Brown, a young [African-American] man who figured out how to cultivate the rare Cordyceps militaris, a medicinal mushroom, published a handbook on his techniques, hoping to get as many people as possible to grow it and benefit from it, which could lead to the emergence of a local Cordyceps market and a drop in prices. [Padilla-Brown is now working on releasing the second volume of the handbook.] So there is a conceptual basis for the notion that we might be able to democratize food with fungi.
Let’s talk about the techniques and practices of DIY mushroom cultivation and collection. If someone who knows nothing about mushrooms would like to start growing or foraging for them, where should she start?
It’s a rich question. If you’re curious and want to try growing them, you can get a grow kit. They’re very easy to find. It’s an add-water situation, and you can grow them in your closet or basement. Caring for mushrooms is similar to tending to a houseplant. But it’s also a mind-expanding experience and they don’t have to be psychedelic.
“My hope is that the community side of the trend will outpace the companies that are moving to make a killing on therapeutic psychedelics and the medicinal mushroom market.”
My favorite mushroom to grow is shiitake. The oyster mushroom is the most common go-to for the first-time mushroom cultivation because it’s such a resilient mushroom. With a shiitake, on the other hand, you need to put a tent over it and keep it humid.
Those who cultivate mushrooms and teach workshops also often lead forays to introduce people to mushrooms in the field. An easy resource is to look up your local mycological society. Through them, you can find out who is growing and teaching about mushrooms in your area. This is happening everywhere. If you’re moved by the social justice dimension, see if you live near one of the gatherings I documented in the book.
Be aware that the first step with mushrooms is always just the first step; they pull people in. My entire worldview was transformed by walking into the forest and recognizing that I could walk out with all the food I needed for that day. Just learning what fungi are, how they operate, the roles they play, and all the things you can do with them can set up the stage for the next questions: why are they doing these things? What else do they do? What about the trees they associate with? Then you start thinking about the trees, the state of soil, the microclimate. Looking to mushrooms means looking to a wider ecosystem.
I have to ask you about magic mushrooms and their psychedelic qualities. The “shroom” culture has pretty negative connotations. But that may be changing, as there are now clinical trials on psychedelic mushroom therapies for people dying of cancer, those battling addiction, major depression, and end-of-life anxiety. Are fungi the future of our medicine?
It’s a sticky question, I think. Fungi are brought in to serve all these valuable roles, and people are seizing upon their ability to facilitate experiences, either through the traditional cultural rituals, retreat centers, or academic trials [at institutions like Johns Hopkins University]. But I’m hesitant to frame them as the answer or as a solution to anything. To me, if a therapeutic application is distributed along the same lines that every other valuable thing is distributed in our society, it doesn’t change anything. It just means the same people who were going to get the medicine before fungi were big are now going to be able to get the fungi medicine. The people in the POC Fungi Community told me, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford a $500 session to address my depression through fungi.”
The other thing is that there’s nothing new about what’s happening. People talk about “discovering” magic mushrooms in Huautla de Jímenez, Mexico. But these mushrooms had been known for a long time and only recently have been marketized and monetized.
But fungi are also unique in their nature, their cultural import, associations, and history, and there is space to resist that [commodification] trend. My hope is that—as it dawns on us as a society how valuable these organisms are to all life and to the various needs we have—it will happen in a way that recognizes the inequitable distribution of previous natural resources. I put my faith in the communities forming around these fungi to address their needs in equitable ways, more than in the fungi themselves to save us from our patterns of behavior.
What surprised you the most when researching and writing this book?
By far the most promising aspect of fungi is how they bring people together in seemingly unexpected ways. It’s less about any specific technology or technique or ecological function, but rather it’s about the allure they have to get people talking about what’s wrong in their communities.
I hope this book leads people who are curious about mushrooms to find out that there’s another dimension to them. And that the communities that are forming around fungi and the kind of work they’re doing inspire others to start reconsidering the roles they play and how they can gather and organize to improve conditions for themselves and their neighbors. If fungi can help us do that then we can say—unironically—that they helped us save the world.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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]]>The post Our Future Food Supply Depends on Endangered Wild Crops appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Colin K. Khoury, the study’s lead author, has been a long-time advocate of wild plants and food crop diversity. He has worked for seed companies and seed conservation nonprofits, including Native Seeds/SEARCH. He currently works (remotely) for the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia and is also a researcher at Saint Louis University, based at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Ft. Collins, Colorado facility.
Civil Eats spoke with Khoury about the study, the threats to these plants, and what can be done to help crop wild relatives thrive.
You have written that “the future is going to be a lot wilder and weedier” and that this wildness and weediness will be key to our success. Why are these wild relatives so important to our future?
Colin Khoury.
Agriculture is this ironic field that requires genetic diversity to persist, but also is always reducing this diversity down. That reduction has to do with our modern system, with technology and the fact that you need uniformity in the field to make industrial-scale agriculture happen. It also has to do to do with the small number of seed companies. At the same time, diversity enables agriculture to deal with pests and diseases; if you have the same plants in the field, it’s a lot easier for a pest to “unlock” that variety and eat it all.
In more traditional systems, farmers plant lots of different crops and varieties. Conventional agriculture, on the other hand, gets away with uniformity by every few years changing the varieties that are grown. This means plant breeders go to the seed banks and find new traits. They’re continually mixing and matching. And our crops’ wild ancestors are the major source of this genetic diversity.
On top of that, climate change is forcing agriculture to change faster. Even the coldest average temperatures are now a lot hotter than they used to be. So, plant breeders need to find varieties of wheat or corn that are more tolerant to heat. Those traits can be found in the wild relatives. They’re the plants that thousands of years ago people figured out how to domesticate.
Agriculture is this ironic field that requires genetic diversity to persist, but also is always reducing this diversity down. That reduction has to do with our modern system, with technology and the fact that you need uniformity in the field to make industrial-scale agriculture happen.
For example, wild sunflowers grow on the roadside in Colorado. They’re the species from which our cultivated sunflowers come. Those are now grown by farmers across the U.S., in Canada, Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and South America, but they came from here.
As people domesticated these crops, they [bred] for taste and size, but left other traits behind. So, in the wild, there is all this genetic material that we’re now finding to be useful. Wild sunflowers can adapt to a lot colder and hotter situations than the ones in the fields. And they are close enough cousins that you can cross them and bring in these traits without too much trouble. They don’t require genetic engineering or expensive technology to move traits from one species to another. The idea behind going back to the wild is that genetic diversity is the foundation of how we are going to make it through.
Interestingly, there are places where the interactions between cultivated crops and wild relatives continue naturally. There are parts of Mexico where wild maize grows, and it is encouraged by traditional farmers because they know that a little bit of mixing helps make their crop more resilient. It’s amazing. That knowledge is indirect and goes way back.
Have these wild relatives already been used to improve current commercial crops?
Virtually every crop we eat from the supermarket has already benefitted from breeding with a crop wild relative. So, it’s not an esoteric or marginal practice. You could not have industrial tomato production without a lot of breeding with wild relatives.
The biggest seed companies have their own seed banks, although they also use the USDA’s public seed bank system. In the developing world and in the U.S., university programs also act as seed banks and do genetic breeding using wild crop relatives.
These crops have also actually saved commercial crops a number of times. North American native grapes saved the European grape industry in the 1800s. When a soil-burrowing insect pest called phylloxera was brought to Europe from North America, it wiped out vineyards in France and other countries. Researchers found that the roots of wild grapes in North America were resistant to it, so they encouraged European growers to graft their varietals on top of those roots.
Indigenous communities have used wild plants for millennia to feed themselves and for cultural purposes. They have also for many years called for their conservation. Is the scientific community just catching up?
Some conservationists in agriculture have been warning for decades that we’re losing important diversity to human activity. That’s not really new. But the combined voices are getting stronger because there is more science underneath it. That’s the reason we were able to publish our paper in a high-level scientific venue. Compiling information on hundreds and hundreds of species, in a way where you can compare them all, has taken many decades of people recording who the species are and where they live.
Really inclusive research, that’s not just extracting information from Native peoples but is collaborative, requires a different timeframe and trust building. Western science is not used to doing this, but it’s slowly changing, and that’s exciting.
I fully agree that Native people’s traditional knowledge has incredible wisdom and it has not been listened to enough. The way that crop wild relatives have contributed to modern agriculture is mostly through a stream of public and private research, companies, and people with money . . . and Native people have largely been outside of that conversation.
Really inclusive research, that’s not just extracting information from Native peoples, is collaborative and requires a different timeframe and trust building. Those brought up in western science are not used to doing this and that’s why the amount of research that’s truly collaborative and inclusive is a very minor portion of it. But it’s slowly changing and that’s exciting.
What are the biggest threats to crop wild relatives?
The primary threat is the modification of their natural habitats by people, including developing it into farmland and constructing new homes. The second driver for the loss of for wild species in general is climate change.
Most of the information on the impact of climate change on crop wild relatives is still obtained by modeling future climates, rather than already seeing effects. One famous study predicts that species may completely disappear . . . but the more likely scenario is that a species may lose its range size and many of its populations, but others will be able to hold on. In addition to modeling, there is now real evidence coming in from [Israel, part of the] the Fertile Crescent that some populations of wild wheat and barley relatives have already been affected by hotter and drier temperatures.
There are also issues with over-harvesting in some places. Many wild relatives are not that exciting, but others—like wild chili peppers—are very much in demand. People go out and collect them and even prefer them to the commercial varieties because they’re hotter and have different tastes. So, a lot of these populations are disappearing because there are more people in the world and more demand. But you can’t just stop people from collecting culturally important plants. You have to find a balance between the local needs and conservation, and include people in conservation efforts.
We don’t necessarily think of the U.S. as a hub of plant diversity. Yet your study found a richness of wild crop relatives across the country. Was this a surprise?
Yes. My colleagues and I have been doing this work for a while, but despite this we were surprised by how much diversity of agriculturally relevant plants there is. Unlike Mexico, South America, the Fertile Crescent, or South and Southeast Asia, this part of the world is not known as the breadbasket of agricultural historically. So, it was surprising that we have so many cousins of crops that come from other places. The geographic breadth of this diversity was also a surprise. I knew certain parts of the U.S. were rich, like the Southern border, because it’s closer to Mexico where there is more diversity. But we found a diversity of crop wild relatives from the top of Alaska to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Hawaii. It’s everywhere, and that’s amazing and also daunting.
Your study found that half of the plants you surveyed are endangered in their natural habitats, including 7 percent that are critically endangered, and most of the others are vulnerable or nearly threatened. Can you give a few examples of the species we should be most concerned about?
I like to talk about the ones that are listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act. One is called the paradoxical sunflower. It grows only in salty little wetlands in New Mexico and Texas, which are largely on private ranch lands. It’s closely related to the domestic sunflower and it’s super salt-tolerant. We do have some collections of it and the public plant breeders in North Dakota have bred more salt-tolerant sunflowers using paradoxical sunflowers.
Another example comes from Florida, a wild pumpkin called the Okeechobee gourd, and it only grows on the side of Lake Okeechobee, close to Orlando. There’s not much left of it and the species is resistant to diseases that threaten commercial crops in the pumpkin family.
Then there is the Texas wild rice, which occurs only in very clear water on a two-mile stretch of the San Marcos River, the only place in the world, and it’s related to the wild rices that are so important to the Native peoples of the Upper Midwest. There are many other examples.
How should we improve conservation efforts for these plants? Who should be responsible for these efforts?
There are established methods for taking care of these plants. One approach is conserving the plants in seed banks or botanical gardens. It is easier because seed banks are a controlled environment. All you have to know is how to collect the seeds at the right time and how to dry them. Then the seed banks can take care of these seeds for decades and centuries and researchers, educators, and breeders can access the diversity.
The second approach is conserving the plants where they live, in their natural habitats, so they can continue to evolve, so they’re still interacting with pests and diseases, so they continue to serve their functions in the ecosystems, and so they are available to local users. Methods to do that are also well established: Monitor the populations and make changes if populations are declining.
Who should be doing this conservation work is less clear. The USDA is already doing it. But, I want to emphasize that the enormity of the task and the trajectory of how quickly these plants are threatened means it would take us many decades, at the current pace, to get the work done. We need a large effort to verify where the species live today and to do the collecting. And that really requires a lot of field work. Because it’s such a big effort and the USDA has only so much money and people, we’re trying to involve more people—citizen scientists and hobby gardeners.
We need a large effort to verify where the species live today and to do the collecting. And that really requires a lot of field work, so we’re trying to involve more people—citizen scientists and hobby gardeners.
We have been working for several years now on collaborating more with botanical garden communities all over the country, which have their own conservation systems, professionals, and connections with hobby botanists. They may be willing to go out and check crop wild relatives populations. And I hope we can start a big project where over five to 10 years we can get the work done. It’s not just about the money but also the labor, so we need cool innovative approaches like engaging students over the summers, training them to collect the seeds, and sending them out in teams.
In terms of habitat preservation, we’re working with the biggest landowners in the U.S., federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of the Interior. We need to contact other big landowners, including Native American tribes, military landowners, state forests, the Nature Conservancy. We’ve made slow, steady progress. It’s not that you need to set aside the land or buy new land, it has to do with creating awareness about these plants. Plants get very little funding, so even on public land such as a National Parks, managers need to be aware that crop wild relatives exist and need protection. They need to create management plans, otherwise they have other priorities like elk and other animals.
Speaking of awareness, what should be the role of raising public awareness and creating more public access to these plants?
There’s a term called plant blindness; it means people don’t know much about plants and they don’t notice them. To counter this trend and create more public awareness, we talk about the role of U.S. botanical gardens, which are especially good at connecting with people. They receive more than 120 million visitors annually. Through exhibits, information, and art, these gardens could feature the wild plants our foods come from.
Your study advocates for the urgent conservation of crop wild relatives. How can we make sure that these plants are not only safeguarded, but that their genetic material continues to be accessible to all who need to use them but may not have the financial means to buy expensive seeds?
More needs to be done on accessibility and availability of crop wild relatives. Nobody should own them . . . this tradition of where crops come from, it goes back thousands of years. Who do you attribute a crop to? It doesn’t make sense to have ownership. Unfortunately, we live in a time when you’re allowed to patent life and it’s not going to end anytime soon. So, a balance needs to be reached. I feel good that the seed bank system in the U.S. is a public resource. It’s available for free, including free shipping, to researchers, plant breeders, and Native American tribes. Due to a lack of funding, it is not available to regular gardeners.
There are also a lot of varied opinions about who should own these plants and who has the rights to benefit from them. There are big politics and a movement towards restricting access in places where the plants originate, and many of these countries feel they have been taken advantage of. It’s unfortunate because the history of agriculture and farmers is about sharing seeds. The problem is that the benefits from breeding those plants have not been shared equitably. I feel strongly that diversity should not be owned, but we also need to recognize the innovation of plant breeding. There needs to be a balance between profits and accessibility. And the public seed bank system needs more support from the government and taxpayers.
Going back to the idea of a weedier, wilder future, do you envision that we may go back not just to using some crop wild relatives to improve current commercial crops, but also to actually growing them in their natural areas and using them in our diets?
Diversification is important for reasons other than its own sake: if you want to obtain the right nutrients for the human body, diversity is a good way of doing it. It’s a major pathway towards better health and nutrition. Our Native foods are amazing; they are also tasty. Have you heard of the pawpaw? Its conservation is happening mainly through a network of people who love them. They are yummy to eat, but the plant is also hard to commercialize because it matures quickly and the fruit is only edible for three days before it goes bad.
There’s a whole suit of plants that would be wonderful if they were added to our diets. There are plants in North America that were on their way to being domesticated into major crops, but when Europeans arrived a whole different trajectory started and they disappeared. One example is the potato bean. It’s native to the South, but when white people arrived, it was being grown by Native Americans from St. Louis to Cape Cod. It was likely part of the first Thanksgiving, then it stopped being cultivated as wheat and other crops came along. But it’s still here. I’ve been growing it for some years!
The potato bean plant, aka apios americana. (Photo CC-licensed by Mary Keim on Flickr)
To bring these plants into our diets, we’ll need the hobby gardeners to spread the passion around. Upscaling is also a challenge. A little bit of plant breeding can make some plants much more productive. That’s what happened with quinoa. It wasn’t known as a food outside the Andes 40 years ago and now it has “exploded,” it’s grown in over 100 countries. Quinoa’s success comes partly from people talking about how great it is, but it is also due to the fact that plant breeders figured out how to grow it in many places. Everyone can play a role in the diversification of the food system.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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]]>The post Does Regenerative Agriculture Have a Race Problem? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>When the documentary Kiss the Ground was released on Netflix earlier this year, it introduced the concepts of regenerative agriculture and soil health to a mainstream audience. Produced by the nonprofit organization of the same name, the film has won a slew of awards. And the trailer alone has been viewed over 8 million times.
And yet, the film has also frustrated and alienated a number of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the food and agriculture world who say it all but excludes their voices and completely ignores their ancestors’ contributions to the regenerative movement. What’s worse, they say, is that the film fails to step beyond its soil health focus and upbeat message about reversing climate change to address the social inequities and structural racism at the heart of American agriculture, including Black and Indigenous land dispossession, discrimination, and a lack of access to farmland.
“The film offers a very comfortable conversation. This is about carbon, we need to heal the soil, and it’s all hunky-dory,” said Rishi Kumar, the executive director of the Sarvodaya Institute and a Pomona, California-based urban farmer and educator who worked as a consultant for the nonprofit for more than a year. And, he adds, “the organization engaged with white farmers, funders, and leaders. They were not questioning some of the fundamental assumptions and values that have led us to this point.”
Since then, the organization has acknowledged the film’s omissions and pledged to change its approach. But Kumar and other BIPOC farmers say the film is just one high-profile example of regenerative agriculture’s broader problems. They see the movement as yet another attempt to rebrand age-old growing traditions and Indigenous practices that pre-date the “conventional” farming that regenerative agriculture advocates claim they are disrupting—without inviting people of color to the table.
According to Loren Cardeli, executive director of A Growing Culture, a nonprofit that supports smallholder farmers around the world, the regenerative movement fails to address the power imbalance within the food system and dismisses the traditional community-based approach to land management, he said, an omission that will significantly reduce its present-day impact.
“Regenerative agriculture has become a way to save the day without addressing our white privilege,” said Cardeli, who is white.
With Black Lives Matter marches sweeping the nation in 2020, leading to a national reckoning over systemic racism across myriad industry sectors, BIPOC farmers and leaders—including some who describe their work as “regenerative”—have begun publicly criticizing the regenerative movement, saying it’s high time to address racial injustice, power, and equity in the food system.
“With the onset of social media, social movements, and very real demographic changes in this country . . . we can no longer be ignored,” said A-dae Romero Briones, the director of the Native Agriculture and Food Systems program at the First Nations Development Institute. “People are finally hearing the message.”
Reforming the False Narrative of Agriculture
The struggle to make the U.S. food system more racially just and equitable isn’t new. People of color have long sought to bring the conversation to the forefront, but their efforts have largely gone ignored. As such, alternative agriculture’s enduring whiteness, unacknowledged use of ancestral farming practices, and singular focus on the environment while eschewing social justice have long plagued its various movements. They also carried the legacy of early environmentalists who sought to erase Indigenous people’s imprint on the American landscape.
Organic farming advocates—nearly all of whom were white—recognized the need to address social issues and fought to write workers’ rights into the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Organic Program in the 1990s. But that effort failed and the program’s rules focus solely on the environmental aspects of food production.
In the following decade, a small number of mostly white food movement leaders raised concerns about racial equity, though again largely sidelining people of color from the conversation. Only in recent years have BIPOC farmers, experts, and organizations slowly entered the mainstream to explore the historical roots of racial inequity and exploitation, leading to open conversations about issues ranging from reparations to land ownership.
Regenerative agriculture itself is a relatively new term in the U.S. The Rodale Institute began using the term in the 1980s, but it didn’t gain prominence until this past decade, when the idea of plants sequestering carbon captured the nation’s imagination. Regenerative agriculture, which doesn’t always disallow the use of synthetic chemicals, has also found wide appeal among conventional farmers who have boosted their soil health by cutting out tillage, planting cover crops, and adding holistic practices such as rotational grazing.
Although there is no one agreed-upon definition or approach to regenerative, the movement has seen an avalanche of funding efforts, investment, corporate campaigns, farmer training programs, books, and more in recent years. Universities ranging from Yale to University of Vermont (in partnership with Ben & Jerry’s) and California State University at Chico have all established programs focused on regenerative agriculture. And public figures such as Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio have also championed the movement.
Farmers such as Allan Savory, a rancher and co-founder of the Colorado-based Savory Institute, and Gabe Brown, a North Dakota farmer and rancher who runs a regenerative agriculture consulting business, are known as some of the movement’s pioneers and have gained large followings. And over the past few years, multiple Big Food companies, including Cargill, Nestlé, and General Mills, have jumped on the bandwagon, pledging to support the transformation of thousands of acres of land.
The present-day regenerative movement is—much like agriculture in general—”inherited, guarded, and perpetuated by white men,” said Romero Briones with the First Nations Development Institute.
Native Americans across the country, who cultivated sophisticated agricultural systems that often relied on regenerative practices, were not considered “farmers,” she said, because their agriculture was less intensive and didn’t include commodity crops grown commercially. Later generations saw Native people as “noble savages” living on untouched, virgin land with little impact on the environment.
Recent research, described in the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann, has shown that Native Americans actively managed and even constructed their natural landscapes—and their agricultural and land management practices sustained communities that were much more populous than had been acknowledged previously.
Examples of Indigenous regenerative land practices abound. Native American communities did not use plows or till the land. They used agroforestry and silviculture to control the growth and quality of the forests, terraced the land to prevent erosion, planted riparian buffers to protect sensitive areas, and grew both wild and domesticated foods.
Intercropping was common, as was maximizing living roots, and many tribes planted the “Three Sisters” (maize, squash, and beans together), a system which descended from the Mesoamerican planting system called milpa. Native farmers also used wood ash and fish waste as fertilizer. Such practices clearly benefited the soil: There are places in Mesoamerica that have been continuously cultivated for four thousand years and are still productive.
Using ruminants to fertilize and aerate soil was also practiced before cattle set foot in the U.S. plains tribes, for example, moved buffalo herds to specific areas to regenerate the land. Native Americans also regularly used patch-burning on the plains and forest understory burning to regrow fresh grass and attract bison, deer, and elk, which they hunted. These small intentional burns increased plant diversity, reduced invasive plants, and increased the numbers of plants and animals. They also reduced the risk of megafires (which release a lot more carbon than low-intensity controlled burns).
Despite such expertise, Indigenous people are rarely included in conversations about organic or regenerative agriculture and have grown disillusioned by the movements, said Romero Briones. “And the more disillusioned our people become, the more unwilling they will be to participate,” she added.
And while it’s still much smaller in scope and less profitable than the $50 billion organic industry, the fact that regenerative is packaging itself as something new and that it stands to make a lot of money, yet hasn’t picked up on the current racial reckoning, makes it hard for many people—BIPOC and otherwise—to stomach.
“All of these practices are part of Indigenous land management. And yet they get presented like somebody just figured them out overnight,” said Chris Newman, a Black and Indigenous farmer in Virginia, who is working to set up a centralized agricultural trust through Sylvanaqua Farms, which he co-runs with his wife.
Newman, a member of the Choptico Band of Piscataway Indians, said his father was forced to attend an Indigenous boarding school where the teachers “beat the Indian out of him,” including his knowledge of seed keeping and traditional foods. Given these brutal efforts at erasing Native food culture, he said, he finds it painful to watch the current regenerative movement rebrand and profit off of Indigenous farming.
Recently, Newman said he was on a call with a wealthy landowner who wanted to put his land under regenerative development, including a mix of farming, agro-forestry, and other practices. The landowner was planning on hiring a white-led organization from out of state to oversee the work, Newman said, instead of seeking services from local farmers such as himself.
“I was thinking, ‘Why do you need these people when you have us? What do they bring besides the comfort of whiteness?’ They don’t have our expertise or our connection to this landscape,” Newman said.
The white farmers, experts, and institutions that champion regenerative practices have become “power brokers,” says Newman. He sees them as monopolizing the distribution of grants and assets such as capital investments in infrastructure, effectively taking them away from Black and Indigenous people.
A similar point was made by HEAL Food Alliance, a group of 55 multi-sector organizations focused on health, environment, agriculture, and labor, who published a letter last year challenging the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walmart Foundation to do more to support BIPOC grassroots leaders in food and agriculture. The letter criticized the foundations for giving money to large, white-led organizations to do service work in BIPOC communities, instead of funding the BIPOC-led groups on the ground. It also said the funding process often isn’t equitable for and accessible to BIPOC-led organizations.
“While many foundations around the country are having conversations and making moves to directly fund BIPOC-led groups to support their communities, it is high time for food systems funders to do the same,” the HEAL letter said.
Managing Land for Collective Resources
Another major challenge, according to BIPOC experts, is that the present-day regenerative movement has diluted and weakened the traditional approach to land management. Indigenous agriculture was far more effective because it was based on the concept of community, said Romero Briones, which allowed Native people to regenerate very large swaths of land over many generations.
“For us, the land is a resource the entire community depends on, so it’s the responsibility of the community to take care of it,” added Newman. “There was no market economy, no reason to abuse it, no reason to plant a monocrop or take all the fish out of the river.”
To be a true force of reformation, Newman said, regenerative farming needs to become “a team effort.” This can be achieved within a market economy if farmers work together and policies support food and farming for the common good.
To that end, Newman plans to build an employee-owned cooperative of small farms to provide BIPOC farmers and land use managers with collective access to land, training, information technology, farm inputs, and capital. He sees Indigenous ethics for managing landscapes as key to this approach, as well as a focus on a much wider definition of regeneration: using both public and private lands to practice row crop production as well as agroforestry and silvopasture.
If small farmers can access resources, reduce their spending, and sell into a common market, Newman said, they won’t need to ratchet up food prices, keeping regeneratively produced food accessible to low-income communities.
Borrowing from Black Regenerative Pioneers
The regenerative agriculture movement also heavily borrows, without due recognition, from the practices carried out in Black agricultural communities, both in Africa and in the diaspora, says Qiana Mickie, consultant and former executive director of Just Food, NYC.
Across Africa, Black agriculturalists have innovated in soil stewardship for millennia, she said. In Namibia, the Ovambo people built mounds in order to control water flow and increase soil fertility; Nigerian and Ghanaian farmers grew marigolds and similar flowers next to crops to attract insects like ladybugs and benefit from natural pest control. Many of these traditional techniques have recently been documented by Leah Penniman, founder of Soul Fire Farm, in her book Farming While Black.
Black agriculturalists were also pioneers of the movement in the U.S. At the turn of the century, farmer and scientist George Washington Carver used nitrogen-fixing peanuts to improve soil health, and promoted biodiversity on farms, and the use of compost and swamp muck to amend soil. Booker T. Whatley, a horticulturist and Carver’s fellow faculty member at Tuskegee Institute, also promoted the use of soil regeneration techniques, including planting clover to add organic matter and nitrogen to the soil.
“There are many unheralded Black and Indigenous academics, leaders, growers, and scientists who have chartered regenerative work and who could be lifted up and have not been,” said Mickie, who helps organizations make their food justice promises tangible.
The movement typically features the same two or three experts of color, Mickie said, tokenizing Black and Indigenous voices to speak on behalf of countless communities. In reality, she said, regenerative agriculture should not be branded or codified.
“There was not one person or community in Africa or elsewhere who did it a certain way. Regenerative is a set of diverse practices that Indigenous ancestors had to hold, a collective ancestral voice and knowledge,” Mickie said. “We’re falling into the trap of branding it in a way where we’re seeing the same few practices and the same voices. Doing so, we risk losing the eco-diversity of the practices.”
Addressing the Violence at the Heart of Agriculture
In order to lead to real change, regenerative agriculture must address “the violent roots of farming in the U.S.”, said Sanjay Rawal, director of Gather, a film about the renaissance of Indigenous foodways.
The white settlers who took over Native villages, farms, and landscapes killed or expelled their original inhabitants. Unlike Indigenous people whose agriculture was for subsistence purposes, many of the settlers grew cash crops for sale, including tobacco, wheat, or other grains. Because they often grew a single crop year after year and did not improve the soil in any way, the settlers quickly depleted it. By the 1800s, the soil of the original colonies was so exhausted that it became unproductive and most farmers headed west to steal even more land.
Then came the slave trade and waves of immigrant laborers—from China, Japan, The Philippines, and Mexico—arriving to toil in harsh conditions for little pay on farms across the American West.
“Our relationship with farming in the U.S. has always been based on violence,” Rawal said. “No one alive today is directly responsible for the past, but there was the initial theft of land and that land has been passed from generation to generation.”
Without addressing this history and the inequities that stem from it, regenerative agriculture risks becoming just another form of exploitation, Rawal said.
“People just want to make money off of the regenerative movement. They want to sell courses and kits and scientific techniques,” said Rawal. “But there is no recognition of the people who do have the skills and they are not at the table.”
Missed Opportunity to Recognize BIPOC Legacy
Ryland Engelhart, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Kiss the Ground and a producer of the documentary, told Civil Eats the criticism he received from BIPOC advocates was “a wake-up call” and acknowledged that the film—which took seven years to produce—missed the mark when it comes to the representation of diverse voices and the recognition of Indigenous agricultural experience. Black and brown experts are visible for just a few minutes in the 84-minute documentary and indigenous people’s contributions are not recognized.
“We could have done better,” Engelhart said. “We should have acknowledged that regenerative agriculture sits on the shoulders of many cultures who lived more in connection with the earth and understood its rhythms, including the people of this country before it was colonized.”
Engelhart said the team at Kiss the Ground had been discussing how to create equity and diversity within its ranks prior to the film’s release, but the criticism led to a transformation within the organization. Over the past few months, the group has diversified its leadership and board, Engelhart said, adding six new BIPOC board members and promoting an Indigenous staff member to a leadership role.
The organization also set up listening session with BIPOC community members who felt the film didn’t represent them. It has hired consultants to address diversity issues and its board will form a human resources committee to examine the organization through an equity lens, he added. In December, the entire organization participated in the Uprooting Racism training at Soul Fire Farm.
In addition, Engelhart said, Kiss the Ground has added voices from various cultures to its soil advocacy training program and now offers scholarships for BIPOC, LGBTQ, and other marginalized farmers and ranchers looking to transition to regenerative models.
The nonprofit also plans to release a 45-minute educational version of the film to 114,000 schools in 2021, which will include a segment on the Indigenous perspective on regenerative agriculture.
Engelhart agrees that the regenerative movement offers an opportunity that goes beyond improving soil health. “We have a responsibility to not only rectify land management practices, but also to recognize the deep well of intelligence and lived knowledge that many Indigenous people practiced for millennia fulfilling a regenerative cycle of life,” he said. “There is an opening for cultural regeneration.”
Include Other Voices and Listen to the Elders
Black and Indigenous farmers and leaders have mixed feelings about whether regenerative agriculture can reform itself to address issues of inequity and power. Despite their potential, Indigenous practices are seldom discussed or studied, said Romero Briones, and “no one is asking the Indigenous communities for their input.”
“People are trying to figure out which cover crop is the most beneficial, when Indigenous people can tell you which plants they planted and ate to insure biological and environmental health,” she said. “There’s a learning curve that the regenerative movement has to go through that the Indigenous food movement has figured out long ago.”
If for no other reason, the regenerative movement—including the scientists who study soil and ecosystem health—should aim to learn about Native people’s ways of farming and managing land so that more farmers can incorporate Indigenous practices, crops, and varietals, Romero Briones said. Such a change would benefit not just soil, but also forests, national parks, and other natural areas, not to mention the climate, she said.
The regenerative movement also needs to question the outsized role that cattle are supposed to play in regenerative agriculture, Romero Briones said. The arrival of cattle in colonial America—which she dubs “cattle colonialism”—led to entire tribes of Native people being displaced for pasture grazing permits. The cattle ate plants that were important to Native people and to the environment. It’s likely some of those plants also sequestered a lot of carbon, she said.
But she also emphasized the fact that Indigenous land stewardship practices shouldn’t be viewed as cures to environmental problems because “to place the burden of reverse engineering of sorts on Indigenous peoples is disingenuous.”
The Minneapolis-based Regenerative Agriculture Foundation wants to encourage more white people do the hard work of fighting for social justice within the food system—especially in the Midwest, where focus on no-till farming and other regenerative practices is growing, said executive director Mark Muller.
“The soil health movement among Midwest farmers has infiltrated the established organizations, including the Farm Bureau . . . to protect the soil and make more money, that’s resonating. But the transformational vision of regenerative agriculture, that’s not quite there yet,” Muller said.
To bridge the two visions of regenerative agriculture and bring more farmers on board with social transformation, Muller’s group is launching a cohort of white food and farm leaders to address the lack of equity in today’s regenerative agriculture. The goal is to give them more resources and training from BIPOC experts, Muller said, but also to create a network in which they can connect with other local like-minded people who have a social justice focus.
“A lot of rural white people want to be part of the conversation. They want to be good allies, but they find it challenging in the rural Midwest where it’s always been a white-dominant culture,” Muller said. “Our goal is for them to talk to each other, learn from each other, and encourage each other to take action.”
Muller said that while carbon markets and soil health are important to the regenerative movement, conversations about land ownership and who has access to farmland are also imperative to addressing climate change.
Farmers and leaders of color emphasized that there still is time to change focus. “Regenerative agriculture has a moment to recalibrate its initial direction,” said Sanjay Rawal. “If they start including other voices, start listening to the elders, a lot of knowledge will be disseminated quickly and profoundly.”
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]]>The post Black Farmers Say They Were Dropped from the USDA’s Food Box Program appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Every time Lula Cooley dropped off food boxes at Black churches or on the doorsteps of low-income senior citizens in Laurel, Mississippi, she was met with jubilation.
“’Acorn squash, sweet corn, green peas, watermelon! Thank you, Jesus!’ They just went on and on,” said Cooley, who is retired and works as the city’s senior center coordinator. “I cannot express what these food boxes meant to so many people.”
The boxes—part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farmers to Families Food Box program—came overflowing with produce grown by small-scale, Black-owned farms in the South. And they were delivered to Laurel by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a group that represents Black farmers, landowners, and their cooperatives.
This summer, the Federation supplied 19,000 boxes over a three-and-a-half month period to 20 nonprofit organizations, churches, and community groups, which distributed them across Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. The boxes were handed out in places like Laurel, a town of 18,000 people whose population is 60 percent Black and where one-third of residents live under the poverty line and typically can’t afford to buy such fresh produce, said Cooley.
And although the program lifted up Black farmers battered by COVID-19 closures, reached historically underserved food-insecure communities, engaged scores of volunteers, and created two dozen jobs, the Federation’s food box contract has not been renewed. Other small growers across the U.S. say they were also snubbed by the USDA over the past three months, despite successfully fulfilling their earlier contracts.
Lula Cooley.
Instead, the agency awarded new contracts to large suppliers—giant food distributors such as Sysco. The move left growers with unsold crops and communities in the rural South and other areas hard-hit by the pandemic with diminished access to produce.
“When we no longer had a contract [from USDA] it wasn’t like [the Black farmers] got a call from one of these other suppliers. They were just left out. There was a big void that was left,” said Cornelius Blanding, the Federation’s executive director.
Despite Challenges, Program Helps Farmers, Families
Launched in May under the USDA’s $19 billion Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, Farmers to Families was meant to help farmers, whose markets were upended by the pandemic, and funnel unsold produce and dairy to the neediest Americans.
The program was authorized to spend $3 billion in April and was expanded by another $1 billion at the end of summer. At the end of October, just before the election, the USDA announced it would add another $500 million in funding to continue Farmers to Families through December.
Through four rounds of contracts, the program has to date delivered more than 110 million food boxes. As the cornerstone of the Trump administration’s pandemic hunger relief, it has been much touted by government officials, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue has called it “a miracle.”
Yet Farmers to Families has been plagued with challenges. When it launched in May, industry leaders accused the USDA of giving lucrative contracts to companies with little experience of working with farmers or storing and distributing perishable goods.
Complaints about geographic distribution gaps (some parts of the country not getting enough boxes, others getting too many), delays, and inflated payments to some contractors have also surfaced. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis is leading an investigation into the program.
In October, the USDA again drew ire when it mandated that a self-promoting letter signed by President Trump be included, both in English and Spanish, in the food-aid boxes. Many nonprofits that distributed the boxes decided to remove the letters due to worries that they would be seen as political activity just weeks before the election.
Despite such issues, organizations around the country have praised the program for feeding Americans at a time when food insecurity is skyrocketing in the U.S.
Fresh produce boxes provided by the
Federation as part of its USDA Food Box program await donation in south Georgia. (Photo courtesy of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives)
In the case of the Federation, the contract made it possible to pay fair-market prices for the more than half-million pounds of produce it purchased from 35 Black farmers—a boon given that the vast majority of farmers and landowners surveyed by the organization have seen their markets disappear due to the pandemic.
The support was badly needed, since small-scale Black farms typically operate within razor-thin margins, with 80 percent making less than $50,000 annually farming, Blanding said. And because they had crops already in the ground when the pandemic hit, the food box program not only gave them a source of income but also helped avoid significant financial loss.
“Without this [program], I don’t know where they would have gone. I can’t even imagine it,” Blanding said.
For Ben Burkett, a member of the Indian Springs Farms Association, a Mississippi vegetable marketing cooperative that’s a member of the Federation, the food box program was a godsend: Through it, the co-op’s members were able to sell the crops they had already planted for New Orleans restaurants and food service establishments, which shuttered when COVID-19 hit.
“This program stepped in just in time,” said Burkett. “And it was a blessing on both sides.”
The co-op’s members, who are all Black farmers, delivered about 11,000 boxes between May and August. The produce was a high-quality, colorful range of fruits and vegetables, said Burkett, and was delivered to families the day after it was picked. Such a feat was possible on a grand scale, Burkett said, because of an incredible upswelling of community support.
“Some people just came to volunteer, others we were able to pay for their work,” added the farmer. “It brought the community together.”
It all seemed like a grand success. So, the Federation and its farmers were surprised when then USDA rejected its application for the third round of Farmers to Families. The sting was especially severe given the long history of discrimination against Black farmers by the USDA. And they weren’t alone; other small farmers were also caught off guard by the lack of new contracts, and some were stuck with unharvested crops they had planted for the boxes.
A USDA spokesperson told Civil Eats by email that the agency modified the program after the first two rounds “to address feedback from nonprofit organizations that there was not adequate distribution of all different types of food boxes.” As a result, vendors had to bid for new contracts. They are now required to provide “combination boxes” (a mix of meat, dairy, and produce), identify their community partners and “last mile delivery” arrangements (in response to previous criticism about lack of such services), and gear their distribution to so-called “opportunity zones.”
Due to the shift, the contracts went exclusively to a small number of large national food distributors. At least half of the initial contracts were not renewed in the fall, and that number has been whittled down even more in the final months of the program.
For Burkett’s co-op, the loss of the contract meant a slew of surplus crops with no customers. And while restaurants had started reopening, most are only operating at one-third of their typical capacity, he said.
Now, says Burkett, “the food service companies don’t put much produce in their boxes.” His co-op is hopeful it can get another contract, if the program continues—but the farmers must make alternative plans for now. And without a sense of where he can sell next year’s crops, he doesn’t know what to plant.
Communities Left Without Food
The changes to the food box program have also led to chaos and hardship for many of the organizations on the receiving end, according to interviews by Civil Eats and several complaints filed by lawmakers. (And one of the largest recipients is alleged to have redirected $3 million to its own nonprofit despite a lack of track record in delivering food to people in need, House Democrats have alleged.)
The USDA acknowledged that while some nonprofits that did not receive boxes in the first two rounds received them in the third round, others received fewer boxes or none at all.
Frederick Chestnut, a board member of the Mississippi Rising Coalition, delivers food boxes to victims of Hurricane Zeta in November. (Photo courtesy of Mississippi Rising Coalition)
“USDA made painstaking efforts to ensure comprehensive coverage for the states, with the goal of covering every county in the country,” the spokesperson said.
But none of the groups previously served by the farmers affiliated with the Federation are currently participating in the program, and that means thousands of families in the South are lacking access to food.
The Federation has intimate knowledge of the Black community in the South and the local groups and community organizers who serve it. As a result, its boxes reached people who “are usually not on anyone’s radar,” said Chawnn Redden, the Federation’s regional marketing coordinator. “We sought out where the real need was, as opposed to just taking the easy route and giving it out to the nearest food bank,” she added.
The senior center in Laurel was one such example. The boxes that landed there were directed to hundreds of families. Cooley, the coordinator, ran food drives, worked with local pastors and community organizations, and drove to the homes of elders who were stuck at home. Reaching people by word of mouth and finding elderly men who seldom ask for help was especially important, Cooley said, and it’s something that traditional food banks rarely do.
“Some people have a lot of pride, but when they had a chance to get the food, they would reach out to me,” she said.
Since the Federation’s contract ended, area churches have continued giving limited assistance, but they haven’t had the capacity to fulfill the community’s growing need, Cooley said. She hasn’t found another food box distributor.
“People still call me,” she said. “They ask: ‘Miss Cooley, when are we gonna get some more food?’ I don’t feel good at all when somebody truly needs help and we have nothing to give them.”
Another of the Federation’s partners was Mississippi Rising Coalition, a nonprofit that delivered about 500 food boxes every week to both rural and urban communities across the state over the summer.
“These areas are not only impacted by COVID, but they’re also food deserts where nutritious food is hard to come by, expensive, or inaccessible,” said Lea Campbell, the organization’s president. “The food box program filled a really desperate need and I don’t understand the rationale behind ending the [Federation’s] contract.”
James Skinner, the director of the group’s Food Security Initiative, personally drove a rented U-Haul truck from the Gulf Coast to Mississippi’s Pine Belt to deliver the boxes to community centers, immigrant advocacy groups, international students, and a university food pantry. Hundreds of volunteers worked to make the deliveries and distribution a success, Skinner said.
Indian Springs Farmers Cooperative workers packing food boxes for the Federation’s contract. (Photo courtesy of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives)
“It was very disappointing when the contract ended,” he told Civil Eats. “The hardest thing was to turn people away.”
Mississippi Rising has not been able to connect with one of the new USDA-approved box distributors since its contract ended in September. The group has continued to occasionally provide food when they receive direct donations from farmers, but Skinner and Campbell say the donations in no way match the consistency and volume of the food box program.
Gainesville-based Hispanic Alliance of Georgia, another group the Federation supplied over the summer, is having a similar experience.
“The company that supplies [food boxes to] Georgia is in Florida and is not answering the phone,” said Vanessa Sarazua, the Alliance’s executive director. “We can’t reach them and we need to be able to provide this food.”
In Gainesville, where the Latinx community is more than 40 percent of the population and most Latinos toil in low-wage jobs such as poultry processing plants, the more than 40 agencies that are part of the food bank distribution system rarely serve their needs, said Sarazua. The boxes helped fill this gap.
For communities that are still receiving boxes, the contents have changed significantly. Despite the promise of “locally sourced” produce, as touted in Trump’s letter, many of the boxes now come packed with processed meat and other commodities. According to the USDA, for rounds three and four, contractors were required to include “1 or 2 locally grown fruit or vegetable items, as available, and if none available, add additional items of vendors choice.”
“In essence, it’s gone from a model where we’re serving collard greens and peas to serving hot dogs,” Blanding of the Federation said. “Yeah, people are eating. But I think it matters [what they eat]. So, this shift is concerning.”
Limited Model Program Continues
Knowing the program had been a lifesaver to both farmers and hungry families, the Federation is working to build off of the USDA model and continue providing its own food boxes. The organization has started using private funding to pay member farmers for their produce and continue to send food boxes to its partners.
Green Peppers grown at Metro Atlanta Urban Farm in College Park, Georgia. (Photo courtesy of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives)
But the Federation’s private efforts have only been able to provide a fraction of the previous amount of produce, said Redden.
“[The shift] dramatically reduced what we could purchase from farmers who had hopes they would be participating through the end of the year,” she said.
Moving forward, Blanding says that providing families with a box of raw ingredients direct from farmers is an approach that makes sense with or without the pandemic.
“It’s a model to build off for providing food during disasters, as well as something that could be extended as part of the social programs of our country,” he said.
Sarazua of Hispanic Alliance of Georgia agrees. “Hopefully, the USDA can look at it as a future model to more directly reach vulnerable children and families,” she added.
Top photo courtesy of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.
The post Black Farmers Say They Were Dropped from the USDA’s Food Box Program appeared first on Civil Eats.
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